ECHO OF DEPORTATION

Maria KATYSHEVA

“If I could, I would destroy all Russians, except doctors and teachers,” was the only phrase in the essay of one of my fifth graders. For me, an eighteen-year-old teacher in one of the rural schools in the Shatoi region, these words were a strong and unexpected blow. Why? For what? How did we Russians cause such hatred? And what should I do with the author of this short essay? If I tell the director, he might just give the student a good beating: Bexalt did not always act according to Sukhomlinsky, he believed that tomboys only understand a strong hand. I didn't want executions. And the class would not forgive me for this, because I myself encouraged them to write on the topic “What would I do if I could” sincerely, the way they think. They wrote sincerely, about their own childhood. Only this essay... I decided to take my time, first figure it out and understand what is behind these cruel words.

Dogman, why do you hate us Russians so much?” - I asked my landlady in the evening. The answer was no less stunning: “The Russians evicted us...” It was the end of the 60s, the “thaw”, having failed to justify the hopes and expectations associated with it, ended. The time has come for prohibition and strict regulation in matters of publicity. The word “censorship” has come into common use everywhere. This was a time of falsification of historical facts, some of them were “favored” in ways pleasing to the ideologists, others were completely hushed up as not meeting the goals of the party. The topic of deportation at that time was considered one of the most dangerous; its discussion was excluded. Repressions, the names of the victims, especially the fact of the eviction of entire peoples - what is the practical demonstration of the Soviet ideals of internationalism? It was forbidden to mention this, and God forbid that even a hint of the previous excesses of the authorities leaked to the media.
I remember one characteristic episode that I witnessed later, in the early 80s, while working at a newspaper. Local poet Ivan Mintyak brought a selection of poems to “Grozny Rabochiy” for the Sunday poetry page, among others there was a poem about abandoned gardens, so sad in autumn. The editor, after some thought, put it aside: “We won’t give this, otherwise the regional committee will say that we are reminding you about the eviction: the Chechens were deported, and the abandoned gardens have gone wild.” Although there was no hint of politics or deportation there.
“...Don’t be so upset. We understand that this was done by the authorities, Stalin...” Dogman reassured me. In 1944, she was a teenager, she understood and remembered everything well. From her I learned how those deported died on the way to Siberia and Central Asia, how they died of hunger and cold, how difficult it was to survive. Then for the first time I heard the name of Malika Chikueva, a girl who, there, in a frozen freight train carrying exiles farther and farther from their native land, accompanied herself on the accordion, sang a song cursing Stalin... With Malika Chikueva, an elderly woman who passed away songs from the hell of camps and prisons, but who retained the beauty of her soul, I will become acquainted with many years later, as a correspondent for the regional party newspaper “Grozny Rabochiy,” already during the period of perestroika. One of my journalistic works will be the article “The Death and Revival of Zumsoy,” and for the first time I also heard about the tragedy that happened in this village in 1944 from my landlady Dogman: Zumsoy was very close to the village where I taught. Journalists working in the local press in the 70s and 80s most often had to write about people who either experienced all the hardships of eviction from beginning to end, or were born and raised in exile and retained memories of it.
It coincided in time whether you were taking on an essay about a scientist, artist, writer... That Makhmud Esambaev, that Raisa Akhmatova, Khalid Oshaev, Lyalya Nasukhanova, and many, many others experienced this. The authors of the essays were inevitably forced to perform miracles of balancing act: to talk about people in whose lives deportation was a huge event, but this fact was supposed to be passed over in silence. My journalistic practice, naturally, also brought me together with such people. These are Abuzar Aydamirov, and Akhmad Suleymanov, and Kati Chokaev, and then young, and now famous, “Promethean” writers... Through communication with them, through impressions from business trips to Maisty, Galanchozh, UrusMartan, Shatoi and Vedeno, through Introducing Stepan Savelyevich Kashurko to the work of the search group, page after page of the tragedy of the people unfolded before me. The apotheosis of this tragedy, of course, was Khaibakh, which was first talked about from the pages of a newspaper only in 1989 - the journalist of the youth newspaper “Komsomolskoe Plyamya” Said Bitsoev, who recorded and published his memoirs, dared (at that time that’s what he dared) to do. eyewitness of the events Dziyautdin Malsagov in a selection with materials from Akhmad Suleymanov, Salamat Gaev and Dalkhan Khozhaev. But I always remembered the words: “If I could, I would destroy all the Russians...”, and therefore, when the interlocutor told how the Russians helped their family during the eviction, and then during the deportation, I was glad that people they do not forget this, they say with gratitude: it means that not everyone was an instrument of Stalin’s evil will and willingly obeyed vile orders, not everyone lost their humanity; This means that not all Chechens treat us with hatred. In Khaibakh, Khamzat Murtuzaliev, a native of this village, told how soldiers helped them get ready, packed their belongings, and forced the confused mother of the family to take expensive things, thanks to which they survived in Kazakhstan. Another recalled: when in exile they, the children, weak from hunger, were fading away, lying under one blanket, a Russian neighbor came and brought a bucket of potatoes. She noticed that no one had come out of this house for several days, and she understood what was going on. “Go away, Russian,” the father of the family greeted her with rude words, “don’t give us your potatoes.” “You are a fool,” the woman replied, “we are just as exiled as you. Only when we were brought here, there was no one here and no one to help us...”
This is how people of different nationalities survived, helping each other. And at the funeral meeting in Khaibakh, the old people spoke warmly about Captain Gromov, who tried to stop the crime. Someone then spoke about a whole group of soldiers, Ryazan guys, who refused to obey the order to shoot the inhabitants of one of the mountain villages and were shot along with them. Later, while working for the newspaper “People”, I came across a detailed description of this story in the article “Red Edelweiss”: its author is an old soldier, one of the direct participants in the events that happened in the Maisty-khi gorge. When the war began in Chechnya in 1994, he, remembering 1944, would say: “...Now I understand what a knot Stalin and his company tied with my hands in those years in the Caucasus. Now we wash ourselves with blood, untying... All the bumps are now falling on us - the Russians. And Ukrainians, Jews, and Uzbeks took part in those operations... And the main command was not given from the Kremlin by Russian people...”
But such is the lot of a state-forming or, as they also say, imperial nation. She has to bear the full weight of responsibility for mistakes, and even for crimes of those in power, and then also hear: “If I could, I would destroy...”. About the military operations in Chechnya in 1994-96, after the end of the so-called first war, a well-known politician said live on air that it was a mistake and a shame for Russia. But who at the top was punished for this mistake, paid at such a high price? Who apologized to the affected people? We must once again bear the burden of responsibility...
Some, especially abroad, say: 60-70 years have passed, the repressions took place a long time ago, new generations have grown up, why now reopen old wounds by remembering all this? Yes, this is the pain that does not go away over the years, it grows in new generations. I know this from myself, since I come from a family crushed by repression. This pain lives in the heart, knocks like the ashes of Klaas, splashes out with the words “if I could, I would destroy...” This pain is so palpable also because justice has not yet been restored to the victims. How many years have passed since the adoption of the Rehabilitation Law?! That's it... But it is not being implemented. We have no time for him. As they liked to say in Soviet times, turnover gets stuck. We have “either diarrhea or scrofula” - either a gas crisis or a financial and economic crisis. But long-standing problems, and especially problems of territorial rehabilitation, still hang like a sword of Damocles over the tranquility of Russian society. It is possible that again the Ryazan boys, like their grandfathers in 1944, like their fathers in 1994, will be forced to go on a business trip to the Caucasus - for blood. And again, somewhere in mountain villages they will start calling dogs by the nicknames Yarmal or Shaman, and one of the fifth graders will write: “I would destroy the Russians...”
Do we need it?
The acute pain still caused by past repressions will subside only when the whole truth is told and the justice trampled upon in those years is restored. What about the scars? Well, of course they will stay. But scars, as we know, give masculinity and remind us of the lessons of the past...