"They were just throwing the corpses into the snowdrifts". The brutal deportation of Chechens and Ingush began 80 years ago

Chechens are one of the most tested nations today. After losing the wars with Russia in the 1990s, they are now brutally controlled and subverted from within by pro-Kremlin ruler Ramzan Kadyrov. But they didn't have a bed of roses even before that. One of the most tragic events in the history of the Chechen nation was Stalin's total deportations, which killed hundreds of thousands of people. Exactly 80 years ago, on February 23, 1944, special units of the NKVD troops launched a large-scale operation to displace Chechens and other Caucasian peoples to remote areas of Central Asia, primarily to Kazakhstan. And the reminder of this tragedy in today's Chechnya is also more than painful. First, Kadyrov completely banned it, and now he doesn't know how to properly return to it.

Operation "Lens"

"Suddenly the soldiers closed the gate with a bolt, covered the barn full of people with hay and set it on fire. Foreboding death, the people broke down the barn door at the last moment, but the soldiers started shooting with automatic weapons. The wall of bodies prevented others from escaping, they were all burned to death," Salamat Gajev recalled 15 years ago when we met in one of the Chechen villages about the events of February 1944. As a five-year-old child, he survived one of the most brutal events accompanying a not very well-known tragic chapter in the history of the Soviet union – the expulsion of the Chechen nation from the Caucasus.

Together with Jana Hradilková, we initiated the recording of the memories of Salamat Gajev and several other witnesses of the deportations as part of her charitable activities in Chechnya (which took place at the end of the 2000s, when it was still relatively safe to travel to Chechnya). They are stored on the Memory of the Nation portal.

The Soviet secret service operation Chechevica (Russian for "lens"), which resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of people, began on February 23, 1944. Except for the Chechens and their close relatives, the Ingush (collectively referred to as the Vajnach nation), they were deported to the Kazakh steppes on Stalin's direct orders and other Muslim nations of the North Caucasus – Karachays, Balkars, but also Crimean Tatars and Georgian Turks.

The expulsion was violent and tragic, many people died in the first days. For example, on February 27, members of the NKVD burned alive 700 people in a barn in the mountain village of Khaibakh, mainly old people, women and children. Allegedly because their transport to the lowlands would be too costly and technically demanding. Only those who were not in the village at the time of the operation remained alive, such as Salamat Gajev. Fortunately, on the day of the tragedy, he was with his mother in a remote pasture where the NKVD soldiers could not reach. “There my mother learned about what happened, about the cruelty of the soldiers. She then tried to hide with us children, I remember that we were staying in some kind of bear den. In the end, however, they caught us after some time," Salamat Gajev says. In a barn in Khaibakh, Salamat lost a number of his relatives. "The newborns also died there - the twins Hassan and Hussein, who were born to a relative on the night when everything happened."

Unproven collaboration

The official justification for the deportation was the accusation that the Chechens and other peoples had collaborated with the Germans for their North Caucasus campaign and for "active and almost mass participation in the terrorist movement directed against the Soviets and the Red Army." The Red Army allegedly had to use its troops to fight instead of fighting the Germans with collaborating Chechens. In fact, instead of fighting in the war, thousands of soldiers participated in organizing deportations.

There can be no doubt about the participation of many Chechens in the so-called terrorist movements, in other words, the uprising against Bolshevik power. In 1940, another of the series of uprisings led by Hasan Israilov broke out in Chechnya, which lasted with varying degrees of intensity until 1944. However, opinions differ on the issue of collaboration with the Germans. Chechen historians completely reject this, on the contrary, the NKVD claimed that 18,000 Chechens and Ingush fought on the side of the Wehrmacht against Soviet units. However, Chechnya was never in the territory occupied by Germany, the Germans only reached the western part of the North Caucasus. Many Chechens also fought in the ranks of the Red Army.

Members of the NKVD used a ruse during the operation, where they took advantage of traditional Caucasian hospitality. They also occupied remote villages in the mountains many days in advance, often staying with local residents, whom they told that they were preparing a major operation against the German troops. According to their traditions, the mountaineers hosted them without suspecting anything bad.

"They shot her on the spot"

Zulay Sulejmanova was ten years old at the time and lived in the village of Chechen-aul. “I remember one day at daybreak they took my father and all the men from our village to the stable, which they locked. When a girl from a neighboring house saw people in military uniforms all around her, she panicked and ran right into their ranks. They shot her on the spot. Her father saw the whole thing locked in the stable. He tried to get out and the soldiers shot him for trying to escape," Zulaj Sulejmanova recounts. "Then the others picked us up, children and mothers, and took us to the edge of the village. There they loaded us onto trucks and started taking us to the city, to Grozny."

Another eyewitness, Khabibul Eskerchanov from the mountain village of Urd-Yukhoi, later found out that the trucks carrying the deported Chechens from the mountain villages to the lowlands were the legendary American Studebacker cars. These were supplied by the United States to the Soviet Union as part of military aid during World War II. The Red Army got a hundred thousand of them. But not all of them served on the front against the German army:

“They loaded all the residents onto these cars and took us to the city. At the same time, it was known throughout the village how the domestic animals sensed that something bad was happening. The dogs howled, the cows mooed, they weren't milked or fed - it was a terrible sight," recalls Khabibul Eskerchanov.

They simply put the dead in the snow

Zulay Suleimanova and other residents of the village were taken to Grozny, where they were loaded onto a train. There were only freight wagons for coal and cattle without windows, instead of couches only wooden sheds, small stones in the middle of each wagon. However, she could not properly heat the wagon, the Chechens were suffering from terrible cold and hunger.

“When someone died from the cold, their body was taken out and simply placed in the snow, the ground was frozen, you couldn't dig into it. Every morning, around eight o'clock, they gave out a tin mug with hot water and a hundred grams of bread per person to the people in the wagons. They also took sick people out of the wagons - they took them away and no one knows what happened to them, no one ever returned to the wagon."

180 special trains with 65 wagons each were sent to take the deportees to Kazakhstan (over 300,000 deportees) and Kyrgyzstan (70,000), hundreds and thousands more ended up in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

According to NKVD documents, which described detailed reports and statistics of the entire operation, out of 520 thousand Chechens and Ingush living in the North Caucasus in 1944, only 240 thousand of them remained alive after 13 years of deportation. More than 60 percent of the population did not survive the deportation and life in the new territories.

We fought over every spoon

Khabibul Eskerkhanov and his relatives were loaded into cattle trucks and spent almost a month on the way to Kazakhstan. Snowdrifts lined the railway, the winter of 1944 was exceptionally harsh. “There were a lot of small children, younger and older than me. I was three years old then. There were pebbles in the middle of the wagon, we called them burghers. The adults roasted corn on them, and when a seed from the corn fell on the floor, we children fought over it. Thin soup was also cooked, we fought over every spoonful."

"Some died of hunger along the way, but it was impossible to bury them. When the train stopped to unload the dead, there was so much snow everywhere that they just threw the corpses directly into the drift and buried them in the snow."

After a few weeks, when they reached the Central Asian steppes, the train began to stop also to drop off groups of displaced people. How many people and where they would go was decided on the fly. The kolkhozes along the route were called to see how many people they could accept. At first, Chechens had to build dugouts or huts from branches in new places. Zulai Suleimanova's family was planted near the city of Leninogorsk (now Ridder) in northeastern Kazakhstan. Almost three thousand kilometers as the crow flies from his home in the Caucasus.

"There wasn't a single separate room for individual families in a kind of dormitory. They all lived in one big space. There was a limestone mine nearby, where my parents started working. In the factory, they gave the Chechens shoes made of wood and sewn on the top with fabric. We received vouchers for food - 100 grams of bread for children, 200 grams for adults. But we were all terribly hungry anyway. People went to the forest to gather berries and also grass. Many did not have the strength to return from there, they died of hunger in the forest. Living conditions were miserable, typhus soon spread, a terrible disease that killed half of the displaced."

The family of Khabibul Eskerchanov was displaced to the town of Kyzylorda, 800 kilometers southwest of today's capital of Kazakhstan, Astana. "Years later, my relatives told me that even though I was only three years old at the time, so that my face looked like an eighty-year-old man, I had so many wrinkles. All this from hunger. People ate grass, clover, hedgehogs. They were swollen with hunger and many were dying. The local inhabitants, the Kazakhs, were barely enough to support themselves. They looked at us with fear at first, they were afraid of us and said we were cannibals. But over time they realized that we are good people, that we don't eat anyone, and on the contrary, they even started to be friends with us."

Our houses were occupied by the Russians

It is estimated that at least 200,000 members of the North Caucasian peoples died during deportations and exile. Since 1957, when Nikita Khrushchev decided to restore the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic, Chechens were slowly allowed to start moving back to their native land in the North Caucasus. "At home, in our village, all the houses were occupied. Mainly the Russian population. All we had to do was spend the night outside, on the street, and wait for the new owners to leave or resell their, previously our, holdings to us. People built shacks and similar temporary dwellings in yards. Many years passed until the new residents finally left our houses," Zulaj says.

However, Chechens were still second-class citizens in their country. While the majority of new settlers from the ranks of Russians, Ukrainians and other peoples of the USSR left the villages and smaller towns, Chechens still formed a minority in Grozny. Deportations were not allowed to be talked about, and February 23 was even officially celebrated as the Day of the Soviet Army. Three decades of relative calm followed, an unprecedentedly long period of peace within the framework of more than two centuries of conflict between Chechens and Russians. It was as if both sides were gathering strength for another tragedy, two wars that flared up in full at the beginning of the 1990s. But that's another story...

Reminder of deportations - what about it?

Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, deportations began to be publicly commemorated. In Chechnya itself, in 1994, a monument was created on the initiative of the then president of de facto independent Chechnya, Dzhokhar Dudayev. The commemoration of the deportations took place every year on February 23, both in Chechnya and Ingushetia itself, and also abroad, including the Czech Republic, where, for example, the Czech-Chechen Society regularly organizes an ascent to Prague's Petřín hill.

But the big turning point came in 2011. At that time, Chechen pro-Kremlin ruler Ramzan Kadyrov decided that the official day of commemoration of the deportations would be moved from February 23 to May 10. It was a very controversial move, because May 10 is the anniversary of the funeral of Kadyrov's father, Akhmat Kadyrov, the pro-Russian president killed in 2004. This date has nothing to do with the deportations themselves. Additionally, Chechnya officially returned to celebrating Soviet Army Day on February 23. In neighboring Ingushetia, however, the day of the deportations continued to be remembered.

In 2014, the original monument to deportations, built in the days of independent Chechnya under Dzhokhar Dudayev, was finally abolished and dismantled. “Its demolition is a spit on the soul of our people. I don't think the authorities realize what they are doing. First, they canceled the funeral events that we held every year, now the memorial itself is destroyed. The only explanation I see for this is that the monument was created during Dzhokhar Dudayev's time, and in this way the authorities are trying to destroy everything that was associated with that time," one resident of Grozny commented on the demolition of the monument for the Kavkazsky node server.

In the same year, the chairman of the Assembly of Caucasian Nations, Ruslan Kutayev, was sentenced to four years in prison after he spoke out against the ban on commemorations at the original date. The memory of the deportations began to be downplayed so as not to jeopardize the official line of inseparable bond and friendship between Russia and Chechnya, or between Putin and Kadyrov. In Russia, many historical events are re-viewed through the lens of the Soviet Union, and Stalin is hailed as a great manager. It is not appropriate to recall his crimes. A similar strategy can be observed in Russian-annexed Crimea, where in 2014 the Russian administration banned commemorations of Crimean Tatar deportations. As in the case of the Chechens, the Crimean Tatars were deported in 1944 on the orders of Stalin on charges of high treason. They commemorate this part of their history on May 18, but since 2014 commemorative gatherings have been banned and people who oppose them have been arrested.

It is interesting, however, that from 2020 February 23 began to be slowly and quietly commemorated again in Chechnya. Although these are not public events, official representatives are reporting on the anniversary and Ramzan Kadyrov is also speaking. In 2021, on February 23, at a closed memorial meeting, Ramzan Kadyrov's message was publicly read: "Mass deportation - this terrible act was justified by false accusations of collaboration with fascist occupiers... Today, the Chechen nation is successfully developing and occupies a dignified place among the fraternal peoples of Russia. We will always remember the victims of this terrible tragedy,” Kadyrov wrote, according to the official Russian news agency TASS.

In 2023, already during Russia's war against Ukraine, in which official Chechen units play a significant and ugly role, on the anniversary of the deportations, Kadyrov cursed Stalin on his social media accounts to the surprise of many for his decision to displace the Chechens. At the same time, he called for the rewriting of Russian history textbooks, in which the deportation of the Caucasian peoples is explained precisely by collaboration with the Nazis. These accusations are now being used by Russia against Ukraine, and at the same time it is in great need of Chechen support in the ongoing war. It is therefore possible that we will now see new, surprising statements in this direction on the 80th anniversary. This just proves how big a role the interpretation or distortion of Soviet history and Stalin's crimes play in today's Russia. However, this does not change the tragedy of hundreds of thousands of ordinary Chechens, which began 80 years ago.

Štěpán Černousek,
February 2024