Artificial Famine

The USSR, deporting the Chechens and Ingush from their native land, made no provision for food at the places of exile - and from famine and disease in exile almost a third of the deported died within four and a half years. The Special Settlements Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs tallied the toll for the Kazakh SSR: by 1 July 1949, of the Chechens, Ingush, Balkars and Karachays initially resettled there, 101,036 people had died - 23.3% of those brought in; "the highest mortality was among the deportees from the North Caucasus and the Kalmyks"^[1]. The colonizer had taken the people's livestock and food back home: by the resolution of the State Defense Committee of the USSR of 31 January 1944 the people's commissariats (ministries) were obliged "to accept in the North Caucasus from the special settlers livestock and agricultural produce... issuing exchange receipts for what was accepted," while from the confiscated livestock 350 horses "fit for cavalry service" were handed over to the occupier's police cavalry units^[2]. Pchelkin, People's Commissar (Minister) of Internal Affairs of the Kirghiz SSR, reported to People's Commissar (Minister) of Internal Affairs of the USSR Beria on 22 April 1944: the food the exiles had brought with them "is running out," "the established ration is critically insufficient," the collective farms are "in no position to help for lack of it, as a result of which in some districts there are instances... of the eating of roots and grasses"^[1]. Historian P. M. Polian writes: for lack of food, shelter and fodder the exiles in Kirghizia "had to slaughter up to 90%" of the livestock issued "in compensation for that left behind in their former places of residence," while the funds allocated to them were handed out by local bosses to others - in the Kazalinsk district "one ton of bread was issued to the local party activists," and in the collective farms of the Bazar-Kurgan district "food was issued only to able-bodied special settlers, while those unfit for work were deprived of rations"^[1]. In exile the Chechens and Ingush died by the tens of thousands: by the end of 1944 the number of exiles ("special settlers" in the colonizer's terms) had fallen by about 11.5 thousand in Kirghizia and by more than 46 thousand in Kazakhstan^[3]. In 1945, among the North Caucasus exiles, 44,652 children died - 2,230 were born; no fewer than 80 thousand people were starving^[3]; in the winter of 1948-1949 in the Kazakh SSR (today's Kazakhstan) up to 118 thousand were starving, and 418 people died of hunger^[3]. By October 1948 about 146.9 thousand North Caucasus exiles had died in exile; historians put the direct losses of the Chechens and Ingush at 145.7 thousand people, and together with the unborn - at 300 thousand; the people recovered its pre-war numbers only by 1959^[3].