Case Study:

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The deportation of Muslims from the Georgian region of Meskhetia is one of the numerous deportations carried out by the Stalinist regime during the Second World War. It occurred in a few days in November 1944, long after the Red Army had defeated the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad and at a time when no German presence threatened the Caucasus. This deportation, like the preceding ones, proceeded in well-rehearsed fashion. Nearly 100,000 Muslims were exiled from their mountainous region of southern Georgia to the remote republics of Central Asia. While no specific charges were laid against them, the deportees were accused of being traitors to the Soviet nation. They suffered exile, remained on probation, and were victims of an hereditary collective punishment.

 A. The Context

The causes of this massive deportation were various and are still the subject of debate. One thing is certain: the deportees were never accused of collaborating with the German enemy. Among the explanations advanced for the deportation, two facts stand out. On the one hand, the population lived in a mountainous region bordering Turkey, which was an undeclared ally of Nazi Germany. On the other hand, those who were deported as ‘Turks, Hemshinli (Armenian Muslims) and Kurds’ were all Sunni Muslim in culture and were mostly Turkophone.

Only the ‘Turks’, who formed the overwhelming majority of deportees from Georgia (90 per cent), had a problematic ethnonym. The term, imposed on the occasion of the deportation, covers a disparate reality, which is a source of debates about identity up to present day (Tournon, 2007): were they Turks or Georgians? The deportees referred to by the name of ‘Turks’ and then ‘Soviet Turks’ have always had a problematic ethnic identity. Tsarist censuses referred to them by different names: Sunni Georgians, Ottomans, Azerbaijanis. Subsequently, the mere fact that they were Muslim was enough to make them potential allies of the Turks in the eyes of the Soviet authorities – especially since the border between Soviet Georgia and Turkey was well known for being porous.

Even so, Georgian intellectuals and the Georgian authorities regarded them as Georgians who had been Islamized by three centuries of the Ottoman yoke. That is why, with a view to the cleansing of the Turko-Soviet borders, the government of the Soviet Republic of Georgia proposed the transfer of this supposedly high-risk population to the interior of the country as an alternative to deportation. In addition, the plan envisaged a policy of re-georgianization of these Muslims, who did not all regard themselves as Georgians (Mamulija, 1999). But Stalin and Beria preferred the solution of banishment to the remotest parts of the USSR, with the definitive assignment of a Turkish identity deduced from their language and their religious culture.

The ethnic and religious identity of the population does not explain everything; the situation of Meskhetia also partially motivated the deportation. The Soviet leadership knew that Turkish troops had been dispatched to the border with the USSR. Even if this presence was more defensive than offensive, Stalin preferred to secure the border. Moreover, he harbored the secret project of annexing the north of Turkey and its straits. To that end, the cleansing of the borders of any dubious elements was indispensable. The Muslims of Meskhetia, who until 1921 had fought with the Turks against the Christians, were thus condemned as potential traitors. Only the Muslim Adjars, clearly identified as Georgians and enjoying an autonomous republic, were spared.

On July 31, 1944, Stalin signed the deportation order. Between November 15 and 18, the inhabitants of 212 villages from the regions of Adigeni, Axalcixe, Aspindza, Axalkalaki and Ninocminda were rounded up. On November 25-26, some hundreds of ‘Turks’ were deported from neighboring Adjara. Officially, the deportees numbered 91,000, but scholars are still undecided as to the actual number of victims. Depending upon the source, the figure ranges between 90,000 and 116,000 deportees. In sum, half of them were minors under the age of 16, 27,000 women, and around 19,000 old or handicapped men. In 1944, at the time of the deportation, nearly 40,000 Georgians were fighting at the front. Only 20,000 survived and had to join the exiles in Central Asia (Bugaj and Gonov, 1998).

A security strip of 7-80 kilometers was established in Meskhetia and punctuated by military posts screening entry and exit in order to ‘secure’ the border with Turkey. The region was thus placed under strict control. Most of the emptied villages were re-inhabited by Georgians who had been forcibly transferred from Imeretia. Other villages were simply razed to the ground and some were transformed into fields. Cemeteries and other sites of commemoration disappeared for the most part and only a handful of religious sites was spared.

Around 11,000 Muslims from Meskhetia were exiled to Kirghizia, 30,000 to Kazakhstan, and 54,000 to Uzbekistan. Reception conditions varied, but the majority of exiles lived in dilapidated barracks that offered them no protection against the severe winter. Few had a decent roof over their heads; many were without shelter. Like most deportees before them, they became ‘special settlers’, second-class citizens, forbidden to move more than five kilometers from their assigned location, which required them to present themselves to the komandatura every two weeks to report to the NKVD. The overwhelming majority, including minors, worked in kolkhozes; 6,000 were in sovkhozes; and 1,300 in factories. All of them were paid a pittance in difficult conditions (Afanasiev, Werth, 2004).

For a long time, the Muslims of Meskhetia hoped that Stalin, whom they regarded as innocent and ignorant of their case, would do them justice. After his death in 1953, a series of laws made it possible to free certain population categories: minors, the spouses of free citizens, invalids, and war heroes. In 1956, Nikita Khrushchev partially freed the punished peoples one after the other. On April 28, the Turks, Hemshinli and Kurds once again became Soviet citizens, but were not able to claim reparations or return to their places of origin. In 1957, Khrushchev agreed to restore certain peoples to their rights and their ‘homelands’: Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, and so on. The Crimean Tartars, the Volga Germans, and the Meskhetian Muslims did not benefit from such decisions; and their exile was arbitrarily maintained.

However, on October 31, 1957 an ambiguous decree gave the deportees hope. They obtained the right to go to the Caucasian Republic of Azerbaijan and become citizens of it. Up to 40,000 of them opted for integration into a country that was culturally close to their Muslim identity and geographically close to their Georgian homeland. But this half-solution led to a definitive division between two identitarian movements among the exiles. The first, which is in a majority, regards the deportees as ethnically Turks and accepts integration into Azerbaijan. The second, in a minority, considers them to be Georgian ‘Meskhs’ and envisages nothing less than their return to Georgia. But Georgia refuses any negotiation on the sensitive subject of repatriation (Junusov, 2000; Umarov-Gozališvili X., 1994).

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