Soviet deportations of Chechens and Ingush

The Soviet deportations of Chechens and Ingush were a series of deportations conducted by Joseph Stalin's totalitarian regime in the later stage of World War II after the Soviet Red Army retook the part of Chechnya previously occupied by Nazi Germany.^[1] The deportations saw 400,000 Chechens and 91,250 Ingush expelled from the area within eight days.^[1]

Soviet deportations of Chechens and Ingush
Part of Genocides by the Soviet Union
Location	Chechnya[1]
Date	1944[1]
Target	Chechens and Ingush[1]
Attack type	Ethnic cleansing[1]
Deaths	33% of pre-war Chechen and Ingush population[1]
Victims	400,000 Chechens and 91,250 Ingush deported to camps across Central Asia and Siberia[1]
Perpetrators	Soviet Union[1]
Motive	Ethnic cleansing[1]

Events

Routes of the deportations of Chechens and Ingush from the Northern Caucasus in February 1944.

Fearing that the Chechnya's mountainous terrain favors guerrilla war, the Soviets entrapped the Chechens and Ingush by inviting them to join the Red Army Day celebrations on February 23, 1944.^[1] Once they showed up, they were arrested by soldiers armed with machine guns.^[1] The Chechen and Ingush deportees were sent to camps across Central Asia and Siberia.^[1] They were not allowed to return to Chechnya until 1957.^[1]

Impact

The Chechens and Ingush lost as much as 33% of their total pre-war population under the Soviet invasion.^[2] This is around the same percentage of population that Cambodia lost during the Cambodian genocide (1975‒79) under the pro-Soviet Khmer Rouge regime.^[3]

Academic views

Some historians classify the Soviet deportations of Chechens and Ingush as a genocide,^[1] just as the many other crimes against humanity committed by the Soviet Union.^[4]

Related pages

• Holodomor
• Soviet deportation of Greeks
• Soviet deportation of Koreans
• Soviet persecution of Poles during World War II
• Soviet deportations from Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina

Footnotes