Stalin Liquidates Two Republics¶
Core Argument¶
Here, the text from Socialist Appeal (No. 27) presents a polemical indictment of Stalinist national policy during the Second World War, focusing on the liquidation of the Chechen-Ingush and Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics. The core argument is that the deportation of entire nationalities—specifically the Chechens, Ingush, and Crimean Tatars, totalling 1.5 million people—was not a wartime security measure but an act of unmitigated barbarism and national oppression, comparable only to Nazi excesses.
The chapter draws its immediate evidence from a report in the Daily Worker (28 June), which quotes Deputy Bakhumurov of the Supreme Soviet. The official justification is that the bulk of the population "did not oppose the traitors who collaborated with the German invaders." On this pretext, the Chechen-Ingush Republic was abolished, and the Crimean Republic was downgraded to a region (Crimean Oblast). The text seizes on the bureaucratic flatness of the language—"transported to other districts… allotted land… given state economic assistance"—to argue that the regime treats human beings as "so many sacks of potatoes."
The historical context drawn upon is the earlier precedent of the Volga German Republic, whose entire population was deported to Siberia as a "precaution" against potential Quislings. This establishes a pattern: the Stalinist bureaucracy uses the excuse of collaboration to uproot entire peoples, regardless of individual guilt or innocence. The text explicitly rejects the Stalinist version of events, posing a devastating rhetorical question: if the revolution had truly liberated these peoples, why would they prefer "the slavery of the Nazis to the rule of Stalin"? The implication is that Stalinist rule itself has become indistinguishable from oppression, driving national minorities to desperation.
The polemic is directed squarely against the Stalinist bureaucracy, which the text accuses of using terror to enforce submission among the national republics. The measure is framed not as a response to genuine treachery but as a calculated act of repression: "to terrorise the peoples of the national republics into submission to the Great Russian bureaucracy." The argument is that the deportation punishes all—workers, peasants, even Communist Party members—indiscriminately, and that this is a mockery of socialism's elementary principles. The chapter thus functions as a Trotskyist critique, arguing that Stalinism has betrayed the revolutionary legacy of 1917 by adopting methods of national oppression that negate the very idea of liberation.