Roberto Carmack

46th Annual ASEEES Convention in San Antonio, TX

11/22/14

Traitors or Patriots? Competing Narratives of Deportation in Kazakhstan, 19411945

In the summer and fall of 1941, the NKVD deported as many as 905,000 Soviet Germans
from their home regions.1 After several agonizing weeks, these starved, exhausted, and diseased
Germans arrived in isolated eastern regions of the Soviet Union. One of these deported
Germans, Frida Wolter, recalls her arrival in the following terms:
Chairmen from various collective farms met our echelon when it arrived at the Aleiskaia [Train]
Station. As if in a slave market, they yelled out Are there any blacksmiths? Who is a
blacksmith? Step forward! Carpenters! We need carpenters! Tractor drivers, mechanics come
here! We need an accountant or bookkeeper! Is there no agronomist or livestock specialist?2
This kind of ruthless labor exploitation framed the lives of the German deportees throughout the
war. Party and government officials determined the place of the deportees in Soviet society, in
significant measure, by their ability to perform socially useful labor.
During World War II, the NKVD exiled several other national groups from their home
regions and exposed them to abysmal living and working conditions. By the end of the war,
Kazakhstan had become the largest single region of exile. From 1941 to 1945, the NKVD

1 This estimate is given by Pavel Polian in Against Their Will: The History and Geography of Forced
Migrations in the USSR (Budapest: New York, 2004), 136-137.
2 Gerhard Wolter, Tri kruga dantova ada, in Svetlana Alieva (ed.) Tak eto bylo: natsionalnye repressii
v SSSR 1919-1952 gody: v 3-kh tomakh (Moscow: Rossisskii mezhdunarodnyi fond kultury Insan,
1993) vol. 1, 150. Gerhard Wolter does not elaborate the region to which Frida was deported.
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deported approximately 462,694 Soviet Germans to the Kazakh republic.3 In 1943-1944, the
NKVD exiled another 45,529 Karachays, 405,192 Chechens and Ingush, and 21,750 Balkars to
Kazakhstan.4 Until 1961, Kazakhstans deportees lived in special-settlements that were
administered by the NKVD but which often existed next to and inside villages populated by
Kazakhs, Russians, and other non-repressed Soviet citizens.5 Most existing works about the
wartime deportees assert that Stalin and other Soviet leaders designed the special-settlements to
isolate and separate the deportees from Soviet society while destroying their languages, cultures,
and other national particularities.6
More recently, some historians have argued that Soviet leaders never intended to exterminate
the deported groups and designed exile to facilitate the Sovietization of these nationalities.7

3 For this estimation, see Michael Herceg Westren, Nations in Exile: The Punished Peoples in Soviet
Kazakhstan, 1941-1961, PhD dissertation (University of Chicago, 2012), 3-4.
4 Ibid. During the war, the NKVD also deported 34,785 Soviet citizens to Kazakhstan from Kalmykia,
Crimea, and Georgia. The State Defense Committee ordered the deportation of the Soviet Germans to
prevent them from assisting the advancing Nazi forces. The Supreme Soviet, in contrast, ordered the
deportation of the North Caucasian nationalities for actively collaborating with the Nazi occupiers.
5 The OGPU introduced the special-settlements in the early-1930s to confine dekulakized peasants. For
the origins of the special-settlement system, see Lynne Viola, The Unknown Gulag (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007) and Oleg V. Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the
Great Terror (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 9-82.
6 See in particular Robert Conquest, The Nation Killers: The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities (New
York: Macmillan, 1970); Aleksandr M. Nekrich, The Punished Peoples: The Deportation and Fate of
Soviet Minorities at the end of the Second World War (New York: Norton, 1978); Norman M. Naimark,
Ethnic Cleansing Between War and Peace in Amir Weiner (ed.) Landscaping the Human Garden:
Twentieth-Century Population Management in a Comparative Framework (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2003), 218-235; N. F. Bugai, L. Beriia--I. Stalinu: Soglasno Vashemu ukazaniiu-- (Moscow:
AIRO XX, 1995); Katherine R. Jolluck, Exile and Identity: Polish Women in the Soviet Union during
World War II (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002).
7 See in particular Westren, Nations in Exile.
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This paper offers a different perspective from these two historiographical extremes. I argue that
the special-settlements were not sites of total exclusion they were geographic and
administrative interstitial spaces that simultaneously existed inside and outside mainstream
Soviet society. Party and government officials in Kazakhstan used the liminal status of the
deportees to justify their exploitation as forced laborers in the end, this interstitial status
facilitated the commodification of the special-settlers and their transformation into objects of
labor.8
The exact place of the deportees in Kazakhstans society remained ambiguous throughout the
war. Despite the fact that special-settlers often lived in villages attached to collective farms or
other economic enterprises, the deportees could not leave their province of exile to seek work or
education without the express permission of NKVD commandants.9 After the State Defense
Committee and Supreme Soviet ordered the deportation of targeted nationalities, military officers
discharged members of these national groups from the army.10 But even though members of
repressed nationalities could not legally serve in the military, Party, soviet, and NKVD officials
in Kazakhstan often recruited German and North Caucasian exiles to serve as propagandists and
administrators in exile.11 The special-settlers were legally repressed, but not like inmates in the
Gulags corrective-labor camps. In many ways, their rights and responsibilities of specialsettlers resembled those of free Soviet citizens.
8 Michael Westren argues that the goal of the deportations was to reintegrate the special-settlers into
Soviet society. See his Nations in Exile. I disagree with Westrens argument. During the war, Party and
government officials in Kazakhstan demonstrated very little interest in reintegrating or rehabilitating the
deportees.
9 D. Khozhaev, Genotsid, in Alieva, Tak eto bylo, vol. 2, 169-173.
10 See Bugai et al, Oni srazhalis za Rodinu: predstaviteli repressirovannykh narodov SSSR na frontakh
Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny: kniga-khronika (Moscow: Novyi khronograf, 2005).
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The abysmal living conditions of the deportees also reflected their intersitial status. In the
summer of 1941, the Soviet Sovnarkom and Central Committee of the Communist Party issued
complex directives ordering local Party and government organs in Kazakhstan to provide the
necessary food, medical services, and transportation so that the Germans special-settlers could
reach their places of exile.12 On paper at least, the Soviet leadership expected local officials to
treat the German deportees in a humane manner. Similarly, in June 1944 Nikolai Skvortsov, the
head of the Kazakh Communist Party and Nurtas Undasynov, the head of the Kazakh
Sovnarkom, ordered provincial Party committees and the chairpersons of provincial soviets to
treat [North Caucasian] special-settlers in the same way as [local] collective farmers, state
farmers, and industrial enterprise workers in every respect and to supply these deportees with
the same amounts of food and supplies that locals were entitled to.13 Local officials in
Kazakhstan constantly violate this decree. Local government officials often refused to distribute
scarce food supplies to North Caucasians in particular, and they commonly embezzled supplies
sent by government organs to the special-settlers.14 This kind of criminal neglect contributed to
11 For example, in April 1944, Skvortsov and the head of the Kazakh NKVD Nikolai Bogdanov ordered
provincial Party committees in Almaty Province to train Chechen and Ingush officials to take over
administrative positions in local soviet and agricultural organizations. See [Doklad Ob itogakh rasseleniia
i zhoziaistvenno-bytovom i trudovom ustroistve spetspereselentsev Severnogo Kavkaza v Kazakhskoi
SSR.] GARF f. 9479, o. 1, d. 183, l. 13. In September 1943, Soviet NKVD officials estimated that half of
the commandant staffs that administered Karachay exiles would soon consist of NKVD officials from the
Karachay Autonomous Province, while the other half would consist of Kazakh NKVD officials. [Plan
rasseleniia pribyvaushchikh iz Karachaevskoi avtonomnoi olbasti v Kazakhskuu i Kirgizskuu SSR
pereselentsev.] GARF f. 9479, o. 1, d. 137, l. 34-37.
12 See in particular GARF f. 9479, o. 1, d. 85, l. 1-6.
13 GARF f. 9479, o. 1, d. 183. l. 264-266.
14 A March 1945 report delivered to the Kazakh Sovnarkom indicated that Party officials throughout
East-Kazakhstan Province were embezzling government food supplies intended for the special-settlers,
leading to starvation among them. APRK (Archive of the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan) f. 708,
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an extraordinarily high mortality rate among special-settlers, particularly during the first months
of exile. As many as 101,306 North Caucasians alone died in Kazakhstan from exposure,
disease, and starvation between 1943-1944 and 1949.15
In these lethal conditions, the special-settlers could not be reintegrated into Soviet society as
equals of other national groups in Kazakhstan. These conditions, however, did not deter local
officials from mobilizing the deportees for labor. During the war, Soviet officials had no choice
but to force practically every Soviet citizen to work in order to support the war effort.16 The
Soviet leadership also expected the special-settlers to contribute to the war effort with their labor.
Party-state troikas in Kazakhstan attempted to settle German deportees in regions where the
heads of economic enterprise could most effectively utilize their labor.17 According to a
January 1942 report produced by the Soviet NKVD, local troikas in Pavlodar Province settled
incoming German deportees according to two major factors available living space in
agricultural areas and the general labor needs of collective farms, state farms, and Machine
Tractor Stations (MTSs).18 The imperatives of labor mobilization informed the process of exile
from the very beginning

o. 9, d. 314, l. 1-5.
15 Westren, Nations in Exile, 84.
16 See John Barber and Mark Harrison, The Soviet Home Front, 1941-1945: a social and economic
history of the USSR in World War II (London: Longman, 1991), 123-179.
17 These troikas consisted of the heads of government soviets, Party committees, and NKVD
organizations.
18 [Dokladnaia zapiska O rezultatakh rasseleniia i trudoustroistva nemtsev-pereselentsev v Pavldarkskoi
obl. Kazakhskoi SSR.] GARF 9479, o. 1, d. 85, l. 188-194.
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Various reports from Soviet and Kazakh NKVD officials indicate that if there was a deficit of
laborers in a region, local Slavic and Kazakh collective farmers were often willing to accept
German special-settlers and integrate them into their communities. For example, in October
1941 Captain Zabedev, the head of the NKVD organization of Qostanai Province, reported to his
NKVD superiors in Moscow that collective and state farmers in the province warmly welcomed
over 15,400 German deportees. 19 In Zabedevs estimation, these locals accepted the deportees so
readily because they arrived in the middle of the harvesting campaign and the local farmers were
shorthanded because Red Army officials had conscripted so many local farmers.
According to Zabedev, these collective and state farmers were fully prepared for the arrival of
the Germans, and the deportees quickly picked up farm implements and began working the
fields. Zabedevs report also pointed out that because the number of local workhands in Qostani
Province was so low, without the German special-settlers many collective and state farms in the
region would have probably failed to deliver their produce quotas to the state. If this report is
accurate, these German deportees saved these local farmers from hunger or even starvation. The
language that Zabedev employed in his report is telling. Rather than characterizing the German
special-settlers as enemies of Soviet power, he portrayed them as saviors of the local agricultural
economy. This does not necessarily mean, however, that Zabedev had an altogether positive
view of these German special-settlers. Like other NKVD officers in Kazakhstan, his primary
concern was to ensure that collective and state farm managers put the Germans to rational
economic use. Humanitarian concerns were secondary to this objective.

19 [Dokladnaia zapiska O rasselenii nemtsev-pereselentsev, pribyvshikh iz ASSR Nemtsev Povolzhia i

Saratovskoi oblasti.] GARF f. 9479, o. 1, d. 85, l. 167-172. For another NKVD report about German
deportees being immediately put to work on collective and state farms throughout Kazakhstan, see GARF
f. 9479, o. 1, d. 84, l. 75-84.
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The rational utilization of German specialists was an integral component of the overall
labor mobilization process. Because they were one of the most educated national groups in the
Soviet Union, a relatively high number of German deportees had advanced technical and
educational qualifications.20 To the chagrin of NKVD officials in Moscow, local government
officials in Kazakhstan often relegated German specialists to unskilled labor, thereby failing to
take advantage of their professional skills. Lieutenant Grushinov, the head of the SpecialSettlement Section of the Soviet NKVD, highlighted a particularly egregious case of this
neglect in an internal NKVD report written in November 1941.21 In this report, Grushinov
indicated that an unspecified number of collective farm officials in South-Kazakhstan Province
were forcing elderly German academics to work on cotton fields. Grushinov also complained
that German tractor drivers, lathe operators, and a number of other specialists were doing very
basic farm work that did not correspond to their occupational specialties. This was despite the
fact that these professionals could have greatly increased the productivity of local state farms and
MTSs with their professional skills. According to Grushinov, a number of German professionals
had become so discontented with their employment situation that many were illegally migrating
to Tashkent and Shymkent to find work to which they were more accustomed.
Several years later, local officials in Kazakhstan were struggling to efficiently employ
deported professionals from the North Caucasus. In April 1944, head of the Kazakh NKVD
Nikolai Bogdanov reported to Beria that local Party and soviet officials were failing to utilize a
20 Irina Mukhina, The Germans of the Soviet Union (London: Routledge, 2007), 94.
21 [Dokladnaia zapiska o poezdke v komandirovku v Uzhno-Kazakhstanskuu obl. KSSR po voporsy
pereseleniia nemtsev s 11/IX po 16/XI-41 g.] GARF f. 9479, o. 1, d. 84, l. 104-113. According to this
report, the NKVD had deported 7,511 Germans to South-Kazakhstan province by November 1941. The
recipient of this report was Ivan Ivanov, an important administrator of the Special-Settlement Section of
the Soviet NKVD in 1941-1942.
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large number of the Karachay, Chechen, Ingush, and Balkar professionals that had been deported
to Kazakhstan during the previous few months.22 According to Bogdanov, 8,066 North Caucasian
special-settlers in Kazakhstan were teachers, agronomists, tractor drivers, combine operators, and
medical personnel, but 3,265 of these professionals (40%) were working as simple farmhands
and in other semiskilled professions.
The failure of local government officials to absorb these German and North Caucasian
professionals into Kazakhstans workforce is not altogether surprising. The NKVD, after all,
deported most of the North Caucasians to rural regions containing relatively few educational
institutions, high-tech economic enterprises, or medical facilities. The criticisms that Soviet and
Kazakh NKVD authorities meted out to local government officials for not efficiently employing
German and North Caucasian specialists spoke to a much larger issue. For these NKVD officers,
these deportees were valuable economic resources that should not go to waste. These officers
portrayed the Germans and North Caucasians as economically useful, but also as people who
were not truly part of the Soviet community in the same way that Kazakhs and Slavs were.23 The
value of the deportees to these officials consisted mostly in their actual or potential economic
productivity.
Interestingly, NKVD reports about North Caucasian deportees in Kazakhstan also contain
many positive assessments of their labor efforts and many criticisms of local officials for
preventing these special-settlers from achieving their full economic potential. Rather than
22 [Doklad ob itogakh rasseleniia i zhoziastvenno-bytovom i trudovom ustroistve spetspereselentsev
Severnogo Kavkaza v Kazakhskoi SSR.] GARF f. 9479, o. 1, d. 183, l. 12-21.
23 This is not to suggest that NKVD and other Party-state officials in Moscow and Kazakhstan
characterized the German and North Caucasian deportees in an identical manner. NKVD officers, for
example, often characterized the German special-settlers as fascists; a word that they seldom used to
described the North Caucasian deportees. In the aggregate, however, there were more similarities than
differences in the ways that NKVD officials characterized the German and North Caucasian deportees.
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blaming the North Caucasians for their lack of economic productivity, the leaders of the Kazakh
NKVD commonly blamed local officials for not establishing the necessary conditions for
productive labor. A typical April 1944 special communiqu from Bogdanov to Vasilii
Chernyshev, the deputy head of the Soviet NKVD, indicated that only 1,500-1,800 Chechen,
Ingush, and Balkar deportees out of 6,043 were laboring on the collective farms of Shuchinsk
District in Aqmola Province.24 According to Bogdanov, the remaining 4,243-4,543 North
Caucasian special-settlers were idle, i.e. not engaged in productive labor. In Bogdanovs
estimation, this mass unemployment was due to a combination of mismanagement on the part of
collective farm chairpersons and the refusal of some special-settlers to work because of
inadequate food supplies. In neighboring Makinsk District, half of the labor capable North
Caucasian deportees were not working, evidently because collective farm chairpersons would not
employ them because they did not trust these North Caucasians to operate vehicles or work on
animal farms.
According to Bogdanov, collective farm officials were preventing North Caucasians from
working all over Kazakhstan. Bogdanovs communique to Chernyshev noted that in a number of
districts in Zhambyl Province, exiled North Caucasians had become so desperate for work that
they were forming groups on their own initiative to petition collective farm chairpersons for
employment. According to Bogdanov, these chairpersons were generally refusing these
petitions. A certain Aligbaev, the chairman of the Lenin Collective Farm in Sarysu District,
allegedly went as far as to tell a group of Chechen exiles that rather than give them work, he
would eject them all from his collective farm so that the NKVD could provide for their basic

24 [Spetsoobshchenie o nastroeniiakh povedenii spetspereselentsev Severnogo Kavkaza chechentsev,

ingushei, balkartsev.] GARF f. 9479, o. 1, d. 183, l. 239-243.
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needs. In his report, Bogdanov also accused Aligbaev of telling these Chechens that he would
not hire them because they are a dangerous and useless people.
By piling blame onto collective farm officials like Aligbaev, Bogdanov could feasibly
claim that the Kazakh NKVD was not responsible for the lackluster employment situation among
the North Caucasians. It is entirely possible that some collective farm officials in Kazakhstan
were prejudiced against the North Caucasians, but Bogdanovs communiqu glossed over the
fact that the Soviet and Kazakh NKVD organizations had put these officials in an impossible
situation by deporting thousands upon thousands of special-settlers to the republic. Tellingly,
Bodgdanovs communiqu does not assign any blame to the North Caucasians for being
unemployed. Indeed, from 1943 to 1945 Party and NKVD leaders in Kazakhstan consistently
reported that many North Caucasians were conscientiously laboring on collective farms and in
other economic enterprises despite the obstacles thrown in front of them by local government
officials. For example, in April 1944, Skvortsov and Bogdanov sent a report to Beria claiming
that many work brigades on Kazakhstans collective and state farms consisting solely of deported
Karachays, Chechens, Ingush, and Balkars regularly over-fulfilled their output norms by 110140% - far above the output norms of many Kazakh and Russian brigades in the republic.25
If these farmers were not North Caucasian special-settlers, Skvortsov and Bogdanov
probably would have characterized them as ideal Soviet citizens who were bolstering the war
effort and strengthening the Soviet Union through their selfless labor.26 Instead, Skvortsov and
25 [Doklad ob itogakh rasseleniia i zhoziastvenno-bytovom i trudovom ustroistve spetspereselentsev
Severnogo Kavkaza v Kazakhskoi SSR.] GARF f. 9479, o. 1, d. 183, l. 12-21.
26 This was the phrase employed by Soviet propagandists to describe the labor feats of non-repressed Soviet
citizens during the Great Patriotic war. Tellingly, newspapers in Kazakhstan such as Sotsialistik Qazaqstan and
Kazakhstanskaia Pravda commonly propagandized the labor efforts of Kazakhs and Russians but never of deported
groups.

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Bogdanov described these special-settlers as economically useful commodities. Party and

government leaders in Kazakhstan expected the special-settlers, like all Soviet citizens, to labor
endlessly to support the war effort, but these officials continuously reminded the deportees that
they occupied a different legal and administrative world than Russians, Kazakhs, and other nondeported groups. During the war, the leaders of the Kazakh republic did not fully exclude the
special-settlers from mainstream society, but neither did they seek to reintegrate them.
Deportation at the hands of the NKVD sent the German and North Caucasian special-settlers to
an interstitial zone where their rights and duties as Soviet citizens were not clearly defined in
practice. In the eyes of Soviet leaders in Moscow and Almaty, labor became the principal factor
that defined the existence of these deportees, and this tendency towards objectifying the specialsettlers intensified as the war ended in 1945.27

27 I explore these issues in depth in Chapter 5 of my dissertation, The Mobilized and the Repressed: the
Peoples of Kazakhstan at War, 1941-1945 (University of Wisconsin Madison, forthcoming June 2015.
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