• DOI:10.1353/kri.2005.0029
• Corpus ID: 161159084

The Nature of Anti-Soviet Armed Resistance, 1942-44: The North Caucasus, the Kalmyk Autonomous Republic, and Crimea

@article{Statiev2005TheNO,
  title={The Nature of Anti-Soviet Armed Resistance, 1942-44: The North Caucasus, the Kalmyk Autonomous Republic, and Crimea},
  author={Alexander Statiev},
  journal={Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History},
  year={2005},
  volume={6},
  pages={285 - 318}
}

• Alexander Statiev
• Published 16 June 2005
• History
• Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History

In 1943–44, the Soviet government deported several ethnic groups, justifying this act primarily by these nationalities’ collaboration with the Germans. In 1989, the Supreme Council of the USSR condemned the deportations as “illegal and criminal,” but the assumption that an exceptionally large proportion of these peoples collaborated with the invaders and that this was the major cause for their deportation continues to linger in Russian public opinion. The resistance and collaboration of the North Caucasian ethnic groups, Kalmyks, and Crimean Tatars has attracted little attention among historians. The most important publications of the Cold War era regarding these groups were those by Aleksandr Nekrich and Joachim Hoffmann. Nekrich produced a brief overview based on solid research in published primary and secondary sources, both sanitized by Soviet censors; Hoffmann presented a case study of Kalmyk collaboration using, sometimes uncritically, German primary and secondary sources. Post–Cold War scholars prefer to concentrate on the deportations but usually ignore the nature of the conflict between stigmatized ethnic groups and the authorities. Russian historians at most touch on this dynamic. Some accept the official reports about collaboration and insurgencies in these regions at face value, others emphasize