in the campaign “Operation "Chechevitsa": the Total Deportation of the Chechen People and the Special Settlement Regime (1943-1949)”
The USSR lured out by deception the Chechens who were hiding in the mountains from the occupation regime, promising freedom - in the NKVD's (predecessor of today's FSB) papers this was called "legalization." Those who believed the promises were arrested or deported together with their compatriots to Kazakhstan and Kirghizia (today's Kyrgyzstan) in the course of the genocidal Operation "Chechevitsa." The report of Dementiev, head of the Grozny Oblast internal affairs directorate (1956), states: in September-October 1943 alone "30 bands were legalized, comprising 183 men, plus 60 lone bandits"[1]. Historian P. M. Polian writes: the NKVD files "listed 1,300 so-called legalized bandits, that is, men who had come forward, by mutual agreement, with a confession and been released from repression for it. All or nearly all of them were arrested shortly before the deportation or in its course"[1]. In the days of the deportation the troops announced clemency for those who had gone into the mountains - and deported those who came out. A Russian student eyewitness from Grozny, whose testimony was printed in the émigré journal Prometheus in 1949 and is cited by the Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov, writes: "At the same time an amnesty [a promise not to punish] was announced for those who had gone into the mountains, if they came forward voluntarily. Some of them did in fact come forward, but were deported all the same…"[2]. In the summer of 1944 the colonizer repeated the deception: historian P. M. Polian writes that in June "tried and tested" religious authorities, deported in February, were brought from Kazakhstan to Grozny, and they induced hundreds of Chechens in hiding "toward legalization and, hence, deportation"[1].