Book is out of print.
This is a thin but powerful book about the national groups of people living in South Russia who, in the 1940s, were systematically rounded up, loaded onto railroad boxcars, and sent to Siberia, to Kazakhstan, and other points north and east. The groups deported en masse were first the Volga Germans in 1941, the Karachi and Kalmycks in 1943, and then the Chechans, the Ingushi, and the Crimean Tatars in 1944. It felt strange to be reading about the deportation of the Chechans, whom I had never heard of before, at the time the Russian invasion of Chechnia was hot in the news in 1994. The deported groups included most people living in the area of the Crimea and north Caucusus, whether Moslem or Christian. Then they would surround a village, read a decree, and give the people a brief time to gather food and clothing and appear at a place where Studebaker trucks, given as a stimulus to economic development through the US lend-lease program, would take them to trains.