February 23, the day Russia marks Defender of the Fatherland Day, is also when Chechens and Ingush remember the victims of the 1944 deportation. 82 years ago, the NKVD began the forced removal of the Vainakh peoples from the Chechen-Ingush ASSR to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Within days, people were packed into freight cars, the republic was abolished, homes and land were redistributed, and cemeteries were destroyed. By various estimates, one in four deported Chechens and Ingush died either on the journey or during the years of special settlement.
Today, the authorities restrict mourning events and screenings of films about the tragedy, yet its memory survives in other forms: family stories, literature, music, cinema, and memorials.
Memory in songs and personal testimony
In 1978, Vladimir Vysotsky performed in Grozny. According to actor Vasambek Naurbiev of the Chechen Drama Theatre, the singer told the audience he knew the fate of the Chechens and Ingush, asked television crews not to film the next song, and then performed “Life Flew By in a Bad Car.” In the Soviet period, the subject of deportation was effectively silenced, so such a public performance was a rare exception.
“For fifteen and a half days I rode in that railcar, corpses were stacked in piles, it was winter. My mother died of hunger,” recalled choreographer Makhmud Esambayev, who chose to go into exile voluntarily together with his people.
The deportation theme also runs through the work of Timur Mutsurayev. Among Ingush musicians, it is especially powerfully expressed in the song “Daimokhk” by the studio Loam, where exile is portrayed as personal loss and an unbroken bond with the homeland.
Stone, cinema, and the struggle for remembrance
Memory of the deportation was also preserved in physical monuments. In Nazran on February 23, 1997, the “Nine Towers” memorial complex was opened. In Grozny, local residents in 1992 created a monument from churts, gravestones taken from destroyed cemeteries that returning Vainakh families later found in house walls, foundations, and by roadsides. The memorial bore the words: “We will not break. We will not weep. We will not forget.”
In 2014, that memorial was dismantled on Ramzan Kadyrov’s orders. The old gravestones were later seen on Akhmad Kadyrov Avenue, within a memorial complex dedicated to fallen security personnel.
The fate of such stones was also reflected in the Soviet-era film “An Unspent Cloud of Gold” by Ingush director Sulambek Mamilov. The director later said the film was approved only with difficulty, cut down, and delayed in release. A similar fate met the modern film “The Letter” by Amur Amerkhanov, based on real events from 1972, when Ingush public figures sent an appeal to the CPSU Central Committee describing the consequences of deportation and discrimination. In Ingushetia, the film’s premiere was blocked, and officials obstructed screenings and festival participation.
Despite this pressure, each new generation of Chechens and Ingush continues to keep this history alive in cultural memory. In that way, the experience of catastrophe endures as something that, in the view of the Vainakh peoples themselves, can neither be erased nor forgotten.