The “cleansing” began in the night of February 23–24 and lasted for weeks. Outdoing their quota, the NKVD captured and sent east an astonishing 478,479 people, with more to follow.26 The security forces were given license to finish off those who could not travel. In Khaibakh hundreds were lured into resting in a barn, which was then set aflame; those who tried to escape were shot. Magomed Gayev (born in 1931) recalled that the “elderly, ill and weak and also those who took care of them were sent to the stable. I saw how the stable was set on fire. A thick smoke rose to the sky. Even over a great distance we could understand that something terrible happened in the village.” In other areas people were shut inside mosques, which were then torched. Hospital patients who could not be moved were killed as a matter of course, as were often children and others unfit for the journey ahead.27
Stalin wrote to congratulate the NKVD for the “successful fulfillment of state tasks in the North Caucasus.”28 He admitted that there might have been “abuses,” but as always he preferred to exceed quotas rather than to fall short. In a note to Stalin on July 9, 1944, Beria gave the final tally of the Chechen-Ingush as nearly a half million people, though his figures have a typically phony exactitude.29 Standard operating procedure was to erase all place-names, and change them into either Russian or another language, thus to make the disappearance total.30
One survivor of the ordeal heading east recalled: “In ‘cattle cars’ filled to overflowing without light or water, we traveled for almost a month to our destination. Typhus was having a heyday. There was no medicine. During the short stops at lonely, uninhabited stations we buried our dead near the train.” Murad Nashkoyev, a Chechen journalist, had similar experiences. He recently spoke of his trip and said that when they arrived in Kazakhstan, “the ground was frozen hard, and we thought we would all die. It was the German exiles who helped us to survive—they had already been there for several years.”31
Some adjusted better than others, though the conditions were invariably bleak and the reception by the indigenous population anything but comradely. Those groups with unsavory reputations found it particularly difficult, as did the Chechens. One such woman recalled that entire families went for months “with swollen bellies, searching for animal carcasses in the steppe.” A Chechen farm worker in Kazakhstan stated that he had “worked as a cattle herder for twenty-five years. In all this time I never once humiliated my animals like they humiliated us. The komendanty [local authorities] and collective farm chairmen told us straight out that we were to be the lowest of the low, without rights.”32
What about the suddenly emptied lands back home? Almost as much misery and death was caused by the forced resettlement of the “cleansed” areas. What did outsiders know about the special forms of farming, animal husbandry, or wine growing there? According to oral testimonies, the people in the resettled lands were reduced through mortality by as much as one-quarter in the first two years, when sickness and epidemics tore into their midst.33
A separate but related operation targeted the Balkars (a Muslim people with Turkic language), also living in the North Caucasus. On February 24, 1944, Beria proposed to Stalin that they all be banished. Their lands had been briefly occupied by the Germans, who initially mistook them for Jews and murdered them.34 As soon as the Wehrmacht was driven out, the Balkars were accused of having joined “German organized bands to fight against Soviet power.” There is little information on their fate, save that a total of 37,044 people were counted in the east, minus 562 who died in transit. As usual, every effort was made to obliterate all evidence that the Balkars had ever existed in their former homeland.35
CRIMEA AND GEORGIA
When the Soviets liberated Crimea from the invaders, Stalin apparently decided to remove all offending or potentially hostile “foreigners.” In their place he wanted Russians or Ukrainians—not unlike the tsar many years before. The area was not threatened by Turkey, as Stalin and Beria claimed, and in fact they dreamed of possible offensive operations against that country. Were there to be such a war, so the Kremlin ruminated, “their” Muslims might cause difficulties. Indeed, as we have seen, the Soviets went to the brink of war with Turkey in 1946 and were aggressive in Iran.36
The largest of the Turkic people targeted were the Crimean Tatars, who were Sunni Muslims. Stalin alleged that “many” of them had “betrayed the Motherland.” They deserted the Red Army, he charged, joined the enemy, attacked Soviet partisans, and “actively participated in ‘Tatar National Committees,’ organized by the German intelligence organs.” He also accused them of trying to separate the Crimea from the USSR. In a letter of May 10, 1944, Beria presented the Boss with a plan to deal with between 140,000 and 160,000 people, and the next day orders were given for their banishment, to be completed by June 1. The operation began two days early, when Red Army and NKVD troops surrounded the villages and seized everything. The people were given receipts for what was taken and money to pay for the trip to Uzbekistan, where they would supposedly live as “special settlers.”37
A sense of how these operations descended on victims is conveyed by Isaak Kobylyanskiy, a Jewish officer on regular duty in the Red Army who happened to be in the Crimea in mid-May 1944. At nine in the morning he and four others were having breakfast in the courtyard of a home owned by a Tatar, Rakhim by name. A truck drew up with a sergeant of the NKVD in fresh uniform. He read out the family’s names and declared: “According to government decree, you and your family are to be resettled. You have fifteen minutes to prepare.” Rakhim’s wife began crying uncontrollably. Of course, resistance was hopeless, and within minutes they were gone. The kerosene stove used to prepare breakfast still hissed away.38
The next day, as Kobylyanskiy and the Red Army began the long march out of the Crimea, they passed near another Tatar village. It was completely deserted—the people had apparently been removed the previous morning. The houses were still unlocked, and the eating utensils lay undisturbed on the tables. In several cases, rising dough in a pan had overflowed and fallen on the floor. “The entire village,” he recalled, “resounded with wild howls from abandoned, suffering cows, which had not been milked for two days.”39
Tenzila Ibraimova remembered that she was seized in the village of Adzhiatman in Freidorfskii district on May 18:
The deportation was carried out with great brutality. At 3:00 in the morning, when the children were fast asleep, the soldiers came in and demanded that we gather ourselves together and leave in five minutes. We were not allowed to take any food or other things with us. We were treated so rudely that we thought we were going to be taken out and shot. Having been driven out of the village we were held for twenty-four hours without food; we were starving but were not allowed to go fetch something to eat from home. The crying of the hungry children became continuous. My husband was fighting at the front, and I had the three children.
Finally we were put on trucks and driven to Yevpatoria. There we were crowded like cattle into freight cars full to overflowing. The trains carried us for twenty-four days until we reached the station at Zerabulak in Samarkand region, from which we were shipped to the Pravda kolkhoz in Khatyrchinskii district.40
The operations did not go smoothly. People destined for Uzbekistan ended up in Siberia or the Altai region. Beria reported daily, stating that by May 20, a total of 180,014 (later revised upward) had been caught, from the Kremlin’s perspective, all without “incidents.” In fact more than 20,000 people died in transit east.41 To add to the misery, the sullied reputation of the deportees and their “guilt” as enemies of the people preceded them, so they were received at their destinations with hostility and hatred. They were never given work appropriate to their skills and instead were often put up in barracks next to factories and told what to do. The real aim was to wipe out their social identity and entire way of life.42