16/10/2025
In March 1944, nearly 38,000 Balkars, a Turkic mountain people from the North Caucasus, were deported by Stalin’s regime to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Siberia.
Accused of “treason” and “collaboration with the Nazis,” they were loaded into freight trains under armed guard, given only minutes to pack.
Inside the cattle cars there was no light, no heat, and only a pipe for a toilet. Eyewitnesses recalled children dying of cold and hunger, their bodies left by the tracks. Up to half of all deportees died during the journey and in special settlements.
Their deportation was part of a broader Soviet campaign to “cleanse” border regions of “unreliable” peoples alongside the Chechens, Ingush, Karachays, and others. Their fertile mountain lands in Kabardino-Balkaria were immediately repopulated.
Those who survived exile were only allowed to return in 1957, to find their villages destroyed and their cultural life erased.
