A Longing to Go Home

By Elizabeth Tucker/Moscow

The despair of a twice-exiled people is etched into Inna Hairadze's tear- streaked face. Together with 100 other Meskhetian Turks, she stands in a thin wool coat on a Moscow street, protesting her people's lot. In 1944, "to strengthen border safety," Joseph Stalin deported the Turks from their mountainous homeland in Georgia to the flatlands of Uzbekistan. Then, last June, the Uzbeks rose up against the Turks, burning houses, belongings, even babies. One hundred people died, and 17,000 Turks were moved out. Authorities in Moscow scattered the refugees across Russia, where they are still denied permanent residence status and thus cannot get good jobs. "We want only our homeland," Hairadze implores. "We'll take even a marsh."

Hairadze is but one of 3 million people in the Soviet Union who, thanks to Stalin's legacy, still live unwillingly outside their native regions. Now, increasingly, these unhappy outcasts are demanding their old lands back. But going home is problematic when home has been usurped. After the Meskhetians and other groups were driven out during World War II, new communities moved in. So even though Gorbachev's government has denounced Stalin's deportations, it faces major obstacles in reversing the past.

The first victims of Stalin's expulsions were the Koreans who peopled the Soviet Far East. In 1937 they were herded to the snow-blown steppes of Kazakhstan to prevent them from "collaborating" with the Japanese. Later Stalin deemed the Volga Germans "saboteurs and spies" and in 1941 banished them to Siberia. The Crimean Tatars followed in 1944. Other exiled nationalities included the Kalmucks, Chechens, Ingush and the Balkars. By the 1960s, some of these groups had been rehabilitated and given back their autonomous regions. But "lost" peoples remain, among them the Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars and Meskhetian Turks.

Today Russians occupy the grain-growing Volga, Ukrainians the Crimea's sunny coast, and Georgians the stone houses built long ago by Turks. These relative newcomers are loath to make way for returning natives, especially in these tough times. Says Igor Krupnik, a researcher at the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences Institute of Ethnography: "The Crimeans can't let the Tatars come back and have houses when there is a waiting list years long."

While many officials are apathetic toward the displaced peoples, others have been openly hostile, perhaps in an effort to shore up their own declining popularity. According to Genrikh Grout, spokesman for Renewal, a society devoted to returning Germans to the Volga, authorities in the Saratov area along the Volga River have publicly denounced would-be German returnees as "fascists." Says Grout: "There is no soap, milk, sausage or order here, and this ((name-calling)) is a channel to siphon off resentment."

Because of its souring relations with the outlying republics, Moscow is wary of intervening. Given the resentments caused by the army's brutal suppression of a peaceful demonstration in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi last April, the central government does not dare ask the agitated Georgians to return Turkish villages to the Meskhetians. Moscow has ordered up a plan for repatriating the Crimean Tatars and Volga Germans, but nothing has been done yet.

The plight of the Meskhetians has yet to be resolved by Moscow, and the Turks, who long for the Georgian sun and wish to preserve their language and customs, are growing restless. Many have taken the situation into their own hands and have returned to Georgia, only to be cast out by authorities there. Ansar Ismailogle, leader of the Meskhetians who protested in Moscow, traveled to Georgia last year and ventured to a spot from which he could see his birthplace of Atshuri. But he was not allowed to visit the village. Said the homesick Turk: "I looked and cried."