Stalin's Genocides by Norman M. Naimark Page B

Feliks Dzerzhinskii—were also purged during this period. Many were shot as agents of the Polish government.
    German communists faced a similar fate, though the party itself was kept intact. In February 1940 some 570
    German communists were handed over to Stalin’s Nazi allies in an exchange of prisoners at Brest-Litovsk. Many of those lost their lives in the gaols and concentration camps of the Third Reich. In all of the national operations, justified uniformly as efforts to deprive the enemy of a potential fifth column during a potential war, 350,000 people were arrested, 247,000 of them executed.8
    The Great Terror marked a general transition in state repression from social to national groups. After 1937, for the first time in Soviet rhetoric, the “Great Russian na-removing nations 87
    tion” was elevated above the others. At the same time, the government disbanded as reactionary and unnecessary many smaller national units and subunits that had existed since the early 1920s as distinct administrative entities.9 In the second half of the 1930s, Poles, Germans, Koreans, and Iranians who lived in border regions met the bitter fate of executions, forced deportations, and scratch-ing out new lives in special settlements and the Gulag. On the eve of the war, Ukrainians, Finns, and Estonians were
    “cleansed” from their homelands en masse and in a similarly brutal fashion.
    In 1937 the first “total” forced deportation of a people took place when Stalin ordered the resettlement of the Koreans, some 175,000 people altogether, from the Soviet Far East to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The Koreans suffered extreme privations during this large-scale transfer. It took them more than a month to reach their destinations.
    Like the kulaks, they showed up at settlements that had none of the building materials, supplies, food, and heating materials that had been assured by government orders.
    Some four thousand Koreans who arrived in the town of Kustanai spent at least a week in their train cars before the local authorities did anything to help them.10 The real threat of Japanese subversion of the Korean population was in no way proportionate to the harsh fate of the Koreans. In this case, Stalin struck at the Koreans for no other reason than that there was a Japanese threat in the East, not because the Japanese could and did use the Koreans, nor because there was evidence the threat of Korean collaboration would turn into an actuality at any time soon.
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    chapter 5
    The Korean deportation was an important milestone in the history of Soviet actions against the nationalities, even though there were some notable exceptions to their generally harsh treatment.11 Soviet officials learned lessons about how to conduct military-like operations against their own people, using surprise and speed as their most valuable weapons to uproot masses of unsuspecting citizens.
    They developed techniques—if still imperfect—for transporting at once large numbers of people by rail. NKVD
    special units both at the point of embarkation in the Far East and on arrival in Central Asia learned the business of the mass deportation of an entire people, old and young, workers and peasants, party members and not.
    Stalin’s campaign against foreign nationalities subsided as the war appeared imminent. The Great Terror against other categories of “enemies of the people” was also called off when Beria replaced Yezhov as head of the NKVD in November 1938 on the eve of the war. Beria then proceeded to purge the entire NKVD organization, much as Yezhov had purged the Yagoda-led security police. With deceptive innocence, Beria accused the NKVD’s previous leaders of allowing excesses against perfectly loyal Soviet citizens, engaging in torture to extract false confessions, and unjustly punishing family members.
    As a consequence of the secret protocols of the Nazi–
    Soviet Pact of August 23, 1939, whose existence Soviet authorities denied until December