Case Study:

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 E. Memories of deportation

The ban on discussing the deportation greatly influenced the Chechen memory of the event. Tragic recollections connected with individual and collective grievances were passed on through the family structures. The destruction of the main social frameworks of memory after the deportation and the loss of spatial and temporal markers during the forced exile transform intergenerational memories into one of the principal sources of the Chechen memory.

Individual memories linger on the physical, moral, and symbolic violence endured during the entire deportation. Beyond recalling starvation, cold, fear, death and sufferings, they are embedded in incomprehension. An incomprehension felt by the deportees when they learn about the decision to deport the entire Chechen population. A decision based on the pretense of a massive collaboration with a German army that most Chechen never saw. Testimonies present the deportation as treason, a betrayal taking physical form in the brutality used by the NKVD soldiers. Testimonies recall the warm welcome that soldiers were given while taking a rest before returning to the front; soldiers were lodged in the local population’s homes. Many victims’ statements express their incredulity when they saw the very soldiers they housed previously enter by force to deport them.

The violence towards women and elders, the non-respect of beliefs, traditions and customs are strongly committed to memory. Survivors systematically point to the fact that men and women were put together in the same cars without any division. They also commonly evoke that they were not allowed to bury, as required by the Muslim tradition, persons who died in the convoys. When visiting the cars during the rare stops, the NKVD guards threw out the dead bodies.

While expressing uniqueness and telling about a particular experience, each testimony, whether oral or written, continually reinforces the Chechen community of destiny. Testimonies relate in similar terms the violence endured during the deportation and the forced exile, and speak uniformly about shared grievances and traumas. These testimonies describe the scattering of the national group (and sometimes a family throughout the whole Soviet territory), the very harsh living conditions, the ban on the Chechen culture and the widespread feeling of abandonment on all sides. They also integrate events that occurred either during the gathering (like the Khaibakh mass killings) or after the forced removal and the massive Russification of the dissolved Chechen-Ingush ASSR(such as the destruction of religious and historical monuments). All these events emerge from witness memories. They are part of a collective memory, which describes the deportation as a tragedy and as breach in a group’s life. It recalls all outstanding facts and episodes that illustrate the violence and rough treatment that the deportees experienced during thirteen years.

The Chechen collective memory structures individual memories. The historical account also supplies a scheme of mediation that also conditions the act of individual recollections. Testimonies not only provide a simple description of individual experiences, but also inscribe them within a formalized framework. With the recurrent use the term of genocide, narratives mix the individual survivor’s life with an attempt to contextualize the Stalinist regime’s genocidal policy.

The genocide has changed the Chechen and Ingush peoples – instead of the big mountain dwellers, of the elegant mountain dwellers, of the holy mountain dwellers, living in mountains for centuries, were born puny and sick children, among which a big number died….The guardians of the national wisdom, of ten centuries of accumulated experience died, the experts of the Chechen-Ingush history, habits, traditions, the experts of the secrecies of the former Masters of the work of metal, and others, died, as died the achug [Caucasian singers] and the expert of the folklore. (Khozhiev, 1991:171.)

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