Today is the 71st anniversary of the
deportation of the Chechens and Ingush. To celebrate Red Army Day in 1944, the NKVD systematically
deported almost the entire Chechen and Ingush populations from their mountain homeland in the Caucasus to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. There they lived under
severe legal restrictions and in dire poverty. As a result of the extremely poor material conditions in their new places of settlement
over 145,000 died prematurely before the end of 1952. Only in 1957 did the Soviet government restore the Chechen-Ingush ASSR and sanction the
return home of the deportees and their children.
If memory serves, John Le Carre used these deportations as plot elements in his 1994 novel Our Game.
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