Stalin's_Deportations

The year is 1944, and Zulpa, a Chechen girl only ten years of age, is being forcefully removed from her home in the Soviet Union along with her family and tribe. They have been identified as a threat and accused of collaboration with the Nazi party. Stalin and his men have taken their cows to a collective farm, and herded the people there as well. When the morning comes, they will be loaded into cattle trucks to begin their journey to concentration camps called gulags in Central Asia or Siberia, but many Chechens will not survive the journey. Some will needlessly be shot by soldiers, while others won’t be able to withstand the climate, conditions, or lack of food. Zulpa will be one of the few who make it, and she will be considered one of the lucky ones; even after all the hardship she endures. At ten, she cannot understand why she and her family are being pushed out, but they are not the only ones, and there is a long story behind their sorrow. Here is what happened: Joseph Stalin is the key character in this story. He became a significant figure when he was appointed as General Secretary of the Communist Party’s Central Committee in 1922. He abused this position; manipulating whatever he could so that eventually most of the Party staff owed their positions to him before they realized what was happening. Once they did, it was too late, and Lenin, the only person to challenge him, was too ill to do much about it. However, Lenin sent a letter to Leon Trotsky, who made an agreement to help work against Stalin in the future. Stalin realized that they were collaborating, and when Lenin passed away in 1924, Trotsky was the only one left in Stalin’s path. Within the next year, Stalin arranged for Trotsky to be removed from the government. Stalin became ruler of the Soviet Union in 1929, and decided to use his power to modernize the country and its industries with his Five Year Plans, the first of which included collective farming. Over 80% of the Soviet population had been farmers, but Stalin overtook any and all privately owned farmland and livestock as a collective farm for the government. Knowing that he was upsetting the people of the Union, he feared that there would be a riot of the Kulaks. The Kulaks were a class of formerly wealthy farm owners who had employees and owned more than 24 acres of land. Needless to say, they felt that they had lost much of their life when collective farming took hold. Rather than risk a revolt, Stalin declared them “enemies of the people”, took every single one of their possessions, and sent an estimated ten million on a train to Siberia. Many perished, and the others became slaves. He also was afraid of loss of power in Ukraine. To create a feeling of insecurity, he arrested over 5,000 Ukrainians; falsely accusing them of plotting an armed revolt. They were then either shot or deported to prison camps in remote areas of Russia without even a trial. Stalin forced between 1.5 million and 3.3 million people in all to resettle and become slaves in his gulags. Within these millions of people were at least 13 nationalities, including the Ukrainians, Poles, Koreans, Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Karachays, Meskhetian Turks, Finns, Bulgarians, Greeks, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Jews, and Kulak. Each nationality possesses their own history, background, and version of the deportation and genocide, but many of the causes were similar in reason. Most of these deportations took place from 1941- 1944. At this time, World War II was taking hold of countries around the Soviet Union, and Stalin refused to be conquered by the Nazi’s. Stalin and Hitler were alike in many ways, and they both wanted the same thing- to make their countries the most powerful in the world. Needless to say, they hated each other and were each others rivals. However, Stalin’s men weren’t strong enough, and after a while, German armies began to overtake Stalin’s armies. Stalin began to panic, and for a good reason. However, the United States joined the war, and the Red Army drove the Nazis away and penetrated Germany. All during those four years, Stalin’s fear took hold of him, and he felt the need to make his people insecure. He didn’t want any traitors, and he wasn’t going to take any chances. He doubted the loyalty of the Germans, and they were the first to go. This was in 1941. The Soviet Union continued deporting all of those that they thought would be a threat or an ‘enemy of the people’. Some were not even deported; they were killed instead- burned alive or drowned in the mountain lakes. They accused most of those deported of collaboration with the Nazis, and put them on trains or on cattle trucks to Siberia and central Asia. In the February of 1956, the deportations were deemed a violation of Leninism, and most deportations were reversed. However, Tatars, Meskhetians and Volga Germans were not allowed to return to the Soviet Union until 1991. The deportations of the Chechen people helped to fuel separatism in Chechnya, during the 90’s while other deportations of Stalin helped to lead to separatist movements in the Baltic States and Tatarstan. Also, however cruel the deportations may have been and however ill-meant they were, they saved the lives of thousands of Jews. Stalin sent the polish Jews away a year prior to when the Nazis started deporting Jews to death camps. Instead, they were deported to forced labor settlements where they, while not under good conditions, were safe from the Nazis. Though Stalin’s deportations managed to save lives, it cost many more, and it was not meant to be a good thing. Stalin’s paranoia and lack of conscience brought one of the largest genocides ever to be remembered.