The memory of Balkars deportation

In March 1944, accused of collaborating with the Nazis, tens of thousands of people from the Caucasus were forcibly transferred to Central Asia and Siberia. It was only 13 years later that they were able to return to the present-day republic of Kabardino-Balkaria. Official commemorations avoided mentioning Stalin and the Soviet oppressors. But local historians invite reflection on the relationship between the Russians and the ‘minor peoples’.

Moscow (AsiaNews) - A commemoration was held in Nalchik, capital of the Russian republic in the Caucasus of Kabardino-Balkaria, in honour of the 81st anniversary of the deportation of the Balkars, the Turanian ethnic group that makes up a third of the republic's population, heirs of the ancient Volga Bulgars.

On 8 March 1944, on the accusation of collaborating with the Nazi occupying forces, by order of the head of Stalin's KGB, Lavrentij Berja, the entire Balkan population of the area was deported to Central Asia, the majority (over 37 thousand people) to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, and about 500 Balkars were dispersed between Uzbekistan and Siberia. According to official data, around three thousand of them died of hunger, cold and disease. The survivors were only able to return home after 13 years.

The deportation was condemned as unjust during the Khrushchev years, and today there are about 100,000 Balkars living in the republic. The president of Kabardino-Balkaria, Kazbek Kokov, further recalled the event as ‘a criminal act of arbitrariness and denial of all law and rights, one of the most tragic pages in our history’.

Without explicitly naming Stalin and the Soviet authorities as the culprits of this historic infamy, Kokov emphasised that today ‘the Balkars are building their future in the spirit of brotherhood of the single multi-ethnic family of Kabardino-Balkaria and all of Russia’, trying to gain a current political advantage from the commemoration.

The ceremony took place at the Memorial to the Balkarian victims of the repressions in Nalchik, with all the senior officials of the local administration and a large crowd of people. The head of the adjacent Caucasian republic of Karachay-Cherkessia, Rashid Temrezov, also sent a message of solidarity on behalf of ’ the Karachay who have lived through this terrible event, sharing the suffering of their Balkan brothers, and we understand their feelings well’, also avoiding pointing the finger at the Soviet oppressors. The president of Ingushetia, Makhmud-Ali Kalimatov, also joined in the general remembrance of ‘this painful page in the common history of the Caucasian peoples’.

In Khronika Kavkaza, the historian Majrbek Vačagaev discussed the matter with the journalist and Balkarian dissident Adam Badt, who warns that the question of responsibility for the deportation of the Balkars ‘is not as simple as it may seem, because it is only one of the many episodes of the long Russian domination of the Caucasian peoples, who have always considered us liable to repression and extermination at any moment and for any reason’.

In this region the Russians ‘have always been hated as conquerors and tyrants, either with protests and weapons in hand, or simply with resentment in the depths of their souls’. According to Badt, this story should ‘serve as a lesson to all the minor peoples who have ended up under the heel of the Russians’.

Looking back over Russian history, Vačagaev observes that ‘the Muscovite rulers have always needed to carry out some form of massacre, from the archers of Peter the Great to the uprisings and revolutions, and even the mass deportations, as the backbone of state policy’. In particular, with the repression of the Balkans Stalin intended to ‘send a signal to the entire Russian population, tired of the war, which could be considered a form of betrayal’.

In fact, there is no historical evidence that the Balkans had collaborated with the Nazis, other than the ‘testimonies’ extorted by Stalinist commissars under the command of Beria, and this also applies to the other Caucasian peoples, or the Kalmyks and Soviet Germans, who never even came into contact with the invaders, but who in turn suffered repression simply because they shared Hitler's ethnicity.

As the two commentators recall, ‘tens of thousands of Balkars and Turans from the Caucasus lost their lives on the front lines of the Great Patriotic War, but they will not be remembered in this year of celebrations of the Russian victory’.

Photo: Marie Čcheidzeová / Wikipedia