Paul
Goble
Staunton, September 24 – The great
Russian memoirist Nadezhda Mandelshtam once observed that “happy is that
country in which the despicable will at least be despised.” On that measure, Putin’s Russia is an
increasingly unhappy place where ever more despicable things past and present
are being justified or even presented as positive goods.
In a commentary on a Russian-language
site in Latvia now more widely distributed by a Moscow one, Yury Alekseyev
argues that Stalin’s deportation of nations, including the Crimean Tatars, was
justified and less cruel than any alternative or of similar actions by others (imhoclub.lv/ru/material/zachem_bili_nuzhni_deportacii#ixzz3mRbyy7F6
and km.ru/science-tech/2015/09/22/istoriya-khkh-veka/764492-zachem-byli-nuzhny-deportatsii-s-tochki-zreniya-vo).
This goes back to the
pre-perestroika Soviet treatment of these criminal acts, a dangerous
development at a time when some Russian writers and politicians seem prepared
not only to challenge more honest assessments of historical events but all too
ready to provide what can only be described as justification for similar
actions in the future.
“To say that the leadership of the
USSR consisted of fools is possible,” Alekseyev says, “but this is not so.
Fools don’t win wars.” Moreover, to ascribe to Stalin “cruelty and
vengefulness” in the case of deportations is inappropriate because removing peoples
from near the front likely to help the enemy is the normal “military practice
of all countries in the world.”
According to the Russian
commentator, Stalin was not as cruel and bloodthirsty as others including the
Turks and the Austrians during World War I. Instead of simply killing such
people as they did, he simply shifted them to other parts of “the enormous
territory of the USSR” because he wanted to use their work for the war effort.
The deportation of Crimean Tatars to
Uzbekistan in 1944 shows this, Alekseyev says.
The Crimean Tatars were pro-German from the outset and provided Hitler
with “more than 20,000” soldiers. Moreover, “the number of Crimean Tatars per
capita who pledged allegiance to Hitler was a record in World War II. This is a
fact,” he says, although it is hardly indisputable.
After Soviet forces retook Crimea,
the German command left the Crimean Tatars behind in order to engage in
partisan warfare and tie down Soviet military units, Alekseyev continues. Given
their hostility to Soviet power, “the Crimean Tatar population was ready to support
its partisans for a hundred years.”
In such circumstances, he asks
rhetorically, what could Stalin do? He might have left several Soviet divisions
on the peninsula and used them over the course of “many years” to suppress the
partisans. But that would have meant taking those divisions out of the
frontlines fighting the Germans.
Stalin could have simply wiped out
the Crimean Tatars, following the script which he says Hitler used in occupied
areas. “As they say, no people, no problems.” Or he could have left them be and
allowed them to continue their subversive work hoping against hope that such
actions would not help the Germans.
But instead the Soviet leader chose
deportation. Was this harsh? “Not very,” certainly not compared to the very
worst things that were done during the war. Indeed, Alekseyev insists, “any
alternative” to the deportation of the Crimean Tatars “would have been much
more horrific.”
He adds that he “will not talk”
about German methods of dealing with the civilian population on the territories
Hitler’s forces conquered. Instead, Alekseyev says he wants to remind everyone
that the US “burned up with atomic bombs approximately the same number of
peaceful citizens of Japan as [Stalin] exiled Crimean Tatars” to “sunny
Uzbekistan.”
“Perhaps I am mistaken,” Alekseyev
concludes, “but the practice of Stalin’s deporations seems to me more humane,”
adding that the Americans also deported people with Japanese background from
the West coast to the interior even though no Japanese soldier was on American
soil.
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