The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing

In February 1937, a young English adventurer, Fitzroy Maclean, arrived in Moscow to take up the position of third secretary at the British Embassy. Maclean harbored a secret ambition: “I was going, if it was humanly possible, to the Caucasus and Central Asia, to Tashkent, Bokhara and Samarkand.” However, foreigners were then forbidden access to central Asia. So Maclean instead boarded a train for Baku, hoping that from there he could cross the Caspian Sea and reach central Asia. In Baku, he illegally boarded a steamer to Lenkoran, a Caspian port near the border of Azerbaijan and Persia. There he found a hotel room. The next morning he was awakened early by a procession of trucks, which continued the entire day, “driving headlong through the town on the way to the port, each filled with depressed-looking Turko-Tartar peasants under the escort of NKVD frontier troops with fixed bayonets.” At the port, the peasants were being loaded onto ships for deportation to central Asia. The people of Lenkoran gathered to watch the deportation and speculate on its cause. Maclean favored the explanation of an elderly Russian, who said that “the arrests had been decreed from Moscow and merely formed part of the deliberate policy of the Soviet government, who believed in transplanting portions of the population from place to place as and when it suited them. The place of those now being deported would probably be taken by other peasants from central Asia.” This, he said, had happened before. It was, he remarked somewhat cryptically, “a measure of precaution.” Another local approached