History with revaluation

Chechen authorities are not giving up attempts to increase compensation for Stalin's deportation

50 years after the decision on the rehabilitation of the Chechen and Ingush peoples and the restoration of the Chechen-Ingush autonomy within the RSFSR, abolished, as is known, by Stalin in 1944 after the total deportation of the indigenous population to Central Asia, in Grozny there is an increased interest in compensation for moral and material damage caused by deportation. And at the beginning of the year, at the first January meeting of the Chechen parliament, the speaker of its lower house, Dukvakha Abdurakhmanov, “on topic” proposed erecting a monument in Grozny to Nikita Khrushchev, the head of the CPSU Central Committee, who decided that the peoples evicted by his predecessor should return to their homeland. The resolution was unanimously approved by the deputies.

Grozny, where not all residential areas have been restored, is known for its reverent attitude towards monuments. On Pobedy Avenue, for example, a monument to the Chechen, Ingush and Russian Bolsheviks, demolished during the war, has been rediscovered, and a few blocks away there is a completely new monument - to the deceased President Akhmat Kadyrov by Tsereteli. So there is practically no doubt that a monument to Khrushchev will appear in Grozny - even despite the all-Russian revision of Nikita Sergeevich’s “liberal” legacy. By the way, in Magas, the new capital of neighboring Ingushetia, Khrushchev Street has existed for several years.

In addition to the monument, Chechen deputies added a memorable date to the calendar. Now, in addition to the mourning day of deportation (February 23), there will be a day of rebirth - January 9. It was on this day in 1957 that a government decree was adopted on the rehabilitation of the Vainakhs and the restoration of the Chechen-Ingush Republic. Apparently, there are no disagreements. The local press, however, expresses a modest opinion that it would still be more appropriate to erect a monument to the victims of deportation and to those dozens of families who, even before the decision of the Union government, illegally returned to their homes. The public is also concerned about the material side of compensation for harm: the situation with it is clearly more complicated than with the perpetuation of memory.

Constitutional judges of Chechnya last week asked their federal colleagues to evaluate the law on the rehabilitation of victims of political repression. From the point of view of the acting head of the Constitutional Court, Sheikh-Akhmet Abdurakhmanov, the amount of compensation for the rehabilitated, established by the amendment to the law of 2000, is 10 thousand rubles. per person - cannot be considered satisfactory. The Chechen side is also not satisfied with the procedure for issuing compensation. To receive money, citizens have to collect a whole package of various documents, including a certificate of rehabilitation, which is very difficult to obtain due to the damage caused by the last two wars to the archives of the local Ministry of Internal Affairs. In each case, you have to contact the information center of the federal Ministry of Internal Affairs, which still stores files with data on all deported Chechens. But the procedure is such that each request is processed individually.

The Ministry of Labor and Social Development of Chechnya believes that the total number of surviving victims is just under 149 thousand people. In the early 1990s, when compensation was paid to those rehabilitated throughout the country, Dudayev’s “set aside” Chechnya demonstratively refused payments. As a result, deported Chechens remained the only category that was almost unaffected by rehabilitation in its financial sense.

At the same time, Grozny regularly reminds that the amounts of compensation provided for by federal law are too small. The alternative amount does not appear in the current appeal to the Constitutional Court. However, in the recent history of Chechnya there have been cases of rather ambitious determination of the limit of material compensation. For example, two years ago, the former head of the State Council of Chechnya, Taus Dzhabrailov, presenting in Moscow one of the options for an agreement on the division of powers between the republic and the federal center, proposed paying each victim 1,000 times the minimum wage. At that time, this amount was 720 thousand rubles, that is, 72 times more than all other politically repressed persons. In terms of the number of victims in Chechnya, it amounted to more than 100 billion rubles. - this is one and a half times more than the federal budget allocated for the restoration of the Chechen economy from 2000 to 2004.

Chechen constitutional judges are also concerned about other compensation - for housing and property lost by residents during the last wars (350 thousand rubles per family for a completely destroyed house and another 50 thousand for lost property). Although the Constitutional Court cannot yet replace the prosecutor's office, judges for some reason complain there about four hundred criminal cases, initiated, according to their data, mainly against unscrupulous applicants, although the main complaints of citizens are usually addressed to officials who include their relatives and friends in the lists of deprived people and demanding fabulous kickbacks for transferring real money. I. o. Chairman of the Constitutional Court Sheikh-Akhmet Abdurakhmanov believes that the applicant simply cannot mislead all seven members of the republican compensation commission: “This is not the fault of the recipients, but of the members of the commission, and not a single official from this category has been held accountable.” In this case, the judge is not entirely right: the former chairman of the relevant government committee was demonstratively sentenced to imprisonment last year. After this compensation, Chechen Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov personally took control of the compensation, and now it is absolutely clear that if anyone is to blame for the abuses, it is the careless citizens themselves.

Ivan SUKHOV