Let Our Fame Be Great

by Oliver Bullough

  When I called on her – unannounced – at her house in the suburb of Khasanya just outside the lowland city of Nalchik, it was hard to imagine her as a young girl, and harder still to imagine her as a lonely battler for justice. She was now a stout, white-haired old lady with a face scoured by the horrors she had seen. As she wandered around her spotless house, its walls decorated by carpets and a giant picture of the mosques in Mecca, we tried to communicate but repeatedly failed.

  Like everyone of her generation who was a child during the deportations, she missed out on education and remains illiterate and almost entirely unable to speak Russian. Almost blind, she needed me to operate her telephone for her, and to find her daughter, who agreed to act as a translator.

  For Kishtikova, whose maiden name was Ekhchieva, has a remarkable story beyond the miracle of her surviving the massacre. The state had declared what she had gone through in 1942 to be genocide, but had offered no compensation or support. The survivors like her were illiterate villagers with a distrust for the law and a dislike of the state. It was inconceivable that they would appeal for justice voluntarily, while human rights groups had other horrors to worry about.

  What they needed was a sympathetic lawyer, willing to work for nothing, and that is just what Kishtikova had in her son-in-law.

  ‘The idea to appeal to the court was mine,’ the son-in-law, Iskhak Kuchukov, aged fifty-six, told me over tea in his office later that day. ‘The murder of these civilians is a war crime. They closed the criminal case against Nakin, because he died. They said that an order to wipe villages from the face of the earth did not mean to kill. I was angry and just decided to see what would happen if I tried to gain her redress in the courts.’

  He launched his mother-in-law’s compensation case on the regional courts shortly after The Cherek Tragedy was published in 1994, armed with its account of events and witnesses prepared to testify on her behalf. She was appealing for compensation not because of what had happened to her, but because her father, Lokman Ekhchiev, was killed by the soldiers.

  ‘When my mother-in-law started to tell me how she had hidden under the bed, it was interesting. That was when I decided to get involved. Then it kept not working out, and I got more involved. I was just interested to see if it was possible to gain compensation.’

  It was still the heady 1990s, when activists believed that publicizing the crimes of the Soviet regime would be enough to persuade Russia’s citizens to condemn it. The local parliament was on the side of the villagers, and President Boris Yeltsin himself marked the fiftieth anniversary of the deportation with promises to make sure justice was done for the Balkars.

  But, as Kuchukov’s case ground on, the political atmosphere changed. The war in Chechnya hardened society against the appeals of Muslims from the Caucasus mountains, and the new president, Vladimir Putin, restored communist symbols and openly regretted the end of the Soviet Union.

  Kuchukov, therefore, was as surprised as anyone when Kishtikova won. In October 2002, the court ruled that her father had been killed illegally and that she was eligible for compensation. For a moment, it seemed like a great victory. A victim of repression had managed to prove a specific act – rather than a mass action like the deportation itself – had occurred and managed to secure compensation for it, which was quite an achievement. But there was a sting in the tail.

  ‘She won 10,000 roubles,’ said Kuchukov with a wry smile. I initially assumed that was a monthly stipend, but he set me right. It was a lump sum. At the time, 10,000 roubles was equivalent to about £200 – two months’ salary for the average Russian.

  For the life of her father, and for the loss of all her father’s property, with a delay of almost sixty years, Kishtikova had won enough to live on frugally for a few months. I thought back to the figures dreamt up by the 1943 investigation into the tragedy, and how one woman had supposedly lost property worth more than eleven years’ wages. If that same scale was applied in 2002, Kishtikova would have been eligible for almost 700,000 roubles, with compensation for the loss of her father added on. What she had received was not compensation, it was an insult.

  Only one other victim bothered to follow her lead and jump through the hoops required to win this nominal sum, and she happened to be Kishtikova’s neighbour and the mother of one of the authors of The Cherek Tragedy. As for the other survivors of the massacre, who did not have connections to Kuchukov, they treated the state with the contempt with which it had treated them and ignored it.

  Many of them still lived in the Cherek valley, and had done ever since they returned from exile, and I wanted to visit them, and to see for myself how the Balkars had recovered from their ordeal.

  Getting to the Cherek valley was surprisingly easy. The gentle rolling hills of Kabarda reared up to forty-five degrees. Patches of rock showed among the grass, as if the mountains’ muscles were straining to burst out of their skin. The trees became darker and more wild. And the land of the Balkars had begun. The road, which had been merrily bowling along by a stream, started to be pushed up against a cliff, and the valley ahead was choked by the gorge we were entering.

  For centuries, the Balkars had been protected by their narrow valleys. Only a mule or a careful horse could have navigated the slopes leading to their homeland in the days before modern roads. No army could have passed this way without a long and agonizing march in single file, their approach overshadowed by cliffs a thousand metres high.

  But now, the road has been tunnelled and cut into the cliffs, making the journey a joy rather than a struggle. The clear mountain air fizzed in my veins, and cut into my lungs in a feeling strangely reminiscent of the few weeks after giving up smoking. My body was not quite sure why breathing had become so easy.

  A giant white-headed bird – an eagle perhaps, or a vulture – skimmed along the cliff opposite, wingtip-to-wingtip with its own shadow. It soared up to alight in a patch of trees clinging to a gentler slope in the middle of the bare rock. Perhaps no man had ever walked among those trees surrounded by cliffs, where the huge bird made its home. The glaciers above were a dazzling white against the blue of a perfect sky.

  Amid this splendour, however, my mind kept flicking back to the days of the deportation. Although a road had been built by 1944, it had not been tunnelled out so generously, and it crawled around the cliffs rather than dodged through them. The deportation had been a logistical nightmare and I was filled with a reluctant admiration for the brains that had coordinated the destruction of this people. They might have been evil, but they knew how to do their jobs.

  As we passed out of the gorge, the cliffs edged away from us, gradually easing their gradient and becoming khaki-brown. Ahead was the village I had come to visit, although it was unrecognizable as the scene of the massacre of November 1942. When the Balkars had returned, their own hamlets were in ruins. Their distinctive burrow-shaped houses had collapsed, where they had not been burned by the Red Army, and were uninhabitable.

  The Soviet government did not restore the hamlets tucked up against the rocks. Instead, it built a straight street of modern houses along the valley floor. Generous though the action was, and comfortable though the houses were, the government may also have wanted to concentrate the villagers for easier control, for this was a tactic repeated in all the valleys of the Balkars and the Karachais.

  A map in the museum in Nalchik illustrated the abandonment of the Balkars’ villages well. It showed present-day villages with red lights, and pre-deportation villages with dots of light blue. The abandoned villages clustered in the high valleys like clumps of planets around the red star of the present-day settlement. There were red lights now on the plains too, for not all the Balkars were allowed to return to their ancestral homes in the mountains. Scattered among the Circassians on the plains, they would be less likely to take to the hills again and cause trouble.

  But the ruined villages are not only remembered by blue glowing dots on a map. Their remains are still there on the hillsides, rising up i
n terrace after terrace of finely crafted walls. Across the rushing river Cherek from the present-day village of Upper Balkaria, and reached by a rusting suspension bridge, is what is left of Kunyum, Khutai’s home hamlet. It rose up from the river bank like a maze. Each level interlocked with those above and below, but in no recognizable pattern, and I was reduced to scrambling up collapsing walls to ascend higher. There was no sign that anyone else had been there recently, and the only witness to my visit was a curious horse who watched me out of sight.

  At the top of the village stood a tower. Square and tapering, it was of the kind that is far more common over the mountains in Georgia where the Svans long delighted in building defensive towers to use as bases for attacking their neighbours. I sat at its foot and wondered for a while whether this tower was the one built by Akhtougan to defend himself and his kidnapped bride against his irate father-in-law’s army. But I was wrong, for Akhtougan’s tower was in the Baksan valley at the foot of Mount Elbrus sixty kilometres or so to the west. Perhaps another family feud, this one lost from history, had provoked this mammoth construction.

  The ruins of Sauty were below me, while tracks led into the hills where once Glashevo and other hamlets had held communities of herders. The square, blue-green patches of cabbage fields dotted the valley floor – cabbages grow particularly well at this altitude – and fruit trees spilled delicious plump plums and apples onto the roads.

  Over to my right – to the south – the river flowed from deep in the mountains where the pass into Georgia crossed by the British climbers in the nineteenth century had represented safety for the Red Army soldiers desperately fleeing the Germans.

  At my back were the steep slopes of the mountains. It was easy to see how the residents of this hamlet, who had been warned of the approach of the Red Army soldiers on the other side of the river in sufficient time, had managed to escape their assailants and flee into the hills. Less than a hundred metres away, a ravine dived into the mountainside, and beyond that were the high pastures and safety.

  Downhill to my left, where the valley turned north towards Russia, stood the neat square houses built by the Soviets. They looked modern and more hygienic than the stone-built burrows I was sitting among, but I knew which I would rather be living in if the valley was attacked once more.

  Back on the valley floor, I set off in search of survivors of the November 1942 massacre, aware that few of them would be able to tell me new information since they would be very old now, and would have been very young during the events. A son of Mariyam – the woman who lost her fingers and whose baby flew through the air after being hit by a bullet – was said to live here, but I could not find him, and ended up talking to another Mariyam whom I was directed to by mistake.

  Mariyam Endreyeva, now eighty-two years old, had lived in a remote hamlet when the massacre took place, and remembered seeing refugees as morning broke.

  ‘People came running to us and told us what had happened, and we ran with them into the hills. We were panicking, we were all panicking. We were in the hills for ten days, while this was all going on. The children that survived came to us, they were still alive, no one knows how they survived. We lived in caves,’ she told me and a small audience of family members who had gathered to hear her story.

  She lay on her back in a bed drawn up in the house’s living room, her bare right foot poking out from under the blanket. She spoke in Balkar, and as she spoke I had plenty of time to watch a fly which was walking steadily all the way from her big toe to her little toe, bridging the gaps in between with little jumps. When it reached the end, it dawdled for a while, then started back again.

  Once Endreyeva started talking, she would not stop, and moved seamlessly into the story of the deportation and how the soldiers had sat at the end of the trucks stopping them from getting a clear view of their homes as they drove away.

  As she talked, the gaps she left for translation into Russian became less frequent, and I was free to listen to the free flow of the Balkar language.

  It seemed amazing that she could have lived eighty-two years in Russia and not have learned Russian, but as I listened to her talk it became increasingly clear why. The impact of Moscow on her life had been wholly negative – a fact betrayed by the Russian words that had crept into her native tongue over the years: ‘soldier’; ‘army’; ‘komendatura’; ‘registration’; ‘special settler’. These were the words of repression and hate, not the words of education and enlightenment.

  Her family directed me further down the street to another survivor. Abdurakhman Misirov, now aged seventy-two, a straight-backed noble-looking man, told me his own tale with minimal prompting. Like most of the survivors, he had been too busy hiding to note down details of the massacre, but he confirmed how the villagers had never believed the official story that the Germans had killed their neighbours.

  ‘The shooting started at night, we could hear it, so close, and we hid ourselves in a haystack. There were thirty or forty of us in there. Some injured people came there too. We were there for seven days, without food, without water even. That was when they burned the village. We were scared we would burn too, so we ran away at night,’ he said.

  ‘We knew who had done this, we knew it was the Red Army men, and we had not expected it. How could we have expected it? If we had expected it, we would have run into the mountains. They were in Soviet uniforms, so we knew who they were. Even before the deportation, these officials were saying it was the Germans who did this, but we knew they were lying all along.’

  He did not invite me in, and I could tell he was not comfortable talking about what had happened, perhaps because he knew that at least 112 people with his surname had not been as lucky as him and had died at the hands of those Soviet soldiers.

  But before I went he told me I should look up the tale of a relative of his: Ali Misirov, who gave evidence to the commission investigating the crime, and whose incredible story was thereby saved for posterity.

  Ali Misirov’s account is probably the most lucid of all those given by the eyewitnesses in The Cherek Tragedy. It stands on its own and does not intersect with those of any other survivors, unlike many of the others quoted earlier. Born in 1918, Misirov was serving at the front in 1942, but was seriously wounded by shrapnel, and sent home on leave after his treatment. At home in Sauty, he was made secretary of the local division of the Communist Party, as one of the few literate and military-age men around. This did not apparently imply any sympathy for the communists, however, since he watched impassively as Khutai and his men bombarded the Red Army’s garrison with the anti-aircraft gun they had seized from the retreating Soviets, and then saw how the troops left the valley over the high pass towards Ossetia. The soldiers, he said, had been detaining local men, which was why the bandits had decided to bombard them in the first place.

  ‘Directly after the soldiers left, the villagers found in the basement the bodies of seven or eight of their neighbours who had disappeared earlier,’ he recalled, setting the scene for what would happen later.

  As a communist, he was clearly concerned that he would be killed by the advancing Germans and himself planned to leave the valley on the morning of 28 November, but was forestalled by the arrival of Nakin and his men. They started to shoot around two o’clock that morning.

  ‘Everyone who was in the house began to run all over the place, and I, just in my underpants, jumped into the potato clamp. After a little time I looked out. The soldiers were gathering people and shooting them in groups of five or ten. Everyone. Women, children, no difference. Alibek Misirov, and he was a complete cripple, was shot without a thought. Children running away were shot in the back,’ he said.

  ‘At first I thought that the Germans had come, but then I clearly heard the Russian language, being spoken well.’

  He said he had never lost consciousness at the front, but hiding in the potato store he had no idea how much time passed as he drifted into a daze. After a period – ‘maybe three days, maybe fiv
e’ – he came out of his hole, and walked outside. He saw a soldier, but the soldier took fright at the sight of this half-naked man wandering around in the snow and himself ran away. Misirov called the soldier back, telling him to take him to the staff building. There Misirov managed to convince them he was in the army and not a bandit, and their doctor agreed to treat him. Misirov collapsed. He lay unconscious when Nakin’s troops pulled out, and was spared by the Romanian troops who briefly occupied the valley.

  ‘All my people were killed – my wife, my son, my sister with her two children – but I did not bury them – I was ill, I did not have the strength to stand. They say that whole bodies were only found rarely, in the main there were just burnt bits, which were buried in bags, in pillowcases, or just wrapped up in cloth,’ he said.

  His account stops there, and the reader is left to wonder whether he returned to the army. Presumably, he did so, although he had died before I visited the mountains so I had no chance to ask him myself. Perhaps he was arrested as a bandit and sent to Siberia. We know he survived the war, so maybe he was deported directly from the front. Or he may have been one of those soldiers who were demobilized and condemned as traitors only when they had finished fighting their country’s enemies. Either way, he would have had decades to rave at the horrible irony of being exposed to the massacre only because he had been injured fighting for his country.

  But the greatest irony was yet to come.

  In 1990, the controversial Soviet film director Alexei German, who had outraged Soviet officials with his portrayal of Red Army soldiers in a film called Checkpoint and who was known for his absolute perfectionism when it came to casting and props, needed an actor to play Stalin in his film Khrustalyov, My Car. He sent envoys to the Caucasus to find an old man who looked like the dictator.

  Sure enough, they found Misirov. The man’s resemblance to Stalin was uncanny, and he – who was seventy-nine when the film was released in 1998, just five years older than Stalin was when he died – played the dictator as Stalin lay shaking and spitting on his death bed.