Dénouement Ë 193
7.5 Dénouement
The fate of the Soviet Caucasus was sealed, for the time being, by the triumph of
the Soviet Union over Germany. Well before Soviet forces took Berlin in May 1945,
Moscow was hard at work on Caucasian strategies, going so far as to implement eth-
nic cleansing in the Northern Caucasus. Already in late 1943, the Karachays were
deported to Central Asia, and in the following February the Chechens and Ingush
were deported wholesale to Kazakhstan and Kyrgysztan (Operation Chechevitsa). “No
exceptions were allowed. Party leaders, war heroes, and famous writers and artists
were sometimes sent separately under somewhat better circumstances, but everyone
had to go.”⁹³With Karachays and Balkars (deported in March 1944), the deported
Chechens and Ingush numbered more than six hundred thousand. During the brutal
process of transport, roughly ten thousand perished and, according to one account,
approximately one hundred thousand died in the rst three years of exile.⁹⁴Osten-
sibly, they were expelled because “many Chechens and Ingush were traitors to the
homeland, changing over to the side of fascist occupiers, joining the ranks of diver-
sionaries and spies left behind the lines of the red Army by the Germans. They formed
armed bands at the behest of the Germans ghting against Soviet power.”⁹⁵The real
reason, however, was likely to have been Moscow’s suspicion “that sympathy for local
insurgents was widespread, that problems with conscription and desertion re ected
an endemic lack of Soviet patriotism, and that the local party apparatus was ine -
cient, in ltrated by potential traitors, and wholly unreliable.”⁹⁶Whatever the extent of
treachery among Chechens and Ingush, and however many of them may have fought
in the Red Army, entire nations (“bandit nations”) were held collectively responsible
and punished accordingly. This was a “Soviet-style nal solution.”⁹⁷Furthermore, in
the autumn of 1944, suspecting that Turkey had a secret plan to attack the Soviet Cau-
casus, Moscow deported more than ninety thousand “Meshkhetian Turks” (in fact,
Georgian Muslims living in Meshketia), Kurds, Khemshins, and Greeks from Georgia’s
borderlands with Turkey to Central Asia.⁹⁸In all these operations in the Caucasus,
Moscow extensively used American trucks sent by Lend-Lease via Iran to transport
deportees to rail stations and depots.
93 Norman M. Naimark,Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe(Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 96.
94 Naimark,Fires of Hatred, 97.
95 Naimark,Fires of Hatred, 94.
96 Marshall,The Caucasus under Soviet Rule, 268.
97 Naimark,Fires of Hatred, 96. These deportations were followed in May 1944 by the expulsion of
Crimean Tatars. The expression “bandit nation” is taken from Burds, “The Soviet War against ‘Fifth
Columnists’,” 303.
98 These and other expulsions are detailed inStalinskie deportatsii 1928–1953(Moscow: MFD-
Materik, 2005).