re: #8 Bob Levin

That does account for the large anomaly in the idea, that the plans died immediately when Stalin died—yet, when have you seen bureaucracy stopping dead in its tracks?

Notably, Kostyrchenko agrees (as well as anybody familiar with late-Stalin era history) that if Stalin lived longer, anything could have happened. Also, we can’t get into the dead tyrant’s head and see whether he had any private ideas about the deportation (or worse). So as a hypothetical, the deportation was possible. It’s just there is no credible/reliable information that there were such concrete plans or that real preparations were made (as some hearsay witnesses describe).