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Fun fact: During Josef Stalin's reign tens of millions of people were deported to the Urals, Siberia and Kazakhstan. Stalin de-populated whole regions in the Balkans, Eastern Ukraine, Crimea, Volga delta etc.etc. The "permanent revolution" purged and devoured 85% of the Communist party's nomenclature, an unprecedented level of carnage turned against itself. The Tatars suffered like so many others during Stalin's almost 30 years of deliberate, systemic terror. I am a descendant of German Mennonites who settled in Western Ukraine starting in the 1780s when Catherine the Great gave them farmland and freedom as they were looking to escape religious prosecution (they were/are also pacifists) in the militaristic Kingdom of Prussia. Starting in the late 1920s / early 1930s Stalin's regime systematically destroyed their communities, deported many to the concentration and labor camps in Siberia and executed anyone with above elementary level education. My maternal grandfather, a veterinarian, was executed in 1937 (my mother was less then a year old) and after WWII was over my widowed grandmother and her 5 daughters we put on the same trains destined for the internment camps on the Asian side of the Ural mountains as the Crimean Tatars. My grandmother died of denied medical care in 1947 and I was born in that very same place in 1964 (the camp was officially dissolved after Stalin's death in 1953). The total number of killed by Stalin is estimated to be in the 20-25 million range, not counting the soldiers and casualties of WWII.

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There's a good one on this stuff in Russia: https://www.amazon.com/Shamans-Coat-Native-History-Siberia/dp/0802776760

elm

the russians were, like the US, rough on everybody

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