Let Our Fame Be Great

by Oliver Bullough

  But their every raid made them more vulnerable, since they could not avoid leaving tracks or leading their hunters directly to their hide-outs. And sure enough, in 1944, just a few months after the deportation, their luck ran out. Troops surrounded them in the high mountains, pinning them down among rocks with rifle fire. The outlaws fired back and held their assailants off, but were defenceless when their opponents brought up a mortar and began to lob shells down on top of them. Khutai and his gang, the last free Balkars in the Caucasus, died.

  Since 1943, the police had taken to collecting the heads of dead bandits as proof of their demise, and they took Khutai’s with them when they descended to the town of Nalchik once more. But, having deported the Balkar nation, there was no one left who could positively identify him, and they were reduced to sending for someone from Kazakhstan who could confirm their victory.

  A former colleague of Khutai’s called Magomed Gazayev, therefore, made the long trip back to his homeland. According to the legend, he was forced to look on a grisly identification parade of disembodied heads, before he was despatched back to Kazakhstan. Among them, he confirmed, was that of the great bandit. Khutai was dead and the Turkic population of the high Caucasus had been exterminated.

  The Soviet government made clear that it intended those Karachais and Balkars who had survived to remain in Central Asia for ever. In a secret decree from 1949, the government made clear that the exile was permanent. Any attempt to leave their allotted homes was punishable by twenty years in prison, and anyone helping them to leave was liable to a sentence of five years. By cruel coincidence, the decree was dated 26 November 1948, just a fortnight before the Soviet Union, and all the other members of the United Nations, signed up to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

  Those included Article 9 – ‘No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile’; Article 10 – ‘Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him’; and Article 11 – ‘Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence’.

  The government was merciless in its refusal to abide by these promises. A certain Sergeant Tappaskhanov wrote to Stalin in July 1945, asking that his sister and his brother be allowed to return to the Caucasus, where, it appears, he had found his way after being demobilized from the army. After listing the medals he won defending the nation, he described how one of his four brothers had been killed at the front, while two were missing, presumed dead. Only one other brother and his sister remained alive.

  ‘When they were deported, they could take nothing with them, and now they live in their new place in very difficult circumstances,’ he wrote.

  ‘I already wrote you a letter in December 1944, asking that my brother and sister be allowed to move to the Kabardino-Balkar autonomous republic, but I received an answer . . . that my request that my brother and sister be allowed to move to the Crimea could not be approved. But I did not ask and do not ask that they be allowed to move to the Crimea, I asked and ask that they be allowed to move with their children to Kabardino-Balkaria.’

  He should not have wasted his ink. The next month, the government adopted a decree barring demobilized soldiers from the deported nations from returning to their former homes, and instructing their commanders to send them to Central Asia. Those former soldiers who had somehow found their own way to their former homes should be rounded up and sent to join their relatives in exile. Sergeant Tappaskhanov is unlikely to have stayed in the Caucasus for long and probably joined his brother and sister in Central Asia, rather than the other way round. Even those men who shed their blood defending the Soviet Union were deemed to have betrayed it on account of their nationality.

  In the Soviet Union, however, even the word ‘eternal’ could change its meaning. Stalin died in 1953, ushering in a period of relative openness that would later be known as the ‘thaw’. The Soviet dictator’s butcher, Lavrenty Beria, who had personally presided over the deportations, was himself then rounded up and killed. Nikita Khrushchev took charge of the subdued state, promising to right the wrongs of his predecessor.

  The first signs that something was changing for the deportees came in 1955, when their young men started to be conscripted into the army. Although the conscripted youths are unlikely to have rejoiced at the change, it meant they were now trusted to fight for the Soviet Union if the need arose, which was an important step towards rehabilitation. That year restrictions on the exiles’ movement also began to be lifted, initially just for certain categories, and eventually for the whole nations.

  In February 1956, Khrushchev accelerated the changes, making a speech to the 20th Party Congress condemning Stalin’s ‘cult of personality’, and promising to redress the graver excesses of his rule. He mentioned the deportations of the Karachais and the Balkars by name as examples of Stalin’s crimes.

  ‘How can you lay responsibility for enemy actions of a few people on whole nations, including women, children, old people, communists and Konsomols [young communists], and subject them to mass repression?’ he asked a closed session of the congress. Stalin, he said, had been drunk with power and no one had been able to stop his crimes.

  ‘The Ukrainians only escaped this fate because there are too many of them and there was nowhere to put them,’ he said, provoking laughter in the hall.

  And then the Karachai-Balkar nation reappeared, having vanished from all official publications for more than a decade. They had not even warranted a mention in the public decree issued – two years late – by the government to legalize the deportation. The decree mentioned only the Chechens and the Ingush as having been deported from the North Caucasus, while books on state law also failed to mention the Turkic highlanders.

  But in the 19 May 1956 edition of the newspaper Sovetskaya Kirgizia (Soviet Kyrgyzstan), the reader learned that the state publishing house had begun to publish the works of Karachai-Balkar poets in their native language. There was no explanation in the paper as to why these minorities should suddenly have arrived in Central Asia, though presumably its readers already knew. On 20 January 1957, Kazakh radio admitted the existence of a Karachai-Balkar dance troupe in the city of Almaty.

  By that time, the Soviet government had in principle decided to allow the Turkic tribesmen to go home.

  But news of Khrushchev’s speech to the Party Congress had already filtered out and some 2,600 of the highlanders, anticipating their pardon, had acted on their own initiative and gone home on their own. A document from the Kabardin Republic’s section of the Communist Party dated 22 May 1956 was already complaining that individual Balkars had already crept back to their homeland and were refusing to leave.

  ‘The Balkars coming to Kabarda categorically refuse to leave the republic and affirm that only necessity, that is the use of force, can make them once again go to their place of settlement or to other regions outside the Kabardin Autonomous Republic,’ the document, addressed to Moscow, said, before going on to suggest that the Balkars be put to work.

  The local government tried to halt the flow of returnees, declaring itself unready for them. In June 1956 it said it did not have the money to accommodate the whole Balkar nation if it returned all at once, since the Balkar villages were destroyed and collective farms would have to build more accommodation. Only 23 per cent of their homes, the government said, remained intact.

  But the Balkars kept up their pressure. A letter to the Communist Party’s Central Committee in July 1956 described their desperation to come home. ‘We, by the order of Beria and his gang, were called bandits, traitors, fascists, which artificially created enmity between nations. The words “Chechen”, “Karachai”, “Balkar” became common synonyms for the local population, which used these words to scare their children,’ the letter, signe
d by one Zh. Zalikhanov, said.

  ‘The longer we are based here, the more our thirst and desire to return to our homes increases . . . We have a national saying: “the place where you were born is better than a place where you are satisfied”.’

  The government gave in. On 24 November 1956, a secret suggestion was made within the inner sanctum of the Communist Party that the Balkar and Karachai names be restored to their former homelands. By January of the next year, that had become a decree and the peoples were allowed to go home. Their nightmare was over.

  But they did not receive any official apology or compensation. Instead, a veil was drawn over what happened to them and books from the period betray a remarkable amnesia about their fate, as if embarrassed by it.

  The book Sovetskaya Kabardino-Balkaria, which was published in 1972 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the region’s creation as a communist autonomous region, hailed the local population’s battle against the German army.

  ‘When Kabardino-Balkaria was temporarily occupied by the Hitlerite forces, a guerrilla movement appeared here. The popular revengers of the republic conducted raids on the enemy garrisons, keeping the occupiers in constant action,’ the book said, praising these guerrillas for killing 700 enemy ‘Hitlerites’ and capturing thirty-one. There was no mention of the alleged Balkar collaboration, nor of the massacre in the Cherek valley, nor of the subsequent deportation.

  It was an approach used by other books from the 1960s onwards. Where once the Balkar and Karachai nations had been written out of existence, now the fact that they had been written out of existence was itself written out of existence. Some academics published accounts of the massacre in the Cherek region – two of them are listed by the dissident Aleksandr Nekrich in his book The Punished Peoples – but even these rare mentions squarely blamed it on the Germans, and would continue to do so for another three decades.

  Soviet society forgot about the devastation visited on these little nations, and concentrated instead on building the communist utopia that was always just around the corner. But the Karachai and Balkar peoples remembered. And that remembrance would come spilling out as soon as it was allowed to.

  17.

  Playing Stalin

  Suddenly, in the mid-1980s, the Soviet system began to change with bewildering speed. For decades, the state had emphasized the common destiny of the Soviet peoples, but now the new movement towards openness allowed nations to examine their own experiences.

  This allowed the Balkars and the Karachais to finally discuss what had happened to them in 1943 – 4, to debate who was to blame and to demand an apology. And an apology was not long coming. Even the most ardent communist had to recognize that deporting an entire nation was a grossly disproportionate punishment even if a few individuals had committed treason.

  Mikhail Gorbachev, then still the leader of the world’s largest country, condemned the deportations in September 1989. He was followed in November that year by the Supreme Soviet in Moscow, which called the deportations ‘barbaric acts’ contrary to international law. The local government in Nalchik followed suit, condemning the deportations and promising rehabilitation and compensation.

  And the true facts of the Cherek valley massacre began to emerge as well. In August 1990, the local Interior Ministry’s own newspaper, Versiya, published a searing article on the tragedy, and condemned the fact that soldiers, officially tasked with protecting the villagers, had ended up killing them.

  ‘The leadership of the republic all these years has spent more time on the deaths of a few hundred cattle than on the genocide of a whole people. Yes, and until now the documents, related to this tragedy, are “top secret”. Why? Who does this benefit?’ the article asked.

  But here the newspaper and the politicians were far behind the Balkars themselves. They had known the identity of their murderers all along, and had seized the opportunity afforded by Gorbachev’s openness policy to erect a monument to the dead on the ruins of Sauty.

  ‘Traveller, stop! Honour the memory of the 470 lives of children, women and old folk of this mountain village who were brutally shot and then burnt by the dogs of the Stalinist genocide – the NKVD troops in November 1942. We will save the memory of you for centuries. From Balkaria. 1989,’ the monument said.

  And the villagers were not prepared to leave it there. A group of people whose families came from the hamlet of Glashevo, all relatives of those killed by the NKVD, demanded a free investigation into the tragedy. The investigation was announced and they waited for a public admission of guilt. And sure enough, on 31 July 1992, Kemal Glashev – who shared a surname with fifty-five of the victims of the massacre – obtained a public admittance that their murders had been committed by Soviet troops.

  This preliminary report by military prosecutors described the arrival of Nakin in the upper reaches of the Cherek valley, the murder of around 700 people, and the destruction of more than 500 houses. But it did not satisfy the villagers, for the prosecutors said no court case was planned since, in accordance with the law, the criminal case had been closed when Nakin was killed at the front in January 1943, just over a month after the massacre.

  Furthermore, the prosecutors cleared the names of the captain’s superiors, leaving Nakin alone to shoulder the blame for what had happened. The report even justified Nakin’s actions by claiming that bandits and deserters had opened fire on his soldiers from the villages where the massacres took place.

  This whitewash was not good enough for the Glashevo group, and they took their case to the regional parliament. It agreed with them, calling the prosecutors’ decision to halt the case ‘unfounded’ and officially declaring that the massacres in Upper Balkaria were an act of genocide. The parliament also proclaimed the establishment of a separate investigative committee to record once and for all the truth of what happened.

  It was a victory for the villagers, but it did not help their quest for justice. The military prosecutors were not going to be bounced into condemning one of their own, and they took another year and a half to issue a second report, which gave additional information on the massacre but confirmed that the criminal case would be closed once more, with no charges brought.

  This second report’s cold chronology of the events of those terrible days gives a bleak glimpse into the inhumanity of the Soviet army. Nakin, the report said, had told his superiors that he had killed 1,200 people in just twenty-four hours, but had been left to operate unsupervised in the remote valley.

  The superiors, who had also died by this stage, were once again cleared of wrong-doing.

  Of those superiors, General Kozlov had given the oral instruction ‘to wipe villages of Balkaria from the face of the earth, stopping at nothing’. Divisional Commander Shikin, meanwhile, had passed on the instruction on paper, ordering Nakin ‘to conduct the most decisive battle against banditism and its accomplices. In no circumstances should you show pity even to indirect accomplices. If there is a possibility to take hostages [the bandits’ relatives], then send them to the plywood factory, but if you have to, destroy them.’

  It is a chilling document, and the final whitewash and decision to heap the blame once more on Nakin has a dull, thumping inevitability.

  ‘In the actions of Major-General P. M. Kozlov, commander of the 37th Army, no crimes are perceived in as far as the oral order to Divisional Commander Shikin “to wipe the villages of Balkaria from the face of the earth” has a figurative character, and therefore cannot be seen as an order to shoot the civilian population,’ the prosecutors decided in a conclusion that astounds me every time I read it. Shikin’s belated warning to Nakin not to harm women and children – which came after the captain announced he had killed the 1,200 people – got him off the hook as well.

  The prosecutors, therefore, officially declared that there was no need to involve the courts and that the case was closed. Their official summary was released in March 1994, and is full of accounts of the fictional battles with bandits that Nakin’s troops cla
imed to have fought, as if that justified their barbarity.

  Fortunately, we are not forced to rely on the prosecutors’ conclusions for information on the tragedy, since a small group of five Balkars had also been at work. Also in 1994, it published a tiny grey book with the simple title The Cherek Tragedy, based on the facts uncovered by the state commission into the events. In clear, unadorned, straightforward prose, it laid out precisely what had happened in November 1942, stripping away the accumulated lies that had congealed in the military prosecutors’ reports and revealing the full horror of the Red Army’s rampage. Perhaps with half an eye on the army’s whitewash of itself, its authors called their book the ‘first serious attempt’ to uncover what had happened.

  It is an excellent document, packed with archive reports, a detailed chronology and priceless eyewitness testimony which together form the backbone of my own account of the events.

  Among the twenty-one eyewitnesses quoted at length in the book, many of them with grainy portraits to go with them, is a woman called variously Fazika or Nazifa Kishtikova. She was just six years old when the massacre occurred, and managed to escape by hiding under a bed when the soldiers burst in. She had been staying with her aunt Zariyat in Sauty so found herself in the heart of the tragedy, and cut off from her immediate family.

  A wounded neighbour had burst in to tell the little group in her aunt’s house what was happening, and they all hid in the house when the soldiers started to shoot at a sheep that was standing in their doorway. Having presumably killed the sheep, five or six soldiers forced their way into the room and ordered the inhabitants – all women and children – into the courtyard. Lined up by height with the tallest at one end and the smallest at the other, the young girl was last in line to be shot and managed to slip away unscathed before the bullets reached her.

  She hid for several days, creeping out to drink water from a puddle and suffering from excruciating thirst, but survived.