Paul
Goble
Staunton, May 6 – A casual consumer of
Russian propaganda outlets in advance of Moscow’s commemoration of Victory Day this
year could be excused for thinking that the USSR defeated Hitler all on its own
and that the Russian people were the only component of the Soviet war effort.
But, of course, neither of these
memes is true. The USSR played an enormous role in defeating Nazi Germany but
it hardly fought alone or did so without massive aid from the West. And ethnic
Russians, the largest ethnic group in the USSR then, did so as well, but they
too did not fight alone; and both the contributions and sufferings of other
nations must be remembered.
Numerous Russian opposition
commentators have pointed out how much the allies, however despised they may be
now, contributed to outcome of World War II, but the contribution of
non-Russians in the USSR to the Soviet effort have received much less
attention, especially in the Moscow media.
That should be corrected, and the
Nazaccent portal makes a contribution to redressing the balance although its
decision to focus on smaller nationalities rather than on larger ones like the
Belarusians and Ukrainians who now have their own independent states understates
just how large the non-Russian role was (nazaccent.ru/content/24005-grani-pobedy.html).
The portal carries
an article that focuses on four groups, which significantly it identifies not
so much in ethnic terms as in economic and regional ones: the reindeer herders
of the Northern Peoples, the nomads, the mountaineers of the North Caucasus,
and the hunters of the taiga regions of Siberia and the Russian Far East.
During the war, the Saami and Komi,
two peoples of the Russian North, formed three reindeer transportation
companies within the 14th army of the Karelian front. These units
transported move than 10,000 wounded soldiers and 17 tons of materiel. Of the
reindeers involved, only ten percent survived the war.
In 2012, the Komi succeeded in
having a monument erected to these special forces in Naryan-Mare. At present,
the Saami community of Murmansk is seeking government permission to erect a
second and is collecting money for this project.
Until 1944 when Moscow annexed it,
Tyva (or Tuva) was nominally independent; but it supplied its gold reserve,
50,000 horses and a million head of livestock to feed the Soviet army. And it organized a cavalry squadron which
struck fear into the hearts of the Germans by its remarkable horsemanship and
take-no-prisoners approach.
The role of the North Caucasus “mountaineers”
was more complicated not only because German forces occupied part of that
region but also because Stalin deported more than a dozen of its peoples
declaring them collectively guilty of collaboration with the enemy. In 1942, Moscow ended the draft in the
region, but these things didn’t end North Caucasian participation.
By the end of that year, there were
11 national units fighting for the Soviet side on the North Caucasus and
Transcaucasus fronts and Nazaccent notes that “after the deporation of the Caucasus
people to Central Asia, many Caucasus fighters changed their names in documents
and thus remained on the frontlines.”
And
the taiga “hunters,” particularly a group from the Nanai nationality, gained
fame for their marksmanship. One Nanai sniper was so good that the Germans put
a price of 100,000 Reichsmarks on his head.
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