Memories of a Day No One Should Forget
By Yo'av Karny
Washington Post - February 20, 2000
Last week, Russia announced that it was turning Grozny, the ruined Chechen capital, into a no-man's zone. A city where 400,000 people used to live is to be sealed off for two weeks, a senior official announced. Russian leaflets now exhort the remaining inhabitants to leave at once because their city is likely to be attacked by the rebels on Feb. 23 -- Red Army Day.
If the rebels do launch a raid, it won't be to slight the honor of the Russian army. They will have a different anniversary in mind: Fifty-six years ago, on Feb. 23, 1944, the Soviet Union moved to do away with the Chechens by forcibly relocating the entire population to Central Asia. It was the depth of winter, and the frozen steppes offered little hospitality to the deportees. A conservative estimate puts the death toll at around one-third of the Chechen population. In all probability, the actual numbers were higher.
In 1994, the Chechens marked the 50th anniversary of their deportation from their homeland. Throughout the year, huge signs adorned downtown Grozny, depicting the number "50" against the background of raging flames and a howling wolf (the Chechen national symbol). Impatient to destroy the Chechen "bandits," the Russian generals could not wait for the 50th year to end before they unleashed their first attack against the capital, in December. The commemorative signs were among the first casualties of Russia's artillery.
Disregard for the Chechen calendar arises not only from Russian insensitivity. Rather, it attests to the true nature of Russia's conflict with Chechnya. Contrary to the words emanating from Moscow these days, the problem is not exclusively one of law and order, nor one of "territorial integrity." It is a matter impregnated with profound cultural misunderstandings, psychological distortions and different concepts of memory and self-esteem. There will be no end to Russia's 220-year-long conflict with the Chechens until it pays greater attention to these factors.
I was struck by the symbolic importance of the anniversary the other day, when Lyoma Usmanov, Chechnya's representative in Washington, asked me to join a small delegation of Chechen parliamentarians on a tour of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. A member of the delegation, a chairman of the committee that normally oversees budget, said, "The Jews understand us best."
I'm not entirely sure they do, but I understood what the chairman was trying to say. What happened in February 1944 is the Chechen version of a holocaust. While I know some Jews frown on the use of the word "holocaust" in a context other than that of the Jewish experience during World War II, in doing so I mean no disrespect. No gas chambers awaited the Chechen deportees. But in February 1944, they were victims of a solution no less final than, say, that of Hungary's Jews just months later.
It was shortly before the liberating Red Army troops exposed the first Nazi death camp in Poland that troops of that same army packed the entire Chechen nation (and their ethnic kin, the Ingush) into sealed cattle cars and dispatched them on a three-week-long journey for "resettlement" in the east. No Chechen or Ingush -- not even the Chechen soldiers serving with the Red Army at the German front -- were spared the special treatment. The operation was run by Lavrenty Beria, Stalin's secret police chief, who proudly reported back:
The eviction of the Chechens and the Ingush is proceeding normally: 342,647 people were loaded onto special trains on February 25 and by [February 29] the number had risen to 478,479 of whom 91,250 were Ingush and 387,229 were Chechens. The operation proceeded in an organized fashion, with no serious instances of resistance, or other incidents. There were only isolated cases of attempted flights.
There is little doubt what the architects of the eviction had in mind Chechnya was to be divided among its neighboring provinces. Cartographers, historians and lexicographers were told subsequently to delete any reference to the Chechens from maps, textbooks and encyclopedias.
Beginning in 1944, there was no longer a nation by that name: It had no past, no present, no future.
The brief post-Stalin thaw made it possible for many of the survivors to reclaim their possessions, but to quote a North Caucasian historian, Svetlana Akiyeva, "the links between generations were destroyed. Many elders died before they had the opportunity to pass on oral traditions to the young," and much of the historical memory, and therefore the nation's identity, was lost forever.
The Chechen independence struggle, begun in increments in 1990, was born in the shadow of this partial amnesia, which is why it proved easy prey to foreign Islamic militants whose espousal of the Chechen cause is a mere subterfuge for the imposition of their own intolerant and aggressive theological dogma.
The Chechens and the Ingush were deported wholesale in 1944 alongside a host of small Muslim nations, which the Soviet government indicted, convicted and sentenced for the alleged sin of collective collaboration with Nazi Germany. To be sure, some collaboration with the Germans did take place during the brief period of their occupation of the Northwest Caucasus (but not of Chechnya), from late 1942 to early 1943. But collaboration in the Caucasus never matched that which permeated Ukraine, Belorussia or the Baltic states. Yet it was the "traitorous nations" of the Caucasus who were subjected to collective punishment, suggesting a long-simmering intention to destroy the native populations of the mountains. In fact, Russian generals and politicians had been preparing blueprints for just that since the early 19th century.
The North Caucasian holocaust was as modern a genocide as any in its methods. Evicting a whole nation almost overnight was a technological and organizational feat on par with the best in Adolf Eichmann's repertoire. If there is a distinction, it lies in the astonishing fact that more than half a century after the event, the perpetrators' heirs engage in a total war against the survivors and their descendants, betraying no compunctions, no apparent sense of guilt, just the same old vindictiveness.
If anything, it is the Russians who feel sorry for themselves, imbued with the certainty that they are the victims, and that their victim hood provides them with the license to resort to another collective punishment. Despite official apologies, which former president Boris Yeltsin extended to most of the deportees six years ago, there is virtually no recognition of Russian culpability. In a standard Russian textbook for 10th-graders I found a single sentence referring to the plight of the North Caucasians under Stalin. I know of only one literary attempt to deal with 1944 (a tale by Anatoly Pristavkin titled, "A Golden Cloud Passed the Night").
A more introspective Russia, a less self-pitying Russia, a Russia more willing to confront the history and moral implications of its relations with its subject nations, would be a much better neighbour and partner. But for that to happen, Russia would have to experience nothing short of an epiphany. Perhaps, for now, all we can hope is that outsiders may recognize the crimes committed against the Chechens in 1944. It would be entirely consistent with its mission if the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum were to install a plaque honoring the memory of the victims of the Chechen genocide, placing on permanent display Beria's report to Stalin, and adding the cattle cars of Chechnya to its 1941-1945 time line. Who knows, perhaps Russian visitors would be sufficiently taken aback as to experience shame. And perhaps we would all begin to see today's conflict for what it is.
