Word: stalins
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...despair of a twice-exiled people is etched into Inna Hairadze's tear- streaked face. Together with 100 other Meskhetian Turks, she stands in a thin wool coat on a Moscow street, protesting her people's lot. In 1944, "to strengthen border safety," Joseph Stalin deported the Turks from their mountainous homeland in Georgia to the flatlands of Uzbekistan. Then, last June, the Uzbeks rose up against the Turks, burning houses, belongings, even babies. One hundred people died, and 17,000 Turks were moved out. Authorities in Moscow scattered the refugees across Russia, where they are still denied permanent residence...
Hairadze is but one of 3 million people in the Soviet Union who, thanks to Stalin's legacy, still live unwillingly outside their native regions. Now, increasingly, these unhappy outcasts are demanding their old lands back. But going home is problematic when home has been usurped. After the Meskhetians and other groups were driven out during World War II, new communities moved in. So even though Gorbachev's government has denounced Stalin's deportations, it faces major obstacles in reversing the past...
...first victims of Stalin's expulsions were the Koreans who peopled the Soviet Far East. In 1937 they were herded to the snow-blown steppes of Kazakhstan to prevent them from "collaborating" with the Japanese. Later Stalin deemed the Volga Germans "saboteurs and spies" and in 1941 banished them to Siberia. The Crimean Tatars followed in 1944. Other exiled nationalities included the Kalmucks, Chechens, Ingush and the Balkars. By the 1960s, some of these groups had been rehabilitated and given back their autonomous regions. But "lost" peoples remain, among them the Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars and Meskhetian Turks...
...Stalin, for example, ordered the liquidation of an entire class of Russians in order to bring about industrialization and agricultural reform. It is estimated that millions of people died during his purges, with millions more interned on work camps...
...some local communists say they can see a justification for Stalin's measures. "We uphold Stalin," says Lawrence. "He made some very serious errors, but he did them in the context of trying to implement communism...