50 years on, Stalin’s last victims want to go home

‘‘We still do not understand. We fought for Stalin and then he threw us out. Why did he do that? The young men were at the front. He deported a defenceless people,’’ said Gasanov.

Stalin, accused the Meskhetians of collaborating with the Germans and herded into railway wagons for the journey to Central Asia. During his four-decade rule, Stalin uprooted millions in a brutal re-engineering of Soviet society.

But the Meskhetians — originally from the west side of Georgia across the border with Turkey — are one of the last peoples deported by Stalin to remain in exile, denied the all-important internal passports and access to state services.

Ethnic violence in the last days of the Soviet Union drove them into a second exile, and 13,000 ended up in Russia’s southern Krasnodar region.

Though Russia considers them illegal, the UN views Meskhetians as Russian citizens. The government in their Caucasus homeland of Georgia also says it has no room for them.

Ethnic clashes have been rife across Russia since the Soviet Union collapsed 11 years ago, with darker skinned immigrants from the Caucasus frequently the target. But the Muslim Meskhetians say they may be immigrants, but not by choice. ‘‘We are a good people, we don’t drink, we work hard, why should it be like this?’’ asked Sarvar Tedorov, who heads the Meskhetian civil rights group Vatan, adding that ‘‘Stalin may be dead, ‘but Stalinism lives on.’’ (Reuters)