The Nation Killers

Between 1941 and 1944 Soviet Russian troops rounded up eight small indigenous nations for deportation to eastern Siberia and the Sino-Soviet frontier. An estimated 1,500,000 men, women and children- the peoples of the Karachai, the Kalmyks, the Chechens, the Ingush, the Balkars, the Meskhetians, the Crimean Tartars and the Volga Germans --were loaded into cattle-trucks and forcibly re- moved from their homelands. Approximately one-third of them died during the first bitter year. Stalin justified this genocide with accusations of collaboration with the invading Nazis and pro- German sympathies. It was not until Robert Conquest undertook the massive task of research that resulted in The Nation Killers that the full story became known.