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.
Nakh peoples
A 2011 study by Oleg Balanovsky and a number of other geneticists showed that the Y-DNA haplogroup J2a4b* (a subclade of J2, located mainly in the Middle East, Caucasus and Mediterranean) was highly associated with Nakh peoples. J2a4b* accounted for the majority of the Y-chromosomes of Ingush and Chechen men, with the Ingush having a much higher percentage, 87.4%, than Chechens, who had 51–58% depending on region (the lowest being in Malgobek, the highest in Dagestan and Achkhoy-Martan). In their paper, Balanovsky "et al." speculated that the differences between fraternal Caucasian populations may have arisen due to genetic drift, which would have had a greater effect among the Ingush than the Chechens due to their smaller population (another possible reason for the difference is the greater absorption of foreign peoples into the Chechen populace, reflecting an older theory that the Ingush are more 'archaic' than other Caucasian peoples). The Chechens and Ingush have the highest frequencies of J2a4b* yet reported (other relatively high frequencies, between 10 and 20 percent, are found in the Mediterranean and Georgia).