Rebuttal to Grover Furr on Soviet deportations

In an interview with the Georgian Times, famous pseudohistorian Grover Furr has made a bunch of outrageous claims about the Soviet deportation of ethnic minorities carried out during WW2. For anyone who knows who Grover Furr is, this is not surprising.

I will be refuting his claims in this article.

The interview

Furr's Claim #1:

N. Bugai, the leading Russian expert on deportations and a strong anti-Stalinist, documents some exceptions to the deportations for veterans and their families. Bugai also stated that “… the Soviet government had by and large allocated its priorities correctly, basing those priorities on its right to maintain order behind the front lines, and in the North Caucasus in particular.”

Debunking:

Veterans weren't spared from deportation so this is not true.

The "special settlements" for the Crimean Tatars actually contained 8,995 former Red Army soldiers who were Crimean Tatars [1].

Among these were:

534 officers

1,392 seargants

7,079 rank and file soldiers

Soviet authorities also deported Crimean Tatars who were members of the Communist Party. 742 Crimean Tatars who were members of the Communist Party were recorded at being at the special settlements in March 1949[2].

As for Furr's source, N. Bugai, it's worth noting that Furr basically cherrypicked this guy. Bugai actually mentions the high mortality of groups after them being settled in special settlements (which will be discussed later in this article) in this article and Furr straight up ignores this. Bugai also makes it pretty clear in the same article that for most Soviet deportations, veterans weren't spared.

This isn't the first time that Furr has cherrypicked scholars. Remember that time when Furr cited a literal holocaust conspiracy theorist as his irrefutable proof?

It's strange to me how, for Furr, a scholar suddenly becomes correct once they say 1 thing that agrees with his narrative. 

Furr's Claim #2:

In her famous book “GULAG”, the American anticommunist, Ann Applebaum denies that there were massive rebellions and desertions. In my book Antistalinskaia Podlost’ I cite facts which were uncovered by other researchers that prove that these pro-Nazi rebellions did involve most of the people in the ethnic groups in question.

Debunking:

I don't have time to refute Furr's entire book. I may do so in the future. 

Furr claims that he proved that there were in fact mass rebellions conducted by the deported ethnic groups. This is NOT TRUE and I will refute this claim here.

There were in fact some Crimean Tatars who chose to collaborate with the Nazis. About 9,225 Crimean Tatars fought in German units in order to stop Soviet partisans in Crimea[3]. The Crimean Tatars who collaborated with the Nazis, however, only accounted for less than 1% of the over 1 million Soviets[4] who collaborated with the Nazis during WW2. Furthermore, the Crimean Tatars who collaborated with the Nazis only accounted for a small part of the 218,000 Crimean Tatars[5] living in Crimea. 

Many Crimean Tatars actually fought in the Red Army. Soviet records show that about 20,000 Crimean Tatars (or around 15% of the adult male Crimean Tatar population) were mobilized into the Red Army during WW2[6]. Around 8,927 Crimean Tatars were demobilized by the NKVD and sent to special settlements once the deportation happened[7]. 

Besides, whether the Crimean Tatars were involved in large scale collaboration with the Nazis is actually sort of irrelevant. The VAST majority of the people deported during the deportation of the crimean tatars were innocent women and children[8]. By Furr's logic, Stalin should've deported every last Russian in the USSR, since many Russians collaborated with the Nazis in WW2. 

We will talk about whether the Chechens and Ingush collaborated with the Nazis in a bit.

Furr's Claim #3:

For example, over 90% of Crimean Tartar recruits deserted. Researcher J. Otto Pohl has argued, from German sources, that not all these men joined Nazi forces. Even if true, this makes no difference as the Soviets could not have known this, and most would have joined anti-Soviet partisan or bandit groups.

Debunking: 

The Crimean Tatar recruits did not desert. They were captured. Furr lied.

In "The Hidden Ethnic Cleansing of Muslims in the Soviet Union: The Exile and Repatriation of the Crimean Tatars"[8]:

According to Necip Adulhamitoglu, a Crimean Tatar historian, thousands of Crimean Tatars serving in the Red Army were captured by the Germans as whole Russian armies (most notably General Vlasov's army) surrendered to the seemingly invincible nazi forces.13 Many of those captured Crimean Tatars were taken to prisoner-of-war camps where the mortality rate was quite high. Although the nazis had initially called for the murder of all 'Asiatic inferiors' (Hitler considered 'Mongols' and Tatars to be Untermenschen - subhumans who were even lower on the race scale than the despised Slavs), along with the Jews and communists, Hitler's generals in the field revised this hasty policy when the Red Army began to put up a more determined resistance before Moscow, Stalingrad and Leningrad 

So many of the 20,000 Crimean Tatars who joined the Soviet army were captured during the Crimean campaign. They didn't "desert".

Besides, this entire argument of the Crimean Tatars deserting is completely irrelevant. Members of an ethnicity deserting from an army is not evidence that said ethnicity is plotting a massive rebellion against the government. 

Furr's Claim #4:

Likewise, 93% of Chechen and Ingush men drafted to military service in 1942 deserted, went into hiding, joined the Nazis, or joined rebel or bandit groups. In February 1943, pro-Nazi Chechen nationalists led a major pro-German rebellion under the Nazi flag,

Grigory Tokaev and Viacheslav Molotov both agree that there were large anti-Soviet rebellions in these areas during the war. The only difference: Tokaev thinks the rebellions were justified.

Debunking:

Can we just take a second to laugh at how Furr cited Viacheslav Molotov as his irrefutable proof?

Viacheslav Molotov..... wasn't a historian or scholar. He was Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Soviet Union from 1939-1949. As a high ranking Soviet leader, Molotov played a key role in the deportations conducted by the Soviet Union during WW2, along with other crimes committed by the Stalinist regime. The opinion of a Soviet politician is literally worthless.

Anyways, Furr claims that the Chechens launched a pro-Nazi rebellion during the Battle of the Caucasus. True, some Chechen nationalists did collaborate with the Nazis in order to try and establish an independent Chechen state. The fact is, however, that most talks between the Chechens and the Nazis failed[9]. According to historian Babak Rezvani, only around 100 Chechens were involved in direct collaboration with the Axis[10]. 

There were in fact some Chechens who resisted Soviet rule, but did not directly collaborate with the Nazis. Still, this collaboration only involved possibly about 2% of the Chechen population[11]. 

Not only that, but plenty of Chechens served in the Red Army in order to repel the German advance towards their homeland. About 17,000 Chechens joined the Red Army[12], and a further 13,000 joined the "People's Militia" of the Chechno-Ingush ASSR[13].

Keep in mind that at the beginning of the interview, Furr claimed:

......these pro-Nazi rebellions did involve most of the people in the ethnic groups in question.

I don't think 2% of an ethnic group is "most", and I don't think the rebellions were "pro-Nazi" when we consider the fact that the vast majority of historians do not believe there was wide-scale Nazi collaboration among the Chechens and Ingush[14][15][16][17][18], and how there is a severe lack of evidence for wide-scale Nazi collaboration as explained above.

And, once again, Furr fails to explain how all of this justifies a massive deportation of the ENTIRE Chechen and Ingush populations.   

At this point, we get into the meat and potatoes of the subject: the deportations themselves. Furr begins denying the death numbers.

Furr's Claim #5:

Historian, V. I. Zemskov has specialized in deportations in general. His estimate is that out of 151,720 Crimean Tatars deported, 191 died during the course of deportation. That is 0.13 per cent. Not 13% or 1.3%.

Debunking:

these numbers are simply not in touch with reality. 

Zemskov gets these numbers from an NKVD report which reports that about 191 Crimean Tatars died in transit[19]. 

The issue is that this report is clearly an underestimate of the deaths. After the deportation, the NKVD further reported that out of the 183,155 deported Crimean Tatars, about 176,746 had arrived to the special settlements[20]. Another NKVD report in July showed that only 341 more Crimean Tatars arrived at the special settlements[21], with about 6,068 permanently missing.

We have good reason to believe that most of the 6,068 missing Crimean Tatars died during transit, before they reached the special settlements. One could argue that these people escaped during transit and that's why they were missing, but this is highly unlikely, since the NKVD hunted down members of deported ethnicites across the entire USSR. Scholar J. Otto Pohl states[22],

The NKVD hunted down ethnic Germans, Karachays, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, and Balkars throughout the expanse of the USSR and sent them to special settlements

The true amount of deaths during transit is debated, but is generally considered to be around 5,000-7,000. Professor Michael Rywkin considers the deaths during transit to be around 7,900[23], while Brian Williams considers the deaths during transit to be around 7,000[24].

Also, Furr casually omits facts in this part of the interview. He completely omits and ignores the deaths after settlement. There again exists debate about the total amount of people who died in the Deportation of the Crimean Tatars (including both transit deaths and deaths in settlement). Rywkin estimates that around 42,000 Crimean Tatars died in both transit and in special settlements[25]. Some historians, like Clement Hall[26] and Alan Fischer[27] estimate that over 100,000 died. At the very least, however, Stalin killed about 18% of the Crimean Tatar population in the USSR[28]. 

Furr's Claim #6:

According to Bugai and Gomov, “NKVD records attest to 180 convoy trains carrying 493,269 Chechen and Ingush nationals and members of other nationalities seized at the same time. Fifty people were killed in the course of the operation, and 1,272 died on the journey.” This is 0.27 per cent; 0.26 per cent if you exclude the 50 killed in the course of disarming, etc. Since it happened in the winter during the fiercest war in world history, that figure does not seem very high. It is probably a lot lower than the rate suffered by Soviet civilians in the occupied areas.

Debunking:

Furr is again spouting ridiculous numbers and ignoring historical facts. 

Firstly, his source claims that only 50 died when the NKVD loaded the Crimean Tatars into trucks for deportation. This completely ignores the Khaibakh Massacre, a major incident during the deportation of the Chechens and Ingush where the NKVD mass murdered about 700 Chechens by locking them into a barn and then setting the barn on fire[29]. 

According to Tom Shattuck in Operation Lentil: Soviet Ethnic Cleansing of the Chechens[30]:

In the process of moving over half a million people, the NKVD demonstrated brutal tactics to make the people obey their orders. The Soviet forces claimed the removal occurred smoothly and only 50 Chechens died in the process, but in reality, thousands of Chechens died during Operation Lentil. 

Also, the amount of people who died during transit is probably higher than 1,272.  

Shattuck further says:

The number of deaths in the process will never be known because so many people died at different stages in the Operation. Many died from attacks in the villages, but many more died during the journey to Central Asia. “Some 3,000 perished even before being deported . . . One can extrapolate from these separate figures that roughly 10,000 died from disease, hunger, and cold.” 

Not only this, but Furr is again ignoring deaths during settlement! Furr focuses purely on deaths during transit because he cannot refute the deaths in settlement. Pohl claims that about 123,000 Chechens and Ingushes died in both transit and settlement combined[31]. Historian Alexander Nekrich argued that about 150,000 Chechens and Ingushes died[32]. Some estimates range even as high as 200,000[33]. The undisputed fact is that thousands upon thousands of Chechens and Ingushes died in this horrible crime perpetrated by Joseph Stalin and the NKVD.

Furr also cannot refute the extremely poor conditions in the special settlements. So, he chooses to ignore these too. Soviet authorities provided around 100 grams of food a day to the deportees[34]. Even the Nazis gave more food to the Jews at Auschwitz, giving about 300 grams of food a day[35].

Furr's Claim #7:

In the case of the Chechen-Ingush and the Crimean Tatars, collaboration with the Nazis was massive, involving most of the population.

Debunking:

This is a lie as explained before. Collaboration with the Nazis was extremely little in these ethnic groups.

Furr's Claim #8:

To try to isolate and punish “only the guilty” would have been to split the nation up. This would probably have destroyed the nation and there would have been very few young men for the young women to marry. Instead, the national group was kept together, and their population grew.

Debunking:

Even more lies. The national groups were NOT kept together, and the population of the deported ethnic groups did NOT grow.

The NKVD actually reported that many families were seperated during the deportations and consequent settlements. At first, the NKVD reported that about 14,460 families who had been deported to Kazakhstan had been divided in the deportation[36]. By September 5, 1944, many families had reunited, but around 8,982 remained divided[37]. Among the families deported to Kyrgyzstan, around 2,941 families were divided[38], and by 5 September, 1,982 remained divided[39].

So, no, if massive amounts of families are being divided in the deportation, that's not "being kept together".

Furr claims that the population of the deported ethnic groups grew. This is completely false.

According to historian Brian Williams in The Hidden Ethnic Cleansing of Muslims in the Soviet Union: The Exile and Repatriation of the Crimean Tatars[40],

This statistic is, however, treated with caution by most outside observers, and is disputed by Ann Sheehy and Bohdan Nahylo.50 Kremlin sources based upon the bi-weekly reports made by Crimean Tatars in the special settlements state that the Crimean Tatar population in Uzbekistan had dwindled from 151,604 to 119,460 by the year 1946 (i.e. a loss of 30,000, 'only' 20 per cent of the total exile population).51 By 1948 between 40,000 and 44,000 Crimean Tatars had died in Uzbekistan and their number was certainly not replaced by 6,564 births in this period

The following table further disproves Furr's false claim that the Crimean Tatar population grew[41]:

Source: J. Otto Pohl, The Deportation and Fate of the Crimean Tatars

 As you can see, the amount of Crimean Tatar deaths in the special settlements outnumbered the births. 

Furr's Claim #9 (Final claim):

I don’t think this is hard to understand. These events of Soviet history, especially of the Stalin period, are misinterpreted, distorted, lied about, in the service of extreme anti-working class, right-wing nationalism.

The deportations that I discussed above were the result of large-scale Nazi collaboration. In order to justify this Nazi collaboration and create a myth of a “heroic past” for the right-wing nationalists of these groups, this Nazi collaboration must be depicted as “justified”, and the deportations as “unjustified.”

Debunking:

Ah, the old "academic conspiracy" trick. Holocaust deniers, Armenian genocide deniers, Anti-vaxxers, Young earth creationists, and in this case neo-Stalinists absolutely love using the academic conspiracy trick. 

Essentially, they try to claim that there exists a conspiracy among scholars to suppress the truth. Furr cannot explain why historians and scholars disagree with his false and disproven claims, so he chooses to ridiculously claim that there's some sort of right wing anti-communist conspiracy, or whatever. There isn't.

Furr claims that Nazi collaboration is being "justified" by historians. Nobody except for neo-Nazis is attempting to justify Nazi collaboration. This is a strawman argument and can be dismissed. Furr says that the deportations are being depicted as "unjustified" and well, he's right. Anyone who doesn't support the mass killing of innocent people knows that deporting innocent men, women, and children to forced labor settlements with horrid conditions and almost no food is bad. Only an authoritarian like Grover Furr would actually think that deporting ethnic minorities is justified.

Conclusion:

The conclusion is that the deportation of the crimean tatars, the deportation of the chechens and ingush, and all other mass deportations carried out by Stalin were horrible crimes against humanity, if not outright genocides. This adds further proof that Grover Furr is a fake historian and a liar. 

Yet again, Grover Furr has been exposed for lying to suit his neo-Stalinist agenda. This is not the first time Furr has been exposed for lying.

Sources:

These are all the sources and pieces of evidence used to support my article.

[1]: J. Otto Pohl, The Deportation and Fate of the Crimean Tatars, p. 1 

[2]: Ibid

[3] J. Otto Pohl, The False Charges of Treason Against the Crimean Tatars, p. 1

[4]: Yegorov, O. (2019, October 16). Why did over a million Soviets fight for Germany during World War II? Russia Beyond. Retrieved October 10, 2021, from https://www.rbth.com/history/331136-collaborationism-ussr-general-vlasov.

[5]: Parrish, Michael (1996). The Lesser Terror: Soviet State Security, 1939-1953. p. 104

[6]: Brian Williams, The Hidden Ethnic Cleansing of Muslims in the Soviet Union: The Exile and Repatriation of the Crimean Tatars, p. 327

[7]: J. Otto Pohl, The False Charges of Treason Against the Crimean Tatars, p. 6

[8]: J. Otto Pohl, The False Charges of Treason Against the Crimean Tatars, p. 7

[9]: Brian Williams, The Hidden Ethnic Cleansing of Muslims in the Soviet Union: The Exile and Repatriation of the Crimean Tatars, p. 327-328

[10]: J. Otto Pohl, Scourging the Caucasus: The Soviet Deportation of the Karachais, Chechens, Ingush, and Balkars in 1943-44 p. 54

[11]: Rezvani, Babak (2014). Conflict and Peace in Central Eurasia: Towards Explanations and Understandings (repeated ed.). BRILL. p. 218.

[12]: Ibid

[13]: Dunlop, John B. (1998). Russia Confronts Chechnya: Roots of a Separatist Conflict. p. 60-61

[14]: Williams, Brian Glyn (2015). Inferno in Chechnya: The Russian-Chechen Wars, the Al Qaeda Myth, and the Boston Marathon Bombings, p. 46

[15]: Ibid

[16]: Wood, Tony (2007). Chechnya: The Case for Independence. New York, London: Verso. p. 36

[17]: Gammer, Moshe (2006). The Lone Wolf and the Bear: Three Centuries of Chechen Defiance of Russian Rule. C. Hurst & Co. Publishers. p. 161-165

[18]: Fowkes, Ben (1996). The Disintegration of the Soviet Union: A Study in the Rise and Triumph of Nationalism. Springer. p. 71

[19]: Tom Shattuck, Operation Lentil: Soviet Ethnic Cleansing of  the Chechens, p. 92

[20]: V.N. Zemskov, "K voprosu o masshtabakh repressi v SSSR," Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia, no. 9, 1995, pp. 114-127. Reproduced on http://www.tuad.nsk.ru/~history/repress/Disput.HTM (link is dead)

[21]: J. Otto Pohl, The Deportation and Fate of the Crimean Tatars, p. 4-5

[22]: J. Otto Pohl, The Deportation and Fate of the Crimean Tatars, p. 4

[23]: J. Otto Pohl, Stalin's Genocide Against the "Repressed Peoples", p. 273-274

[24]: Michael Rywkin, Moscows's Lost Empire (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1994), table 8, p. 67.

[25]: Williams, p. 589.

[26]: Ibid

[27]: Hall, M. Clement (2014). The Crimea. A very short history, p. 53

[28]: Fisher, The Crimean Tatars, p. 170

[29]: J. Otto Pohl, The Deportation and Fate of the Crimean Tatars, p. 10

[30]: Tom Shattuck, Operation Lentil: Soviet Ethnic Cleansing of  the Chechens, p. 94

[31]: Ibid

[32]: Pohl, J. Otto (1999). Ethnic Cleansing in the USSR, 1937–1949, p. 67-68

[33]: Nekrich, Alexander (1978). The punished peoples: the deportation and fate of Soviet minorities at the end of the Second World War. New York: Norton. p. 138.

[34]: Bancheli, Tozun; Bartmann, Barry; Srebrnik, Henry (2004). De Facto States: The Quest for Sovereignty. Routledge. p. 229

[35]: J. Otto Pohl, Scourging the Caucasus: The Soviet Deportation of the Karachais, Chechens, Ingush, and Balkars in 1943-44 p. 67

[36]: (Iwaszko, Tadeusz (2000). "The Housing, Clothing and Feeding of the Prisoners". In Długoborski, Wacław; Piper, Franciszek (eds.). Auschwitz, 1940–1945. Central Issues in the History of the Camp. Volume II: The Prisoners—Their Life and Work. Oświęcim: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. pp. 60–61

[37]: J. Otto Pohl, Scourging the Caucasus: The Soviet Deportation of the Karachais, Chechens, Ingush, and Balkars in 1943-44, p. 66

[38]: Ibid

[39]: Ibid

[40]: Ibid

[41]: Brian Williams, The Hidden Ethnic Cleansing of Muslims in the Soviet Union: The Exile and Repatriation of the Crimean Tatars, p. 340

[42]: Ibid