The Soviet War against ‘Fifth Columnists’:The Case of Chechnya, 1942–4

 Jeffrey Burds

The question arises: why should bourgeois states treat the Soviet socialist state more gently and more good-neighborly than any other bourgeois state? Why should they send into the rear of the Soviet Union fewer spies, wreckers, saboteurs and assassins than they send into the rears of allied bourgeois states? Where did you come up with such a notion? Is it not more accurate, from the perspective of Marxism, to suppose that bourgeois states might dispatch into the rear of the Soviet Union two or three times more wreckers, spies, saboteurs and assassins than into the rear of any bourgeois state?Is it not clear that so long as capitalist encirclement exists there will also be among us wreckers, spies, saboteurs and assassins dispatched into our rear by agents of foreign states?I.V. Stalin, 3 March 1937

Perhaps the most distinctive category in Stalinist policing of the 1930s is the symbol of vrag naroda— ‘enemy of the people’ — and its ready adaptation to the evolving (re-)conceptualization of Stalinist enemies. Vragi— ‘enemies’ —was a label applied as easily to descendants of the exploitative classes of the pre-revolutionary era — nobles, bourgeoisie, clerics, right-wing intellectuals —as it was after 1928 to industrial ‘wreckers’ (vrediteli), kulaks(‘wealthy peasants’) and their podkulachnik accomplices, Trotskyites (‘Left-Wing Deviationists’) and Bukharinites (‘Right-Wing Revisionists’). Vragi narodabecame the catch-all to include all forms of anti-Soviet (anti-Stalinist) thought,predilection, or action.