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The poorly-treated ethnic minority did not like Stalin.
Key point: Many were unhappy enough with Soviet rule that they went to the otherside. However, most of them would meet a gruelsome fate.
Between 1944 and 1947, over two million Russians who had been living in the occupied countries of Europe, some voluntarily, some not, were forcibly repatriated to the Soviet Union. Many met death by execution immediately, while others were literally worked to death in the hundreds of gulags that dotted the largest slave society in history.
Whether these individuals were civilian or soldier, Soviet Premier Josef Stalin reasoned that anyone who had been living outside the borders of the Soviet Union was to be considered contaminated by anti-Soviet ideology and therefore could not be trusted. It mattered not that many had been forcibly removed from their homeland by the former German enemy.
How an SS brigade joined Soviet partisans in the fight against the Nazis
Colonel Constantine Kromiadi (C), Vladimir Gil (next to him), and officers of the Druzhina brigade. Archive photo The Soviet government did not know what it would do with punishers from the Druzhina SS Brigade, who had defected to its side when the war was over. In the end, that problem resolved itself.
During World War II, hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens fought on the side of the Nazis. Collaborators were considered some of the worst enemies of the USSR, and Red Army soldiers often preferred not to take them prisoner, instead shooting them on the spot.