Our heroes

Samashki, Chechen Republic

May 9 was a genuine holiday for me only when I was a child. Balloons, flags in hands, well-ironed red neckties, ceremonial formations against a backdrop of reawoken nature with its brilliant colours... But from the seventh or eighth grade onwards my delight in having two or three days without any hateful lessons became mixed with a sense that it was not a Chechen holiday.

Although I wanted to join in, I could never shake off the thought that the Chechens had marked the first thirteen celebrations of this anniversary in exile, allegedly for having supported the defeated side. The official version promoted by Stalin and Beria said that we too had been defeated on that day. On the other hand, there is no point in denying that the Chechens did put up resistance to Soviet rule, a resistance which at times was very considerable. As, for example, on the very eve of World War II, when one or two of the mountainous areas of our land were liberated from the Bolsheviks and the NKVD and a provisional national-revolutionary government was declared there.

For many long years, the victory over fascism was treated as a victory for the Communist regime and for Marxist-Leninist ideology. If the people were mentioned, it had to be with the prefix “Soviet”. Yet this word represented the political system and ideology which as a people we Chechens opposed....

We were never allowed to forget that we had “not behaved very well” during the struggle against Hitler. After a rally by Ingush in the centre of Grozny in 1973, Mikhail Suslov, the principal ideologist of the time, is supposed to have said that we were “forgiven but not rehabilitated”. Hence the distrust, which was reflected in everything: from the ban on Chechens and Ingush occupying high-ranking positions in Party and Soviet organizations, to the taboo imposed on the study of certain periods of Chechen and Ingush history.

Time and again I would count the number of Vainakhs who had received the Hero of the Soviet Union award for their deeds of heroism during the war and compare them with the number of recipients among our neighbours. The comparison was nearly always not in our favour, and so I was usually very pleased whenever the name of a compatriot popped up – after all, he had brought glory not only to himself, but to all the rest of us as well.

But then I grew up, and by that time Russia had “grown up”, too. Perestroika and glasnost allowed us to discover what until then had been carefully concealed. We learned that the Chechens had no duty to fight for the Soviet Union. That country had given us nothing that would have been worth dying for. On the contrary, it had done everything possible to turn us into its irreconcilable foes. Deception, collective reprisals, the bombing of villages – these things we experienced even before Hitler and Stalin locked their peoples in combat with one another...

Take, for example, the history of the proclamation of Soviet power in the territory of Chechnya. At the First Congress of the Peoples of the Terek Oblast it was announced that the central Russian government wanted to have a Mountain People’s (Gorskaya) Autonomous Republic in the North Caucasus. The Chechen delegates gave their consent to this only after Joseph Stalin, whom Moscow had been appointed Commissar for Nationalities, promised at the Founding Congress in Vladikavkaz that no one would interfere in the republic’s internal affairs, and would not prevent the declaration of Sharia and the Adats as its basic laws. The lands which had been confiscated during the Tsarist era would be returned.

Less than a year and a half later, these promises were aggressively and dismissively broken. First, there was a series of military operations aimed at the “disarming of the population”, very similar in their methods to the “mop-ups” of today. These operations were followed by a campaign of terror against the most prominent public and religious figures. The “disarming of Chechnya” continued until the end of 1925. It resulted not only in the extra-judicial killing of many thousands of people, but also in the removal from their posts of local leaders who were entirely loyal to the authorities. From then on, all the way until the Perestroika era, no Chechen would be appointed head of an oblast, or after the change of its administrative status – of the republic. The Chechens were not trusted.

Collectivisation began in Chechnya during the autumn of 1929, as it did throughout the North Caucasus – earlier than in the rest of the Soviet Union. It began with "excesses", which were later “condemned and corrected”: the mass repression of “Kulak-Mullah elements" and the national intelligentsia. The percentage of those subjected to repression relative to the population as a whole was extremely high even by the standards of the USSR. On the night of July 31 to August 1 1937 alone, more than 14,000 people were arrested in the cities and villages of the republic, representing no less than 3 percent of its total population. For that reason, resistance was equally fierce. From the 1920s until the late 1950s an organized insurgency operated in Chechnya. At times it acquired such a magnitude that entire units of the Red Army, like the 82nd infantry regiment at Goity in January 1930, perished in battles with the partisans.

To me, the people who had found within themselves the courage to stand up and fight a regime that was capable of committing such crimes were also heroes. And I have no reason to be less proud of them than I am of those who were killed on the fronts of the Second World War. Because both regimes – Hitler’s Third Reich and Stalin’s Soviet Union – embodied what has always been repugnant to human nature: a lack of respect for the rights and freedoms of others, ignoring the immutable fact that man is created by God, and that consequently his life is entirely in God’s hands.

I cannot say what would have happened if our fathers and grandfathers had not resisted the force that was directed against them. They could have closed their eyes and lived a life of leisure. But they do not want that. The placed honour and dignity above personal well-being. And so for me they are heroes. Heroes of the struggle for national liberation.

Those who lost their lives or took part in the war against Nazism were also heroes – perhaps the most magnanimous ones of all, for they fought for a country that had tried to destroy them, and most of them were volunteers.

No, I don’t want to go back to my childhood habit of counting them all. I know that we have just as many heroes as other nations do. What matters is that these heroes are ours!

Photo: IslamNews.Ru.

(Translation by DM)

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