National composition of political repression victims in Western Siberia in 1931-1941

By the orders NKVD solved many artificial large-scaled counter-revolutionary plots, whichwere organized mainly by representatives of the so-called specific nationalities (considered to be the enemies of the Soviet state). Theyincluded people who were suspected in espionage subversive activity arrangements on the USSR territory, organization of the armedrevolts with the aim to destabilize the Soviet government. Special NKVD units were instructed to reveal the counter-revolutionaryorganizations branches in different regions of the Soviet state. Execution of NKVD orders meant an active search for the specificnationality representatives and proof of their hostile activities against the USSR. In this case NKVD agents used operative registrationfiles for some groups of people by gathering personal information from passport and registry offices, enterprises, etc. It was against theSoviet law and abused human rights. Moreover, national identity was usually defined on the base of secondary characteristics, such asthe spelling of the last name, which by no means could help identify the person's nationality. Such a method of enemy findingdemonstrates the absence of information about the subversive activities in the country regions. But this circumstance was not taken intoconsideration; and the orders provided strict accounting for. Moreover, directed orders did not require any live data to prove the factsof hostilities against the USSR. The Federal Security Service (FSB) Department has archive materials that made it possible to bring outquite a large number of criminal cases with scores and hundreds of people involved. There were just a few pure counter-revolutionaryorganizations, more often they consisted of members of several nationalities, sometimes they were multiethnic. So, one of theorganizations in the Altai region detected by NKVD agents included 26 spies and saboteurs representing 8 nationalities. Similarorganizations were found in all the regions of the country. In Western Siberia over 50 nations and nationalities suffered at the time of theBig Terror. In the period of 1931-1941 the main part of the nations that suffered (from Tomsk, Kemerovo and Altai regions, AltaiRepublic) were Russians - 61 386 people (68.2% of the total amount of repression victims), Ukrainians - 6845 (7.06%), Germans -5115 (5.27%), Poles - 4374 (4.5%), Byelorussians - 2462 (2.54%), Balts - 2985 (3.08%), etc. The presented data provide a conclusionthat the majority of the victims of repressions is Russians and representatives of nationalities quite spread in the regions. The obtainedresults confirm the conclusions made by some foreign researches that the program of mass repressions of non-Russian nationality peoplewas implemented in the USSR.

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