Let Our Fame Be Great

by Oliver Bullough

They packed the family’s belongings as quickly as they could, brushing off the child’s increasingly frantic questions about their plans. Finally, bags and cases were piled on the floor, but there was no room on the donkey for the red gramophone. Korkmazov pleaded and pleaded but the strangers who had come to guide them refused to take it. Finally, however, his aunt Dubrai relented. The gramophone was loaded onto the donkey. It had been saved for a second time.

  They walked for hours, exhausting the little boy, who sat for a time on the donkey. After a short sleep, they headed off into the dawn and walked all that second day. Their journey continued more days than Korkmazov now remembers. But early one morning they reached their destination: Lower Teberda.

  It was the start of a perfect summer for the boy. He was related to everyone in the village, and although their attentions were at first baffling – especially since his command of the Karachai language was poor – he soon made friends among his cousins in the high mountain valleys of his people. There were no tanks, no anti-aircraft guns, no bombs, no explosions, just the sound of the river and the talk of his family.

  But the war was still felt. There were no young men in the village, since they had all been conscripted. The herding – for the Karachais were a herding nation – was done by the children. Korkmazov was among them, and they lived for the summer in a wooden hut, sleeping on cut grass, watching out for the cattle, and obeying the orders of Aimat – the daughter of his favourite aunt, Dubrai. But the summer would not last for ever, and soon they would have to descend to the village where his peaceful life was about to end.

  While he had played in the mountains and watched the cattle, the secret police had been busy. Forces from the NKVD – which would later be renamed the KGB – scoured the mountains, rooting out armed men and anti-Soviet guerrillas who were fighting the Red Army. In April 1943, a decree authorized the banishment of 110 families of people judged to be bandits. Momentum was building for a solution to the unruliness of the Karachais.

  The Karachais had, it was decided in a secret decree, ‘behaved traitorously, joined units organized by Germans for fighting the Soviet authorities, handed over honest Soviet citizens to Germans, accompanied and provided terrain guidance to the German troops advancing over the mountain passes in the Caucasus; and after the withdrawal of the enemy they resist measures carried out by the Soviet authorities, hide bandits and secret German agents from the authorities thus providing them with active support’. On 12 and 14 October, the necessary papers were signed. The Karachais were going to pay as a whole for their lukewarm support for the government in Moscow.

  ‘All Karachais residing on the territory of the Karachai Autonomous Oblast shall be banished to other regions of the USSR, and the Karachai Autonomous Oblast shall be abolished.’

  Armed units numbering 53,327 servicemen arrived in the region. They were tasked with rounding up 62,482 people, meaning there was more than one soldier to every Karachai adult. As it turned out, those estimates were too low and they deported a total of 69,267 people. Among them were criminals, but not very many. Just 55 bandits were recorded as having been caught, along with 41 deserters, 29 draft dodgers and 184 accomplices – under half a per cent of the total deported population. The Karachai nation was paying a terrible price for the sins of the few.

  Korkmazov woke up one morning to the sound of truck engines, and the shouts of male voices. When his blinking neighbours emerged into the morning light, they were surrounded by soldiers. Lorries seemed to be everywhere, and were being loaded with children, women and pensioners. A man came into the house where Korkmazov was living, and ordered them all outside. He told them to take the clothes they were wearing and food for a day, and immediately started pushing them onto the truck.

  One of the old men looked out at the twin peaks of Elbrus – Europe’s tallest mountain – as he pulled himself into the truck. The first rays of dawn were falling on it and had painted it red.

  ‘Our Elbrus is crying red tears. It must be saying goodbye to us for ever,’ he said tragically.

  But Korkmazov had another concern: the fate of his gramophone, which had once again been deemed surplus to requirements. A soldier saw him taking it, and said it was not allowed, and Korkmazov started the screaming that saved it for the third time.

  His gramophone secured, and sitting up in the front of the truck with the two Mishas, he started the long journey to Central Asia, where his people would live for most of the next two decades.

  The column of trucks arrived at an empty field, crossed by railway tracks. A long train of cattle cars waited for the Karachais, but Korkmazov paid it little attention since the first Misha took him to a maize field and picked a full bag of corn on the cobs. By this time, other officers had arrived and, as the villagers climbed out of the truck, a major saw the gramophone in Korkmazov’s arms.

  ‘What is that, lieutenant?’ he asked.

  ‘A gramophone, comrade major,’ replied Misha.

  ‘I can see it’s not a harmonica. Where has this gramophone come from, and since when did exiled traitors get to take music with them? Answer me now.’

  ‘It’s mine, comrade major,’ answered Misha, putting it in the cab of the truck, and telling the major he had expropriated it for himself and was taking it to be mended. The answer satisfied the major, and the gramophone was saved for the fourth and last time. Korkmazov, however, was beginning to worry about other things.

  ‘Misha,’ he asked, ‘what does “exiled traitors” mean, like what the officer asked you about?’

  ‘Don’t pay attention. It is just how us soldiers talk. I don’t even know what it means,’ replied the kind officer, whose answer calmed the young boy. Misha waited until the major was not looking, then lifted his young friend into his arms, and dashed back to the truck. He took a bullet, emptied out the lead and the powder so just the brass case remained and loaded it back into his pistol.

  ‘There, now, pull the trigger,’ he said to Korkmazov, who delighted in the feel of the gun’s click. Misha then pushed the lead bullet back into the now dinted brass case. ‘Take it to remember me by,’ he said. Misha picked Korkmazov and the gramophone up in his arms, ran back to the wagon and loaded them onboard along with the large bag of maize.

  With a last hug, he took the boy and said: ‘Don’t cry, all will be fine. You’ll see, all will be fine. Goodbye, my little friend’. And he turned away, only to watch from his truck as the train doors were closed, and the Karachai nation was taken away.

  I met Korkmazov sixty-five years later in Bishkek, one of the cities of Central Asia where the Karachai nation ended up. He was an old man by then, with nothing of the child visible in his moustache and shaved head notched with razor scars. His journey took him as an adult to Moscow, then in disgrace to the furthest parts of the Far East, then in old age back to Central Asia. He visited the mountains from time to time, but he never lived there again.

  It took me some time to persuade him to let me use his account, which he has written into an as yet unpublished memoir called ‘I Had a Home Once’.

  He had the manuscript in front of him as he spoke. Finally pushing it aside, he described arriving in the steppes of Kazakhstan. They lived in a single room, all sixteen members of his family, to whom was added his mother, who found them in 1944, a rare happy event for by the time she came stumbling through the door, starved and unrecognizable, the tragedy that engulfed the Karachais had expanded. Like a fire that becomes larger the more fuel it consumes, it had threatened, burned and destroyed its neighbours.

  11.

  A Dirty Animal

  Khozemat Khabilayeva was a couple of years older than Korkmazov, but still just a child when her nation was scattered. Her life was saved by her dog.

  She too was from a mountain village, but one far more remote than any lived in by the Karachai nation. She was from the very south-eastern corner of Chechnya, up near the border with Dagestan. This was a land that had never been governed, where the highlanders had resisted any fo
reigners’ attempts to change the way they lived.

  Now the Karachai lands were swept clean, the Soviet government paid its attention to other peoples. First came the Kalmyks, Buddhist nomads of the steppes north of the Caucasus, where the locals were accused of siding with the German occupiers. They were despatched, in late December 1943, mainly to northern Siberia, with a casualty rate more terrible than can easily be imagined.

  Next came the Chechens and the Ingush, but this was an operation on a whole new scale with a whole new justification. Where there had been around 90,000 Kalmyks exiled from the barren steppe, there were more than 450,000 Chechens and Ingush being deported from some of the most rugged terrain in the Soviet Union.

  The government could not pretend the Chechens and Ingush had welcomed the Nazis to their lands since, apart from one very small corner in the north-west of their autonomous area, the Germans never made it that far. Instead, a new justification was dreamed up in which the whole Chechen nation had taken the opportunity of the war to launch their own insurgency. The charges included ‘active and almost universal involvement in terrorist activities directed against the Soviets and the Red Army’. The plan was codenamed, with crude humour, ‘chechevitsa’ – the Russian word for lentil, which is almost identical to the word ‘Chechen’ – and scheduled for 23 February 1944. The humour here was even cruder, since this was the official celebration day for the Red Army. While the whole country was honouring the brave troops battling the Soviet Union’s enemies, the Chechens would be receiving the punishment due to traitors.

  The degree of planning involved was enormous.

  Even six decades later, Khabilayeva could remember how the Russian soldiers reached her village in late January. They were prepared to receive the orders to move as soon as the whole region was covered, and the Chechen nation surrounded. They came without warning, and took over her uncle’s house to use as their headquarters. It was divided from her own family’s home by just a wall, and they could hear the rumble of the Russian voices all day and all night, but could not understand a word of what they said.

  ‘Maybe they were not actually Russian. They might have been Kazakhs, we did not know what nationality they were. Almost all our men were at the front, and none of us spoke Russian except my teacher. She was my cousin and director of the school. She’s still alive in fact, though she’s been paralysed for five years,’ Khabilayeva told me.

  On the evening of 22 February 1944, her father – who, as an invalid, was not at the front fighting the Germans – invited ten of the soldiers in the village to share their supper. It was a simple meal of milk, the delicious potatoes that grow in the high mountains, and cottage cheese. The soldiers seem to have appreciated it. On leaving, they made signs that he should put food in a bag and leave it by the door. The family did not know what was going on, and only later understood they were being warned about what was about to happen to them.

  Early the next day, perhaps three in the morning, before it was light, the soldiers came back for her father. They entered the room roughly and took him out of the house without a word. Khabilayeva had another sister, just six years old. They sat there with their mother, and their newborn sister of ten months, and they wept for their father. They were sure they would not see him again, and cried for him as if he had died. They sat in the dark, the four of them, and cried together.

  Then the dog began to bark, heralding the return of the soldiers, who gestured them to get out of bed. Khabilayeva’s mother was still crying. She seems to have had a difficult time since the birth of her third child, and was incapable of organizing things for her other daughters – a task that Khabilayeva adopted for herself. She quickly dressed herself, then her smaller sister.

  ‘I did not cry, I did not cry. I took my sister and we left the house. I did not cry then, but every 23 February now I remember our home and I cry,’ she said, a sort of blank despair on her face as she said it.

  The family dog was called Khola, and he was maybe three years old. A Caucasus shepherd like Korkmazov’s Boynak, he was large and shaggy, lethal to wolves that attacked the flocks but gentle with those he loved. He was with her and her sister as they left their family home for the last time. The two girls looked out on the mountains of Chechnya. To their north, densely wooded hills stretched away towards the plains of Russia. In all other directions, the hills rose into a high tangle of naked peaks.

  Although on the map Khabilayeva and her neighbours were less than a hundred kilometres from Grozny, there were no roads, and no trucks to carry them. The ninety-six families in her village would have to walk to the nearest point where they could be picked up and shipped off.

  The soldiers were prepared, and had marked out the path for them with two wires, parallel and twenty metres apart, which served both as markers for the deportees and as telephone wires to link them to their base. As they were walked away, she looked back at the village of Khindoi, which she was not to see again.

  ‘You could not go to either side, to the electric wire, or they beat you. There was a lot of snow that year, and there were three children with no shoes. They were barefoot, I saw this myself, but they survived, ’ she said. ‘In fact, I heard that one of them had died just two years ago.’

  The villagers had walked about half a kilometre from their homes, which were still visible, when they were stopped once more. The soldiers separated out the older women and one old man, and took them aside. The man – his name she had forgotten, but she remembered that people said he was 110 years old – had been to Mecca twice in the years before communism arrived.

  ‘He told us not to worry about him. It was the will of Allah. He told us that the first time he was in Mecca, the Muslims there cried for the Caucasus, they said there would be war there, but they prayed for us. Then he told us not to forget each other, not to forget Allah, that Allah would help us. This old man, he spoke for five minutes. Then we had to walk further, and he was left behind with ten women. One of them had a wooden leg. They must have had orders to kill those who could not walk far,’ she said.

  ‘This woman with the wooden leg she cried out not to leave her, that they would kill her, but we walked on. We entered a gorge where a stream was, and before we were halfway through we heard it: dada-da-da. They had shot the old man and these women.’

  All over Chechnya at the time, people were streaming from the villages to the collection points. They did not know that on 29 January, after the soldiers had arrived in Khindoi even, the head of Stalin’s NKVD secret police – Lavrenty Beria – signed an ‘Instruction on the procedure of resettlement of Chechens and Ingush’. Beria was already in Grozny by 20 February, by the time Khabilayeva’s father was preparing to host the soldiers.

  With such a high-profile controller of events, there could be no one left behind. With snow on the ground, a tight schedule and a homicidal boss, it is not surprising that the officers decided it was better to kill people than to delay the plan. In a way, Khabilayeva and her fellow villagers were lucky. In the even more remote village of Khaybakh, the soldiers decided they could not evacuate everyone. So they drove the villagers they felt were not transportable – probably 500 of them, perhaps more – into a barn and burned them alive. There were to be no Chechens left behind.

  The first night, Khabilayeva’s villagers came to a village she called Kielo-Yurt, which may have been what is now called Nokchi-Keloy. They got there at around ten in the evening, having walked since first light. The children managed to squeeze into the empty buildings, but the adults were left outside. It was cold but Khabilayeva and her sister had their dog Khola for company. He lay down with them, his fur keeping them warm.

  The second day saw them walking on to the village of Day. That was little more than fifteen kilometres away, but it was a terrible journey for young children, especially for those with bare feet. They had slept little the night before, had walked solidly for two days, but on arriving at their new stop they were forced to sleep outside. There was nowhere inside for
them, but at least the children had maize straw to lie on and the dog to keep them warm. Their parents had to stand up for a second night.

  On the third day, they descended into the valley of the Argun river, where transport was awaiting them and their long walk was at an end. This had been the collection point for much of upper Chechnya, and the toll had been appalling. Bodies lay in the snow. Khabilayeva remembered seeing them, the victims of typhus that was raging among the weakened women, children and pensioners being herded down from the heights.

  ‘My mother knew nothing, she just cried. She looked for her sisters and found her oldest sister, whose sons had carried meat down. But our mother was still crying all the time, just crying. And the families were separated on the trucks, half a family there, another half somewhere else. That was where we had to leave our dog behind,’ she said.

  Khola, their faithful companion in the mud and snow for three days, was desperate to get on board the truck with them and, in an incongruous show of compassion, the Russian officer said he could. But Khabilayeva’s father, who had been returned to his family now the soldiers deemed resistance impossible, refused his daughters permission, since dogs are dirty animals under Muslim custom. Khola’s presence would pollute the Chechens in the sight of Allah and make them unable to pray. The girls were forced to leave him behind.

  ‘That dog had come with us all the way,’ said Khabilayeva.

  ‘He took nothing from us, he didn’t eat for those three days, he just walked with us and helped us. Someone had dropped a carpet because they could not carry it, and he took it in his teeth for us. He found a big jar of oil as well and we took that with us. When I lay down with my sister, he lay on us, he kept us warm. After my father said we could not take him, he was outside the truck. He was jumping, and jumping. He jumped for hours, barking, trying to go with us. That dog was like a person.’

  She lowered her head and cried now for the first time since our conversation began. Her face was hidden by her white headscarf, but I could see the wet marks on her hands as she dashed the tears away. After some time, she resumed her story.