Caucasus Report

Seventy-four years after the event, the deportation of the entire Chechen and Ingush peoples to Central Asia on orders from Soviet leader Josef Stalin remains a contentious issue.

For one thing, Russians nationwide seem increasingly inclined to lend credence to the rationale cited at the time for that move: that the population of the Checheno-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic had collaborated with the advancing Nazi German Army in 1941-42, and was thus guilty of treason. (Nikita Khrushchev exonerated the Chechens and Ingush of that charge in his legendary "secret speech" to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in March 1956, paving the way for the return of the deported peoples from exile.)

In addition, both the Chechens and some Ingush resent the stance taken by their respective leaders with regard to commemorating the deportation. For decades, that commemoration took place on February 23, the anniversary of the day the mass deportation got under way, which was designated the Day of Remembrance and Mourning. Then in 2012, Chechen Republic head Ramzan Kadyrov decreed that since February 23 is a national public holiday -- Defenders of the Fatherland Day -- it was inappropriate to celebrate the deportation anniversary on that date. Instead, Kadyrov issued orders that the deportation anniversary should be celebrated on May 10, which happens to be the date on which Kadyrov's late father, Akhmad, was buried in 2004 following his death in a terrorist bombing on May 9.

The perception that Kadyrov ranked his father's killing as a tragedy equal in significance to the deaths of the estimated 100,000 Chechens who perished during the deportation or in exile triggered widespread resentment among the Chechen population. So too did Kadyrov's assertion in 2014 that some Chechens, whom he did not identify, bore part of the blame for the deportation.

In line with Kadyrov's edict, no formal commemoration of the deportation took place in Chechnya this year. The news site Caucasian Knot, however, reported that Chechens were resorting to social media to share suggested ways to circumvent that ban, including distributing alms in memory of those who died and symbolically leaving the gates to their yards open, which is traditional practice when a household is mourning the death of one of its members.

In addition, some Chechens who live close to the border with the predominantly Chechen-populated Novolak district of neighboring Daghestan were reportedly among an estimated 1,500 people who gathered there for formal prayers in memory of those who died during the deportation and ensuing 13 years in exile.

Kadyrov did, however, post on Mylistory a statement pegged to the February 23 anniversary affirming that it was the Chechens' "true faith," courage, and devotion to their homeland that enabled them to survive. (That assertion is problematic in light of Kadyrov's concerted efforts over the past decade to redefine what constitutes "traditional Chechen Islam."

Chechen parliament speaker Magomed Daudov for his part, in seeming ignorance of the nature of Stalin's tyrannical regime, posted a statement implying that if at that time the Chechens had had a national leader of the caliber of Akhmad Kadyrov, he would have been able "to defend his people."

By contrast, in neighboring Ingushetia some 10,000 people participated in an official gathering on February 23 to commemorate the victims of the deportation, and an estimated 1,000 households opened their courtyard gates in a sign of mourning. But this year republic head Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, who in 2012 had equated the deportation with genocide, posted on Instagram an anodyne and muted statement in which he hailed the centenary of the creation of the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army and argued that the deportation anniversary should not "prevent us from remembering our heroes...who participated in strategic battles."

Some Ingush activists openly deplored that shift in emphasis. Magomed Mutsolgov, whose Mashr organization offers legal advice to people whose relatives are believed to have been abducted by or otherwise fallen foul of the law enforcement agencies, was quoted as suggesting that Yevkurov was seeking simultaneously both to save face vis a vis the republic's population and to demonstrate his loyalty to the federal authorities by playing up the importance of the national holiday.

Criminalizing Revisionism

Yet despite their equivocation, the Chechen authorities reject unequivocally revisionist attempts to justify the deportation. One week prior to the anniversary, the Chechen parliament submitted to Russia's State Duma a draft bill criminalizing any deliberate effort "to distort the truth" about the history of World War II.

Former Russian parliament speaker Ruslan Khasbulatov, who himself experienced the horrors of the 1944 deportation as a small child, countered that initiative with a far more nuanced and sophisticated counterproposal to criminalize any attempt to justify the deportations -- an argument that could be construed as directed against Kadyrov personally.

Citing archive documents, Khasbulatov examined in some detail the factors that influenced the timing of the deportation of the Chechens and Ingush and the role played by Stalin's henchman Lavrenti Beria. He further convincingly debunked the myth of Stalin's alleged genius as a military strategist, while at the same time paying lip service to what he called the dictator's ‘'outstanding contribution" to the history of the U.S.S.R.

In that context, Khasbulatov condemns Stalin's post-World War II humiliation and destruction of Field Marshal Georgy Zhukov and other brilliant military commanders who inflicted major defeats on Nazi forces, stressing Stalin's compulsive self-aggrandizement and his despicable treatment of men to whom he owed a huge debt. Both traits have a more recent parallel in Kadyrov's sidelining of Sulim Yamadayev and Said-Magomed Kakiyev, commanders respectively of the elite East and West battalions that were directly subordinate to Russian Military Intelligence. Those military formations played a key role in the defeat of Chechnya's pro-independence president, Aslan Maskhadov, in the 1999-2000 war.

In the early 2000s, Sulim Yamadayev was one of Akhmad Kadyrov's most trusted advisers. He was assassinated in Dubai in March 2009. Adam Delimkhanov, who represents Chechnya in the State Duma and is close to Ramzan Kadyrov, is suspected by the Dubai authorities there of having masterminded Yamadayev's killing.

The views expressed in this blog post do not necessarily reflect those of RFE/RL

In a recent interview with the Russian daily Kommersant, Russian presidential administration deputy head Magomedsalam Magomedov cited unspecified sociological polls in which 79.7 percent of respondents assessed relations between Russia's various nationalities as "well-intentioned."

Magomedov did not, however, mention what is arguably one of the most glaring exceptions: the enmity between the Ossetians and Ingush that still persists 25 years after the violence in October-November 1992 in which according to official statistics some 600 people, predominantly Ingush, died and between 30,000 and 60,000 Ingush were forced to flee their homes in North Ossetia's disputed Prigorodny district.

Participants at a recent conference in St. Petersburg singled out several reasons why, a quarter of a century later, the mutual distrust and suspicion between the two nations still persists. Of those reasons, arguably the most important was said to be the failure to hand over to their families for burial the remains of many of the Ingush killed during the conflict who were interred in unmarked mass graves.

The roots of the conflict date back to the early days of the Soviet Union, specifically, the redrawing in the 1920s and 1930s of the borders between the various territories of the North Caucasus. In 1934, the Chechen and Ingush autonomous oblasts were merged to form the Checheno-Ingush Autonomous Oblast, which was upgraded two years later to the status of an autonomous Soviet socialist republic (ASSR).

The Checheno-Ingush ASSR was formally abolished in 1944 following the deportation at the behest of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin of the entire Chechen and Ingush peoples to Central Asia. Part of its territory was renamed Grozny Oblast and the remainder divided between Georgia and the Daghestan and North Ossetian ASSRs, with the latter receiving Prigorodny Raion, a narrow strip of particularly fertile land on the right bank of the River Terek in the extreme west of the republic.

In his landmark "secret speech" to the 20th congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in February 1956, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev condemned the Stalinist deportations of the Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars, Balkars, Karachais, and others, and exonerated the Chechens and Ingush of the suspicion of collaboration with advancing Nazi German forces that Stalin had adduced as the rationale for them. But when the Checheno-Ingush ASSR was formally reconstituted in 1957, its borders were revised, leaving Prigorodny Raion part of North Ossetia.

The Ingush never came to terms with that decision. In early 1973, they staged a mass protest in Grozny to demand the return of Prigorodny Raion, the organizers of which were apprehended and put on trial.

In the late 1980s, CPSU General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of "glasnost" made possible the public discussion of the wrongs and horrors of the Stalin era. As a consequence of that broad debate, in April 1991 the U.S.S.R. Supreme Soviet adopted a Law on the Rehabilitation of the Repressed Peoples that stated that Prigorodny Raion should be handed back to the Checheno-Ingush ASSR, but the Ossetians pressured Moscow to impose a five-year moratorium on implementing it.

Ethnic Cleansing

The split in July 1992 of the Checheno-Ingush ASSR into separate Chechen and Ingush republics played into the hands of the North Ossetian leadership, which according to former Russian Nationalities Minister Valery Tishkov began forging clandestine plans to provoke a clash in Prigorodny Raion between the Ossetian and Ingush communities in order to create a pretext to expel the Ingush en masse and neutralize the perceived threat posed by the Ingush demands to hand the district back.

As part of those preparations, North Ossetian President Akhsarbek Galazov oversaw the distribution of weapons to illegal Ossetian paramilitary groups. Meanwhile, the Russian leadership demonstrated seeming indifference to the imminent crisis. Tishkov, who personally met with officials from both sides in a bid to defuse mounting tensions, suggests that one reason for that apparent lack of concern may have been the anticipation that in the event of armed hostilities between Ossetians and Ingush the Chechens would come to the aid of their Ingush ethnic cousins, thus providing the perfect pretext for ousting separatist Chechen President Dzhokhar Dudayev, who in 1991 had refused to sign the new Federation Treaty on relations between Russia's various territorial entities.

A series of incidents in late October 1992 in which Ingush died at the hands of Ossetians spiraled within a week into fighting between Ossetian paramilitaries and bands of young armed Ingush men who Galazov told Moscow were trying to wrest military control of Prigorodny Raion. Russian officials (including then-Emergency Situations Minister Sergei Shoigu, currently Russia's defense minister) dispatched to Vladikavkaz, the North Ossetian capital, and gave the green light for the deployment of Russian Army troops, which made no effort to protect Ingush civilians. In Tishkov's words, "preventing casualties and destruction and trying to separate the conflict parties was not the primary motive behind the federal center's actions." Consequently, tens of thousands of Ingush fled for their lives to Ingushetia as marauding Ossetians systematically destroyed their homes. Both sides took hundreds of hostages, some of whom are still unaccounted for.

The Russian authorities imposed a state of emergency in Prigorodny Raion and neighboring districts of North Ossetia and Ingushetia after the fighting died down, but made no effort to determine the chain of events and decisions that precipitated it or call to account the officials responsible. As for the Ingush displaced persons, they were mostly left to fend for themselves. Two years later, their plight was eclipsed by the start of Moscow's military intervention in Chechnya in the name of "restoring constitutional order."

No Attempt At Resolution

In August 1997, in response to renewed interethnic clashes in Prigorodny Raion, Russian President Boris Yeltsin summoned Galazov and his Ingush counterpart, army General Ruslan Aushev, and offered 200 billion rubles (then worth $34.5 million) annually for the next two years to finance reconstruction in Prigorodny Raion and thus enable Ingush families to return. At the same time, Yeltsin also called for a 15-20-year moratorium on Ingush territorial claims, which Aushev deplored as tantamount to "burying one's head in the sand."

A program unveiled in May 2005 for expediting the return of the Ingush displaced persons to their abandoned homes in Prigorodny Raion by the end of 2006 was only partially implemented. Consequently, as of October 2016, just 23,430 Ingush had succeeded in returning, with a similar number still in Ingushetia, according to Magomed Mutsolgov, head of the NGO Mashr. Those who have returned experience problems finding work; Ingush and Ossetian children attend separate schools.

Neither has the Russian leadership undertaken any serious effort to promote reconciliation. As a result, as Tishkov points out, deep-rooted stereotyped perceptions of "the adversary," often based on a distorted or mythologized perception of past events, continue to poison relations between the two ethnic groups.

Those negative perceptions surfaced late last year when Rustem Kelekhsayev, the head of the North Ossetian presidential administration, called for a more concerted effort to integrate into North Ossetian society young Ingush from Prigorodny Raion. Kelekhsayev was denounced on social media as a traitor, and in the region's parliament by lawmaker Dzhambolat Tedeyev, the trainer of Russia's free-style wrestling team.

Meanwhile, the Ingush collective hostility toward Ossetians has been compounded by the periodic abduction and subsequent disappearance of Ingush in North Ossetia. The human rights watchdog Memorial chronicled 18 such cases between mid-2005 and mid-2007.

The views expressed in this blog post do not necessarily reflect those of RFE/RL