Pillage

Deporting the Chechen people in February 1944, the colonizer looted its emptied homes. The Chechen historian Dalkhan Khozhaev writes: "In the days of the deportation, parallel to the human stream, columns of military trucks moved toward Grozny in an unbroken flow, loaded with the valuables looted from the emptied homes of the Chechens and Ingush. The items the guards deemed most valuable - carpets, burkas, Caucasian mounted belts, weapons ornamented with gold and silver (daggers, shashkas, flintlock rifles made by Chechen masters of the last century), jewels - were carried in canvas-covered vans"^[1]. Drozdov, head of a brigade of the People's Commissariat (Ministry) of State Control of the RSFSR, who inspected the districts handed to Dagestan in August 1944 on the instructions of the government of the RSFSR, reported "unrestrained theft and squandering of the property of the special settlers," begun "soon after the deportation": Yusupov, acting chairman of a district soviet, "fully outfitted himself at the expense of the property of the special settlers" - he was short four hand-operated and four treadle sewing machines, 26 rugs, 30 carpets and 6 bicycles; Khashaev, prosecutor of Dagestan, received a house, an orchard, a vegetable garden and an "ownerless" cow; people's judge Suleimanov formalized his haul with a receipt: "Goods received, money not paid, to which I hereby subscribe"^[1]. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov sum up: "Implicated in the unrestrained theft of other people's goods was the entire party-economic and militia top brass of Grozny Oblast, Dagestan, Stavropol, North Ossetia and Georgia"; those caught were dismissed and tried, but "in the end the arrests had to be abandoned, since no one would have been left at liberty to govern"^[2].