Dark Shadows: Inside the Secret World of Kazakhstan by Joanna Lillis

Author:Joanna Lillis [Lillis, Joanna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784538613
Google: C1FyswEACAAJ
Goodreads: 40398699
Publisher: I. B. Tauris, Limited
Published: 2018-10-30T00:00:00+00:00

Polina-apa (apa is a respectful term of address for older women, loosely ‘elder sister’) has no memories of the Aardakh, but the traumatic story was passed down by her mother (her father had disappeared in the Terror, presumed shot). ‘Our people went with nothing. My mother told me: we were driven out of the house. She said: I wanted to take a bucket, so we’d be able to gather water and have a drink on the way, but one soldier shoved me out and said: Go!’ The villagers of the Chechen village of Lyunki were taken to the nearest town, Itum-Kale, and then on to Groznyy: ‘There was a road in the mountains with a chasm underneath, a drop of two or three hundred metres,’ said Polina-apa, her sharp brown eyes misting over as she recounted her mother’s memories. ‘One old man said: I’m not going anywhere, and he jumped from the truck into the chasm. […] That’s how we got to Groznyy.’

Their expulsion was a shock, but with hindsight her mother realised that some Russians billeted with the family – ‘medics and a captain, they lived with us, four of them, all Russians’ – had been part of an advance guard to prepare the ground for the expulsions. That is how this old lady ended up with a Russian, rather than Chechen, name: her mother named her after a Russian nurse living with the family who helped at Polina’s birth.

Three months later, the infant was one of 387,000 Chechens expelled from Chechnya, along with 91,000 Ingush.3 Most ended up in Kazakhstan, where this family was taken to a village in Kostanay Region in the north, where, according to family lore, the kindness of the Kazakhs kept them alive. ‘This babushka came with kurt [dried cheese balls, a Kazakh staple] and blankets, and fed us and clothed us. We lived with them for two years, that Kazakh family.’ She was so grateful that she brought up her children to be thankful to the Kazakhs. ‘They say they survived only because the local Kazakhs helped,’ said her son. ‘They arrived in March, it was cold, with nothing, without clothes, without food. My mother always tells me: Ansar, you’re alive because the Kazakh people didn’t let us die.’

The mayor’s late father was also a deportee, who ended up in Krasnaya Polyana in 1944. ‘He’d always remember how they came here: they arrived in March, him at the age of 14. His sister and mother died of starvation, on the same day. He took them to the cemetery, buried them, came home, and his second sister was lying there dead. They’re buried here, in our cemetery. All in one day.’ The younger siblings ‘were left in my father’s hands; he worked raising cattle on the kolkhoz and helped out in the fields – that’s how he fed the family’.

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