WI: Stalin settled depopulated areas of USSR with Georgians

OTL, Stalin was from Georgia (Caucasian), but overall let that slip to the wayside so that he could gain more power in the USSR. This is especially evident in WWII, when he began to emphasize Russian history and how it could defend against German aggression.

However, what if, after WWII, Stalin began to settle the areas that had been massively depopulated with ethnic Georgians. OTL, Georgia "only" lost 300,000 people, which meant that it still had 3,000,000 people left. Compare this to Belarus, which lost nearly a quarter of it's population.

My thought is that if Stalin wanted purely "Georgian" areas, you'd need to have even more civilian deaths than OTL in those areas to empty them enough so that there would be purely "Georgian." (say, Hitler put Slavs in the same category as other victims of the Holocaust and demanded they be exterminated in the areas that Germany held) Even then, there aren't really enough Georgians at all to fill those areas, so there would also need to be some... less than ethical breeding and assimilation policies.

If it happened OTL with no changes, I could see some of the most hard hit areas of Belarus and Ukraine being at least bilingual, though it would need a consistent pressure to keep those areas from assimilating into the local cultures. Overall, though, Stalin would just end up creating a "West Georgian" national identity, which will be... fun to sort out after the fall of the USSR--Though once Stalin dies, unless Stalin grooms his successor to keep up assimilation they would eventually just assimilate into the local culture.

What do you think?
 
Why would Stalin do this? He wasn't a Georgian nationalist, he was more of a Great Russian chauvinist.
I mean, it is Stalin; my guess is just that one day he wakes up and decides to do it, since the areas were so depopulated anyways and "the Georgian people are strong enough to hold the land" or somesuch excuse.
 
I mean, it is Stalin; my guess is just that one day he wakes up and decides to do it, since the areas were so depopulated anyways and "the Georgian people are strong enough to hold the land" or somesuch excuse.
Although Stalin was ruthless, many of his activities were nonetheless calculated and planned. What benefit would he see in repopulating the Georgians, when he just spent an entire war promoting the Russian identity?
 
Aside from ideological concerns resettling depopulated areas with Russians makes the most sense from a numbers standpoint. The USSR lost 27 million people, and with only 3 million or so Georgians there's no way they can repopulate the areas. Russians are the only ethnicity large enough to be moved around to repopulate depopulated areas.
 
I don't see that Stalin would do that. He was ruthless but not idiot. If he begin favor Georgians over Russians, he will not survive long.
 
Although he was fond of Georgian songs like "Suliko"
and of classic Georgian literature like Rustaveli's *The Knight in the Panther's Skin* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Knight_in_the_Panther's_Skin and although he always spoke Russian with a Georgian accent, it is a mistake to see Stalin as *politically* partial to Georgians. In criticizing the anti-centralist tendencies of some Georgian Communists in the 1920's he stated, "I have a notion that certain comrades who are working in a certain piece of Soviet territory called Georgia are not all there in their upper storeys..." https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1923/04/17.htm After World War II, "one day Stalin suddenly asked Beria why all his generals and security staff seemed to be Georgians. Beria answered that they were devoted and loyal. Stalin said angrily that not only Georgians but also Russians could be loyal..." https://books.google.com/books?id=rSgfbK0hi2UC&pg=PA257

In any event, the deported peoples (Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Chechesn, Ingush, etc.) lived overwhelmingly in the RSFSR before their deportations, and already before World War II most of their "autonomous republics" had large Russian populations. Even in 1926 Russians outnumbered Tatars in Crimea (and by 1939 Russians were almost half the population there). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Crimea The Volga German ASSR was about one-quarter Russian by 1939. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volga_German_Autonomous_Soviet_Socialist_Republic#Population The Kalmyk ASSR almost had a Russian majority by 1939. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalmykia#Ethnic_groups The Chechen-Ingush ASSR was 28.8% Russian by 1939. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chechen-Ingush_Autonomous_Soviet_Socialist_Republic None of these areas had significant numbers of Georgians. What on earth would be the point of importing Georgians when there were so many more Russians, they were closer at hand (except perhaps in Balkaria--part of which *was* temporarily transferred to Georgia https://books.google.com/books?id=xwp5y9NDaEwC&pg=PA84), and it was obviously hoped to make the RSFSR (and eventually the USSR) as "Russian" as possible?
 
So, most likely, Stalin would have to change during the RCW and overall have to start a program of Georgian breeding (at the expense of the Ukrainians?) before something like this could occur, while also keeping the Russians happy, and then live long enough to see enough infrastructure to settle those areas with Georgians?
 
Georgians were a small minority in the USSR--the 1926 Soviet census gave a total of 1,820,900 by nationality or 1,908,500 by language. This in a USSR with 144,327,700 people at the time. As for the Communist Party, in 1922, only 1.96 percent of its members were Georgians (compared to 72.00% Russians, 5.88% Ukrainians, 5.20% Jews, and even trailing the 2.53% Latvians, even though Latvia was not in the USSR!). https://books.google.com/books?id=smDy35onbtAC&pg=PA278 A Stalin who showed too much of a partiality for Georgians would never have made it to the top of the Communist Party and the Soviet state.
 
There simply are not enough Georgians.

If things became bad enough in the Soviet Union that Russian migration to war-devastated areas could not be counted on--the Nazis take European Russia?--then that would be a very different Eurasia.
 
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