Let Our Fame Be Great (33 page)

‘Traveller, stop! Honour the memory of the 470 lives of children, women and old folk of this mountain village who were brutally shot and then burnt by the dogs of the Stalinist genocide – the NKVD troops in November 1942. We will save the memory of you for centuries. From Balkaria. 1989,' the monument said.

And the villagers were not prepared to leave it there. A group of people whose families came from the hamlet of Glashevo, all relatives of those killed by the NKVD, demanded a free investigation into the tragedy. The investigation was announced and they waited for a public admission of guilt. And sure enough, on 31 July 1992, Kemal Glashev – who shared a surname with fifty-five of the victims of the massacre – obtained a public admittance that their murders had been committed by Soviet troops.

This preliminary report by military prosecutors described the arrival of Nakin in the upper reaches of the Cherek valley, the murder of around 700 people, and the destruction of more than 500 houses. But it did not satisfy the villagers, for the prosecutors said no court case was planned since, in accordance with the law, the criminal case had been closed when Nakin was killed at the front in January 1943, just over a month after the massacre.

Furthermore, the prosecutors cleared the names of the captain's superiors, leaving Nakin alone to shoulder the blame for what had happened. The report even justified Nakin's actions by claiming that bandits and deserters had opened fire on his soldiers from the villages where the massacres took place.

This whitewash was not good enough for the Glashevo group, and they took their case to the regional parliament. It agreed with them, calling the prosecutors' decision to halt the case ‘unfounded' and officially declaring that the massacres in Upper Balkaria were an act of genocide. The parliament also proclaimed the establishment of a separate investigative committee to record once and for all the truth of what happened.

It was a victory for the villagers, but it did not help their quest for justice. The military prosecutors were not going to be bounced into condemning one of their own, and they took another year and a half to issue a second report, which gave additional information on the
massacre but confirmed that the criminal case would be closed once more, with no charges brought.

This second report's cold chronology of the events of those terrible days gives a bleak glimpse into the inhumanity of the Soviet army. Nakin, the report said, had told his superiors that he had killed 1,200 people in just twenty-four hours, but had been left to operate unsupervised in the remote valley.

The superiors, who had also died by this stage, were once again cleared of wrong-doing.

Of those superiors, General Kozlov had given the oral instruction ‘to wipe villages of Balkaria from the face of the earth, stopping at nothing'. Divisional Commander Shikin, meanwhile, had passed on the instruction on paper, ordering Nakin ‘to conduct the most decisive battle against banditism and its accomplices. In no circumstances should you show pity even to indirect accomplices. If there is a possibility to take hostages [the bandits' relatives], then send them to the plywood factory, but if you have to, destroy them.'

It is a chilling document, and the final whitewash and decision to heap the blame once more on Nakin has a dull, thumping inevitability.

‘In the actions of Major-General P. M. Kozlov, commander of the 37th Army, no crimes are perceived in as far as the oral order to Divisional Commander Shikin “to wipe the villages of Balkaria from the face of the earth” has a figurative character, and therefore cannot be seen as an order to shoot the civilian population,' the prosecutors decided in a conclusion that astounds me every time I read it. Shikin's belated warning to Nakin not to harm women and children – which came after the captain announced he had killed the 1,200 people – got him off the hook as well.

The prosecutors, therefore, officially declared that there was no need to involve the courts and that the case was closed. Their official summary was released in March 1994, and is full of accounts of the fictional battles with bandits that Nakin's troops claimed to have fought, as if that justified their barbarity.

Fortunately, we are not forced to rely on the prosecutors' conclusions for information on the tragedy, since a small group of five Balkars had also been at work. Also in 1994, it published a tiny grey
book with the simple title
The Cherek Tragedy
, based on the facts uncovered by the state commission into the events. In clear, unadorned, straightforward prose, it laid out precisely what had happened in November 1942, stripping away the accumulated lies that had congealed in the military prosecutors' reports and revealing the full horror of the Red Army's rampage. Perhaps with half an eye on the army's whitewash of itself, its authors called their book the ‘first serious attempt' to uncover what had happened.

It is an excellent document, packed with archive reports, a detailed chronology and priceless eyewitness testimony which together form the backbone of my own account of the events.

Among the twenty-one eyewitnesses quoted at length in the book, many of them with grainy portraits to go with them, is a woman called variously Fazika or Nazifa Kishtikova. She was just six years old when the massacre occurred, and managed to escape by hiding under a bed when the soldiers burst in. She had been staying with her aunt Zariyat in Sauty so found herself in the heart of the tragedy, and cut off from her immediate family.

A wounded neighbour had burst in to tell the little group in her aunt's house what was happening, and they all hid in the house when the soldiers started to shoot at a sheep that was standing in their doorway. Having presumably killed the sheep, five or six soldiers forced their way into the room and ordered the inhabitants – all women and children – into the courtyard. Lined up by height with the tallest at one end and the smallest at the other, the young girl was last in line to be shot and managed to slip away unscathed before the bullets reached her.

She hid for several days, creeping out to drink water from a puddle and suffering from excruciating thirst, but survived.

When I called on her – unannounced – at her house in the suburb of Khasanya just outside the lowland city of Nalchik, it was hard to imagine her as a young girl, and harder still to imagine her as a lonely battler for justice. She was now a stout, white-haired old lady with a face scoured by the horrors she had seen. As she wandered around her spotless house, its walls decorated by carpets and a giant picture of the mosques in Mecca, we tried to communicate but repeatedly failed.

Like everyone of her generation who was a child during the deportations, she missed out on education and remains illiterate and almost entirely unable to speak Russian. Almost blind, she needed me to operate her telephone for her, and to find her daughter, who agreed to act as a translator.

For Kishtikova, whose maiden name was Ekhchieva, has a remarkable story beyond the miracle of her surviving the massacre. The state had declared what she had gone through in 1942 to be genocide, but had offered no compensation or support. The survivors like her were illiterate villagers with a distrust for the law and a dislike of the state. It was inconceivable that they would appeal for justice voluntarily, while human rights groups had other horrors to worry about.

What they needed was a sympathetic lawyer, willing to work for nothing, and that is just what Kishtikova had in her son-in-law.

‘The idea to appeal to the court was mine,' the son-in-law, Iskhak Kuchukov, aged fifty-six, told me over tea in his office later that day. ‘The murder of these civilians is a war crime. They closed the criminal case against Nakin, because he died. They said that an order to wipe villages from the face of the earth did not mean to kill. I was angry and just decided to see what would happen if I tried to gain her redress in the courts.'

He launched his mother-in-law's compensation case on the regional courts shortly after
The Cherek Tragedy
was published in 1994, armed with its account of events and witnesses prepared to testify on her behalf. She was appealing for compensation not because of what had happened to her, but because her father, Lokman Ekhchiev, was killed by the soldiers.

‘When my mother-in-law started to tell me how she had hidden under the bed, it was interesting. That was when I decided to get involved. Then it kept not working out, and I got more involved. I was just interested to see if it was possible to gain compensation.'

It was still the heady 1990s, when activists believed that publicizing the crimes of the Soviet regime would be enough to persuade Russia's citizens to condemn it. The local parliament was on the side of the villagers, and President Boris Yeltsin himself marked the
fiftieth anniversary of the deportation with promises to make sure justice was done for the Balkars.

But, as Kuchukov's case ground on, the political atmosphere changed. The war in Chechnya hardened society against the appeals of Muslims from the Caucasus mountains, and the new president, Vladimir Putin, restored communist symbols and openly regretted the end of the Soviet Union.

Kuchukov, therefore, was as surprised as anyone when Kishtikova won. In October 2002, the court ruled that her father had been killed illegally and that she was eligible for compensation. For a moment, it seemed like a great victory. A victim of repression had managed to prove a specific act – rather than a mass action like the deportation itself – had occurred and managed to secure compensation for it, which was quite an achievement. But there was a sting in the tail.

‘She won 10,000 roubles,' said Kuchukov with a wry smile. I initially assumed that was a monthly stipend, but he set me right. It was a lump sum. At the time, 10,000 roubles was equivalent to about £200 – two months' salary for the average Russian.

For the life of her father, and for the loss of all her father's property, with a delay of almost sixty years, Kishtikova had won enough to live on frugally for a few months. I thought back to the figures dreamt up by the 1943 investigation into the tragedy, and how one woman had supposedly lost property worth more than eleven years' wages. If that same scale was applied in 2002, Kishtikova would have been eligible for almost 700,000 roubles, with compensation for the loss of her father added on. What she had received was not compensation, it was an insult.

Only one other victim bothered to follow her lead and jump through the hoops required to win this nominal sum, and she happened to be Kishtikova's neighbour and the mother of one of the authors of
The Cherek Tragedy
. As for the other survivors of the massacre, who did not have connections to Kuchukov, they treated the state with the contempt with which it had treated them and ignored it.

Many of them still lived in the Cherek valley, and had done ever since they returned from exile, and I wanted to visit them, and to see for myself how the Balkars had recovered from their ordeal.

Getting to the Cherek valley was surprisingly easy. The gentle rolling hills of Kabarda reared up to forty-five degrees. Patches of rock showed among the grass, as if the mountains' muscles were straining to burst out of their skin. The trees became darker and more wild. And the land of the Balkars had begun. The road, which had been merrily bowling along by a stream, started to be pushed up against a cliff, and the valley ahead was choked by the gorge we were entering.

For centuries, the Balkars had been protected by their narrow valleys. Only a mule or a careful horse could have navigated the slopes leading to their homeland in the days before modern roads. No army could have passed this way without a long and agonizing march in single file, their approach overshadowed by cliffs a thousand metres high.

But now, the road has been tunnelled and cut into the cliffs, making the journey a joy rather than a struggle. The clear mountain air fizzed in my veins, and cut into my lungs in a feeling strangely reminiscent of the few weeks after giving up smoking. My body was not quite sure why breathing had become so easy.

A giant white-headed bird – an eagle perhaps, or a vulture – skimmed along the cliff opposite, wingtip-to-wingtip with its own shadow. It soared up to alight in a patch of trees clinging to a gentler slope in the middle of the bare rock. Perhaps no man had ever walked among those trees surrounded by cliffs, where the huge bird made its home. The glaciers above were a dazzling white against the blue of a perfect sky.

Amid this splendour, however, my mind kept flicking back to the days of the deportation. Although a road had been built by 1944, it had not been tunnelled out so generously, and it crawled around the cliffs rather than dodged through them. The deportation had been a logistical nightmare and I was filled with a reluctant admiration for the brains that had coordinated the destruction of this people. They might have been evil, but they knew how to do their jobs.

As we passed out of the gorge, the cliffs edged away from us, gradually easing their gradient and becoming khaki-brown. Ahead was the village I had come to visit, although it was unrecognizable as the scene of the massacre of November 1942. When the Balkars had
returned, their own hamlets were in ruins. Their distinctive burrow-shaped houses had collapsed, where they had not been burned by the Red Army, and were uninhabitable.

The Soviet government did not restore the hamlets tucked up against the rocks. Instead, it built a straight street of modern houses along the valley floor. Generous though the action was, and comfortable though the houses were, the government may also have wanted to concentrate the villagers for easier control, for this was a tactic repeated in all the valleys of the Balkars and the Karachais.

A map in the museum in Nalchik illustrated the abandonment of the Balkars' villages well. It showed present-day villages with red lights, and pre-deportation villages with dots of light blue. The abandoned villages clustered in the high valleys like clumps of planets around the red star of the present-day settlement. There were red lights now on the plains too, for not all the Balkars were allowed to return to their ancestral homes in the mountains. Scattered among the Circassians on the plains, they would be less likely to take to the hills again and cause trouble.