Coming to terms with the past: In Germany, the 40 million victims of Stalinism are largely forgotten

On the occasion of the 61st anniversary of the collective deportation of the Chechen people (February 23rd, 1944), the Society for Threatened Peoples (SfTP) reminds that 40 million people were eliminated by Josef Stalin’s rule of terror between 1917 and 1953. In Russia, the world-famous human rights organization Memorial under the leadership of the renown Russian human rights activist Sergej Kowaljow fights for the remembrance of this horrible, long-lasting bloodshed. "We share his worry that the Russian president Wladimir Putin’s politics and understanding of history approaches Stalinism,” said Tilman Zülch, Secretary General of the SfTP, on Wednesday. The human rights activist reproaches Federal Chancellor Gerhard Schröder for fostering a close friendship with the former KGB officer.

In the former Soviet Union, 48 different religious and ethnic communities were deported during and after the Second World War, on 23.02.1944 the akin Ingushes and Chechnyans. Their transport led to Central Asia. Tens of thousands of men, women, and children – according to various ratings about one third of this small group – died during the journey or during exile because of hunger, cold, and illnesses. The Ingushes and Chechens shared this fate with the Crimean Tatars, Karachays, Balkarians, and Meshkets, Calmucks, Soviet Greeks, Far Eastern Koreans, and Russian Germans. In all cases, the majority of these communities were eliminated in what the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948 described as a genocide.

It is only after ten years of exile in central Asia that the surviving Chechens could return. And yet, under the governance of the Russian president Boris Jelzin, a politic of genocide against the Chechens was once again practiced. From 1994 to 1996, 80,000 people thus died. Since 1999, 80,000 more Chechens died. Alltogether, this represents 20% of the small ethnic community.

* This huge number is mentioned in the Handbook on Genocide (Fischer Verlag)