On that ill-fated day in 1944, the entire Chechen people and their Ingush neighbors were deported en masse by Stalin

MONDAY, February 23 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – For Chechens, February 23 conjures up images of people dying of hunger, forced to leave their motherland empty-handed and burnt alive, and also stirs heartbreaking feelings.

On that ill-fated day in 1944, the entire Chechen people and their Ingush neighbors saw their homeland being usurped by the Soviets and were deported en masse by the then Soviet leader, Josef Stalin, from the Caucasus to Central Asia.

The BBC talked to some who survived the tragedy, which led to the death and slaying of a third or a half of those deported.

Last Goodbye

Zulpa, 70, remembers the doomed day as if it were yesterday.

“All of us were herded into the nearby collective farm, and we spent the night there. They wouldn't let us spend our last night at home. And our cows were calling to us.

“We were forced to leave them. It was as if they were crying, and saying farewell. This constant mooing and mooing,” she told the BBC.  

Leaving empty-handed, Zulpa said they were forced to leave their possessions and livestock behind and were loaded into cattle trucks.

“We were traveling in those cattle trucks for 19 or 20 days.

“I remember very clearly how one sick woman in our wagon was asking for water. She was saying: ‘Water, water, water,’ and her son ran to get her some.  

“Just as he came back to the wagon, a soldier shot him dead. He fell to the ground, and the water container lay there beside him. He was just left there,” she added. 

Mohmmad Musaev, head of the Chechen National Archive, says the deportees could have later sold their possession to survive if they had been allowed to take them.

He said they died in great numbers due to this deprivation.   

Cry Of Anguish

“I remember very clearly how one sick woman in our wagon was asking for water,” Zulpa (BBC)

Khanifa Uzhakhova was deported and her family from the Ingush village of Kantyshevo when she was only six years old.

She said February 23 brings back painful memories and resonates with the “great cry of anguish” from the deportees.

“It was in the morning. We had been making corn bread on an iron stove. It was cooked on one side and we'd just turned it over when the soldiers came.

“One of them said something, and I remember my aunt burst out crying. My mother was also very upset, with tears in her eyes. I remember very clearly how we were put in Studebaker trucks.

“I only found out later that was what they were called. Another deep impression from that time is the trains. As they started moving, there was a great cry of anguish from everyone inside, then the sound of everyone weeping,” she told the BBC. 

Dying Of Hunger

Musaev, whose mother was killed in the deportations, said the most terrible time when people were dying of hunger.  

“The most terrible time, when people were dying of hunger, were the early years, before people had settled and adapted.

“That was the time when the dead didn't get buried because there were too many of them. Dying people were crawling to the cemeteries so as not to be eaten by dogs. Fortunately I was too young to understand,” he told the BBC. 

He said that in some cases soldiers killed people rather than deporting them, adding that up to 700 people were burned alive in the mountain village of Khaibakh.

There are other reports of people being drowned in mountain lakes, the BBC added. 

“Some researchers say a third of those deported died. Some say half,” says Mohammad. 

As for the Chechen, Ingush soldiers and officers, they had their military decorations confiscated and were taken prisoner in the terrible Siberia’s gulags, the worst hard-labor camps in history.

The BBC said About 387,000 Chechens and 91,000 Ingush were deported on 23 February 1944 and the next few days.

The deportations were a taboo subject until Stalin's successor, Nikita Khrushchev, condemned them in 1956.

More recently in 1999, some 80,000 Russian troops poured into the Caucasus republic of Chechnya in what Moscow called a lightning-strike “anti-terror operation” but which has since degenerated into a grinding war with Chechen fighters.

The current conflict, the second war between Russia and Chechen fighters in a decade, has left 5,000 Russian soldiers dead -- 12,000 according to rights groups -- and killed thousands of civilians.

It has also driven tens of thousands of Chechens into exile within Russia and abroad.

Thousands of refugees from the war-torn southern Russian republic of Chechnya live in battered tent camps in neighboring Ingushetia and refuse to return home because of continuing insecurity.