Deportation

On 29 January 1944 People's Commissar (Minister) of Internal Affairs Beria approved the principal document of Operation "Chechevitsa" - the "Instruction on the Procedure for the Deportation of the Chechens and Ingush"^[1]; on 31 January the State Defense Committee of the USSR issued two resolutions on the deportation and the destinations^[2]. The first laid out the reception of the deported at the places of exile: the Soviet NKVD (predecessor of today's FSB) was instructed to send "in February-March of this year, for resettlement, up to 400 thousand people to the Kazakh SSR and up to 90 thousand people to the Kirghiz SSR," and in every destination district it was prescribed "to organize troikas consisting of the chairman of the district executive committee, the secretary of the district party committee and the head of the district branch [RO] of the NKVD"^[3]. The second resolution prescribed that people be transported "at the tariff for the transportation of prisoners"^[4]. On 7 February, at a meeting with Beria, "concrete tasks were set for organizing the deportation of 459,486 Chechens and Ingush - 97,635 families," and the date was fixed: 22-23 February^[5]. The colonizer massed in the republic, write historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov, "up to 19 thousand officers of the NKVD and NKGB and 100 thousand combat-ready soldiers of the internal troops... over 15 thousand railway wagons and hundreds of locomotives, 6 thousand trucks"^[2] - under a cover story: "rumors were spread about large-scale tactical exercises in the mountains of Chechnya and Ingushetia"^[5]. On 23 February, the Soviet military holiday ("Red Army Day"), NKVD troops rounded up the men - historian Z. S. Isakieva writes: "Instead of the clubs, the men were driven (and marched) to assembly points under reinforced armed guard"^[5]. The Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov cites the testimony of a Russian student eyewitness, printed in the émigré journal Prometheus in 1949, about the evening of 23 February in the auls: "That evening the Red Army men lit fires on the aul squares and began singing and dancing. The aul residents, suspecting nothing, gathered at this festivity as spectators. When in this way most of the residents had assembled on the square, all the men were arrested. Some Chechens had weapons, and shooting broke out in many places... The men arrested on the squares were locked in barns, and a hunt began for those who had not been on the square. The whole action was carried out in two or three hours"^[6]. "By 11 o'clock of the first day of the deportation more than 94 thousand people had been taken out of various settlements"^[2], and by the morning of 24 February - more than 333 thousand. The NKVD hauled the people in 180 trains: following a "rationalization" proposal the agency packed the loading tighter - "densification of the loading of the special contingent" in its papers - from 24 to 45 people per wagon; historians write: "In reality up to 80 people were crammed into the freight 'teplushka' wagons"^[2]. En route, according to the official figures of the Soviet NKVD, 1,361 people died^[2]; the eyewitness Ametistov, later a judge of the Constitutional Court of Russia, recalled: "I saw them [the Chechens] brought in in wagons - and half were unloaded already as corpses. The living were thrown out into 40-degree frost"^[2]. "The last train with deported Chechens and Ingush pulled up for unloading in the Kazakh steppe on 20 March 1944"^[2]. A. G. Avtorkhanov recorded how it looked to the people: "On 23 February 1944... within literally 24 hours the entire population of the Checheno-Ingush Republic was placed under arrest, and its loading into prisoner trains began, for dispatch to an unknown destination," while the decree liquidating the republic "was published backdated" - two years and four months later^[6].