Shadow of the Defender of the Fatherland

For Chechens and Ingush, February 23 remains a tragic date

At the end of February, many working citizens had another unexpected vacation dedicated to Defender of the Fatherland Day, formerly known as the Day of the Soviet Army and Navy. Due to tradition, this date, in general, has long ceased to be a professional holiday for the military and has turned into a strange gender counterbalance to “women’s day” on March 8th. Meanwhile, the date of February 23 is doubtful from all points of view, and sometimes it seems that it would be more appropriate to make this day a day of mourning. There is no military glory in Russian history associated with this day, but it annually coincides with the day of remembrance of the total deportation of the Chechen and Ingush people - a tragic event that explains a lot in modern Caucasian politics and the relationship of the inhabitants of the North Caucasus with all other Russians.

Although it is believed that there is peace in the Caucasus, Chechnya and Ingushetia are experiencing another disaster. Right before the holidays, in the forest on the border between them, a large group of rural poor people who were collecting wild garlic found themselves in a federal special operation zone . According to official reports, several civilians were caught in the crossfire between the feds and the militants, but one miraculously surviving witness, a 19-year-old Chechen, says there was no crossfire. That the feds apparently mistook him and his friends for militants, because otherwise it is difficult to explain why they were captured and then several of them were shot. The presidents of both republics, Ramzan Kadyrov and Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, are trying to understand what happened, but it is always difficult when security forces are involved.

Against this background, a scandal almost broke out in Ingushetia: the plan of events of President Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, who, being a military man himself, was going to congratulate his colleagues, came into the possession of the local public. The President had to invite the excited residents of the republic and explain that there would not and could not be any congratulations on the day of grief. And, so that the dates do not overlap, pay a formal congratulatory visit to military units the day before, February 22.

Congratulating a Chechen or Ingush on Defender of the Fatherland Day is not so much an insult, but an extreme tactlessness. However, all the TV did on holidays was congratulations. And on one central channel they showed in a row all the episodes of the series about the last Chechen war, in which the Chechens are absolute evil, and the Russian military are absolute good. For some reason, none of the television and their political bosses in a country that considers itself multinational has ever thought about how all this “good” looks, for example, in a village where they have just buried murdered wild garlic pickers, and there are also televisions working there . And many, if not all, consider themselves and their families to have suffered at the hands of “defenders of the Fatherland.”

Meanwhile, yesterday, February 24, the former Soviet republic of Estonia celebrated its independence day. Despite the demonstrative concern of the Russian authorities for ethnic Russians, 19 years after the collapse of the USSR, who make up almost a third of the population of this small country, Estonia's independence day was not included in the list of television stories in Russia. But it is no coincidence that our holidays are celebrated consecutively.

On February 24, 1918, in Reval (as Tallinn was then called), the very short-lived power of the Bolsheviks there ended, and the National Salvation Committee declared Estonia an independent democratic republic. Exactly the next day the Germans entered Revel. But a day of declared independence was enough for the European powers to recognize it. When the Kaiser's Germany itself collapsed in November 1918, the precedent of February 24 became the basis for the formation of an independent country. The accession of the Baltic countries to the USSR in 1940 was never recognized as legal by most Western countries, until the USSR, at the end of its existence, in September 1991, agreed to the sovereignty of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

On February 24, 1918, the Bolsheviks were rapidly moving towards concluding a very difficult peace for Russia with the Germans in Brest-Litovsk. There was one German offensive and exactly a week left before the treaty was signed. The German offensive, launched on February 24, turned out to be much more significant than the semi-mythical successes of the newly created Red Army near Pskov and Narva: if they existed, they were crossed out by Brest. So the feeling of Russian military pride on February 23 seems somewhat strained.

The deportation of Chechens and Ingush is also not easy. Chechens and Ingush, of course, were not the only ones who fell under the steamroller of Stalinist repressions in general and deportations in particular. The first to fall into the flywheel of total deportation in August 1941 were 367 thousand Volga Germans. They were partially followed by Hungarians, Bulgarians and Finns - for the reason that their countries of origin fought on the same side with Nazi Germany. Then, almost completely, Kalmyks, Karachais, Balkars, Crimean Tatars, Nogais, Meskhetian Turks, and Pontic Greeks were deported. Partially Bulgarians, Crimean gypsies, Kurds.

The Chechens and Ingush simply turned out to be more vocal than others. The day of Operation Lentil, February 23, 1944, when NKVD officers pulled 362 thousand Chechens and 134 thousand Ingush from their homes, loaded them into unheated freight cars and sent them through the pitch-black February frost into the barren steppes of Northern Kazakhstan, has become more famous than the dates deportations of Volga Germans or, say, Karachais.

Chechnya had its own Khatyn - Khaibakh, whose residents, who refused to be evicted, were burned alive. A huge number of people froze along the way. But those who survived melted from many disparate rural communities and archaic teips into one ethnic whole. Naturally, hatred occupied a huge place in their picture of the world. Superimposed on the relatively recent memories of the Great Caucasian War of the 19th century, about General Yermolov and Imam Shamil, it was strengthened a hundredfold by deportation.

For clarity, imagine how you yourself would feel in relation to a state that would not just sweep through your cities with a comb of repression, but one fine day would turn all your people, without regard to gender and age, from young to old, into powerless people prisoners. He would have been thrown into icy heated vehicles and taken to someone else’s distant steppe for 13 long years. And then through gritted teeth he would allow him to return, not just without apologizing, but as if continuing to look askance.

Gulag chronicler Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who saw exiled Chechens in Kazakhstan, singled them out from other victims on ethnic grounds: “The Chechens... are difficult for the surrounding residents... rude, impudent, they openly do not like Russians. But it was necessary... to show independence and courage - and the favor of the Chechens was immediately won! When it seems to us that we are little respected, we need to check whether this is how we live.”

And elsewhere: “There was one nation that did not succumb to the psychology of submission at all. Not loners, not rebels, but the whole nation. These are Chechens... After they were once treacherously pulled from their place, they no longer believed in anything... they never tried to please or please their superiors - but they are always proud of them and even openly hostile. Despising the laws of universal education and those school state sciences, they did not allow their girls to go to school, so as not to spoil them there, and not all the boys either. They did not send their women to the collective farm. And they themselves did not hump the collective farm fields. Most of all, they tried to get a job as drivers: taking care of the engine was not humiliating, in the constant movement of the car they found the saturation of their horseman passion, in the chauffeur's capabilities - their passion for thieves. However, they satisfied this last passion directly. They brought the concept of “stolen”, “robbed” to peaceful, honest, dormant Kazakhstan. They could steal livestock, rob a house, and sometimes simply take it away by force. They regarded the local residents and those exiles who so easily obeyed their superiors as almost the same breed. They only respected rebels."

It is not surprising that this respect for the rebels exploded later, 35 years after the “merciful” permission to return home, with two very difficult wars. In which those who were born in exile became commanders, and their children became soldiers. And those who suffered, among others, were the elderly who remembered the eviction.

I, a person from a family in which there is someone to congratulate on February 23 on the holiday of professional soldiers, will never forget two Caucasian old men, bent by age, with an absolute abyss of disappointment in their faded eyes. One Chechen, huddled in a cold second-class carriage in the middle of a snow-covered field, in a train given for housing to refugees from the devastated Grozny. He reflexively shrank all over and covered his head with his hands when a stool was moved on the floor of the reserved seat - it seemed to him that the cannonade was thundering again. And one Ingush who fought the Germans during the Great Patriotic War and was so seriously wounded near Novorossiysk that his family was told that he had not survived. When he returned home from the front, it turned out that his family, the entire village and the entire people had been evicted to Kazakhstan. And in 1992, his family found itself in the middle of the Ossetian-Ingush conflict in the Prigorodny district, which (the conflict) itself became a direct legacy of the Ingush deportation. 15 years after the conflict in Prigorodny, he sat by his refugee trailer and with half-blind eyes looked at his old garden, located 500 meters away. But on the other side of the impassable administrative border of two Russian regions - Ingushetia and North Ossetia.

Some complimentary historians of “Soviet civilization” recall that Stalin’s deportations, firstly, were not a unique “experience”: the tsarist government in the 1860s-1870s first evicted the North Caucasian highlanders to the plain, inviting those who disagreed to retire to neighboring Turkey, and then deported unreliable people from front-line areas to the imperialist war. And secondly, the deportations were really considered “deportations of retribution.” Argamak, allegedly given by the Chechens to Hitler, is most likely a myth, but few people remember that in the early 1940s, including at the moment when the German Wehrmacht launched an offensive in the North Caucasus, anti-Soviet uprisings were raging in the mountains of Chechnya, which had to be suppressed almost like in the 1990s and 2000s, use front-line aviation.

But that’s the problem: no one in Russia wants to understand what really happened. What are the reasons for mutual bitterness? Is it possible to overcome it, and if so, how. The day of mourning and remembrance on February 23 could become a day of awareness and reconciliation. But it won’t as long as we prefer to celebrate when some of our fellow citizens are grieving. For now, it seems to us that German repentance for Nazism is an absurd and complex tribute to stupid political correctness, and not the only way for society to rehabilitate itself, and not in the legal, but rather in the medical sense of the word.

There are about 1.5 million Chechens and Ingush in Russia - a little more than 1% of the country's population. Some will say that this is too little to pay attention to, while others, on the contrary, will say that it is too much, especially after all the deportations, wars and general troubles caused to the “ethnic majority”. But where you can give a damn about 1%, as a rule, it’s easy to give a damn about the other 99%.

Ivan SUKHOV