Residents of Russia's North Caucasus region of Ingushetia are commemorating the victims of the 1944 Soviet deportation of Ingush and Chechens from the North Caucasus to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.
About 1,000 people, including the region's leader Makhmud-Ali Kalimatov, lawmakers, government members, and public organizations, gathered near the Memorial of Memory and Glory in Ingushetia's largest city, Nazran, on February 23 to honor the victims of the deportation.
Kalimatov said at the gathering after a prayer was performed by an Islamic cleric that the deportation remains for each Ingush "a sign of the greatest injustice and wiliness."
"Our fathers and grandfathers, who experienced the horrible deprivation of their native homes, and were forcibly sent to alien, cold, unknown places, managed to preserve the best qualities of the North Caucasus people," Kalimatov said, calling for preserving memories of the victims of the deportation.
Unlike in previous years, Kalimatov did not directly accused Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and his regime of carrying out the deportation.
From February 23 to March 9, 1944, Soviet authorities deported almost all Chechens and Ingush -- an estimated 650,000 people -- to Central Asia, mostly to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, claiming they were collaborating with Nazi Germany.
As many as half of the deportees died either on the journey or due to the harsh conditions in which they were forced to endure.
Soviet authorities liquidated the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic at the time, distributing the ethnic republic's territories among neighboring administrative units and republics.
In 1957, four years after Stalin's death, the republic was re-installed, and survivors were allowed to return to the North Caucasus.
In neighboring Chechnya, the date was not officially marked with any public event.
in 2012, Moscow-backed authoritarian leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, moved the Day of Grief and Remembrance from February 23 to May 10, the anniversary of the burial of his father, Akhmat Kadyrov, who was killed in a bomb attack in Grozny in 2004.
