in the campaign “"Exiled Forever": Life in Special Settlement and Return to an Occupied Homeland (1949-1965)”
The USSR left the exiled Chechens without schooling in their native language and without a written language, and struck the people out of the encyclopedias. Schooling was conducted in Kazakh and Kirghiz. Historian A. B. Kuznetsova cites the words of former exiles: "the written language in Chechen and Ingush was liquidated"[1]. The MGB (predecessor of today's FSB) counted, as of 1 January 1952, "children of the nationalities deported from the North Caucasus - 33,702" not covered by compulsory schooling and explained this by "the absence of winter clothing and footwear, owing to the hard material position of the parents, the absence of schools in a number of places of settlement or the remoteness of schools from places of residence"[2]. In the summer of 1956 inspectors toured the places of exile and reported to the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR: "Teaching of children in schools in the native language was not conducted," in the 1955/56 school year "of 61 thousand children of school age only 50 thousand, or 81%, were being taught," and among the illiterate "in some districts their number reaches 40-50%"[3]. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write that "from all the reference books and encyclopedias of the Stalin era any mention of the Chechens and Ingush was carefully expunged," while the linguist Yu. Desheriev "committed, for those times, a real 'ideological diversion' by publishing in Moscow in 1953 the study 'The Batsbi Language'" - the historians write that in this way he "tried to preserve for posterity the language of the Vainakh people, which by the decision of the 'father of the peoples' [Stalin] was to vanish from the face of the earth" (the Batsbi of Transcaucasia, they explain, spoke one of the dialects of Chechen)[4]. The same historians write that the Chechen intelligentsia itself held on to the language: by its efforts the first issue of the Chechen newspaper "Qinkhyegaman bayrakh" ("Banner of Labor") came out in the summer of 1955[4].