War and the last years
1941–1944
Deportations of nations
Whole peoples were loaded into freight cars and removed, as peoples.
The regime deported Soviet Germans, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Karachays, Balkars, Crimean Tatars, Meskhetian Turks, and others. The Crimean Tatar deportation of 18 May 1944 and the Chechen–Ingush deportation of February 1944 were carried out in days, under Beria’s NKVD, with a death rate in transit and in the first years of exile that ran into the tens and hundreds of thousands across these operations.
The official charge was collective treason. Individual guilt was not the method; the census category was. Most of these peoples were not allowed home until after Stalin’s death, and Crimean Tatars not in any real way until the late 1980s. This is ethnic punishment by a state that called nationalism a bourgeois lie.
Where to check it · NKVD deportation orders; Aleksandr Nekrich; Norman Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides; studies by the Memorial society.