In Grozny Specter Of Stalin Reborn

GROZNY -- Abdullah was only nine years old when the Russians last forced him to leave Chechnya. That was in 1944 under the mass deportations of Chechens ordered by Stalin. Once was enough; this time Abdullah is staying where he is.


"I am not getting ready to go anywhere. This is my land, I am the master here. It is my motherland, that is why I want to stay here."


Abdullah and his wife are among the few remaining Chechens living alongside several Russian families in a block of 187 flats in Leninsky District in central Grozny. At the end of their street stands the new memorial to over 300,000 people who died in Stalin's mass deportations.


Abdullah will not to be forced into leaving again, he said, even though he could join his children in Moscow. "Chechnya has long been a part of Russia but who can say what is right, what jury should decide. The people should have the right to self-determination. The soil belongs to the people who live on it or who were born on it."


A civil servant and from a family of the intelligentsia, Abdullah as a child was among the half-million people from Chechnya and Ingushetia who were forcibly exiled to Kazakhstan.


Fifteen years after he and his family were loaded with thou sands of others into railway wagons for the nine-day journey to phosphorous mining town of Kara-Tal, Abdullah, who declined to give his last name, returned to Chechnya, only to face another struggle. "Nothing was ready, it was disorganized, there was nowhere to live, no work. They should have given people time. The government managed to organize original deportations but failed to organize the repatriation."


People had only just got their lives straight after returning, one of his neighbors said, when Russia started interfering in their lives again.


Now the Chechens are subjected to Russia again, Abdullah said. "They say they are proceeding for the good of mankind but they bombed people."


It is a complaint echoed by Chechens across the country. "This is Yeltsin's humanitarian aid," one bystander said when examining a Russian helicopter gunship shot down by Chechen fighters 50 kilometers west of Grozny. They said it had been attacking Chechen positions in a local village. Radio Moscow later announced the helicopter was carrying humanitarian aid to a nearby village.


Drinking tea in his spacious modern kitchen, Abdullah spoke of the apparent ease and efficiency with which the 1944 deportations were carried out.


"It was done very cunningly. If the people had known they would have resisted, but the soldiers did not fire a single shot. It was done during the night.


"At midnight soldiers jumped over the fence into the courtyard and led by the captain knocked on the window.


"I was asleep. I was told they read a decree or resolution saying that we were being deported. The only thing I remember was my father and the captain counting out the money we had.


"Everything was done in one night, it was a unique operation, taking into account that they had to organize everything, buses, cars and trains."


The irony, not lost on Abdullah, was that few of them realized what was happening to them. "We children, when we were traveling through the steppe, we were excited. The women were crying, some were praying to God, but we could not understand what was going on, we were just moving from one place to another."


"At Astrakhan the train was reversed and everybody thought we were being taken home. There were a number of people who thought that Stalin did not know anything about it and that he was about to bring us back home. They say Goebbels was good at propaganda but Stalin was much better."