Comparison of Nazism and Stalinism
Two ethnic groups that were specifically targeted for persecution by Stalin's Soviet Union were the Chechens and the Ingush. Unlike the other nationalities that could be suspected of connection to foreign states which shared their ethnic background, the Chechens and the Ingush were completely indigenous people of the Soviet Union. Rather than being accused of collaboration with foreign enemies, these two ethnic groups were considered to have cultures which did not fit in with Soviet culture – such as accusing Chechens of being associated with “banditism” – and the authorities claimed that the Soviet Union had to intervene in order to “remake” and “reform” these cultures. In practice this meant heavily armed punitive operations carried out against Chechen “bandits” that failed to achieve forced assimilation, culminating in an ethnic cleansing operation in 1944, which involved the arrests and deportation of over 500,000 Chechens and Ingush from the Caucasus to Central Asia and Kazakhstan. The deportations of the Chechens and Ingush also involved the outright massacre of thousands of people, and severe conditions placed upon the deportees – they were put in unsealed train cars, with little to no food for a four-week journey during which many died from hunger and exhaustion.
Germans in the Czech Republic
In the 2001 census, 39,106 Czech citizens, or around 0.4% of the Czech Republic's total population, declared German ethnicity. In 2011 the census methodology changed and it was newly possible to declare multiple ethnicities or none at all: 25% of the citizens chose the option of not declaring ethnicity. In this census 18,658 citizens declared German as its sole ethnicity, while another 6,563 in combination with another ethnicity. According to regional statistics the largest number of citizens with German ethnicity is 4,431 in Karlovy Vary Region (1.5% of total population in this region). On district level the largest share is in Sokolov District (2.3%) followed by Karlovy Vary District (1.2%), both in Karlovy Vary Region. Today's Germans in the Czech republic form a small minority, remaining after the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans who had formed a majority in several areas of the Czech republic.