Stalin's genocide against the “Repressed Peoples”

 

Stalin's genocide against the “Repressed Peoples”

What is the future for disabled chmobiks in RU? Remember the recent past. After WWII, Stalin ordered to clean the cities from war invalids. They were executed, deported to Siberia. Disabled armless, legless people were hidden from the public in prison-like pensions and forgotten. the term 'ethnic cleansing' was coined during the Bosnian conflict of the mid-1990s, the concept previously existed on a similar scale in the USSR. During the second world war several Muslim ethnic groups were brutally deported from their homeland republics at great cost of life and forced to live in exile in Siberia and Central Asia. This crime against humanity went largely unnoticed by the outside world as this example of ethnocide (the eradication of an ethnic group's language, sense of collective identity, customs, etc.) was overlooked in the general conflagration of the second world war. One of the groups to undergo ethnic cleansing in the USSR at this time was the Crimean Tatars, who were forced to languish in Central Asia as a helot class working in the factories of this desert region until the 1990s. It was only with the collapse of the USSR that westerners gained access to both the exiled Crimean Tatar settlements of Uzbekistan (Central Asia) and long off-limits KGB documents detailing the events surrounding the deportation. This article is the first based on newly-declassified KGB documents and field research in this previously off-limits exiled nation and aims to reconstruct the largely untold story of the ethnic cleansing of this ancient Muslim people. The case of the Crimean Tatar exile has wide applications for those doing comparative work on transgenerational efforts to sustain diasporic group identity among groups in exile (such as the Armenians, Tutsis, Palestinians, etc.), as well as those researching the causes and effects of ethnic cleansing in (post)-communist Eurasia.