Let Our Fame Be Great (30 page)

Kabul Kadyrova, mother of four soldiers at the front, was one of the villagers murdered. She had imagined no soldier would kill a woman with four boys in the army. By this time, the deserters in Mukhol had guessed something terrible was happening, but did not know what. Khutai and a friend went to wake up Khazhdaut
Osmanov, a teacher and hence a respected man locally, to tell him the rumours about what was happening in Sauty. He visited Upper Cheget, learning for himself of the massacre that was making its way towards them.

The men in Mukhol asked Osmanov to write Nakin a letter, asking him what they needed to do to be left in peace. The answer came back that they should surrender, but they were not prepared to do so and left for the hills, leaving a look-out to see what was happening.

They joined up with residents of most of the other villages in the hills, for only those people in Sauty were unable to escape, being trapped by the soldiers who were still patrolling for them. Khalimat Misirova, thirteen years old at the time of the massacre, had already been stopped by a soldier in the village, but he turned out to be kind.

‘You're Muslims, and I am a Muslim. Don't be scared of me, I'm going for water. Don't be scared of me, but we are ordered to kill everyone in this gorge,' the soldier, who was a Kyrgyz or a Kazakh, told them. He advised them to hide the best they could. Her family then went back home and her father hid the children in a potato clamp, having removed the potatoes to make room. The four children hid in the tight space, while the soldiers rampaged outside. The eight children of their neighbours also tried to get into the house to hide, but all eight – Soltan, Osman, Murat, Mukhadin, Muzafar, Aminat, Salikhat, Saniyat – along with their mother Erkekhan were shot in the courtyard.

At least sixty other people were hiding in the house, but the soldiers found them on the third day and killed them together. ‘I could recount the names, but probably couldn't remember them all. There was the old man Batyrbii Misirov, his wife Nanuk, his daughter Khalimat, his sons Khizir, Mukhai, the children of Mukhai, his wife Naibkhan, his daughter Zhansurat, his second daughter Abidat, his third daughter Kyokkyoz. I've forgotten the names of the sons; there were nine or ten children in that family,' she later told investigators.

‘Those four old folk who were killed in the basement, they weren't burned. The oldest was Batyrbii, the other women and children, they
were all shot in the courtyard, I can't say the total, but more than sixty people. They shot them, then burned them.'

Two of the children together with her in the potato clamp argued after this, saying it would have been better to be killed since now they would be burned alive. The two got out and fell asleep where they were, and luckily were not found.

At night, she heard a voice calling them but did not react for a long time, thinking it was the soldiers hunting them again. But eventually she realized it was a fifteen-year-old boy called Yusuf who they'd assumed was dead. Yusuf was hiding on the roof and calling down the chimney. He told them the soldiers were burning the houses in the village and that they needed to get out quickly. The four children managed to climb out of the chimney, only to see the night lit up brightly by the blazing village. Misirova only had one shoe on, and the children were terribly cold as they left the village in the snow but they were eventually rescued by some fellow refugees.

Nakin had by now destroyed the hamlet of Kunyum as well, and in a report to his superiors increased his estimated death toll to 1,500. He said he had totally burned the hamlets of Sauty and Kunyum, while Upper Cheget and Glashevo were ‘destroyed'.

‘According to hostages ninety of the destroyed people were bandits, 400 could have carried weapons, and the rest were women and children. The artillery piece has been taken,' he wrote to Colonel Shikin on 29 November. He received a reply from Shikin that must have pleased him.

‘I find your actions good, and your soldiers' actions just wonderful. If you cleanse Central Balkaria from these bastards, who instead of defending their homeland from the German occupiers betrayed it, and became bandits themselves, then you will have conducted an act of great importance. Secure the rear of our forces,' Shikin wrote.

The deserters and other men from Mukhol decided, however, to obtain weapons to defend themselves against the soldiers. In the circumstances they could not steal weapons from the Soviet troops, who were too well-armed and happy to shoot on sight. They decided, therefore, to send a deputation to the neighbouring valley and to the town of Zhentala, which was already in the hands of the Germans.
They hoped their country's enemies might help defend them against their own army.

On their way, they met Yakub Zhangurazov, a local man who had worked for the Communist Party until the war, but who had apparently changed sides to join the Germans. It seems he was now acting as a German agent and appears to have confirmed that they could obtain weapons from the Germans.

The trip, which took most of 1, 2 and 3 December, ended resistance in Mukhol and allowed Nakin to capture it – a fact that he trumpeted to Shikin on 3 December – although he did not keep it for long. In fact, General Kozlov, commander of the 37th Army, had received the report of 1,500 dead and was very concerned about it. He ordered that an investigation be conducted into the affair, but by this time the male villagers had returned to the gorge with German guns.

Nakin and the Red Army troops were considerably less brave in the face of men with guns than when slaughtering sleeping women and children, and the soldiers were rapidly driven out of the village of Shaurdat and then engaged outside Mukhol. The battle for Mukhol continued for all of 4 December, before Nakin's force retreated towards Sauty at evening-time.

The Mukhol men went on the offensive and Nakin had to consistently pretend to his superiors that secret German forces had already taken the valley to explain the fact that he had lost control of it. The Mukhol men also killed five Soviet partisans they had taken prisoner around this time, just before Nakin left the valley on 6 December.

The army had been conducting its own investigation, although it had not, it would seem, actually sent men to visit the destroyed hamlets. Three days later Seskov, a political officer in the 37th Army, sent a report on the affair to his superior. ‘I consider that Nakin's unit killed many innocent people, who were totally unconnected to the bandits,' he concluded. He said the death toll of 1,500 was unrealistic and had been an attempt to show off before the high command. However, if this figure was correct then at least 1,010 women and children had been killed.

While the Soviet troops were analysing the disaster, the Balkars were left to clean up the damage. They emerged blinking from forests and caves, only to find the world would never be the same again.

Kakus Gazayeva was thirty-two when the massacre took place, and had fled her village of Shkanty for the forest when she heard shooting. She only returned to her home when she heard the Red Army had left the valley, and found her hamlet burned. She went along with her two brothers and her sister to Sauty on that first day.

Another sister had lived in Sauty and had been eight months pregnant with her fourth child, and they hurried to look for her.

‘Their house was fully burned. Not far from the pile of ash, we with difficulty found among many burnt bodies the blackened bodies of Mara and her children: Ibragim, eight; Ramazan, six; Daut, three. We wrapped their remains in cloth and buried them in a common grave,' she said. ‘That same day we found what had been Aslanuki Sarbashev's family, they were relatives of my husband. They were Kabakhan Sarbasheva, Aslanuki's mother; Nafi Sarbasheva, his wife; Ismail Sarbashev, six, his son; two daughters, Shamshiyat, twelve, and Nazhabat, fifteen. Every one of them had been shot point-blank in the head. As we later discovered, they were called into the yard, apparently to hold a meeting, then stood in a row and shot.'

The sad business of attempting to identify the dead continued. Bagaly Temirzhanova said they tried to find people from their clothing or personal belongings. Some bodies were burned into a powder, and the survivors swept up the powder and buried that.

‘Then there were rumours that the Germans were coming. We left the village again. But the Germans did not disturb anyone, and we returned. They helped us to bury the remaining dead. They brought on sledges the sacrifices we had prepared. They did not kill a single person,' she remembered.

The ‘Germans' – they were actually troops from Germany's ally Romania – were decent occupiers, and just looked on while the villagers cleared away the collapsed roofs of their houses, searching for the remains of their relatives within. In Sauty and Glashevo, the dead were buried in long trenches, since there were now too few people to dig proper graves.

It did not take the Soviet army long to realize that, with a new occupier in the valley, even one as mild-mannered as these Romanians (only one German officer ever entered the Cherek valley), they
had a perfect scapegoat for the crime that had been committed. The barbarity of the Red Army could now be blamed on the foreigners, and could be hidden for ever.

On 16 December, before the Cherek valley was even recaptured, the cover-up began. The political department of the 37th Army said the deserters had German agents operating alongside them, thus paving the way for them to be blamed for crimes moved forwards in time by just a few days.

The Romanians pulled out of the valley at the end of December, provoking the villagers to once more flee into the hills in fear of retaliation by the Red Army, and the armed men to set up checkpoints at all entry points. They still, for now, controlled the valley. But storm clouds were gathering over them once more. Negotiations over their surrender continued with the Red Army, while at a gathering of the regional Communist Party one delegate urged the army to go in and crush the independent-minded villagers.

Finally, the NKVD took action. In three columns, it moved into the valley in mid-January 1943, meeting slight resistance at one checkpoint – at which one soldier was killed, and one injured – but taking over the Cherek valley with little trouble. The villagers welcomed the soldiers with red flags, but must have known their troubles were not over yet.

In the days up to 6 February, nearly all the men in the valley who had not been either conscripted or murdered were arrested. Over several days a total of 324 villagers were seized, leaving the livestock without minders, so the animals started to die as well. Another seventy-six people were arrested by the end of the year for their alleged connections to the bandits, bringing the total to 400 – which would suggest the police were operating according to a plan. They had to arrest 400 people and picked up men, women, teenagers, pensioners to meet the demands of their superiors.

On the lists of arrested people, just thirty-five were deserters; the rest were local government workers or political activists. All 400 of the arrested villagers were listed as ‘bandits' in reports to Moscow, although the vast majority of them had no connection to the violence at all, and the real fighters – Khutai and his men – remained at
large in the mountains, still able to move freely from place to place, secure in their knowledge of the terrain.

The Soviet government, however, did not leave the events of November to December uninvestigated. They tasked the local administration with drawing up lists of who had lost what, and how many people had been killed. Among the investigators was Baraz Mamayev, born in 1918, who had not been called up to the Red Army, because of poor health, and who was one of the few literate people left in the valley.

When the secretary of the village council was arrested by the returning Soviet troops, Mamayev was elevated to the position, and told to interview all the villagers and make lists of how much damage had been done. The summary, completed on 13 June 1943, has his signature at the bottom.

It claims to be a true account of the ‘bestiality, thefts, and rapes committed by the German-fascist occupiers and their accomplices against the civilian population'. According to the report, a German major led soldiers into the gorge on 6 December and ‘with active help from the traitors to their homeland, the German-fascist accomplices Yakub Zhangurazov, Battal Tabaksoev and Ismail Zankishiev', they burned houses, shot civilians and left a trail of death behind them.

The report had, therefore, changed the date of the civilians' deaths – to after the period when the Romanian unit arrived in the gorge – and it had blamed the deserters for helping them, despite those being the very people who managed to drive the rampaging Soviet Army out of the Cherek valley. It went on to give a list of the people killed in Sauty.

According to the list, the brave Soviet soldiers killed a total of 310 people in Sauty, of whom 150 were sixteen years old or younger, and slightly more than half of the children girls. A total of twenty-six of the victims were men between sixteen and sixty – the generally accepted definition of ‘arms-bearing age'. Another forty men were over seventy, five of those being older than a hundred.

The female victims present more of a regular spread through the age groups, which is not surprising since most of the younger men
had been conscripted, with sixteen victims being in their late teens or in their twenties, and one solitary matriarch one hundred years old.

Just a quick glance at the lists reveals family tragedies almost too terrible to contemplate. The commission recorded the patronymics of the children killed, grouping them together by father. Numbers 63 to 68 are all the children of an Akhmet Misirov: Kokez, fifteen; Seida, ten; Magomet, six; Elyas, four; Khyzyr, one; and the solitary daughter, Roza, two. Perhaps Akhmet Misirov was at the front, fighting for the Soviet Union. With a homecoming like that awaiting him perhaps it would have been better if he had already been killed.