Brian glyn williams, p.9
Brian Glyn Williams, page 9
is typical of the ritualized narratives of “The Deportation”:
Early in the morning of February 23, 1944, on the squares and on the
outskirts of the village in the mountains, they were aroused by automatics and machine guns; they announced the order of the State Committee
of the District, they searched out and directed everyone to the train
station. Then began the second part of the “scenario,” soldiers entered
all doors, armed with automatics, led by an officer or sergeant who gave them 10–15 minutes to expel the elderly, children and women from
the homes, the wounded were tossed out of medical stations. Any who
resisted—they shot! Any attempting to escape—they shot! Any who
incorrectly understood the order they shot! They had given (the decree
of deportation) in Russian and many did not speak Russian . . . In the
highlands of Chechnya, in several hours, hundreds of people were gunned
down, men, women, children and the elderly.25
The transgenerational narratives of the deportation form a powerful
means of passing on a sense of victimization to those who did not per-
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sonally experience the events of 1944, as the following example demon-
strates:
Then many told how on Soviet army day (the symbolism is real is it
not?) February 23, 1944, the inhabitants in the villages were led to the squares—as if for a holiday—and, not being given time to collect their
things, even time to go to their homes, they were driven by vehicles and deposited at the nearest train station. They told how those who were
unable to walk were killed on the spot. They told how in the village of
Khaibek the sick, among them women and children, were burned alive.
Yes, and they talked about the exile, which is remembered by every
Chechen, old and young—and even of the Caucasian wars in the last
century, as if they happened yesterday, and for every Chechen the name
of General Yermolov [the tsarist general who brutally conquered the
Chechens] is inseparable from the name of Grachev [the Russian general
who launched the 1994 invasion of Chechnya].26
Among the Chechen survivors of the tragedy of 1944, the bloody events
that took place in the above-mentioned highland village of Khaibek
hold a special place of horror. An account of the massacre which took
place in that village should be given here in light of the anguish and rage that the legend of Khaibek continues to evoke among the post-Soviet
Chechens.
According to nkvd accounts, as the Chechens began to arrive in their
tens of thousands for transfer onto cattle cars in the Grozny train station, it became apparent that the troops were operating under a tight operating schedule. “Operation Mountaineer” involved tens of thousands
of soldiers, one hundred and ninety trains, and most tellingly, an entire tank division. This deprived the Red Army of these desperately needed
resources for the war front. The forced transfer of approximately half a million Chechen and Ingush mountaineers over thousands of kilometers
was a major logistical exercise.
For this reason, nkvd generals in charge of the operation were urged
by Stalin to expedite the “removal” of the Chechens. They did this by refusing to allow Chechens the designated fifteen minutes of time to gather the allotted twenty kilos of food, blankets, and extra clothing before being taken from their houses (this seemingly minor point led to starvation and 54
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death from exposure for many who were not told where they were going
or for how long they would be away).
The nkvd and Red Army soldiers involved in the deportation also
confiscated the possessions of the deported people, which varied from
household utensils, furniture, and heirlooms to cattle and farming
equipment. This gave these military units added incentive to prevent the deportees from bringing their most prized possessions with them to their places of exile.
As the mechanized troops hurried to meet their deadlines, they found
other imaginative ways to expedite the transfer of villagers from the isolated mountain hamlets to Grozny. The story of Khaibek reveals the true
nature of this expedited ethnic cleansing. By all accounts, on the snowy night of February 23, the nkvd found itself unexpectedly delayed by the
difficulties in marching hundreds of Chechens, including the elderly and infants, through the snow from the isolated highland village of Khaibek
down to Grozny. In order to meet their deadline and perhaps earn pro-
motions (medals were awarded to the generals in charge of this success-
ful military operation against fellow Soviet citizens), the accompanying Soviet officers hit upon an idea that would speed up the process. Calling for a halt, the soldiers crowded the slow-moving villagers into several
nearby storage buildings, doused them with gasoline and simply burnt
everyone alive.
Villagers from neighboring hamlets could smell the burning flesh of
the tortured inhabitants of Khaibek as they passed nearby and recall witnessing the soldiers’ hurried disposal of their victims’ blackened bodies.
Sadly, the atrocity at Khaibek was not an isolated event, and as many as twelve smaller hamlets experienced a similar sad fate. The nkvd account
of the sickening slaughter at Khaibek coldly states, “In view of the impossibility of transportation and the necessity of fulfilling on schedule the goals of ‘Operation Mountaineer,’ it was necessary to liquidate more than 700 inhabitants of the village of Khaibakh.”27
A Chechen survivor of this massacre left the following simple account
of this atrocity, which compares drastically to the official account:
I was born in 1912 in the village of Motskara, in the Galanchosk region.
Now I live in Gekhi-Uch. I confirm that my family, and my relatives, to the 55
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number of 19, children, women and the elderly, were shot and burned in
Khaibek by soldiers.
My brother Alimkhojaev Salambek, 35 years old, worked as a teacher.
He was shot as he walked along the road. His wife is still living, her name is Besiila . . . To this day she preserves the braid of her sister, Partakhi.
Partakhi, together with her children, was shot and burned in Khaibek.28
Among the Chechens burnt alive in the slaughter at Khaibek were the
grandmother, aunt, and two cousins of a young infant named Dzhokhar
Dudayev. It was this same Dudayev that was later to lead his people in
militarily confronting the Russian Federation in the First Russo-Chechen War of 1994 to 1996.29
One does not have to be a psychologist to understand the impact that
the telling and retelling of the tale of the slaughter of relatives at Khaibek and elsewhere had on Chechen children such as Dzhokhar Dudayev,
who grew up far from their homes in exile. In this respect, the future president Dudayev was no different from his people. All Chechens are either
directly or indirectly related to someone who died in the deportation of 1944. Not surprisingly, for the Chechens, the burning of Khaibek’s inhabitants by their own country’s authorities has become a symbol of Soviet
and Russian rule over their homeland.
The following account of an interview with an elderly survivor who
recalled the deportation takes the sterile reports by nkvd commissars of
“liquidations” of Chechens and puts a human face on this tragedy:
Five of Muradov’s children, too sick to travel, were executed on the spot.
Calmly, he related how one son, bleeding to death, begged for his help.
“I cannot help” replied the father, who was wounded but survived and was then deported himself. His wife and last surviving child vanished in exile.30
Another Chechen survivor left the following account which, like the
previous eyewitness testimony, brings this hidden atrocity to life more
than half a century after the event:
First soldiers came to live in our houses and we put them up like guests.
Lots of them came to every house. They ate with us, dumped all their gear everywhere. We had about 30 in our place and they were there for more
than a month.
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One day, we were told there would be a very important meeting and all
the men were taken away. I had three sisters and we were put on a train
wagon together. My brother was born on the train. It was so cold. It was a cattle train and there were no windows, just darkness. They never told us a thing, didn’t tell us where we were going.
Some people were in other villages at the time, so when we were
deported they were split up from their families and it took years and
years before they ever found their relatives again. In the train, we would shout from carriage to carriage, trying to see if there were relatives. Oh God, I can’t forget this for more than an hour, even today.31
The eyewitnesses agree that after the mountain auls had been emptied of their inhabitants and all Chechens suspected of rebellion sum-
marily executed, the villages were systematically burnt by nkvd troops.
A Russian eyewitness recalled, “For days one could see auls burning in the mountains.”32 Today many of these ancient highland villages, with
their vandalized stone towers, collapsed stone walls, roofless houses,
desecrated cemeteries, and crumbling mosques, remain abandoned. In
the absence of their former inhabitants, an ancient way of life that had been sustained and passed on for eons from one generation to the next
disappeared forever.
This assault on the Chechens’ ancient way of life was not to be lim-
ited to the Chechen-Ingush Republic. In addition to the deportation
of the Chechens residing in their titular republic, another thirty thou-
sand Chechens who lived across the border from the Chechen-Ingush
assr in the neighboring regions of Dagestan also were arrested in the
nkvd’s sweeps and deported as well. The deportation units also began
a manhunt for Chechens in the neighboring republics of the Transcau-
casus (south side of the Caucasus), and scores of Chechens living far
from the battlefront in the Soviet Socialist Republics of Azerbaijan and Georgia were caught up in the nkvd’s net and deported. The further the
nkvd’s net was spread from Chechnya, however, the flimsier Stalin’s
pretext for deporting the widely dispersed Chechen “Nazi collaborators”
became.
Knowing the Chechens’ proud character, it should not come as a sur-
prise that small bands of desperate Chechens in the mountains were able
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to avoid the deportation and to carry out anti-Soviet hit-and-run attacks for years after the event. According to a Russian source, “It took almost half a century to bring about calm and order in the region and the physical extermination of the prominent abreks and the liquidation of their reserves of weapons in the mountains.”33
For the most part, however, there was no escape for the members of
this doomed nationality.34 Even the small numbers of die-hard Chechen
fighters left behind in the peaks of their empty native mountains were
eventually tracked down by Soviet troops and executed.
When the traumatized Chechen people had, by various means, finally
been herded to a central trans-shipment point in Grozny, an nkvd report
triumphantly proclaimed, “The operation proceeded in an organized
fashion, with no serious incidents of resistance or other incidents. There were only isolated cases of attempted flights.”35
From these newly declassified nkvd-kgb documents, we know that
some 387,229 Chechens, and 91,250 Ingush who shared the Chechen-
Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic with the Chechens, were
herded onto cattle cars known as “echelons” for deportation from their
homeland to the depths of Soviet Asia. This population was shipped like
livestock from their homeland at the rate of 80,000 per day.
In their absence, the streets of their once-bustling villages were filled with burning embers and an eerie silence. Plows lay abandoned in their
fields, cattle roamed aimlessly until they were collected and slaughtered by the Red Army troops, once-bustling schoolrooms were empty, and
ancestral homes that had been built from stone over the centuries lay
abandoned and looted as Soviet soldiers dragged off prized family trea-
sures, household articles, and furniture.
In less than a week the Chechens’ ancient way of life had been utterly
destroyed, and they were about to embark on a terrifying journey toward
an unknown fate. The “problem” of the Chechens apparently had been
solved once and for all. In the process, a people who had tilled the lands of their forefathers since biblical times were seemingly destined to disappear forever from the pages of history.
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“ Crematoria on Wheels” The Journey to Exile
Once crammed into the fetid cattle cars, the Chechens commenced the
second part of their punishment and began the terrifying journey from
the homeland most had never left to the distant deserts and plains lying far to the east in the wastes of Soviet Central Asia. While they did not know it at the time, the vast majority of them were being transported hundreds of miles from their mountain home in Europe to the Central Asian Soviet
republics of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.
In the ensuing journey, survivors recall that many train carts were so
tightly packed that there was no room to sit, and many deportees died
from suffocation. The deportees realized that the only modification for
humans was a pipe placed in the floor for a toilet. The vast majority of cattle cars, however, lacked even this “facility.” Mark Taplin writes of these train cars, “The cattle cars set aside for Beria’s ugly errand had already been used for his earlier deportations; they were caked in old feces, and smeared in dried blood and urine. With practice the nkvd had perfected
these sinister operations to a ruthless science.”36
And ruthless the deportation was. The Chechen deportees, who were
dehumanized in Soviet bureaucratese by the term “special contingent,”
recall that the troops who deported them were delighted to discover such a high percentage of children among the “traitors.” The presence of so
many children facilitated the process of squeezing a greater number of
deportees into the cattle carriages. An official report from the period advised that, “The compression of the cargo of the special contingent from forty to forty five persons in a carriage, taking into account 40–50 percent children, is completely expedient.”37
The Chechens were locked into the guarded carts for two to three
weeks as the trains made their way across the wintry heart of the Soviet Union to the distant Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and the Russian province of Siberia. All Chechen families have tales of losses suffered on the trains to the places of exile.
From information gleaned from declassified nkvd reports and the
eyewitness accounts of survivors, it can be ascertained that the trains carrying the stricken deportees made their way from the Caucasus Moun-
tains, along the north shores of the Caspian Sea, through the emptied
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plains of the Kalmyks, who had been previously deported, and deep into
the heart of landlocked Central Asia. While the journey was to take less than a month, for the horrified survivors these were to be the longest
weeks of their lives.
Scores of Chechens died in transit to their unrevealed places of exile,
and witnesses spoke of seeing the pitiful bundles of rotting Caucasian
corpses left along the rail tracks. The heavy death toll resulting from the deportation would indicate that the Soviet regime’s calculated neglect
during the journey and resettlement led to a loss of life on a scale that was genocidal. The eyewitness accounts, such as the following report,
make this abundantly clear. “From cold and the dirt they began to fall
ill. The people were mowed down by typhus, they were not able to bury
those who died. On the rare stops on the empty steppes, soldiers walked
through the wagon taking off bodies.”38
Another survivor of the terrible journey to Central Asia recalled, “The
train again halted at a half station on the steppe, the door was opened.
From the neighboring car a screech reached us. Who had died? It turned
out to be a pregnant woman, but the baby died.”39 Another account states: I have talked to some of the survivors and they said that they had to
stand up in the wagons packed like sardines with the windows of the
trains boarded up and with no stops for food and hygiene. Many people
suffocated and died and their bodies stayed in vertical positions until
