Pitting Neighboring Peoples Against Each Other

The Chechens lived through the exile under constant attacks and provocations. The empire itself made them the target - by the brand of "traitors," by the connivance of local officials and by a secret police that named the Chechens themselves guilty after every pogrom. On 16 June 1950 in the town of Leninogorsk in Kazakhstan the Chechens were attacked by workers recruited to the lead mines, their ringleaders criminals released from Kazakhstan's camps. The pogrom was prepared in secret and caught the Chechen community off guard: most of the killing came on the first day, when the Chechen men, alone or in small groups, had driven off to congratulate their relatives on the end of Ramadan (for Muslims, a major religious holiday). The local authorities, the occupier's police and the special commandant's office did not stop the attackers; the Chechens organized the defense themselves and, after two days of street fighting, by 18 June pushed the pogromists to the town's outskirts, while Soviet troops entered only on 19 June. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write: "In all, 36 Chechens were brutally killed, including women and children"^[1]. The Directorate of Special Settlements of the MGB (predecessor of today's FSB) of the Kazakh SSR admitted that same summer to "mass brawls between deportee-Chechens and local residents (at Kushmurun station, Kustanai oblast, and in Ust-Kamenogorsk and Leninogorsk, East Kazakhstan oblast), accompanied by killings and grave injuries" - and laid the blame for them on the Chechens themselves^[2]; of Ust-Kamenogorsk the 9th directorate of the MGB of the USSR reported in 1952: "a mass brawl broke out involving up to 150 Chechens and about 300 workers. This mass disorder was put down only after the intervention of an MGB unit"^[2]. The Special Settlements Department of the police ministry, in a memorandum drawn up in July 1950, dated the Leninogorsk pogrom to 17 June and counted the dead its own way: "In the brawl 34 special-settler Chechens were killed" - and placed the attack in Ust-Kamenogorsk on 27 June^[3]. In December 1954 in the village of Yelizavetinka, Akmolinsk oblast, students of the mechanization school called the Chechens "traitors and betrayers of the motherland" - and with these accusations Russians went into a mass clash with the Chechens^[2]. On 15 May 1955 in Ekibastuz workers mobilized to the mines through the military enlistment office beat two Chechens in the street; the police sheltered the beaten men in the station house, but the workers came there and demanded they be handed over. Kruglov, Minister of Internal Affairs of the USSR, reported to the leadership of the Bolshevik party and to the government: "Having been refused, the former soldiers pushed aside the officers of the militia station, dragged the Chechens out into the street by force and beat them. After that a number of other Chechens living in the town were beaten by the workers. As a result of the brawl 3 Chechens were killed and 4 injured"^[2].