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The Nation Killers: The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities By Robert Conquest Macmillan, 222 pp., $6.95 Their names are as obscure as their fate, those eight nations of the Soviet Union deported by Stalin from their homelands during World War II and sent into Siberian exile, men, women and children, regardless. They were the Volga Germans, the Karachai, the Kalmyks, the Chechen and Ingishi, the Bakans, the Crimean Tatars and the Meskhetians. Before their deportation as traitors or potential traitors—or independent nationalists, which in Stalin’s eyes amounted to the same thing—they voted 99 per cent approval of the Moscow regime, and curiously enough approved it by almost the same percentage following their partial rehabilitation after Stalin’s death.

The reason for the deportation is a simple one, the same reason that brought about the wholesale deportations when Stalin occupied the Baltic states, that in the more moderate days after Stalin sent Russian troops into Hungary and Czecho-Slovakia. Their nationalism was seen as a potential challenge to the monolithic power structure named so paradoxically the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. For seen through the red spectacles of Leninism, nationalism is only a transitory bourgeois phenomenon that may be utilized to advance the class struggle or suppressed when it becomes a hindrance.

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Francis Russell

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The Nation Killers: The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities By Robert Conquest Macmillan, 222 pp., $6.95 Their names are as obscure as their fate, those eight nations of the Soviet Union deported by Stalin from their homelands during World War II and sent into Siberian exile, men, women and children, regardless. They were the Volga Germans, the Karachai, the Kalmyks, the Chechen and Ingishi, the Bakans, the Crimean Tatars and the Meskhetians. Before their deportation as traitors or potential traitors—or independent nationalists, which in Stalin’s eyes amounted to the same thing—they voted 99 per cent approval of the Moscow regime, and curiously enough approved it by almost the same percentage following their partial rehabilitation after Stalin’s death.

The reason for the deportation is a simple one, the same reason that brought about the wholesale deportations when Stalin occupied the Baltic states, that in the more moderate days after Stalin sent Russian troops into Hungary and Czecho-Slovakia. Their nationalism was seen as a potential challenge to the monolithic power structure named so paradoxically the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. For seen through the red spectacles of Leninism, nationalism is only a transitory bourgeois phenomenon that may be utilized to advance the class struggle or suppressed when it becomes a hindrance.