If the meager supplies ostensibly prepared for the deportation ever really existed, they were not getting to the exiles. A secret report on the inspection of a collective farm in June 1944 stated that the “special settlers,” as the authorities euphemistically called them, were not working, or working sufficiently well, “mostly due to the absence of food supplies, as a consequence of which the absolute majority of the special settlers are extremely emaciated…. Thirteen people have died as a result of typhus and starvation. Ill people in a state of extreme emaciation, essentially at death’s door, as of June 8 this year number 40, including 20 children…. Special settlers are eating mostly grass…. No one is keeping track of special-settler deaths.” The report described the mother of four children aged two to ten, the three youngest of whom could no longer move; she was making them soup out of grass. Reports from other collective farms painted a similar picture, but introduced a new category beyond “extremely emaciated.” This category was “bloated.”
Some of the exiles were placed in collective-farm housing, never spacious to begin with. Usually this meant that a local family who occupied a two-room house had to cede one of the rooms to a family of newcomers. The local families resisted, perceiving the arrival of the exiles, rightly, as a threat not only to their space but to their health: typhus soon spread to the local population. Still, for the exiles, being forced into someone’s house was infinitely preferable to the alternatives: being warehoused in unfinished or vacant, usually unheated apartments, generally three families to a room; being warehoused in common village spaces such as a collective-farm cafeteria or meeting hall; or being shoved into unheated tents or mud huts. Authorities directed the collective farms to construct housing for “special settlers,” but the most construction materials any of the collective farms appear to have been issued was thirty-two logs to put up barracks, the roof to be made of locally collected reeds. No construction appears to have commenced by the fall, when the weather started turning cold again.
Exiles were to be issued plots of land and seeds for planting, but most could not bring themselves to bury even a single grain seed in the ground; they ate them. The few who did manage to plant did not know how to work the local land—and the plots they had been issued were by definition the undesirable, difficult ones. No one had a harvest that year.
The “special settlers” were more than an imposition on the locals: they were, it was well established, the enemies of the people. They lacked even the limited civil rights accorded ordinary Soviet citizens. They had to check in regularly with local secret-police representatives, as one might check in with a parole officer. Secret-police clearance was required for the most quotidian of actions, such as seeking help at a medical clinic. The secret-police officers had a range of disciplinary measures at their disposal, including fines and up to ten days’ administrative arrest.
Other locals also treated the exiles as one would treat the enemy. One collective-farm chairman loaded seven families on three horse-driven carts and instructed the drivers to take them to another town and dump them at the side of the road. This was to serve as a lesson not only for these families but also for the “special settlers” remaining in his village: they too would be expelled if they did not work hard enough. In this case, law enforcement investigated the incident and concluded that none of the members of the seven families was actually physically fit to work. Other collective-farm chairmen claimed that they did not need any additional hands and simply refused to acknowledge the “special settlers,” in the hope of driving them away. They not only withheld rations but also instructed the village store not to sell to the new arrivals. Inspection reports describe numerous instances of local authority figures beating the children of the exiles, sometimes to death. The beatings of adults are not mentioned, probably because they were not seen as warranting notice.
Zayndy Tsarnaev, Anzor’s father, was brought to Kyrgyzstan at the age of thirteen. The family was placed about forty miles east of the Kyrgyz capital, Frunze, in Tokmok, a settlement wedged in a narrow valley between the Kyrgyz Range and the Trans-Ili Alatau mountains. Local legend has it that the Soviets once considered making Tokmok the capital, but the Chu, a furious mountain river that took over the entire valley every spring, rendered the location unsuitable. When the exiles arrived in Kyrgyzstan, an effort to harness the Chu was under way. The men were immediately rounded up and loaded onto horse-driven carts, which took them to the construction site for the future hydroelectric plant. Delivered late at night, the men escaped early the next morning to look for the railroad station so that they could go back to help their families. Secret-police files overflow with reports and complaints filed by construction supervisors, who demanded a police cordon at the site to keep the men from leaving. The paperwork details living conditions at the site. There was no shelter. There were no bathing facilities, which meant the men were flea-ridden. They received two meals a day, at six in the morning and at five in the evening. The rations consisted solely of grain and water. As the men died off, secret police conducted raids to round up new workers from among the special settlers and deliver them to the site. Construction supervisors complained the new arrivals were unfit for work because they were not only extremely emaciated but also naked and barefoot.
The death rate among the exiles remained steady through the freezing spring and the scorching summer; they entered the winter of 1944–1945 with no suitable shelter or reliable source of sustenance, and the dying continued. The following year decimated the survivors, and the year after that killed many of those who remained. And yet, after three or four years—after the death of half or more of the Chechen population, after the pain and humiliation and dread of living in an open-air prison and, incongruously, in a constant state of uncertainty—the life of the “special settlers” appeared to stabilize. They were still, in essence, prisoners, with their movement and activities severely restricted and violence a daily threat, but they gradually secured housing and, to some extent, succeeded in assimilating. Some families continued to hold their children back from Russian- and Kyrgyz-language schools—Chechen-language education had effectively been outlawed—but after a few years this was a small, albeit constant, minority. Access to the legal local economy, accorded only to fully vested Soviet citizens, never really opened up to the exiles, but the Chechens compensated by creating gray-market trading systems, so that after a few years they were not only able to move out of cramped barracks and freezing mud huts but also became providers of coveted goods for the locals—and since virtually all goods were in short supply, most goods were indeed coveted. While most families submitted to having their children educated at Russian- and Kyrgyz-language schools, virtually everyone still spoke Chechen at home, considered intermarriage impossible, and continued to live in accordance with Adat, which, in exile, gradually became both more important and less detailed.
STALIN DIED IN 1953, nine years and one day after the Chechens began arriving in Kyrgyzstan. In another three years the new Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, began gingerly to lift restrictions on the deported ethnic groups. The Party now admitted that the exiles had been wronged—in a meeting with a group of them, Khrushchev even said the dictator had been paranoid and out of control—but the bureaucracy did not know how to handle hundreds of thousands of people who had been displaced. Their houses and lands had long since been occupied by others, in the concerted campaign of colonization that the state had conducted for years after the deportation. Ethnic Russians had been moved into Chechnya by the orphanageful, in conditions scarcely less punishing than the Chechens were facing in Central Asia, and those who survived had by now put down roots. What kind of violence would break out if the Chechens—or the Kabardians, or the Balkars—returned to claim their homes?