Circassians remember their Chechen brothers and support their struggle to exist
posted by circassiankama on February, 2010 as CHECHNYA
Circassians remember their Chechen brothers and support their struggle to exist.
On
the 23 February 1944 the Soviet Union set in motion the immediate
deportation and exile of the entire Chechen and Ingush peoples to the
steppes of Central Asia. In the depths of winter they were subjected to
summary massacres and food shortages: it was a solution no less final
or brutal than the one being inflicted on Jews in Europe. By
conservative estimates half of the population died though the
proportion that perished is probably much greater.
In January 1944, tens of thousands of NKVD troops arrived in the
tiny mountainous republic and fanned out to almost every settlement in
the region. On Red Army Day, February 23, in every town and village the
men were summoned to meetings in the local Soviet building. None
suspected the calamity that was about to befall them and all came
willingly. Instead of celebrations the gathered crowds were read the
Decree of the Supreme Soviet which announced the complete deportation
of the Chechen and Ingush people for treason and collaboration with the
German enemy.
There was no evidence to support the
claim of Chechen collaboration with the Nazis which rather was a
pretext used by Stalin to dispose of a population that had hitherto
refused to submit to Moscow's will. In fact the German advance had
never reached Chechen soil, stopping just short of the border. Moreover
Chechen soldiers had distinguished themselves in the major actions of
the Second World War. Chechen soldiers had been awarded medals and
decoration far greater than their numerical proportion in the Soviet
army. However in the end even the soldiers were not spared. They were
removed from their units and sent directly to the Gulags of Central
Asia.
In each town Studebaker trucks (provided by the United States in
wartime lend-lease) rolled up to be loaded with Chechen men, women and
children at gunpoint. These trucks transported their cargoes to the
nearest railway points where the people were crammed into bare
cattle-trucks with no food and utterly inadequate clothing. Villagers
from the remote mountain settlements were forced to march down to the
plains. Stragglers were shot as was anyone who resisted. Pregnant
women, elderly people and others deemed to require too much effort to
transport were killed. One documented instance is of 700 women,
children and old people who were burnt alive in the mountain village of
Khaibakh. These massacres occured throughout the republic and the empty
Auls (mountain villages) smouldered for weeks after.
Within days, with ruthless efficiency, an entire people had been
erased from the land of their ancestors. Overnight Chechnya and
Ingushetia were entirely depopulated; cartographers were instructed to
expunge all references to them from official maps, records and
encyclopaedias.
On February 29 Lavrentii Beria, Chief of the NKVD Secret Police, wrote to Stalin: "I
report the results of the operation of resettling Chechens and Ingushi.
The resettlement was begun on February 23rd in the majority of
districts, with the exception of the high mountain population points...
478,479 persons were evicted and loaded onto special railway cars,
including 91,250 Ingush. One hundred and eighty special trains were
loaded, of which 159 were sent to the new designated place."
For almost half a
million Chechen and Ingush people on their black odyssey across the
frozen tundra, an ordeal of monumental suffering had just begun. The
sealed trucks were crowded with families - men, women and children of
all ages - in freezing, cramped conditions with no toilet or washing
facilities. Typhoid epidemics swept through the crammed cattle-trucks,
killing many in scenes that must have resembled those of Buchenwald and
Auschwitz. Little food was provided; the weak and ill were finished off
by hunger and cold. Along the way they were treated to contempt and
abuse by local populations who had been told that the people in the
trucks were being punished for collaboration with the enemy.
At one of the railroad stations Dimitri Gulia, the prominent Abkhazian educator, witnessed a scene of surreal despair: "...
an unbelievable sight: an extremely long train... jammed full of people
who looked like Caucasian Mountaineers. They were being sent off
somewhere east, women, children, old people, all. They looked terribly
sad and woebegone... These are the Chechen and Ingush and they were not
travelling of their own free will. They were being deported. They had
committed 'very serious crimes against the Motherland'... "
The trucks were frequently searched for corpses which were simply
thrown from the train to the side of the rail tracks. To avoid this
fate for their kin, the Chechens tried desperately to disguise or hide
the corpses in the hope of giving them an Islamic burial at their
journey's end.
After several weeks of travel the
Chechens were scattered in remote locations across present-day
Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Little or no provision was made
for food or shelter for the hundreds of thousands of deportees who were
mostly left to fend for themselves.
As a historian at Moscow State University wrote two decades later: "...
The most fearful and irremediable blow to the Chechen-Ingush people was
struck in the first two or three years, when starvation and the most
dreadful diseases obliged them to bury tens of thousands of their
fellow tribespeople in the steppes of Central Asia."
In the years that followed thousands were to die of pneumonia and
hunger in exile. It was a catastrophic episode in the already
tumultuous history of the Chechen people. Within living memory they had
already suffered a long war against the full military might of the
Russian Empire in the nineteenth century, followed by large-scale
enforced emigration. Many families were scattered and never able to
reunite.
The settlements of the deportees were in effect large penal
colonies. The most trivial infringements of the rules punished by
imprisonment or hard labour. Yet as the Russian writer and dissident
Alexander Solzhenitsyn described in The Gulag Archipelago, the
Chechens' will to survive endured.
"There was one nation which would not give in, would not
acquire the mental habits of submission -- and not just individual
rebels among them, but the whole nation to a man. These were the
Chechens... I would say that of all the special settlers, the Chechens
alone showed themselves unbroken in spirit. They had been treacherously
snatched from their home, and from that day they believed in nothing...
The Chechens never sought to please, to ingratiate themselves with the
bosses; their attitude was always haughty and indeed openly hostile...
And here is the extraordinary thing: everyone was afraid of them. No
one could stop them from living as they did. The regime which had ruled
the land for thirty years could not force them to respect its laws."
Conditions for the Chechens remained severe until after the death
of Stalin in 1953. Soon afterward Chechens were making official
representations in Moscow for permission to return to their homeland.
Indeed a trickle of Chechens had already started to illegaly return to
their homes. In 1956 at the 20th Party Congress, the Soviet leader
Nikita Khrushchev acknowledged the wrongs that had been done the
Chechens and the other exiled peoples. The trickle of returnees had by
this time become a flood and despite the authorities best efforts to
prevent the Chechens returning - often bringing with them the bones of
their kindred in order to bury them in their ancestral graveyards.
But their lives could never really return to what they had been
before 1944. Many of the ancient mountain Auls were in ruins and
uninhabitable, forcing most of the Chechen people to live in the plains
for the first time in their history, and irrevocably altering their
mountain ways. The massive loss of life among the elderly inflicting
grave damage on Chechen culture and disrupted a rich oral tradition
that had stretched back many centuries.
The evil of the deportations lived on in memories, poverty,
ill-health, and the bitterness spawned by these sufferings. Returning
Chechens also found that their homes had been given to Russian and
Dagestani settlers from whom they had to be purchased back and few were
able to do so.
The deportations represented a personal and collective catastrophe for each of the Chechen nation.
The
trauma and disruption inflicted by the genocide and the Chechens'
subsequent ordeals cannot be overestimated, and the memories and grief
are keenly felt by the Chechen people to this day...
Acknowledgement: All available information and documents in "Justice For North Caucasus Group" is provided for the "fair use". There should be no intention for ill-usage of any sort of any published item for commercial purposes and in any way or form. JFNC is a nonprofit group and has no intentions for the distribution of information for commercial or advantageous gain. At the same time consideration is ascertained that all different visions, beliefs, presentations and opinions will be presented to visitors and readers of all message boards of this site. Providing, furnishing, posting and publishing the information of all sources is considered a right to freedom of opinion, speech, expression, and information while at the same time does not necessarily reflect, represent, constitute, or comprise the stand or the opinion of this group. If you have any concerns contact us directly at:
eagle@JusticeForNorthCaucasus.com