The treatment of minorities in Russia’s invasion is barbaric, with enlisted soldiers sent on suicide missions simply to reveal the location of Ukrainian guns, while reports of deaths by region consistently show higher numbers of fatalities from ethnic republics.
Their use as cannon fodder in Russia’s invasion has sparked protests in Dagestan, Buryatia, and Sakha-Yakutia, but among the brutalized minorities, the Ahiska (or Meskhetian) Turks stand out for their history of mistreatment by first the Soviet and now the Russian state.
Even before the full-scale invasion, Ahiska were seeking refuge in the US as a result of their ethnic and social persecution. Since the full-scale invasion, the numbers have increased dramatically. Most of those fleeing are young men avoiding mobilization or their relatives. Many have mobilization papers from a draft office, the majority of which were dated the day after the war began, though some were issued the year before.
Why target the Ahiska? The depressing answer is that they present an easy target. The group has even less political representation than the Dagestanis and has no separate region of their own within the Russian state. More than 1,000 are currently seeking asylum in the US.
Russia’s policy toward minorities is brutal and exploitative — something underlined by the choice of a former FSB officer, Igor Barinov, as head of Russia’s Federal Agency for Ethnic Affairs (FADN.) He took part in Russia’s bloody suppression of the Chechen independence movement in the 1990s and is an ardent advocate of internet censorship — FADN has created a register of representatives of indigenous peoples much like China’s Uyghur registry.
The Ahiska are an especially tragic story. In 1944, Stalin deported them from their native lands in Georgia and resettled them with other peoples deported to Central Asia, including the Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans, Chechens, and Ingush.
The deportations themselves were extraordinarily cruel, with entire communities loaded onto cattle cars and sent on months-long journeys, often with insufficient food. An estimated 13,000 Ahiska, from a population of around 80,000, died during the deportations. Canada, along with some European parliaments, has since recognized the 1944 deportations as genocide.
After Stalin died in 1953, most of the deported minorities were allowed to return to their indigenous lands. Only the Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, and Ahiska Turks were not, with the latter forced to remain in the Uzbek SSR.
Rising nationalism in the Soviet Union and agitation by Uzbek extremists led to pogroms against the Ahiska in 1989, killing at least 57 and leading to their evacuation by the Soviet army. Some tried to return to Georgia but were either forced to assimilate and declare themselves as Georgians or driven out by Zviad Gamsakhurdia, Georgia’s first democratically elected president.
Other Ahiska were relocated to Nagorno-Karabagh, only to face further deportation when fighting erupted in the enclave in 1993. Still, others took up residence in regions of Russia and Ukraine, including Krasnodar, Rostov, and Stavropol.
In the 1990s, the Krasnodar authorities took a particular dislike to the Ahiska Turks and refused to register them as Russian citizens, under the pretext of the outlawed Soviet-era propiska system of residence permits. As a result, for years afterward, the only official paperwork of the 20,000 Ahiska in Krasnodar was the expired passports of the now-dead Soviet state.
To make matters worse, Cossack paramilitaries, who had been deputized by the regional government, launched a vigilante-style campaign to drive the Ahiska out of Krasnodar, including illegal passport checks and periodic violence. The Georgian authorities also made it very difficult for them to return and created numerous legal and cultural obstacles.
As a result, the International Organization for Migration and the US State Department agreed to relocate the Ahiska to the US under the visa waiver program, although only half managed to depart before the program ended in 2007. While no one really knows precisely how many Ahiska remain in Russia, 2006 estimates put the number at 75,000.
The hostile practices developed in Krasnodar have since spread to other regions like Rostov and Stavropol, where the Ahiska were never treated well. This includes attacks from Cossack vigilantes, who have now metastasized to become a national movement.
Meanwhile, the Ahiska who relocated to Ukraine following the 1989 pogroms have now found their lands are at the heart of the fighting.
The result has been a community dispersed between Russia, Ukraine, the United States, and several other countries, with Ahiska asylum seekers pleading for protection.
The new pro-Russian government in Georgia is even less likely than its predecessors to facilitate the return of an unwanted community, making the Ahiska a contender for the dubious distinction of being Putin’s most punished minority.
It is a long and sad history of persecution as well as sheer bad luck. Cut off and barred from their ancestral homeland, the only viable future for these people is in the United States and other Western countries. They should be offered assistance and a warm welcome.
Richard Arnold is an Associate Professor of Political Science, at Muskingum University, a member of the PONARS network, and a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in summer 2024. He has served as an expert witness for the Ahiska on at least 10 separate occasions.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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