Originally only restricted to family members of rebel bandits during World War II, the deportation was later extended to the entire Karachay ethnic group.

In 1957, the Karachays were released from special settlements and allowed to return to their home region, which was formalized as the Karachay-Cherkess Autonomous Oblast.

Some contemporary scholars such as Manus Midlarsky cite the Chechens, Ingush, Kalmyks and the Karachays as ethnic groups which were singled out by Stalin's alleged genocidal behavior.

In 2002, Walter Comins-Richmond in the Journal of Genocide Research wrote of the Karachays "As a Turkic speaking-people surrounded by Caucasian and Iranic speakers their genesis has attracted much scholarly attention.

[12] During the Russian Civil War in 1917, the Karachays had a short period of independence, but this was reversed when it became a part of the Soviet Union.

The Karachay soldiers serving the Red Army fought in the Battle of Moscow and helped defeat the "Edelweiss" division.

[14] The anti-Soviet band groups, led by Izmail Dudov and M. Botashev, attacked the Soviet forces, including the Red Army, but also terrorized the local population.

[16] On 15 April 1943, the Soviet Office of the Prosecutor General issued Directive N 52-6927, ordering the deportation of the family members of the active band groups outside the Karachay region.

[17] During World War II, eight ethnic groups were expelled in their entirety from their native lands by the Soviet government: the Volga Germans, the Chechens, the Ingush, the Balkars, the Karachays, the Crimean Tatars, the Meskhetian Turks and the Kalmyks.

[21] By October 1943, Stalin and Lavrentiy Beria, Head of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, decided upon the complete deportation of the Karachays, codenamed Operation Seagull.

The Soviet government refused to acknowledge that 20,000 Karachays served in the Red Army, greatly outnumbering the 3,000 estimated to have collaborated with the German soldiers.

During the transit, the trains would seldom stop and open the doors to distribute food, and during that occasion the deportees were not allowed to walk further than 3 metres (9.8 ft) away from the wagons.

[1] Many older people and children died during the long transit, caused by a lack of medical assistance and food shortages.

[27] The Karachay Autonomous Oblast was abolished and carved up between the Krasnodar and Stavropol Krai, as well as Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic.

[28] Scholars Alexandre Bennigsen and Marie Broxup somewhat agree, assuming that the resettlement was aimed at solving the "Muslim problem" of the rebellious people of the North Caucasus.

[30] Initially they tried to use this multiethnic state to exploit cross-border ethnic groups to project influence into the countries neighboring the Soviet Union.

Terry Martin, a professor of Russian studies, assessed that this had the opposite effect; the Soviet fear of "capitalist influence" eventually led to ethnic cleansing of its borderlands.

[32] American anthropologist Jeffrey Cole assumes that the Karachays were just one of several "weak minorities used as scapegoats" in order for the Stalinist system to conceal its own mistakes and failures in World War II.

[35] Due to the World War II evacuations, the Central Asian areas were already overloaded with refugees from European Russia, lacking housing.

[42] On 16 July 1956, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet officially released the Karachays, Chechens and the Ingush from special settlements.

[48] Russian historian Pavel Polian considered all the deportations of entire ethnic groups during Stalin's era, including those from the Caucasus, a crime against humanity.

[50] In its 1991 report, Human Rights Watch described all of the Soviet mass deportations as a form of collective punishment since groups were targeted on the basis of their ethnicity.

[52] Contemporary scholars and historians sometimes include the Karachays as one of the deported ethnic groups who were victims of an attempted Soviet genocide.

Professor Alexander Statiev argues that Stalin's administration did not have a specific intent (dolus specialis) to exterminate the various deported peoples, but that Soviet "political culture, poor planning, haste, and wartime shortages were responsible for the genocidal death rate among them."