February
23, 2006 is the 62nd anniversary of one of the 20th
century's worst genocides. It marks the day the Soviet Union, under
Josef Stalin, deported the entire Chechen nation to Central Asia,
killing massive numbers of the small nation.
In
the upheaval of Russia's Bolshevik revolution, the communist forces
had failed to completely quell the mountaineers’ resistance. After
a vicious nine-month war, perhaps the fiercest local struggle in the
Russian Civil War, the last Chechen rebel stronghold fell in May of
1921. However, violence continued to flare up sporadically in
Chechnya, prompted by the Soviet's agricultural collectivization and
repressive security polices, particularly with regard to religion.
In the manner of their ancestors, Chechens would form small
guerrilla groups and fight from the mountains.
After
the German surrender in World War II, Stalin accused several of the
Caucasian nations in their entirety of collusion with the Fascists.
Against these nations he pronounced a sentence of “likvidatsia”:
liquidation. On February 23, 1944, tens of thousands of Soviet
troops herded the entire Chechen nation onto trains. Chechnya, along
with several other Caucasian republics, was emptied out. The plan
was to erase the Chechens, their history, and their culture.
References to them were stricken from the “Great Soviet
Encyclopedia.”
Those
who could not be transported, such as residents of remote mountain
villages, or patients in hospital, were executed. In at least a
couple of incidents, people were forced into barns or mosques that
were then burned down with all inside.
Soviet
figures put the number of Chechens and Ingush loaded on to the
trains at 478,479. The "official" number dumped, freezing
and starving into the Kazakh steppes were 400,478—suggesting
78,000 had died in transit, or shortly after arrival. That death
toll is held by many to be conservative.
Sixty
years later, the European Parliament recognized the mass deportation
and exile of the Chechen and Ingush nations as an act of Soviet
genocide.
