THE VAST majority of people know the horrors of the Nazi regime, but in my experience far fewer know of the appalling crimes Stalin committed against his own people during World War II. As the war came to an end, Stalin’s secret police—the NKVD—wreaked vengeance upon whole nations within the Soviet Union.
NKVD Lieutenant Nikonor Perevalov was one of Stalin’s servants who took part in these terrible acts of ethnic cleansing. Even though he was in his early 80s when I interviewed him in Moscow at the end of the last century, he sat upright with his military bearing intact, proudly wearing his medals. “I thought I was doing the right thing,” he said, “because my senior officer ordered me to do it. It was my duty to fulfill his orders.”
One of the first reprisals Stalin ordered was against the Kalmyk people, descendants of nomadic Mongols who had settled south of Stalingrad. The Germans had occupied the Kalmyk Steppe in 1942 as they advanced toward the Caucasus and the oilfields of Baku. Because some of the people collaborated with the Germans, Stalin decided that all 93,000 Kalmyks should suffer for the sins of the few. In October 1943 he endorsed the decision of the State Committee for Defense that the Kalmyks be “relocated” to even more remote regions of the Soviet Union, such as Omsk and Novosibirsk in Siberia. In December 1943, NKVD troops—including a unit led by Nikonor Perevalov—were sent to the Kalmyk Steppe to carry out the forced deportation.
Perevalov believed that the Kalmyks “had shown a negative side of their character during the German occupation…. I saw them as someone on the enemy’s side, not just because I was a Communist but from a personal point of view as well. But at the same time, when we looked at them, I thought: how could these people be capable of acting on the enemy’s side? Because I thought they looked quite miserable and pitiful.”
The NKVD took action on December 28, 1943. In the house Perevalov cleared, “there must have been three children under 16 and a husband and wife. They were all frightened. I said to them, ‘You are going to be evicted. You are to be put on lorries and taken to the assembly point.’ They were standing. Numb…. When you look at such backward, such browbeaten people, and you see that this Kalmyk is incapable of doing anything bad, cannot attack you, together with the meagerness of their life, it makes you feel pity for them…. We were under oath to fulfill that order, but at the same time we thought, how can it be that a whole people should be deported? The majority were women, children, and old men—why should these people suffer and be punished by Soviet law? Why did they have to suffer because of those who were really guilty?”
No one knows exactly how many Kalmyks died during the deportations or during their exile, which lasted until after Stalin’s death. Conditions on the trains to Siberia were appalling: on one train, 290 of the 478 passengers died on the journey. The survivors faced starvation and hard labor in exile on collective farms or in forestry camps. And the Kalmyks were far from alone in suffering due to Stalin’s vengeance: in total more than a million people from national groups in the Soviet Union were forcibly deported, including the Chechens and Crimean Tatars.
Yet even though Perevalov knew he was deporting innocent women and children, it never occurred to him to disobey orders. “The commander is the one and only commander; subordinates were supposed to fulfill his orders…. If we had been ordered to shoot them down, we would have shot them down. I would have fulfilled this order. This is the requirement of the oath that we all swear and this is the rule.”
Originally published in the October 2013 issue of World War II. To subscribe, click here.
