Let Our Fame Be Great

by Oliver Bullough

  The Soviet government, however, did not leave the events of November to December uninvestigated. They tasked the local administration with drawing up lists of who had lost what, and how many people had been killed. Among the investigators was Baraz Mamayev, born in 1918, who had not been called up to the Red Army, because of poor health, and who was one of the few literate people left in the valley.

  When the secretary of the village council was arrested by the returning Soviet troops, Mamayev was elevated to the position, and told to interview all the villagers and make lists of how much damage had been done. The summary, completed on 13 June 1943, has his signature at the bottom.

  It claims to be a true account of the ‘bestiality, thefts, and rapes committed by the German-fascist occupiers and their accomplices against the civilian population’. According to the report, a German major led soldiers into the gorge on 6 December and ‘with active help from the traitors to their homeland, the German-fascist accomplices Yakub Zhangurazov, Battal Tabaksoev and Ismail Zankishiev’, they burned houses, shot civilians and left a trail of death behind them.

  The report had, therefore, changed the date of the civilians’ deaths – to after the period when the Romanian unit arrived in the gorge – and it had blamed the deserters for helping them, despite those being the very people who managed to drive the rampaging Soviet Army out of the Cherek valley. It went on to give a list of the people killed in Sauty.

  According to the list, the brave Soviet soldiers killed a total of 310 people in Sauty, of whom 150 were sixteen years old or younger, and slightly more than half of the children girls. A total of twenty-six of the victims were men between sixteen and sixty – the generally accepted definition of ‘arms-bearing age’. Another forty men were over seventy, five of those being older than a hundred.

  The female victims present more of a regular spread through the age groups, which is not surprising since most of the younger men had been conscripted, with sixteen victims being in their late teens or in their twenties, and one solitary matriarch one hundred years old.

  Just a quick glance at the lists reveals family tragedies almost too terrible to contemplate. The commission recorded the patronymics of the children killed, grouping them together by father. Numbers 63 to 68 are all the children of an Akhmet Misirov: Kokez, fifteen; Seida, ten; Magomet, six; Elyas, four; Khyzyr, one; and the solitary daughter, Roza, two. Perhaps Akhmet Misirov was at the front, fighting for the Soviet Union. With a homecoming like that awaiting him perhaps it would have been better if he had already been killed.

  Number 203 on the list is called Mazan Temirzhanov, a 67-year-old-man, while numbers 205 to 209 are all children with the father listed as Mazan Temirzhanov. A 67-year-old seems too old to have been their father. Perhaps he had a son with the same name who was at the front, and who lost daughters Fati, twelve, Tokui, eight, and Arzi, five, and sons Shokhai, six, and Akhmat, three.

  There are 112 people with the surname Misirov on the list, and seventy Temirzhanovs, including little Osman, six, son of Makhmut, who takes up the last – 310th – place.

  The hamlet of Glashevo was analysed in the same way, with sixty-three people listed by name as having been killed by the ‘Germanfascist grabbers and their accomplices’. Here the Soviet soldiers were a bit more restrained in their slaughter. Just nine of the victims were children, while twenty-two of them were men between the ages of sixteen and sixty. But there were still tragedies. Osman Glashev, a man from the village who presumably was at the front, lost his daughters Marzhanat, Illauka, Nazhabat and Bagaly, born in 1936, 1937, 1938 and 1940 respectively. Almost everyone on the list has the surname Glashev, which gave the name to the whole hamlet, and the family must have been almost wiped out by the attack.

  There are no equivalent lists for the hamlet of Kunyum, or Upper Cheget, or Kurnoyat, or for Mukhol. And it is not certain that the lists we do have are complete either. In Sauty, for example, two daughters of the woman Mariyam – who came crawling to Khanshiyat Temirzhanova’s door leaving a blood trail – are listed as killed, but they are aged nine and five and neither of them is young enough to be the infant who flew two metres through the air after being hit by a bullet. Likewise, the Sarbashev family that Kakus Gazayeva remembered burying in Sauty – they had all been shot point-blank – does not feature on the lists at all.

  Subsequent investigations did, however, give total death tolls. Published documents gave the figures 393, 373 and 458. Documents intended for internal use gave higher figures: 713 and 723. The fact that the government was not prepared to publish the true, higher figures may suggest a degree of lingering guilt among officials in the Cherek region who continued to claim the Germans had murdered their neighbours.

  Each survivor also received a detailed report on the value of their lost property. One Aminat Sarbasheva and her family lost, for example, 300 kilograms of maize, 800 kilograms of potatoes, five sheep, 50 kilograms of meat, 50 kilograms of flour, a sewing machine, some cloth, two hats, two tunics, a fur coat, two pairs of boots, ten mattresses, eight pillows and ten blankets. This property’s total value was 107,400 roubles, or the amount of money Sarbasheva would have earned at her 1940 salary level in slightly more than eleven years.

  It is hard to imagine who the officials thought they were fooling with this drivel, even though it was supposedly confirmed by two witnesses and was signed by a whole list of officials. Sarbasheva would have known who destroyed her house and shot her relatives point-blank in the back of the head, and no amount of maize or hats or sewing machines would have made any difference. The officials compiling the reports knew the lists were a load of nonsense as well, as Mamayev – who was one of the signatories – testified to investigators in his old age.

  ‘I heard that the Soviet soldiers killed civilians and burned the houses in the villages, although I did not see them myself; however, there were no German soldiers in the gorge at that time,’ recalled Baraz Mamayev, who was explicit that the ‘bandits’ had done nothing against the population. ‘I knew Battal Tabaksoev and Ismail – Khutai was his other name – Zankishiev well. None of them shot civilians in Sauty and did not take part in burning houses.’

  But these invented reports of the massacre passed up through the Soviet command levels – where officials presumably did not know it had been committed by their own troops on the rampage – and must have shocked and outraged even higher-ranking officials. The reports were incredible, yet there it was in black and white. Balkar traitors had changed sides to fight for the Germans and had slaughtered their own neighbours.

  It was a war crime that could hardly be left unpunished.

  The NKVD examined the consciences of the whole Balkar population, and sent its conclusions to Lavrenty Beria in a document dated 23 February 1943. The Balkars, the report said, had welcomed the Germans to their lands. Secret organizations had existed despite the best efforts of the NKVD, and there counter-revolutionary groups had undermined the efforts of the Red Army.

  ‘In October 1942, when part of the 37th Army retreated to the passes through Balkaria, bandits attacked particular units, exchanged fire with them, destroyed transport, weapons and goods. In the Cherek region, in one battle, several soldiers and commanders were killed and 80 people were disarmed.’ ‘An anti-aircraft gun’ was taken.

  Khutai’s anti-aircraft gun seems to have been an important charge laid at the feet of the Balkars, as was the fact that the fascists allowed the ‘bandits’ to have their own headquarters in the Cherek region and to guard the gorge themselves against attempts by the Red Army to return. Even here, in an internal top secret document, the NKVD did not mention the real reason why the traumatized villagers were desperate to keep the Soviet forces out of their valley.

  The report went on that the Germans pulled out of the mountains but promised to return, leaving Khutai to hold their territory for them. ‘Fulfilling the Germans’ order, the bandit organization of the Cherek region – headed by Zankishiev and his chief of staff Tabaksoev – org
anized the defence of the Cherek region from the offensive of the Red Army and for a month guarded the entrances and exits from the gorge. The majority of the male population of the region took part in the armed uprising,’ the report said, adding that the situation was the same in the Chegem region, where the villagers had risen up against collectivization in 1930.

  The NKVD said it had already arrested 845 people from among the 40,909 Balkars living in their five valleys, but a lot of ‘bandits’ were still hiding in the mountains and being supported by their relatives. Some of the bandits had surrendered, but others refused to do so, including Khutai.

  The catalogue of treachery, crime, violence and – from Khutai – defiance required a major punishment, and the report suggested one.

  ‘As a result of the above-listed, we think it is necessary to resolve the question of the possibility of deporting the Balkars outside the Kabardino-Balkaria region,’ it said.

  The Balkars were going to pay for defending their homes against murder committed by the soldiers given the task of protecting them. The deportation was at hand.

  16.

  The ‘Unnation’ was a New Phenomenon

  In September 1944, one of the last volumes of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia was published. The encyclopedia was the storehouse of Soviet orthodoxy on all subjects and, in this volume, it was the turn of the North Ossetian Autonomous Republic to be described fully, with a map which showed that North Ossetia was bordered to the west by the Kabardin Republic.

  This may not seem like an earthshaking piece of information, and it was largely irrelevant to the article, but for the Turkic people of the high Caucasus, it was crucial. For it was the first step in a process of removing them from the present and the past. Until the deportation, the map would have shown the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic. Now, the reference to the Balkars was gone. It was as if they had never existed.

  This method of rewriting history was perfected in the new, second edition of the encyclopedia, which was published from 1947, starting with a single volume on the Soviet Union as a whole. Under ‘national composition’ every people in the great sprawling communist state was listed, from the ‘Russian’ nation right down to the ‘Assyrian’ with just 20,000 people. But the Balkars and the Karachais had vanished. They had not only lost their homelands, but they had lost any public acknowledgement of their existence. They were still alive in exile, but they had ceased to exist as recognized entities.

  There was, however, a chilling echo of their absence. The ethnic composition of the Kabardin Republic – the former homeland of the Balkar people – in 1933 was listed as 60 per cent Kabardin and 10.7 Russian. There was no explanation for why the figures did not add up to 100.

  As the encyclopedia’s second edition was completed, volume after volume rolled off the presses. Under ‘B’, there was no article on the Balkars. Under ‘K’, there was none on the Karachais. The other deported nations were ignored as well, with no articles on the Ingush, the Kalmyks and more. The article on the Kabardin Republic failed to mention the Balkars once in its entire thirteen pages, despite their having lived there since the dawn of recorded history. Robert Conquest, a combative British historian who investigated the deportations during Soviet times and came up with the above examples, likened this to something out of George Orwell.

  ‘They are ignored almost as if they had never been – in some cases, exactly as if they had never been. There are precedents for this occurring in the case of individuals in the USSR: men . . . were for decades what George Orwell christened “unpersons”. The “unnation” was a new phenomenon,’ Conquest wrote in his book The Nation Killers, published in 1970.

  As far as the Soviet Union was concerned, these nations did not exist and now never had done.

  But the problems faced by the newly deported and newly non-existent Karachais and Balkars in their new homes in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan were very real indeed. They arrived between December 1943 and May 1944 – cruel months in a region where temperatures drop to minus forty degrees in winter – in villages and towns that could barely feed themselves, let alone strangers, during the worst war of all time.

  Azret Khadzhiev, a Balkar man born in 1934, was staying with family friends on the night of the deportation so he was shipped to Kazakhstan without his parents, and ended up in a village called Khrisenko in the Pavlodar region near the border with Russia. He lived for a while with distant relatives, but they could not afford to feed him and were forced to leave him in an orphanage full of children lost in the deportations: Balkars, Chechens, Ingush and others.

  ‘I was there for all that winter and people died everywhere. The collective farm fed us but when the wind was blowing and it was cold they could not reach us and that’s when we would go hungry. People died but God helped me, and I survived. The second winter I was lucky and was taken in by distant relatives in a different region,’ he remembered more than sixty years later.

  According to an NKVD document written in September 1944, there were 68,000 Karachais and 38,000 Balkars in the ‘special settlements’ set up to receive them. The deportees lived under stringent restrictions on movement. They could not leave their designated place of settlement without a permit, and could be imprisoned if they did. Collective farms naturally kept back food for their members, and the new arrivals – already weakened by their terrible experience – sickened and died.

  It is hard to pin down the early mortality rates among the settlers, but it was certainly high. In official documents, 471,871 people from all nations had been deported by July 1946, of whom 104,632 had already died. The experience naturally had a catastrophic effect on the birth rate as well, and just 7,976 babies were born in that period. That equalled a death rate of 22 per cent in two years, which testifies to the terrible conditions the settlers were forced to endure.

  By 1951, more precise data had been gathered by the Soviet security apparatus. Published in an internal Interior Ministry table, it again highlighted the dreadful conditions faced by the deportees from the North Caucasus. Despite failing to include figures for 1943 or 1944, which must have been the years with the highest death tolls, the picture is appalling. In 1945, 44,652 people died and 2,230 were born. The next year 15,634 died, and 4,971 were born. The births figure did not overtake deaths until 1949, and the total number of deaths between 1945 and 1950 was almost double that of births.

  In April 1949, the population of Karachais was 57,491, while there were 31,873 Balkars: a decline of 15 per cent and 16 per cent respectively on their estimated pre-deportation numbers. The scattered populations were in danger of disappearing altogether, while the restrictions on movement and work stopped them finding each other and re-establishing family or neighbourly groups.

  ‘My relatives – my mother, my sisters – had gone to Almaty and they did not know where I was. They finally found me but then they found out they could not get permission to move me to them. You needed the right piece of paper,’ remembered Khadzhiev.

  ‘I worked in a teenagers’ work brigade. I was an orphan effectively. My father had died when the war started, he was in prison and they killed him. People say this Stalin is good, but how could he take someone’s livestock, send him to prison, shoot him and leave a kid like I was as an orphan? Could that person be good? I was illiterate, but a relative wrote to say that my sister and my brother lived in Almaty and had work. You could not even go to the next door village in those days. We had to sign up every month at the komendatura, and I did not get to Almaty until I was fifteen. I had not seen my mother for five or six years.’

  The settlers had little time to remember their homeland, where their villages mouldered away with no one to look after them. But, in those high mountains, a handful of tribesmen remained – the bandits. Since they had not lived in the villages anyhow, they avoided being rounded up by the army and instead were left behind after their people vanished, like fish without a sea to swim in, lacking neighbours, friends and family.

  The Soviet government se
nt a Balkar man called Akhiya Misirov up into the hills to persuade the outlaws to surrender, promising them an amnesty. Many of them agreed to lay down their illegal arms, although they surely knew the amnesty was illusory. Sure enough, they were sentenced to twenty-five years in prison – effectively, a death sentence in the conditions of the time – when they gave themselves up. Perhaps they had no choice since their supplies of food had dried up when their neighbours and families were taken away. But some people resolved to stay in their native hills, and to spurn the government’s offer. Ismail ‘Khutai’ Zankishiev was among them and it is these last months of his life that created the legend that today hangs around him.

  ‘Ismail Zankishiev, the leader of the bandit organization, is hiding in the mountains of the Cherek region with the remains of his organization. He announced that he will not legalize himself because the [Soviet Union’s] signing of a treaty with England and America gives him the possibility of surrendering to the English authorities, who will apparently soon own the Caucasus,’ said a report by the NKVD.

  According to the stories now told about him, Khutai and a man called Shabayev moved together through the mountains, stealing cattle to eat which they would slaughter and store in natural deep freezes provided by the glaciers. They moved fast, crossing from valley to valley, exploiting the knowledge of local terrain that only they had. As the only Balkars left in their native mountains, they have become a symbol of the freedom their nation had lost. Balkars today have forgiven Khutai for his corruption and his viciousness in the 1920s and 1930s, and instead bless him for the defiance he showed.