Balkars Mark 71st Anniversary of Their Deportation with Important New Book

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, March 8 – Seventy-one years ago today, Stalin deported 37,103 Balkars, more than half of whom were children, to Central Asia, from which they were permitted to return only 20 years later.  This year, as last, the Balkars are marking the event with the publication of an important new book certain to mobilize their national consciousness.

 

             Last year on what was a “round” anniversary, Maria and Viktor Kotlyarov published “Balkars: Deportation. Witnesses Testify” (in Russian) containing the reminiscences of dozens of the survivors of that horrific event (http://nazaccent.ru/content/10897-bol-i-gordost.html). This year, the Balkars have issued an even more monumental two-volume work.

 

            Entitled “Under the Shadow of the Mountains” (in Russian) and edited by Boris Temukuyev, the two volumes assemble information about almost all significant Balkars who were born at the end of the 19^th century and participated in the Russian civil war (nazaccent.ru/content/15094-v-nalchike-k-godovshine-deportacii-balkarcev.html).

 

            Because the Balkars are so few in number, they not only always seek each other out but remember the past, good and bad, about their co-ethnics, Temukuyev writes in the introduction. But it is “extraordinarily difficult to find written testimonies” from that period because war, occupation, and deportation have all had an impact.

 

            Nonetheless, Temukuyev has found hundreds of such texts, prepared them on his computer, and, in what is a telling detail, has had to publish these two volumes without any support from the government of Kabardino-Balkaria but with only his own money, the publisher says.

 

            The Balkars form only 13 percent of the population of that, behind the Circassian Kabards who make up 57 percent of the total and the ethnic Russians who represent 22 percent of the total.  But both their links to the Turkish world – they speak a Turkic language – and their control of much rural land make them more important than their numbers might suggest.

 

            And like other nations who were deported in Soviet times – with the first being deported under Lenin and the last under Brezhnev – the Balkars have had their national identities reinforced by the commemoration of their victimhood. The publication of books like these means that the mobilizing potential of those long-ago events will only be increased.