Let Our Fame Be Great

by Oliver Bullough

  ‘I have used that name Khola for two other dogs since then, but I always remember him alone. He jumped and jumped, he barked for us, but he could not get in. Then the truck reversed. It went backwards. He was killed.’

  The trucks carrying the villagers of southern Chechnya pushed down the Argun gorge to the plains, where they could meet the railway and the third phase of Khabilayeva’s deportation began. The cattle cars that would carry them were divided in two by a horizontal floor to allow more people to be packed inside. A hole in the floor acted as a toilet, but no one would use it, being too ashamed to do so in public. This shame has been one of the enduring legends of the Chechen deportation, and many young Chechens today will tell you how their female ancestors were so ashamed to use the toilet that their bladders ruptured. I have never met someone who claims to have seen a case of it, but many Chechens have told me that this happened.

  An American academic called Michaela Pohl asked some medical experts if it was possible for someone’s bladder to rupture through refusal to urinate, and they said it was not. They said spontaneous incontinence would set in before that stage. Nevertheless, Pohl was told by a 63-year-old deportee that a fellow passenger had died of a ruptured bladder, almost as if it was something to take pride in.

  ‘Former deportees clearly valued this memory and referred to it often, not only when describing the terrible hardship of transport, but when asked about the upbringing of young people more generally, and to emphasize the strength of their traditions even during the worst circumstances,’ concluded Pohl.

  Khabilayeva was lucky. She said she simply refused to use the hole in the floor as a toilet, instead waiting for the train to stop. At stops, which were frequent enough for the girl to survive from one toilet break to the next, the guards would give them food, including the first herring that Khabilayeva had ever seen. They travelled for twenty-six days, sitting on the upper level in their carriage, the family below them being the one with the barefoot children and another woman with her son, who was all dressed in red. He was quiet and never spoke. It turned out, after three or four days, that he had died quietly, a victim of the typhus that had raged among the quiet columns of hopeless highlanders. His mother had managed to secretly sew him into a shroud without anyone noticing.

  ‘She asked my father and others to take him away, further from the train. My father said they found a hole in the ground and covered him up. The mother did not cry after that, knowing he was in the earth,’ said Khabilayeva, again pushing tears away.

  ‘For us, it is only men that do the burying. And she asked them to take him away. “Please take him away,” she said, this mother said. I still cannot forget this, how can I forgive what those soldiers did to us?’

  The train stopped in the steppes for forty-one days after that, leaving the deportees to more or less fend for themselves with no instructions and no hope. They had almost nothing to eat, just grass for days at a time. There was orach, a herb, which people ate.

  Khabilayeva’s father said they should not eat it if it was pink, because it was dangerous. It is not clear how he could have known that, for orach is a plant that only grows in near-desert and not in the high mountains of his home. He was right though, for it can be poisonous. But people did not listen to him; they were so hungry they would have eaten anything.

  After a while, they moved on to what is now the city of Almaty, which the deportees were expected to build into a proper capital for Kazakhstan. Behind them the lowland homes of the Chechens and Ingush were taken by foreigners, by Russians, Ossetians, Armenians and other favoured nations. The mountain villages were left empty.

  Here in this new land, they had nothing. They had been taken in wintertime to a country that did not want them and did not know how to feed them.

  ‘I saw how my cousin, my second cousin, died of hunger,’ said Khabilayeva, her eyes hard now and remembering, the tears gone. ‘This was a month after we arrived at our destination, he was eleven years old. We used to know the time from the sirens of the factories. He asked me when the siren would be, and I said soon. He went to sleep and just died there, with all this green stuff coming out of his mouth. His father had died in the camps in 1937, they sent him to the north because he was religious.

  ‘We children, we went everywhere and collected salt or whatever and sold it. The salt came from the railway wagons, and we collected it from the corners where it was left when the wagons were swept out. In the summer we would collect grain in the fields, then in 1946 we started to plant maize. And there would be fish brought in on the trains, and bits would be forgotten in the corners of the cars. We survived, we worked, despite being children. I worked from the age of ten.

  ‘My father was assigned as a street cleaner, but he was ill with his kidneys, so I worked for him. I worked every day, I would not let him work. I never learned to write then, and never have.’

  So we finished our conversation and Khabilayeva sat there with me drinking tea. She is still in Almaty, a city she built and which is now the financial centre of Kazakhstan – a whole new state. She has a house that she built herself, and her children live around her. She still wanted to go home, she said, but the Caucasus was a dangerous place. And besides, she could never really go home, because the Chechens have never been allowed to return to Khindoi. Her village died the day its people left and, sixty-four years later, she was one of the few people who knew it had ever existed.

  12.

  Three Little Boys

  Even before Khabilayeva’s nightmare trek was over, Beria looked for more work to do. He was in the Caucasus still, and his gaze settled to the east once more: on the Balkars.

  The Balkars were ethnically the same as the Karachais. They too were Turkic herders tucked away among the highest mountains of the range, but they lived to their east. The tsarist conquerors had assigned them to a different region from their kin, and this was a distinction that had persisted under the communists. Soviet bureaucrats, who liked to fragment nations as far as possible so as to make them easier to control, decided to make the administrative division into a national one, and declared nonsensically that the Balkars were a different nation to the Karachai. Perhaps they hoped that would make them easier to rule.

  Despite this distinction, however, the Balkars were to share the same fate as their fellow Turks, whom they followed into exile.

  ‘The enemy elements in Balkaria have not stopped their active anti-Soviet work and after the regions of the North Caucasus were cleansed of the Germans, they have found support from the Balkar population. In connection to the forthcoming end of the operation to deport the Chechens and the Ingush, I think it would be advisable to use part of the freed-up troops and security forces to organize the deportation of the Balkars from the North Caucasus,’ wrote Beria to Stalin on 24 February 1944.

  He had agreement just two days later. The State Defence Committee issued an order on 5 March, and the operation commenced within three days. The whole scheme, from conception to completion, took just twelve days.

  I met Tokai Makhiyev, along with two of his oldest friends, at a wake just outside the city of Nalchik in the central Caucasus in 2008. The whole extended family had gathered to mourn his nephew in a ceremony that takes place fifty-two days after a death, not forty days after like everywhere else in the Caucasus. Despite this difference, the Balkars share the culture of hospitality common to the whole Caucasus, and the table was laden with tripes, with mutton and with little steamed parcels of meat in pastry. When I told them I was a vegetarian, bread and honey were placed at my elbow.

  The Makhiyev family had lived in the village of Belaya Rechka just outside Nalchik, rather than in the mountains proper. Their village had been occupied by the German army, and he remembered how they had sheltered three Jewish families during the few weeks that the anti-Semitic troops were scouring the land for Jews to kill.

  ‘They were children – Lyuba, Zima, Genna, Mark – and their mother’s name I do not remember. We used to say the
y were Armenians, not Jews, so that nobody knew. They lived with us in Belaya Rechka until the Germans were thrown out, then they returned to Nalchik. They must have known that the deportation was coming because, two days before it took place, one of the women came to us and said we must go and hide with them, because we were all going to be sent away,’ said Makhiyev, who was seven at the time of the deportation but a distinguished seventy-two during our conversation, pausing to sip tea.

  ‘My mother went to her father to ask him what they should do, and he said he had lost three sons for the Soviet government, one son at the front, and two making roads through the mountains in the 1930s. He said the Soviets would not harm his family, and we did not need to leave.’

  On 7 March, a handsome officer and two soldiers came into the Makhiyev house and wrote down the names of the family members, sending Makhiyev’s mother into a panic. She realized that her Jewish friend’s story was true, and decided they would get up early and hide with them. She got everything ready that night, and all they had to do was dress and leave.

  ‘We got up at five that morning, and it was dark and I couldn’t put on my shoes. My big brother mocked me for it, I remember that. Then there was this knock-knock-knock, and the handsome officer, he was so arrogant, with his two soldiers was back. They asked if we had a rifle, and searched everything. My mother’s brother worked for the security organs, and there was a picture of him in uniform on the wall. They asked who he was, and my brother told them and said he had been in Sevastopol, but had been captured or killed, because it was occupied. They just threw us out then. It turned out this officer stole our things. He kept the key anyway,’ remembered Makhiyev.

  Like all the witnesses to these events still alive, his view was skewed by being seen through the eyes of a child. He retold his youth with total simplicity: the accepting nature of childhood, combined with the resignation of the elderly.

  The villagers in Belaya Rechka were herded into a field, and ringed by soldiers with machine guns. One of Makhiyev’s neighbours – called Bert Gurtuyev, apparently – was an officer home on leave, but that did not save him. The troops took away his pistol and packed him off to stand with the others, still in his uniform, for the rest of the day.

  This day was technically a holiday. Beria had chosen Red Army Day to deport the Chechens, and had clearly decided that juxtaposing a tragedy and a celebration was too funny a joke to resist. The Balkars had been scheduled for exile on 10 March, but he brought it forward two days. March the 8th, celebrated throughout Russia with flowers as International Women’s Day, is marked for the Balkars now by tears, as the day they left their homes.

  But Makhiyev and the other children had no idea where they were going. Although they cried from thirst and hunger, they were excited as they looked at the trucks. They thought they might be going to Moscow, which is what one officer told them was happening. The pleasant lie kept them happy while they were loaded onto the cattle cars, and sent to follow the Karachais and the Chechens to Central Asia.

  By this stage, Beria’s forces had become expert in deporting civilians. Beria reported to Stalin on 11 March that the operation had been finished in twenty-four hours: 37,103 Balkars had been deported to Central Asia, 478 people of the ‘anti-Soviet element’ were arrested, and 288 firearms were seized.

  The organization was spectacular. Most of the Balkars lived in the high, narrow valleys that plunge into the Caucasus massif. They are separated from each other by high ridges, crossable only on horseback or with the most rugged vehicle. Every valley was swept of people individually and, although Beria had sought to get the job done by the time leaves were on the trees, the troops still had to trek to isolated hamlets where the men and boys were looking after the livestock.

  Sitting at the table with Makhiyev and me was Khussein Kuliyev, who was twelve years old in 1944, and thus already doing a man’s work in the mountains. As soon as his friend finished his account, Kuliyev launched into his story, about being with his grandfather in a mountain hamlet called Zhuongu.

  ‘One morning my grandfather woke me up and told me soldiers had come. Maybe, he said, one of them was my father, who was at the front, so I ran to meet them. But my father was not there so I ran back. I was scared. They checked everything, they were on horses. The next day, my grandfather wanted to feed a calf, which had just been born, to make sure it had milk. But when we went out there were three more soldiers, and they would not let him feed it. They said gather up everything you have and they drove us off on foot. We walked for nine or ten kilometres, we did not know where we were going. I said to my grandfather that I wanted to eat, and one soldier heard me. He must have been a Tatar or from Azerbaijan, or one of the other Turkic peoples, because he understood our language and he gave me cheese,’ Kuliyev remembered.

  Finally they reached the lower village, and there found Kuliyev’s mother and his four sisters all gathered in a field. They were loaded onto trucks then driven out of the village. But the road was bad and they had to dismount and walk over every bridge. Their aunt Fatimat had come to stay with them and as they passed through Lower Chegem, she saw her children standing with the crowd.

  ‘She cried out that those were her children, to let her out, but the soldiers hit her with their rifles and we just drove further. She had a three-year-old daughter who she wanted to take but they would not let her,’ he said.

  After the long train journey, the Balkars were unloaded in the steppes of Central Asia where factory directors or collective farm chairmen would choose those they wanted. Obviously, young adults were the most popular, since they could work and would not have children who put a burden on the schools and ate food without being productive. As such, the Kuliyev family with five children and just one adult was left unpicked when everyone else had gone.

  ‘These collective farm chairmen, they came on camels or whatever. In the end, a Kazakh man came in a wagon and he saw us children there and he took us. He said he would take everyone. He put us in the village club to sleep. It just had an earth floor for us but it was only for one night, after that he freed up rooms for us. He was a kind man, he helped us, he gave us a metal oven, he helped us with corn. He was called Mukhash. I remember that, but I cannot remember his surname. He was a kind man.’

  After the Balkars, Beria’s attention moved on. Other nations would be deported – the Crimean Tatars, the Meskhetian Turks, the Soviet Greeks, and others – but they were not from the North Caucasus. Moscow’s perpetual problem of governing the Caucasus had been solved. From the Black Sea – once Circassia – to the borders of Dagestan – where the ethnic map is so knotted that not even Beria could unravel it – the highlanders were either cowed or wiped out.

  Moscow was, it was intended, never to be troubled by the Caucasus again. The troublesome highlanders had been kicked out of the highlands.

  13.

  The Double-Headed Mountain

  The high valleys of the Karachais and the Balkars were discovered by the outside world in 1868, when a party of Englishmen, their Swiss guide and Georgian servants slipped and stumbled down a glacier into the Upper Baksan valley. These valleys had never seen anyone like them before, although the foreigners themselves had had an indication they were about to enter a world where normal rules did not apply before they even crossed the watershed. As they toiled up the slope to the pass out of Georgia, they passed four men hurrying eleven cows down from the clouds. These, it transpired, were men from the Georgian village of Lashrash who, ‘according to custom, had been on a cattle-lifting expedition over the pass, and were now returning with their unlawfully-gotten booty, stolen from one of the herds belonging to the Tartars of the Upper Baksan’.

  Douglas Freshfield, the writer of those words, had reason to be apprehensive about what he would find beyond, especially since his porters were mainly Georgian – the traditional foe in cattle deals of the people they were about to meet.

  But he need not have worried. He was shortly to arrive in one of the most tradit
ional pockets of Caucasus culture, where hospitality was strong and even in the 1860s the hand of the Russian government was rarely felt. His group was made welcome in the village of Urusbiye, and treated with great kindness.

  His party was not here just for fun, however. He too wanted to conquer the Caucasus, but to do so not with weapons but on foot. He had already achieved the first ascent of Mount Kazbek – the great bishop’s mitre that dominates the road from Russia to Georgia – and now he would attempt Mount Elbrus, the tallest mountain in the Caucasus, and thus the tallest in Europe.

  Freshfield, perhaps the foremost mountaineer of his day, was bored of climbing in Switzerland. The peaks had been conquered and the mountains were getting crowded. On coming to the Caucasus, he found a new landscape of soaring peaks, tight valleys blocked by glaciers, villages of strange, burrow-like homes crowned with defensive towers, and lush green grazing for the cattle of the highlands. Here there were no other tourists, and here were villages that had never seen a western European before. Freshfield was stunned by the lost world he had found.

  He engaged in an ambitious and risky trek from Kazbek, along the southern slopes of the Caucasus into the Georgian region of Svaneti, which is legendarily lawless even today. Crossing the pass into the land of the Turkic cattle-herders now called the Karachais and the Balkars, he approached his new foe – Elbrus.

  In fact, his group scaled the great double-peaked mountain with little difficulty, except for the extreme cold, for it is not technically demanding. Their only major annoyance was a flock of sheep that resented their tent and spent the night assaulting it. On arriving at the peak, they saw a view they felt no one had seen before.

  ‘Light clouds were driving against the western face of the peak, and a sea of mist hid the northern steppe – otherwise the view was clear. Beginning in the east, the feature of the panorama was the central chain between ourselves and Kazbek. I never saw any group of mountains which bore so well being looked down upon as the great peaks that stand over the sources of the Tcherek and Tchegem,’ noted Freshfield, before the cold drove his party down to the plains again.