Paul
Goble
Staunton, December 18 – The Soviet
security agencies from Lenin on were infected by an often vicious Russian
nationalism which led their officers to attack non-Russians far more frequently
than Russians, according to a new study based on archival sources by Aleksey
Teplyakov, a Novosibirsk historian.
Many researchers Russian and foreign
have considered the national aspects of Soviet political repression, he says,
but “up to now there have not been any which allow for an assessment of the presence
of chauvinist and nationalist attitudes among the Chekist corporation of the
influence of these subjective factors on the conduct of repressive policies.”
Indeed, he points, many have focused on the
presence of a significant stratum of non-Russians within the Soviet secret
police and other security agencies to conclude that the organs, however
repressive, were not chauvinist and anti-Russian (“Shovinizm i natsionalizm v
organakh VChK-MGB-MVD SSSR, in Sovetskiye
natsii i natsionalnaya politika v 1920-1950 gody (Moscow ROSSPEN, 2014, pp.
649-657, posted online at rusk.ru/st.php?idar=68924).
But in fact, these organs were
infected by chauvinism, and those attitudes were reinforced rather than reduced
by the constant campaigns of repressions against one or another non-Russian
people, with some of the Chekists working in the republics acting like “typical
colonial bureaucrats” and routinely expression “aggressive-chauvinist attitudes”
toward the minorities.
Teplyakov says that within the
Soviet secret police, chauvinism ranged from dismissive comments about “’backward
Asiatics’ or ‘little Jews’” to the belief that non-Russian groups should be
subject to “broad ethnic purges” even if the cases against the members of such
groups had to be fabricated.
During the Russian civil war, the
Chekists sought to decapitate the national movements in Kazakhstan, Kalmykia,
the Gorno-Altay, Yakutia (Sakha), Central Asia and Azerbaijan even as they
recruited other non-Russians to carry out such campaigns. And these campaigns
frequently were overfulfilled because of the attitudes of the Chekists
involved.
In March 1922, for example, Cheka
commanders took note of the fact that “the internal forces suppressing the
uprising in Yakutia could only with difficulty “be kept from wiping out the
Yakuts” involved. Throughout the 1920s, Chekists killed with impunity members
of the numerically small peoples of the North as well as others simply because
they were not Russian.
Stalin’s increasingly nationalist
course in the 1930s only exacerbated this tendency. Stalin himself, Teplyakov
points out, told one official that the organs should force all of the
non-Russians to fall on their knees and then execute them “like mad dogs.” The Chekists needed little encouragement, the
archives show.
After World War II, the situation
deteriorated further, with the organs sometimes provoking nationalist risings
and then using them as an excuse to imprison, torture or kill members of non-Russian
nationalities. That happened with the Nentsy, the Baltic nations, the
Ukrainians and others as well, the archives show.
Chauvinism increased in the ranks of
the organs on a continuous basis during the last years of Stalin’s reign. The state security minister in the
Buryat-Mongol ASSR said that as long as he was in office, “not one Buryat would
be allowed to be in a leading position” anywhere in the republic. He was
subsequently punished. But others did much the same elsewhere without being
called to account.
The Chekists overwhelmingly welcomed
Stalin’s anti-Semitic campaign. Although there had been many Jews among the
Chekists in the 1920s, their numbers had dwindled in the 1930s during the Great
Terror, and members of the Soviet organs routinely talked about the need to get
rid of the Jews inside their ranks and elsewhere.
While Russian and Russianized
Chekists were allowed to flaunt their chauvinism, those Chekists who were of
non-Russian origin were expected to behave as internationalists, which in the
Soviet context meant being pro-Moscow and against their own peoples as well as
other non-Russians.
Sometimes the non-Russian Chekists
sought to insure themselves against attack by posing as more Russian than the
Russians. An example of this was the response of a Jewish Chekist to whom
Patriarch Tikhon spoke in Hebrew. M.P. Shreyder responded that he “lives in
Russia and doesn’t need any other language but Russian.”
But non-Russian Chekists sometimes
could not restrain themselves from reacting to the chauvinism of their Russian
colleagues. I.P Yakovlev, a Yakut who
was a senior official of the Ministry of State Security in the Yakut SSR once burst
out “the Russians are bastards … they are stealing Yakutia and wreaking havoc
on the Yakuts.”
Because it was
found that he was drunk, Yakovlev got away with this with only a minimal
punishment. Others were not so lucky. N.Ch.Tovarishtay, the head of the
interior ministry administration in Tuva said there were too many Russians
about and that they should all be “shot.”
The Tuvan was excluded from the party,
fired, but then restored when it was established that he too had been drunk
when he said that.
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