Grim Anniversary Tomorrow

Tomorrow is Red Army Day and an official holiday here in Kyrgyzstan where it is called Homeland Defenders' Day. It is also the 64th anniversary of the deportation of the Chechens and Ingush from their homeland in the Caucasus to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. I wrote a fairly detailed piece on Stalin's ethnic cleansing of the Chechens and Ingush last year. There are still Chechen communities here in Kyrgyzstan that can trace their origins back to this tragic event.