--- Jim Devine <jdevine03 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> whatever the excuse, Stalin's deportations had their
> precedents in the
> post-WW1 era.
>
FWIW, I'm translating here from my Ethnographic and Political Atlas of the Caucasus (1774-2004):
Border "Preventive Deportations"
Aftre the collective-farming experiment organized famine in many agrarian reasons of the USSR, the attractiveness of the country as a model of social-economic and political development began to seriously weaken. The country's loss of this model status and a worsening of the international situation in many respects changed the social function of the external borders of the Soviet state. The effort to guarantee their impermeability to migration and military effectiveness led to the beginning of s series of border "cleansing" deportations. Among politically untrustworthy elements -- risk groups -- were foreign citizens and citizens of the USSR who had a "foreign homeland" on the other side of the border. The first ethnic deportations were Poles from the western border of the country and Koreans in the Far East. The first deportation in the Caususus was connected to the resettlement in 1937-38 of Kurds (1,300 people) and Iranians (6,700) from the border areas of Azerbaijan and Armenia.
Lyubo, bratsy, lyubo, lyubo, bratsy, zhit!
ËÞÁÎ, ÁÐÀÒÖÛ, ËÞÁÎ, ËÞÁÎ, ÁÐÀÒÖÛ, ÆÈÒÜ!
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