79 years ago, today, the Soviet expulsion of the whole of the Vainakh (Chechen and Ingush) populations from their native land, which perished 30%-50% of the Vainakh populations and removed the entire Chechen-Ingush Republic from the maps, had started
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Decades ago, today, the entire population of Chechen and Ingush people had been summoned to a local party building and the plan to liquidate the whole Chechen-Ingush Republic had taken into the act. The commanders of the operation were the infamous Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria and the orders were given by the Beria and approved by Josef Stalin. The reason of the deportation was announced as the treason and mass collaboration with the fascists although there were thousands of Chechens and Ingushes died fighting with the fascists on the front-line, and many of them had become the war heroes, including the very famous ones like Khanpasha Nuradilov, who had been credited with over 920 confirmed kills when he died at Stalingrad, and officially there were tens of thousands of Chechens and Ingush fighting at the ranks of the Red Army when the order was given, and Nazis were never had managed to reach to the Chechnya, and the except the ones that fought the Nazis, the whole population had never seen a Nazi at their entire lives minus a small piece of land that Nazis had taken for a really short period & Nazis thought of helping Chechen resistance started by old ethnic Chechen communist party members, yet they have strictly telegrammed Hitler that the Jews aren’t to be touched and if Nazis are thinking of occupying the land in any form, they’ll be treated the same as the Russian invaders – which killed any kind of help by default.
The entire population had been deported, and excluding a few that managed to escape to the mountains for seeking revenge, and the men, women and children (who were consisting nearly half of the deported population) had been rounded up and put into the cattle cars just in a few days and they were deported to the various locations from their homeland. That took some weeks while they were only allowed to take three days of worth food. Thousands died every day during the deportation and their bodies were simply tossed out of the cars, while the reason for the death was not just due to the harsh conditions, like the massacre of the entire population of the aul Khaibakh, 700 people including the elderly, women and children literally being burned alive because it was impossible to convey them to the cars due to the harsh snowstorm. Besides that, any resistance to the deportation had met by directly slaughtering the people who dared to do so.
Soviet numbers conclude a figure that one-third of the entire Vainakh population had perished during the exile, while other researchers do come up with numbers that are equivalent to the 50-60% of the entire population.
Not just people had been killed but also the Chechen-Ingush Republic was removed from the maps, the population hadn’t been allowed to return to their homes and their homeland until it was allowed after Nikita Khrushchev became the First Secretary, the parts of the Chechen-Ingush homeland was granted to the other republics, including the Prigorodny District which was gifted to the North Ossetia which again caused problems aftermath, the cleansed country had been settled by others, the names had been changed, Chechen and Ingush books and texts were burned, families were divided and not allowed to see each other or travel to the places that they are, some Chechen or Ingush settlements were even got deleted from the books, and even graveyards had been destroyed and the gravestones had been used to pave roads or as materials to build houses by some of the new-coming settlers. Not to mention people who have been deported but managed to survive yet again faced pogroms, let alone discrimination and starvation in the lands they’ve been forcibly resettled to the point of some asking the authorities to be shot rather than starving slowly. And of course the Ingushetia-North Ossetia tensions due to the part of then Ingush homeland given to Ossetians by Stalin, which ended with Ingush totally being cleansed from it by the 1990s.
The deportation is recognized as an act of genocide, within the meaning of the Fourth Hague Convention of 1907 and the Convention for the Prevention and Repression of the Crime of Genocide adopted by the UN General Assembly on 9 December 1948, by the European Parliament in February 2004. The Ukrainian parliament also lately condemned the genocide while recognising the formal independence of Chechnya.
For further reading, I do recommend you these articles and texts, all of which are in English:
* http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26271733
* http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/3509933.stm
* http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1399561/1944-1957-Deportation-and-exile.html
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Lentil_(Caucasus)
* http://www.waynakh.com/eng/2011/03/the-genocide-of-chechen-people-in-1944-archive-documents/
* http://www.jamestown.org/single/?tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=3467
Copy-pasted from /u/seska-solsa’s submission in /r/history, thanks to him allowing it. Since today is the anniversary, and remembrance is still banned in Chechnya, and it’s not a genocide much known by Europeans excluding peoples of greater Caucasus, I thought it would be a good idea to re-post it.
(I’m more than aware that it won’t raise many sympathies among some people of course, but it’s still a positive thing to make people know about such historical ills).
The Chechen were occupied and killed by the same war criminal Putin!
Russians are monsters!
One of many crimes committed by Russia against ethnic minorities.
I am usually someone who doesn’t comment on Reddit, but I made an account for this. It warms my heart to see that the information of this genocide is being shared to others. My parents came to Europe, Germany during the second war for a better future and safety. My father and mother learned another language, system and culture to be a part of here. My father had to retake some exams, but has been working as a surgeon for many years now. Yet it still hurt a bit to explain people where Chechnya is and what Russia did to us and the caucasus. I am grateful for the good life I have here. Safety, education, job and friends. And now more and more people learn about what was done to us, all though this is sadly a by-product of the current invasion, I wish this light would be shining on us during a more peaceful time, but I am still grateful to have this platform, a european one too, to share our history. I have lost some connection to my history in my life, but I am now building them back. Thank you Europe.