re: #240 Salamantis

Yeah; they weren’t being deported due to their ethnicity, but so that Stalin could control their lands. He also shipped Russians in.

I think it’s a moot question. One of Stalin’s greatest fears was the possible national secession of minority ethnic groups - and those groups (particularly Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Chechens and Ingush) were considered by him to be inherently unreliable on ethnic and national grounds (in Russian the two concepts are more or less interchangeable) - that’s why the Russians were shipped in, with the ultimate aim of replacing the indigenous inhabitants. So there was a strong ethnic, not only territorial, base and bias to Stalin’s “resettlement” policy.

Ethnic cleansing and attempted genocide are very closely related.