RUSSIA'S TINDERBOX - Belfer Center for Science and International ...

dissolved. In March 1944, the final group of 37,773 Balkars was deported from the Kabardino-
Balkaria ASSR, and the republic reconstituted as the Kabardinian ASSR. 74
The repeal of the deportations did not take place until Nikita Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech”
on the excesses of Stalinism in 1956. This was followed in 1957 by official permission for the
deportees to return, and the reconstitution of the republics of Checheno-Ingushetia and Kabardino-
Balkaria. Violent clashes, however, ensued between returnees and the new inhabitants of the
territory—including a pogrom in 1958 by Russian settlers against Chechens and Ingush which left a
legacy of ill-will between the groups in the region.
In Checheno-Ingushetia, all of the ASSR’s former districts were returned with the exception
of Mozdok and Prigorodny and the right bank section of the city of Vladikavkaz, which were left in
North Ossetia. 75 Three additional districts, Kargalinsky, Naursky and Shelkovsky, inhabited by a
mixed population of Chechens, Ingush, Cossacks and Nogais were transferred to the Chechen-
Ingush ASSR from Stavropol’ Krai. During the 1992 conflict between North Ossetia and Ingushetia
over Prigorodny the Ossetians claimed that these three districts were direct compensation for the
Ingush for the loss of the Prigorodny district.
As far as the Karachai were concerned, although they were allowed to return to the North
Caucasus in the late 1950s their former autonomy was not restored. Instead, an autonomous oblast,
Karachaevo-Cherkessia, was created through the amalgamation of the Karachai with the
neighboring Cherkess. Its capital was designated as Cherkessk, the traditional Cherkess center,
rather than Karachaevsk, the Karachai center, or some neutral town on the ethnic frontier between
the two groups. On their return, the Karachai were also resettled in the foothills of the Caucasus
mountains rather than in the range in the south of the republic where they had been deported from. In
addition, the Karachai did not receive full exoneration until 1979 for war crimes they had been
accused of in the 1940s, which included the bizarre charge of the ritual slaughter of 150 children.
The loss of traditional lands and the perpetuation of the false accusation caused considerable
resentment toward the Soviet government among the Karachai.
In the restored autonomous units a distinct political and social advantage was retained by
those who had not suffered deportation. Those groups that had either remained in the units, or had
been brought in to replace the deportees dominated the post-1957 governments. This made it
difficult for the returnees to gain access to key posts, housing and educational facilities and
compounded the problems of discrimination and deprivation they had faced in exile in Central Asia.
After 1957, neither the Soviet government nor the government of the Russian Federation took
aggressive measures to rehabilitate politically and economically the Chechens, Ingush, Balkars and
Karachais. Thus, in the Perestroika period, with the political revisitation of Stalinism by the Russian
74 Figures for the deportations of the North Caucasian peoples taken from Svetlana Alieva (ed), Tak eto bylo:
Natsional’nye repressii v SSSR–1919-1952 gody, Vol.1-3, Insan (Moscow, 1993), cited in Helen Krag and Lars
Fuchs, The North Caucasus: Minorities at a Crossroads, Minority Rights Group International Report 1994,
p.13.
75 Until the mid-1930s, Vladikavkaz was the administrative center of the Ingush, Ossetians and Terek Cossacks,
with the right bank section of the Terek river assigned to the Ingush.
34