Soviet deportations of Chechens and Ingush

The Soviet deportations of Chechens and Ingush were a series of deportations conducted by Joseph Stalin's totalitarian regime in the later stage of World War II after the Soviet Red Army retook the part of Chechnya previously occupied by Nazi Germany. 

  The deportations saw 400,000 Chechens and 91,250 Ingush expelled from the area within eight days.

Events


Fearing that the Chechnya's mountainous terrain favors guerrilla war, the Soviets entrapped the Chechens and Ingush by inviting them to join the Red Army Day celebrations on February 23, 1944. Once they showed up, they were arrested by soldiers armed with machine guns. The Chechen and Ingush deportees were sent to camps across Central Asia and Siberia. They were not allowed to return to Chechnya until 1957.

Impact

The Chechens and Ingush lost as much as 33% of their total pre-war population under the Soviet invasion. This is around the same percentage of population that Cambodia lost during the Cambodian genocide (1975‒79) under the pro-Soviet Khmer Rouge regime. 





Academic views

Some historians classify the Soviet deportations of Chechens and Ingush as a genocide, just as the many other crimes against humanity committed by the Soviet Union. 
 "In the 1939-1941 period alone, Soviet-inflicted suffering on all citizens in Poland exceeded that of Nazi-inflicted suffering on all citizens. (...) The Soviet-imposed myth about "Communist heroes of resistance" enabled them for decades to avoid the painful questions faced long ago by other Western countries." Johanna Granville, H-Net Review of Jan T. Gross. Revolution from Abroad.





Related pages

 Holodomor
 Soviet deportation of Greeks
 Soviet deportation of Koreans
 Soviet persecution of Poles during World War II
 Soviet deportations from Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina

Footnotes

References

Category:Racism
Category:Communism
Category:Deportations
Category:Soviet crimes against humanity