The Great Terror Ë 157
be there illegally.¹¹⁴In fact, more than ve thousand Kurds, Muslim Armenians, and
Turks in Azerbaijan were deported from the southern borderlands.¹¹⁵“Mountain Jews”
were also resettled from Kuba (Quba) in Azerbaijan to the Crimea.¹¹⁶Harsh repression
in Georgia led to rebellions and massive border crossings into Turkey from Adjara.¹¹⁷
In Chechnia and Ingushetia, from mid-1937 onward, people began eeing and taking
refuge in the mountains, where they organized small bands of insurgents.¹¹⁸Just as
ethnic Koreans were deported en masse from the Soviet Far East in the autumn of 1937,
so Kurds, Muslim Armenians, Turks and others were deported in 1937 and 1938 from
the Caucasian border areas.¹¹⁹.
The brutal repression of ethnic Greeks in the Black Sea coastal area (including
the Northern Caucasus) was related to the Caucasian–Japanese subversion scheme:
Kanda mentioned ethnic Greeks in his subversion plan, and Stalin did not forget that
Greece had intervened twenty years earlier in the Civil War against the Soviet govern-
ment with more than twenty thousand soldiers. Indeed, the secret order of the So-
viet secret police on the Greek operation (No. 50215 dated 11 December 1937) explic-
itly stated: “Greek intelligence is actively engaged in espionage and insurgency in the
USSR, carrying out tasks of British, German, and Japanese intelligence.”¹²⁰
It is not an easy task to determine the scale of terror in the Caucasus, given that
there were many mass operations, such as the “kulak operation,” the “Polish opera-
tion,” and the “Latvian operation.” Broad pictures do, however, emerge from available
statistical data. In Georgia, for instance, from October 1936 to 1937 more than 12,000
persons were arrested for political crimes, of whom 7,374 were indicted.¹²¹Because the
terror continued until late 1938, this is far from comprehensive data. Regarding the ku-
lak operation, which targeted mainly formerly repressed peasants and other “socially
alien” elements, 4,975 were executed and 6,229 were sent to the Gulag, although the
114 See Terry Martin, “The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing.”The Journal of Modern History70, no.
4 (1998), 813–14.
115 SeeStalinskie deportatsii 1928–1953(Moscow: MFD, Materik, 2005), 75–80.
116 Jörg Baberowski,Der Feind ist überall: Stalinismus im Kaukasus(Munich: Deutsche Verlags-
Anstalt, 2003), 771.
117 See CAW, I.303.4.1964 (December 1937 report).
118 S.S. Magamadov and S.A. Kislitsyn,Politicheskaia vlast’ i povstancheskoe dvizhenie na Severnom
Kavkaze. Ocherki istorii 1920–1930-kh gg.(Rostov-na-Donu: Iuzhno-Rossiiskii institut- lial RANKh i
GS pri Prezidente RF, 2011), 298.
119 See A.N. Iakovlev,Stalinskie deportatsii 1928–1953(Moscow: Materik, 2005), 75–80. The depor-
tation of Kurds from the Azerbaijan-Iranian borderlands began as early as December 1936. See N.F.
Bugai,L. Beriia – I. Stalinu: ‘Posle Vashikh ukazanii provedeno sleduiushchee.. .’(Moscow: Grif i K,
2011), 112.
120 Ivan Dzhukha,Grecheskaia operatsiia. Istoriia repressii protiv grekov v SSSR(St. Petersburg:
Aleteiia, 2006), p. 52.
121 SeeLubianka: Stalin i Glavnoe upravlenie gosbezopasnosti NKVD 1937–1938(Moscow: MFD, 2004),
415.