Balkar Deportation Anniversary Overshadowed by International Women’s Day Mustn't Be Ignored

Paul Goble

            Staunton, March 8 – Just as the anniversary of the deportation of the Chechens and Ingush falls on the same day as Russia’s Fatherland Defenders holiday, so too the anniversary of Stalin’s deportation of 37,000 Balkars to Central Asia and Siberia falls on International Women’s Day, coincidences that mean these national tragedies are often overshadowed.

            That makes it all the more important that such actions are remembered not only by the victims and their descendants but by all people of good will so that these crimes of the Soviet system are never forgotten and are thus less likely to be repeated in some form, “hybrid” or not, by the post-Soviet regime.

            The travails of the Balkars are recounted by Kavkaz-uzel in a detailed article issued for this anniversary (kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/176100/).  It shows the complexities of the experience of this Turkic nation, the complicity of Stalin-era officials in its mistreatment, and the failure of later Soviet and Russian officials to complete its rehabilitation.

            Between August 1942 and early 1943, German forces occupied five districts of the Kabardino-Balkaria ASSR. Some Kabards collaborated with them, and many, including Communist Party and soviet officials, formed their own independent armed anti-Soviet partisan units, thus providing Moscow with all the excuse it felt it needed to repress them.

            In January 1944, the State Defense Committee began discussing their deportation, and in February, NKVD head Lavrenty Beria and military commanders began discussing how to carry it out. The security service dispatched 21,000 men to KB ASSR to carry it out, telling the population that these soldiers and officers were resting before a new attack on the Germans.

             But while this force was being prepared to go into attack, it wasn’t going to be used against the Germans even though the war was still going on. Instead, on March 8, over the course of two hours, the NKVD units deported all Balkars they could find within the KB ASSR and others located beyond that republic.

            According to archival figures, 37,713 Balkars, 52 percent of whom were children and 30 percent women, were put on trains and sent to Central Asia. In addition, the organs arrested 478 “’anti-Soviet elements’” and after trial executed many of them.  Those deported were given only 20 minutes to collect their things.

            The train journey to Central Asia lasted 18 days, over the course of which 562 Balkars died, their bodies disposed of along the roadbed. The overwhelming majority ended up a special settlers in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, strictly limited in their movements and prohibited from returning to their homeland.

           

            As a result of the deportation, the KB ASSR was renamed the Kabard ASSR, part of the territory of its predecessor was transferred to the Georgian SSR, and numerous places in the republic which had featured the names of Balkars were renamed in order to wipe out any memory of that nation.

            On March 14, 1944, Beria reported to the Politburo that the deportation had been a success’ and on August 22, the Russian government awarded 109 of those involved with deporting this nation with orders and medals.

            During the deportation, the Balkars lost some of the elements of their material culture and most opportunities to get an education. Only one of every six Balkar children within the deported nation were able to attend school, and almost none gained a higher education. Moreover, Central Asians viewed all Balkars as “enemies of the Soviet power” as a result of Moscow propaganda.

            When Balkars serving in the Red Army began to be demobilized in the summer of 1945, they were compelled to go to the places where their relatives had been deported and, despite their patriotic services, compelled to live as restricted special settlers just like those who had been sent east a year earlier.

            In 1956 and 1957, the special settle restrictions imposed on the Balkars were dropped and the territorial and toponymic characteristics of the pre-1944 republic were all restored, including the return to it of the territory that Moscow had transferred to the Georgian SSR. Kabards hurried home: By 1959, 81 percent of those deported were back in their own republic.

            But many Soviet citizens still viewed them as traitors; and it was only on November 14, 1989, that the USSR Supreme Soviet rehabilitated all of them and condemned what Stalin and Beria had done.  Then in 1991, the RSFSR government followed suit and also rehabilitated the Kabards and all the others deported in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.

            On the 70^th anniversary of the Balkar deportation in 2014, a book collecting the testimonies of more than 100 deportees was published. In 2015, Kabard activists said that in Stalin’s time, more than 63,100 Kabards had been repressed, of which only 60,000 had as yet been rehabilitated.

            And then two years ago, Ismail Sanchiyev, the head of the Council of Elders of the Balkar People, made a declaration that remains true to this day. The Balkars “must unit and achieve complete rehabilitation,” he said. “Otherwise they will cease to exist as an ethnic community.”