Genocide: - DIIS

Klas-Göran Karlsson
the Soviet economy in the 1960s was related to the fact that the fl ow of
cheap forced labour was suddenly stopped, after a protracted period of
time when the supply was so abundantly rich that the impetus for technical
development was hampered. 30
In part the same economic motives might at least partly be relevant when
analysing the deportations of ethnic groups during the Great Patriotic
War. The forced migration of large populations to Central Asia and Siberia
satisfi ed the need for a qualifi ed labour force in the armament industry
in a situation in which the German occupation had forced this industry
to move eastwards. In this case the idea of economic advantage was to
all appearances combined with a fear among those in power that ethnic
groups such as the Volga Germans might collaborate with the enemy. For
the north Caucasians such as the Chechens, there was probably also an
element of punishment involved, due to the fact that these ethnic groups
had not allowed a radical Sovietization of their territories in the inter-war
period.
Another structural determinant of the terror is political. The simplest
task is to explain terror against the higher echelons of the party and state
apparatus. Although not in any way challenging Stalin’s prime position
there were confl icts on the ideological direction of the Soviet state. These
were rooted in the 1920s when an animated ideological debate derived its
nourishment from the NEP experience. It is well known that there were
factions and groups with different opinions about the direction and the
pace of social change within Soviet society, all of them referring back to
the Leninist legacy. The transition from the compromises and the moderation
of the NEP era to the radical Stalinist revolution with its high human
and economic costs was strongly criticised from the right, this opposition
being led by Bukharin, Rykov and Tomskii. Two of them faced show trials
and were executed in the purges in 1938, while the third, Mikhail Tomskii,
killed himself in 1936 when he heard that Stalin’s chief prosecutor Vyshinskii
had started inquiries against him.
30 Cf Stanislaw Swianiewicz (1965), Forced Labour and Economic Development. An Inquiry into
the Experience of Soviet Industrialization. London.
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