“The corpses were thrown out of the carriages into the snowdrifts”

On February 23, 1944, by order of Joseph Stalin, the forced eviction of Chechens and Ingush from the Caucasus to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan began. Old people, women and children, including those whose sons, husbands and fathers fought on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War, were loaded into heated cars and sent on a long journey. Kommersant correspondent Musa Muradov traveled to Kyrgyzstan and visited the village where he was born a year before the Chechens returned to their homeland.

Road

The cold February air rushed through the door that suddenly opened wide, followed by several armed military men. The young woman jumped up from the couch in fear, covered the baby with a blanket and, throwing a warm woolen shawl over herself, hurriedly went out to meet the unexpected early guests. This is how the story of my family’s deportation began. I described it in detail in the material “Individual families went into exile, but the nation returned”.

My future mother then lived alone in the high mountain village of Dai. She raised a four-year-old boy alone. Her husband and child’s father was at the front.

He wrote letters to her. Letters neatly folded into triangles were kept in a secluded place. When the eldest of the military began to ask where the owner of the house was, the front-line soldier’s wife, not quite understanding what they wanted from her, took out a stack of letters from her husband and handed them to him. The military man, as my mother recalled, threw the stack at his feet and, raising his voice greatly, repeated his question. At this time, the husband’s brother, who lived next door, came into the house and explained what was happening:

– We are being evicted, we need to quickly get ready for a long journey. For a very long time.

– Why, why, where? — the front-line soldier’s wife tried to understand what was happening.

The military man began to hurry, and the mother grabbed the crying child, wrapped him warmly, and then, having collected some groceries in a bundle, went out. Somewhere on the fifth day of the journey, as my mother recalled, her boy died.

The deportees were transported in so-called freight cars, which were designed for transporting livestock. These carriages, of course, did not have any amenities. In the cold February cold they were blown from all sides.

Thousands of people died along the way. Their corpses, my mother said, were hastily buried at the stations or simply thrown into the snowdrifts. The mother buried her baby at one of the stops, having dug a small grave with great difficulty almost with her bare hands.

My mother also told me how Chechen girls suffered in these carriages, where there were no toilets. They could not afford to relieve themselves in front of the elderly, they endured it. Some eventually died from bladder rupture.

Temporary home

In the summer of 2023, I went to Kyrgyzstan. There, where my future parents were deported and where in 1956, a year before Stalin’s deportation was cancelled, I was born. To the village of Beisheke, located 100 kilometers from the capital of the republic.

The local driver who met me at the Bishkek airport asked:

– First time with us?

“Yes, for the first time,” I answered, but then I came to my senses. “Stop!” How is this the first time?! I was born here!

True, I lived here so little from birth, only a little over a year, that I didn’t have time to remember anything.

– Everything has changed a lot. It’s unlikely that anything has survived there since then. I’m afraid that you won’t find the graves of your relatives,” says our guide.

– No, I will remember everything. I definitely remember the river flowing in front of the house, in which I swam, – my older brother Isa, who was traveling with me, and who managed to live in deportation for five years after his birth, did not agree with him.

My parents talked very little about the years they spent in deportation. Either they were afraid out of habit, or they didn’t want to stir up the bad memory of those difficult times. We experienced so much, but talked about it so little.

The village of Beisheke is one fairly wide and long street, mostly with one-story adobe (clay and straw) houses. The population is just over a thousand people. All Kyrgyz. We did not find a single Chechen or representative of other deported peoples. Although my mother said that there were Kurds living next to us, who were also sent here.

“As soon as the permit came out, your people took off and left for the Caucasus in droves,” says local guard Temirkaly, the only one of the villagers who was over 80 years old and who remembered the exiled Chechens.

“They were good guys,” the old man recalls, “I remember my peer Mansur. He was a brawler, but we were friends and didn’t take offense at each other.

Mansur, my close relative, also dreamed of visiting Kyrgyzstan. It didn’t happen; he died recently.

The brother found the very river in which he swam as a child. But the house in which he and I were born has not survived. It was demolished back in 1960, and in its place the Kyrgyz built a new home – more spacious and comfortable. But the yard was the same one in which our relatives settled back in 1944.

Or rather, there was no yard then. It was a wasteland on the outskirts of the village, where the family of my future father and his two brothers, also with their families, unloaded.

At first things didn’t work out very well for the exiles with the local residents: after all, they were told that they had brought enemies of the people. We had to settle down from scratch. It was hard, cold and hungry.

My half-sister Ama, who is now 94 years old, my father’s daughter from his first marriage, said that they were to some extent saved from starvation during deportation by a female NKVD employee. On the day of eviction, she saw that there were a lot of textiles in the house that my father sold. She told me to take a large mattress, stuff it with fabrics and not take anything else with me. In the first weeks in Kyrgyzstan, these fabrics were exchanged for food. That’s how we survived.

Return

My father’s parents, already quite elderly and sick, also reached Kyrgyzstan. But soon they died here. A few years later, both father’s brothers and all their children died from deprivation and illness, with the exception of the girl, whom the father then took into his family and brought to Chechnya.

Temirkaly warned us not to look for the graves of our relatives in the general village cemetery. “Your people lived separately from us and buried their own in separate places, away from our cemeteries,” said the old man. He pointed towards the foothills, where, two or three kilometers from the village, according to the elder, the exiled Chechens buried their own.

The sloping hill with dry grass bleached by the sun hardly resembled the territory of a cemetery. Only rare, slightly convex tubercles, lined with stones, hinted at graves. Apparently, there were no churt (gravestones) with the names of the deceased here initially. The life of the exiles was so difficult that, as my mother recalled, there was no strength or opportunity to arrange the graves properly. People were so weak from malnutrition that it was not easy to even dig a grave.

It was difficult to understand how many people were buried on this hill, which became a large unmarked mass grave for my close and distant relatives.

Life became somewhat easier for the special settlers after Stalin’s death. According to Lema Turpalov, an employee of the Grozny Complex Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, who is researching the topic of deportation, the regime was relaxed already in 1953. For example, in Almaty, a newspaper in the Chechen language “Kinkhyegaman Bayrakh” (“Banner of Labor”) and radio broadcasts in the Chechen and Ingush languages ​​began to be published.

On January 9, 1957, the Supreme Soviets of the USSR and the RSFSR restored the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Soon the Chechens and Ingush were given the opportunity to return to their homeland.

The return also turned out to be a difficult test. As it turned out, no one was waiting for the deportees in their native land. For 13 years they have been forgotten here. Some houses were occupied by strangers resettled from different regions of the country. For others, they are destroyed.

In the eighties, I got an apartment in Grozny. She was in the old fund. The previous owner, Yuri Ladonitsky, was a native Grozny resident. In the post-war years, he worked for the local newspaper Grozny Rabochiy. From a colleague I received a pile of old newspaper files, including those from the period of deportation. Not a single issue, not a single note, contained the slightest mention of the Chechens and Ingush. It was as if they had never lived here.

Everything was blotted out. Settlements with Chechen and Ingush names were renamed. The Shatoi district, where my ancestors lived before the eviction, was called Sovetsky.

They didn’t even spare the dead. Charts were torn out from many Chechen cemeteries and used as building material for the construction of farms or the construction of roads and bridges.

It was only in the late 1980s that curbs made from gravestones were dismantled in the center of Grozny. Now they are kept at the memorial complex.

But the Chechens and Ingush returned to the Caucasus as human beings, in reserved seat carriages. My family went straight from the station to the mountains. Nothing remains of the house, but once it was a spacious two-story manor. As sister Ama recalled, with wooden floors, which was rare in mountain villages. Now there were only pitiful stone remains, overgrown with tall grass.

We spent the night right on the street. Nobody complained. The May night was not very warm, but the native land warmed us.

Musa Muradov