By
Neil Hauer
Seventy-five
years ago this past Saturday, Soviet NKVD and Red Army soldiers, acting on the
orders of General Secretary Josef Stalin, began Operation Lentil, also known in
the region as Aardakh.
Stalin had ruled that the
entirety of the Chechen and Ingush populations were traitors, collaborating
with the Nazi soldiers that had invaded the Soviet Union but never reached the
Vainakh lands. Nearly half a million people were loaded into industrial
railcars and shipped off from their ancestral homeland, bound for Central Asia.
Within a year, more than one-third of
them would be dead.
Stalin’s goal was not to
eliminate the Vainakh: it was to erase them. They would not be rounded up and
shot, but sent far from their homes.
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