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the
common tragedy united the whole nation in a fight for its very
survival. but the rise of patriotism did not signify abandonment by
the soviet regime of its customary repressive practices. on the
contrary, the punitive apparatus shored up national unity by its own
methods, suppressing all symptoms of dissidence, lack of faith, or
questioning of the leadership抯 actions. the gulag network continued
to function: labor camps and prisons provided recruits for the red
army and were, in turn, replenished by those, returning from the
german captivity (the regime declared surrender to the enemy
tantamount to treason), or those who had stayed behind in the
occupied territories (they were automatically suspect of
collaboration with the enemy), or those arrested for 揳nti-soviet
attitudes and gossip?at the front and in the rear.
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entire nationality groups were singled out for punishment for
alleged collaboration with the enemy, including the crimean tatars,
the volga germans, and a number of caucasian peoples, such as the
ingushetians, ossetians, and chechens. they were evicted from their
home territories by the interior ministry troops and resettled in
the central asian regions, kazakhstan, and siberia. these repressive
operations, which victimized nearly two million people, required a
massive number of railway carriages and trucks, so badly needed to
move supplies to the front. many of the deportees perished en route
to their destinations or did not survive the harsh conditions of the
exile.
despite the efforts by stalin抯 successors梖rom khrushchev to
gorbachev梩o right the wrongs inflicted on these nationality groups,
the consequences of the wartime repressions would continue to have
negative effect on interethnic relations within russia even to the
present day.
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