This fear was not
> unfounded as the WWII history of the Crimean
> Tartars, among others had shown.
---
Not coincidentally, Solzhenitsyn discusses this in Gulag:
"The Lithuanians were the first to start supporting the Germans (understandably so; we had really hurt them beyond endurance in just one year!). Then the Ukrainians formed a voluntary SS division, and the Estonians joined a few SS units. In Byelorussia there was a people's militia fighting against the partisans: 100,000 men! There was a Turkestan battalion, and in Crimea a Tartar one. (All this was the harvest of what the Soviets had sowed, like the senseless persecution of Islam in Crimea, whose farsighted conquerer, Catherine II, had assigned state funds to build new mosques and enlarge others. Hitler's military units had also had enough common sense to protect the mosques.) When the Germans conquered our southern regions, the number of volunteer battalions increased: there was a Georgian one, an Armenian one, a battalion of the Northern Caucasus peoples, and sixteen Kalmyk battalions. (And there were almost no Soviet partisans in the South.) During the German retreat from the Don region, about fifteen thousand Cossacks followed the German army; half of them were able to fight. In the Briansk region, near Lokot, in 1941, before the arrival of the Germans, the local population dissolved the kolkhozes and readied itself to fight Soviet partisans; the autonomous region that was then created remained in existence until 1943, headed by an engineer, Voskoboynikov. It had twenty thousand armed men, whose flag bore the image of St. George. They called themselves "The Russian National Liberation Army.""
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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