In an interview on The Caucasus

Let’s fast-forward to another cheerful book about the Stalin era.

I think The Nation Killers is a slightly neglected book in a way because in Cold War times what you thought about the Soviet Union was conditioned by what side of the political debate you were on. Robert Conquest’s experiences in Bulgaria after the Second World War and the way that the Communists had taken power there filled him with disgust and prompted him to take an anti-Stalinist stance. He ended up doing a lot of research into the purges of 1943-4 when Stalin deported natives of the North Caucasus to Siberia and Central Asia and it is this process of resettlement that is investigated in this book. The Chechens, Ingush, Balkars and Karachais were forced out of their homeland for allegedly collaborating with the Germans in the Second World War. Though some did side with the Nazis, they were mainly opposed to the Soviet regime, which had ill-treated them for decades.

Conquest uncovered the kind of details of the Stalinist purges that make the book really compelling. For example, in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia published after the war, the population of Kabardino-Balkaria was listed as 60 per cent Circassian, 10 per cent Russian. There was no explanation for the missing 30 per cent. The indigenous Balkars had been deported, with about one third dying in the process, but no one had got around to editing the details in the encyclopedia.

I think it’s fair to say that, written as it was in 1969, Conquest’s study was before its time in its damning report on Stalin’s crimes. At the time, a lot of academics in the West were in denial about how bad Stalin’s purges were and it was difficult to get any facts because they tended to be ideologically tainted by one side or the other. In fact, Conquest retrospectively commented that, if anything, he had underestimated how bad it was.