Stolen homeland: 65 years since mass deportations

28 October, 2008, 15:55

It has been 65 years since mass deportations ravaged the Soviet Union under the decree of Joseph Stalin. The forced emigration affected many types of people, based on their social status, nationality and place of residence. Millions were forced to leave their homes, often within hours, and make the arduous journey to harsh and underpopulated areas of the Soviet Union.

Soslambek Djanibekov was 12 years old in 1942, when his family was deported from their historical homeland in the south-eastern Soviet republic of Karachaevo-Cherkessia.

“The whole family, four of us, were at home, apart from our father, a road worker. He was at work. He was picked up from there and, without any food or clothes, sent off on the long journey,” Djanibekov recalled. “The rest of us were given an hour to pack before being forced to spend 22 days on the road.”

The barren steppes of Kazakhstan became the unlikely and inhospitable home for the Djanibekov family. Two families, fifteen people altogether, were forced to live in a small room of a traditional Kazakh dwelling. The floor was earthen and the roof leaked.

“November that year was very cold,” Djanibekov told RT. “We had to burn cane in order to keep ourselves warm somehow. Our mother did not survive such a change of climate, neither did her sister. And so we were forced to move once again, this time to Kyrgyzstan”.

This way, thousands of deported families created settlements in previously unpopulated areas of the Soviet Union. The exact number of those affected by the transfer is unknown. However, various estimates suggest that from 3.3 million to 5 million people were displaced. Some studies suggest that around 43% of the resettled people died either during the transfer, or shortly after from disease and malnutrition.

It was only in 1957, after Nikita Khrushchev made his famous his speech ‘On the Personality Cult and its Consequences’ condemning the deportations that Djanibekov and his two sisters, along with millions of other displaced people, were allowed to return to their homeland.

Historians still debate who is to blame for the massive deportations. Many claim that it was Stalin who cultivated a false belief that certain nationalities would act as ‘fifth column’ subversives during the war, and so took drastic measures to annul this perceived threat. However, Djanibekov doesn't have any doubts about who to blame:

“It was Beria's fault, and Suslov's. They made a mess of the guerrilla movement in the Stavropol area, and instead of accepting the blame they placed it on the Karachaev and Cherkess people, declaring them enemies of the state. They seemed to ignore the fact that their percentage of people fighting in the Second World War was the highest in the whole of the Soviet Union!”

It was not only the Karachaev and Cherkess people who suffered during the mass deportations. Poles, Romanians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Volga Germans, Chechens and Ingush were all declared enemies of the Soviet people. They were all transferred en masse, many of them not surviving nor recovering from the experience.

Mass deportations in the USSR began in 1919, with Lenin’s ‘Decossackization’. The Cossacks were a group a people based around the Don River in south-western Russia. They took pride in their cultural independence and resisted Soviet rule and therefore were declared enemies of the Revolution. In order to resolve the problem the Cossacks were either executed or forcefully deported to Kazakhstan.

The same concept was used by Stalin throughout the 1940s. Reasons for the massive deportations were varied. Some groups, such as the Cherkess, were blamed of being in cahoots with the Nazis. Others, such as the Chechens and Ingush, were accused of banditry. The official party line was designed to give an illusion of killing two birds with one stone: distancing these ‘unfavourable elements’ from the respectable Soviet public and populating previously uninhabited areas of the Soviet Union in order to harness resources.

Soslambek Djanibekov didn't allow the 15 years in exile to ruin his life. At the age of 18, he became a primary school teacher and, graduating from university in absentia, worked his way up to become headmaster. He holds the post to this day, as well as being the director of a Karachaevo-Cherkess cultural museum. According to him, it was the unity of his family and the belief in the strong cultural heritage of his people that kept him going throughout the years of deportation and still keep him going to this day.

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