Residents of Russia's North Caucasus region of Ingushetia have been marking the 80th anniversary of the deportation of Ingush and Chechens from the North Caucasus to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.
Hundreds of people, including the region's leader, Makhmud-Ali Kalimatov, lawmakers, government members, public organizations, and youth groups gathered near the Memorial of Memory and Glory in Ingushetia's largest city, Nazran, on February 23, where a mass prayer was performed to honor the victims of the deportation.
Kalimatov issued a statement on his official website, calling the February 1944 deportation "a terrible crime."
"The years of repressions failed to liquidate or diminish the beauty of our people's soul; the peculiar, beautiful Ingush culture is alive. And the years spent in alien lands proved again the capability of our people to unite, to have an unbreakable faith and strong national culture," Kalimatov’s statement said.
For the second year in a row, Kalimatov did not directly accuse Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and his regime of carrying out the deportation.
From February 23, 1944, to March 9, 1944, Soviet authorities deported almost all Ingush and Chechens -- 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 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, February 23 was not officially marked with any public event.
In 2012, the 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.