Memories of a lost homeland

Albina Digaeva: 3/11/04

Sixty years ago, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin deported nearly half a million Chechens and Ingush to Central Asia and Siberia. Stalin had long suspected both groups of being politically unreliable. The invading German army – with whom some Chechens had collaborated – gave Stalin a pretext to deal with this problem in what he considered an appropriate way: collective punishment and wholesale deportation.

My grandmother, Tamara, was one of those Chechens deported. At the time, she was 10 or 12 years old (my grandmother is not sure of her age). Today, she lives in Moscow, waiting for a visa to France to rejoin her son and his family.

I know what is on my grandmother's mind these days. She wants to die in Chechnya. Her homeland is so dear to her she would not mind returning, even though it has been blown up and ruined. I wonder if she is thinking of her own grandmother, who died in exile in Central Asia.

On February 23, 1944, my grandmother Tamara, her young cousin, and my great-great grandmother were dragged out of their house by Soviet secret police troops, and marched to assembly points where crowds of people were loaded onto trucks and taken to the train station.

There, cattle cars waited for human cargo. The conditions in the trains were unbearable. People had to cut holes into the floor for makeshift toilets. There was no heating, and some people froze to death. Tamara and her cousin were afraid that they would be separated from their sick grandmother. At every station, the train was stopped and doctors checked the passengers' health. Sick people were shot and their bodies left behind.

My great-great-grandmother's condition had not improved when the train reached its final destination, the Chu region of present-day Kyrgyzstan. After a journey of 12 days, the passengers were unloaded onto an open field. They stood in snow up to their knees; it was extremely cold. Nobody welcomed them. The local people were openly hostile to them, because the authorities had warned them that the Chechen and Ingush arrivals were criminals.

Eventually, the deportees were hired at local collective farms. My grandmother and her cousin were forced to live in a shed. They slept on the floor and burned dry grass for heat. The two young girls worked weeding the carrot fields. What little money they were paid was barely enough to buy bread. When they could not afford bread, they secretly collected grains that the tractor drivers had missed in the wheat fields. They tried to save most of their food for their sick grandmother. Once, they even managed to buy her a chicken. When my great-great grandmother was not watching, they licked the leftover bones.

I have often looked at a photo of my grandmother that was taken shortly before she was deported. She was neatly dressed, with short, curly hair.

Tamara's mother, my great-grandmother, was reunited with her daughter after six months. One week later, Tamara's grandmother died. Other Chechens helped the family to bury her. Then, secretly, Tamara left with her mother and cousin for Djambul, a city in southern Kazakhstan.

My own mother was born in Djambul in 1953, the year of Stalin's death. A year later, some Chechens and Ingush started to return home. But even then, this was an illegal journey. Thousands of deportees gathered at train stations to purchase tickets, but an official order had been issued not to sell them any.

Mindful of the need to preserve stability during Nikita Khrushchev's de-Stalinization campaign, the Communist Party Central Committee finally allowed the deportees to return home in 1957. The returning Chechens, however, were made to sign statements that they "would not demand the return of property confiscated at the time of their deportation and that they would not return to those places from which they had been deported."

Today, like my grandmother, I, too, am a refugee. It is painful to remember my childhood in Chechnya. I remember the warm, crunchy Chechen bread that my grandmother used to bake every morning. Her sweet, old cheeks that I used to kiss. I cherish the memories of growing up in my grandparents' house in Grozny.

My grandparents had built the house with their own hands. We had a large garden with yellow and red cherry trees, green apple and pear trees, and an apricot tree. My summers were spent climbing these trees, or sitting on the roof eating apricots. My grandparents' house no longer exists. A bomb destroyed it during the second Russian-Chechen war, which began in the fall of 1999.

Recently, I called my grandmother and asked her to send me some freshly baked Chechen bread. She sounded sad and told me that if I had not gone to the United States, we would still be living together in Chechnya and she would cook me everything I ask. "That would be great," I told her, knowing that it was impossible.

My grandmother does not understand that I came to live in the United States because I had no choice but to leave Chechnya. Like all Chechens, I want nothing more than to live in Chechnya. I hope that one day I can return and take part in rebuilding my homeland.

Editor's Note: Albina Digaeva grew up in Grozny, left Chechnya during the first war with Russia (1994-1996) and was granted asylum to the United States in 1999. She lives in California, where she is pursuing an undergraduate degree.

Posted March 11, 2004 © Eurasianet