Chechen and Ingush Deportees in Kazakstan, 1944-1957 (Michaela Pohl)

101,036 Chechens, Ingush, Balkardians, and Karachaevtsy died in this period (23.3 percent of the deportees), 485 Kalmycks (20.7 percent), 443 Crimean Tatars (10.1 percent), and 19,501 Germans, representing 8.9 percent of the German exiles.

In Kazakstan, according to an NKVD report on excess deaths, 16.5 percent of all special settlers perished between 1944 and 1949, a total of 125,564 out of a special settler population of 760,642 individuals.

it appears that approximately 23,700 Caucasians perished in Akmola in 1944-1949.

The number of deaths in Akmola can be approximated using the results of a special settler census that was carried out in 1949.

Over one third of the Chechens and Ingush exiled to Akmola perished.

Without minimizing in any way the brutality and injustice of deportation itself, Bugai argues that on site the special settlers were successfully mobilized into the labor force,

Pohl argues that the deportations “constituted acts of ethnically motivated murder,”

Already in 1978 the •migr• historian Alexander Nekrich cited evidence from memoirs and unpublished dissertations that testified to extremely harsh conditions

The first of many groups to be forcibly relocated to the region were the victims of dekulakization and collectivization (1929-31), followed by Poles and Koreans (1936-37), and many other, smaller groups of people.

Under Stalin, however, Akmola came to function as a major “prison of nations,”

In the western borderlands, Poles, Germans, and Finns were the main victims;