184 Ë War and Dénouement
of military service age dodged the military draft or deserted the army. (Of 80,000 or so
men who should have served in the Red Army, only about 10,000 Chechen and Ingush
men did serve; of these, 2,300 were killed or missing in action.) In March 1942, for
example, 14,576 were called up, but 13,560, or 93 percent, deserted and joined the in-
surgents in the mountainous areas.⁵³Because Moscow no longer trusted the Chechens
and other Northern Caucasians, in that month all serving Chechens and Ingush were
“recalled to the reserve” from active duty; moreover, the summons in July 1942 of those
born in 1924–25 came “accompanied by explicit secret instructions to exclude from
this cadre men of Chechen, Ingush, Kabard, Balkar and Dagestani nationality.”⁵⁴In
Karachay, too, “hundreds and thousands” of men deserted to the mountains to join
the insurgents and ght against the Soviet forces.⁵⁵In Georgia, 5,686 men were de-
tained for desertion and draft-dodging in 1942; in 1943 the number climbed to 12,958.⁵⁶
Local party leaders were no more reliable. In August-September 1942, for example,
when German forces were drawing closer to Chechnia toward the oil city of Grozny
(and further onto Baku in Azerbaijan), sixteen of twenty-four (two thirds) of the dis-
trict party committee secretaries in Chechnia deserted their posts.⁵⁷But the German
military forces stalled just short of Chechnia (and far from the oil wells of Baku).
With respect to German occupation policy, despite its harshness and brutality,
“German rule in the North Caucasus did not evoke the violent popular disillusion-
ment and eventual hostility which it had farther north”; indeed, the Northern Cau-
casus suered the least of all areas of the Soviet Union occupied by Germany.⁵⁸In
part this was because the region, unlike Ukraine and Russia, was not in the German
settlement plans, and in part because the occupation was brief. Yet it also re ected
German thinking about the Caucasus’s disloyalty to Moscow. By comparison, Georgia
remained under stricter Soviet control. Yet even there unrest manifested itself. For ex-
ample, at a meeting held at the Tbilisi Opera House in 1942, “lea ets were distributed
calling on the people to overthrow Russian Communist rule and proclaim Georgia’s
independence.”⁵⁹As it was, as far as political security was concerned, excluding the
territory recently annexed by the Soviet Union (Western Ukraine and Western Belarus,
the Baltic states, parts of former Finland, and Bessarabia), no other parts of the coun-
try proved as disruptive as the Caucasus during the war.
53 See Igor’ Pykhalov, “Severnyi Kavkaz. Prichiny deportatsii 1943–1945 gg.”Molodaia gvardiia2002,
no. 10, 87.
54 Alex Marshall,The Caucasus under Soviet Rule(London-New York: Routledge, 2010), 263.
55 Magamadov and Kislitsyn,Politicheskaia vlast’ i povstancheskoe dvizhenie na Severnom Kavkaze,
301.
56 Mamoulia,Gruzinskii legion, 283.
57 See Pykhalov, “Severnyi Kavkaz,” 97.
58 Alexander Dallin,German Rule in Russia 1941–1945: A Study of Occupation Policies, 2nd ed. (Boul-
der, Colorado: Westview Press, 1981), 238, 248.
59 David Marshall Lang,A Modern History of Soviet Georgia(New York: Grove Press, 1962), 259.