Participants in a memorial rally in Ingushetia called for commemoration of the victims of deportation.
A delegation of Balkars attended the memorial events marking the 82nd anniversary of the forced deportation of the Vainakhs in Ingushetia. Only one regional head in the North Caucasus Federal District expressed public condolences to the Chechens and Ingush.
As reported by the "Caucasian Knot," about 500 people participated in the mass events marking the 82nd anniversary of the forced deportation of the Vainakhs to Central Asia on February 23 in Ingushetia. Residents of Chechnya also marked the anniversary of the tragedy. The official rally, attended by officials and security forces, took place without the mass participation of ordinary people, who commemorated the sad anniversary in a small family circle.
On February 23, 1944, Operation Lentil began, during which nearly 500,000 Chechens and Ingush were deported en masse from the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic to Kazakhstan and Central Asia. More details about these events and their consequences can be found in the "Caucasian Knot" report "Deportation of Chechens and Ingush".
A large group of representatives of the Balkar people attended the memorial service at the Memorial of Memory and Glory in Nazran, which was attended by Ingush officials led by Makhmud-Ali Kalimatov, representatives of public organizations, clergy, and elders.
A delegation of Balkars arrived in Ingushetia by bus on February 23 and participated in all the mourning events that took place in the republic that day, a "Caucasian Knot" correspondent reported.
Most of the heads of the North Caucasus regions, with the exception of the leaders of Ingushetia and Chechnya, did not publicly mention the anniversary of the deportation of the Ingush and Chechen peoples on February 23. Only the head of Karachay-Cherkessia, Rashid Temrezov, expressed condolences to the Vainakhs, noting that "for Karachay-Cherkessia, the pain of fraternal peoples is close and understandable."
The "Caucasian Knot" also prepared reports on the deportation of the Balkars in 1944 and the deportation of the Kalmyks. In 1943, the Karachays were also subjected to mass deportation.
The heads of Dagestan, North Ossetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, and Stavropol Krai published articles on Defender of the Fatherland Day and Putin's address on February 23, but failed to mention the events of 1944, Fortanga noted.
Speaking at a rally, Murat Daskiev, Chairman of the Council of Elders of Ingushetia, emphasized that the Ingush, while far from their homeland, retained "their language, their adats, their spirituality." "We honor the memory of all who did not return from exile, who died en route," he declared.
Daskiev also emphasized that the deportation to Central Asia became one of the most terrible pages in the history of the people. “How many trials fell upon our people, sometimes even our youngest citizens,” he noted.
I should have died the day we were deported.
Lidiya was one of those who survived the deportation at an early age; she was not yet three years old at the time of her expulsion. She remembered the long journey, after which their family was taken to a small village; the furnishings in the house consisted of a stove, a bed, and a pile of straw in the corner.
Little Lida's mother fell ill upon arrival in exile and took to her bed. "I remember we had a red blanket, and there were tons of lice crawling all over it. I lay down next to her. I tried to cuddle up to her, to get warm, but she didn't move," Lidiya told a "Caucasian Knot" correspondent.
The girl, not understanding what had happened to her mother, clung to the woman's dead body for two days, trying to stay warm, but hunger later forced her outside. A local resident, a Kazakh, passing by, noticed the naked child in tears. Together with another woman, a German, they fed and warmed the girl and organized her mother's funeral.
After her mother's death, Lidiya was passed from one relative to another: all the relatives had children of their own, and no one in the family needed an "extra mouth." In one such family, a boy named Akhmed ate whatever he could steal from inattentive market vendors; a Russian friend helped him steal. The boys recruited Lida to their trade.
They stole everything. One time, they stole a piece of lard.
“I was a ragamuffin. I’d be standing at the counter with my purse in hand, and they’d run up and, as if by accident, swipe carrots or buns into my purse, and then run off. That’s how we ate, stealing everything. One time, they stole a piece of lard—they didn’t eat it themselves, but traded it for boards, which they then sold to a Kazakh and bought a loaf of bread,” the woman recalls.
Later, Lida ended up with a distant relative: her granddaughters, Aza and Marem, stole coal from train cars and then sold it to buy something to eat. The older girls encouraged little Lida to climb onto freight cars to dump coal on the ground—though it was scary, as Aza and Marem reminded her that otherwise, "she'll starve and die."
One day, while Lida was on a coal car, the train started moving. Although the girls shouted, "Jump!" she was frightened—all she could do was sit down on the coal and cry. At the first station the train stopped, she was removed from the train. The railway worker who brought Lida to the control room told the attendant to "give the boy a bath."
The attendant gave her a shower and changed her into clean clothes. "He's not a boy, but a girl, and such a pretty one," she told her colleagues. When asked about her parents, Lida said that her father had been at war, her mother had died, and her relatives had been passed from one family to another. The railroad workers sent her to an orphanage.
Now Lida is once again without a family – her husband, then her two sons, died one after the other. Sick and alone, she has no home of her own. “I should have died the day we were evicted,” says Lidia, recalling her ordeal.