I wrote:
That's why the population of Yakutia is half Yakut. Russia had to wait until Stalin to get a Trail of Tears. -- By ToT I mean a mass deportaion of a people on ethnic grounds. The first one was of the Volga Germans, in the belief that ethnic Germans would be a fifth column in WW2. (All of the men on the mother's side of my ex-fiancee of that generation died in this.) Germans at that time largely lived in separate communities, and their descendents are still regarded as a separate ethnicity. Later, they were followed by ethnic groups thought to have collaborated with the Nazis -- Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush.
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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