Previously political life had been dominated by rich, older men, but now the winners were young men who had fought for the Bolsheviks in the Civil War. Ismail Zankishiev, who may at this time have started to call himself by the nom de guerre ‘Khutai’ by which he is best known today, was among them, fighting as a Red irregular during the civil war that followed the proclamation of Soviet Power by Vladimir Lenin in 1917.
If even half the legends told about him by the Balkars today are true, he must have been a skilled guerrilla warrior. He could, it is said, shoot a soldier downhill from 400 metres through the viewing hole in the protection plate fixed around the breach of an artillery piece. It is also told how he taught his own boys to shoot by killing swallows on the wing with a rifle. Apparently, he even beat his eight-year-old son for failing to shoot his swallow through the eye, or so the story goes.
He took his uncompromising approach to parenthood with him into governing his home Cherek valley, which he dominated for much of the 1920s. He chaired the Village Council of Upper Balkaria off and on between 1924 and 1930, and appears to have exploited his position in much the same way that his tsarist-era equivalents did.
Locals who remember the time say that he requisitioned building materials, and forced local men to work for him on the construction of his new house, where he installed a mistress in a grave affront to local traditions. On another occasion a local man had kidnapped the daughter of a rich family to marry her, and Khutai terrorized those who had been involved to such an extent that they fled into the hills to become abreks – a form of noble outlaw endemic to the Caucasus.
The campaign against the rich, the traditionally powerful and the religious was guaranteed to win him backing in Moscow. But it was not popular among his fellow villagers, according to documents found in the KGB files in Moscow. One woman in the Upper Cherek valley complained about stripping the vote from the previous elite.
‘We cannot live without the elders and the mullahs, they gave meat and milk to the poor, and what do the communists give to the poor? We will not allow the mullahs and the prosperous people to lose their electoral rights,’ the woman is quoted as saying in 1929.
But that was a dangerous viewpoint while the Soviet leadership was pushing ahead with its revolution. It wanted to collectivize agriculture and turn the conservative and stubborn peasant farmers that formed the overwhelming majority of the Soviet Union’s population into progressive and pliable farmhands. Since Soviet ideology was rooted in class differences, it was important to show that even the most wretchedly poor villages were divided along class lines. Joseph Stalin, who increasingly dominated the government in the 1920s, demanded that this local bourgeoisie should be destroyed. They were known as kulaks – the word means ‘fist’ – and could be anyone, since the class of rich, capitalist peasants they represented was more or less an invention. They were said to employ others to do their work for them, and their wealth needed to be distributed to those poorer than themselves.
Often the kulaks had not inherited their wealth at all; they worked alongside their labourers like farmers all over the world, and had just been cleverer and more industrious than their neighbours in investing and building a better farm. Sometimes the kulaks were denounced by jealous neighbours, or picked at random from among the villagers. But that did not spare them from the secret police. Millions of people were ‘dekulakized’ and dumped in the wastes of Siberia or Central Asia to die or starve.
The Balkars were no exception, even though the already stretched dogma of Stalin’s brutalized form of Lenin’s tortured version of Marx’s original theory could not begin to reflect the high valleys’ unique conditions. Here families kept livestock in common, and lived in large extended households in the burrow-like dwellings that so stunned the climbers.
In the circumstances, with police hunting them and arrest possible for any or no reason, it is not surprising that Balkars fled into the hills where hiding was easy and the chances of survival higher than as a previously prosperous peasant farmer. It was all too much for the Balkars to take, and the men who fled into the hills began to organize themselves. Uprisings broke out against Russian rule for the first time in these valleys, worrying the authorities.
Ismail ‘Khutai’ Zankishiev had lost his job as chairman of the village council by this time, apparently as part of a factional intrigue in the village, but had been appointed head of the police force tasked with stopping these would-be counter-revolutionaries.
The new head of the village council, according to a local man’s version of Khutai’s life, managed to restore communications with the men who had fled into the hills and arranged a meeting with them in December 1929.
But one of Khutai’s allies was still working in the council, and he told his former boss. Khutai, as head of the anti-bandit department, insisted on accompanying the new chairman, a man called Magomet Zumakulov, to the meeting. At the meeting Khutai was wounded, and the new chairman was killed, as was one of the two runaways who had come to talk to them. Rumours persist that it was Khutai who shot his political rival in the back.
After the battle, the chances of the abreks returning to normal life were minimal, and twelve more men fled into the hills from the Cherek valley in May 1930. Insurrections were breaking out now from one end of the Turkic realm to the other. But Khutai’s stock was at its highest, and he won the Order of the Red Banner in 1929 for his services to the Soviet state.
Details about what happened in those years between 1928 and 1931 are still hard to come by, although they must exist in the KGB archives. One ninety-year-old woman – Marisat Zhantueva, whom I met in distant Central Asia – told me how she remembered seeing men with rifles marching through her village in 1930, on their way to the Upper Chegem valley, where they intended to set up their own government. They were inspired by rumours that Turkey was planning to invade and restore traditional laws and values.
At least fifty men rose up against the authorities from the village of Dumala, she said, along with men from the two other villages that made up their village council. They rounded up the inspector and the secretary of the village council, both of whom were ethnic Russians, and threatened to kill them. The inspector, she said, begged a neighbour of hers called Chukai Tuduev for help, but he refused. Instead, he pulled out a pistol and killed the inspector himself.
The security forces sent in troops to crush the little insurgency, but the Balkars had a good defensive position. She believed that more than 250 soldiers died crossing the river, before the locals barricaded themselves into a cave and could not be winkled out. Eventually, the authorities persuaded the village women to tell their husbands they would not be prosecuted if they gave themselves up. The men at first were resistant, and pelted the emissaries with stones, but finally agreed to surrender. The government’s promise did not last long. One man from her village, called Karakez Zhabelov, had been part of the uprising, and he decided to take the amnesty offer. He was arrested a week later, as the Soviet government’s retribution broke.
Almost all the Balkars holding positions in the local government were arrested and shot. Ako Gemuev was the highest-ranking Balkar as chairman of the Kabardino-Balkaria Executive Committee, and was unlucky enough to have been from the village of Dumala himself. His fellow villagers are said to have visited him regularly to complain about the evils of collectivization. Those same villagers then rose up and fought against the state.
It was enough to condemn him, and he was arrested in August 1930 under the Legal Code’s notorious 58th article, which covered counter-revolutionary crimes. His crimes came under sections 2 (organizing an armed uprising) and 11 (actively fighting against the working class), which bore the death sentence. Many of the leaders of the Balkar communities, who had been young men during the revolution but were like Gemuev now in their late thirties, were also shot.
Khutai, thirty-five by now, was a classic example. He too was swept up in the wave of repression crashing around his people. He was arrested in the
autumn of 1930 and convicted of being part of the Gemuev plan of organizing armed resistance to the Soviet Union.
Among his co-conspirators were the Sarakuev brothers, led by ‘the large kulak’ Lukman. Doka Sarakuev, a 62-year-old who was arrested, described how he and his four brothers were part of a family of twenty people in total. They owned between them a house, two horses, two bulls, twelve cows, 400 sheep and two donkeys. He complained that their property had been seized as that of a kulak even though they employed no labourers, and had no income except what they earned with their own hands.
His complaint did not save him. Some members of his family were sent to the terrible Solovki camp in Russia’s Arctic, from which inmates did not normally return, while others received labour camp sentences of between five and ten years. Honest farmers, holding their property in common, were being penalized during a drive to collectivize.
Khutai appealed to the leadership of Kabardino-Balkaria for justice, and must have found it impossible to believe that he was being tried alongside the rich, old Balkars that his generation had tried so hard to destroy.
‘I always fought against the class enemies, which is why they are always trying to kill me . . . Now of course I know everything will be against me, because I worked for a decade in the village council. I took land from some people, I took the right to vote from another, it is clear they will oppose me,’ he wrote in an unsuccessful appeal kept in the state archives.
He was convicted and sentenced to ten years’ hard labour in Magadan, a gold-mining district on the Pacific Coast where the weather was so bad and the labour conditions so brutal that the roads were said to be literally built on bones. It could have been a death sentence, but he survived.
The Balkars would be more reluctant to believe Soviet offers of an amnesty another time.
Khutai emerged from prison in the late 1930s or early 1940s, having served his time in the camps. He worked on a collective farm like any normal person, quite a step down from the heights of the revolutionary leader he had once been. But he still dreamed of returning to prominence, perhaps once again as a guerrilla leader as he had been during the heady days when the Red Flag was raised over the high valleys.
For a fresh disaster was breaking over the mountains, and over the Soviet Union as a whole. Germany invaded on 22 June 1941. Meeting little resistance, the armies pushed east and south. They wanted the oil wells of Maikop, Grozny and Baku, and the Soviet troops seemed incapable of stopping them.
The Soviet government, in a desperate attempt to save the city of Rostov, in July 1942 sent in the Kabardino-Balkarian cavalry on horses against German tanks. It was a massacre. The 115th Cavalry Division was shattered, and the traumatized survivors – mountain lads without officers or experience – fled back to their valley homes.
According to the archives, around 600 or 700 deserters hid in the mountains, perhaps fearing they would be killed under Stalin’s ‘not one step backwards’ order, which was issued on 28 July 1942 and which counted retreat as desertion. According to a document later sent to Lavrenty Beria, head of the security services, the majority of these deserters were Balkars and around a hundred of them ended up in Khutai’s native Cherek gorge.
Readers may at this point be wondering why Khutai has a reputation as a Balkar hero. He was a corrupt local government official, was imprisoned in Siberia when the leadership was purged, and tried to get himself off the hook by incriminating others on the way. Now he was out of prison he was appointed to lead a rapid-reaction force against these deserters, many of whom were people being hunted through no fault of their own. These were not the actions of a great man.
And his reputation was about to plunge even further, for he used his little force not to fight the deserters but to settle his own scores. He persecuted a local political rival: Khamid Eneyev, the new head of the village council. Eneyev, along with a deputy, was riding home one night when Khutai’s forces ambushed them. As it happened, the hapless deputy was riding on Eneyev’s distinctive white horse, and was killed in his boss’s place. The attack had failed and Khutai, fearing arrest, fled into the hills, joining up with the abreks, or ‘bandits’ as the government called them, whom he had been supposed to fight.
In fact, at this point in his career, Khutai had done nothing to endear himself to anyone, but do not give up on him yet. He was to redeem himself in the eyes of his nation.
The Germans, meanwhile, were not sitting still. In October 1942, the town of Nalchik, capital of Kabardino-Balkaria, fell and the Soviet 37th Army fled in panic before them, taking heavy losses. Units of the army were cut off in the valleys that reach down towards Nalchik from the mountains, and one of the only ways left for them to save themselves from capture was to retreat up the gorge of the Cherek and either cross over into Georgia, or into one of the parallel valleys.
The new military commander of the region, Major-General Zakharov, was concerned that the deserters hiding in the hills could threaten his army’s withdrawal and on 1 November he ordered the NKVD to take deserters’ relatives hostage. If the deserters had not surrendered within two days, he ordered, the hostages should be shot. The stage was set for the great tragedy that was about to engulf the Cherek valley, whence it would burst forth upon the whole Balkar nation.
The NKVD forces were not idle. Their first victims – listed as ‘bandits’ in the army records, but actually civilians – were two Balkar men called Taubi Appayev and Musos Khasauov. Two more herders, from the Bashiev family, were shot a little later, though it is not clear what for. Soviet troops were still streaming in retreat through the valley, carrying their weapons. For the deserters, who were now very nervous that they were about to be hunted, it was easy to take the weapons of these demoralized soldiers and use them to defend themselves.
The army managed to largely extricate itself from the gorge, but one group of five soldiers had failed to manoeuvre their anti-aircraft gun up the steep slope out of the Cherek valley. Khutai’s men stopped them and, on 21 November, taking two of the soldiers with them, they dragged the gun with bulls to within range of the village council administration, where Eneyev – Khutai’s enemy – was based along with his allies in the village of Mukhol. The bandits opened fire, and had their enemies pinned down all day. They failed to trap Eneyev, who fled to the local hospital when darkness fell and hid with a small Soviet force based there. Over the next four days, the two sides faced off, the bandits armed with their anti-aircraft gun and the soldiers walled up in the hospital. Five soldiers were killed, according to the military records, before the soldiers managed to retreat. The military command lost patience.
General Kozlov, head of the 37th Army, ordered that the bandits in the gorge must be destroyed once and for all, with a verbal order to Colonel Shikin of the NKVD ‘to wipe the villages of Balkaria from the face of the earth, stopping at nothing’.
On 22 November 1942, Shikin passed the order on to the commander of a cavalry unit: ‘Liquidate the bandit group based in the villages of Upper Balkaria. Take the most decisive measures, right up to shooting on the spot, burning their buildings and property.’ On 24 November, a detachment of 152 soldiers led by a Captain Fyodor Nakin was sent into the gorge. On their way in, they detained at least six local men, none of whom had any connection to the battle in the village centre, and shot them dead.
The Cherek massacre had begun.
15.
Liquidate the Bandit Group
Nakin’s forces took up their positions overlooking the Cherek valley on 27 November 1942, and set their operation to cleanse the villages below them of ‘bandits’ for eleven o’clock that evening. The valley held at least nine hamlets. Mukhol, home to the village administration and scene of the battle over the hospital, was further down the valley. The soldiers would have to pass through Sauty and Glashevo before they could reach it.
Other hamlets overlooked the path, including the little settlement of Kurnoyat, home to eighteen families, while Khutai’s home hamlet of Kunyum sat on the
other side of the river, and others – such as Upper and Lower Cheget – were further off.
Nakin divided his force into two. The larger half followed the left bank of the stream towards Sauty, while a smaller group followed the right bank.
While most of the troops prepared themselves, Nakin sent two soldiers – a Russian and an Azeri – to the hamlet of Kurnoyat to start carrying out his orders. The soldiers were welcomed warmly, fed and allowed to rest. In return, they warned the villagers that terrible retribution had come and that they should flee. On their return to the main force, they both admitted they had killed nobody. Nakin, enraged, shot them both. There would be no more mercy from the Red Army.
Bagaly Temirzhanova, then a 23-year-old woman, later gave testimony to investigators describing how two men from Kurnoyat – Yusup and Kumuk Sarakuev – came running into Sauty to warn them that the soldiers had arrived and were planning to kill everyone. The two men, who were her relatives, warned the fifteen or so deserters present to flee but the remaining villagers thought they were safe. The soldiers would not bother them, they thought, as did two men who had been invalided home from the front.
The only armed men left in Sauty had departed. It was defenceless.
One deserter called Edik was left as a look-out and he told Temirzhanova and her neighbours that the soldiers were indeed coming just as she was lying down to sleep, before moving on to warn everyone in the village. Despite her belief that the soldiers would not bother civilians, she went to her neighbour’s house, where around fifteen people were gathered, all of them women or children apart from an 80-year-old man. That was when the shooting started. They had no idea what was happening until a couple more women found them in the morning, and said the soldiers were killing everybody.
The soldiers found them shortly afterwards, and started hammering on the door and demanding it be opened. Temirzhanova, and a handful of others, managed to jump out the window.
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