Stalin's "partial deportation of the Kumyks" in the spring of 1944 is a page of Soviet nationality policy in the North Caucasus that has still not received a thorough reckoning. In the weeks after the deportation of the Chechens and Ingush, residents of Kumyk villages — Tarki, Kyakhulay, Alburikent, Karasuvotar, Kaziyurt and others — were uprooted: some were driven into the emptied Khasavyurt district (Bayramaul, Bammatyurt, Osmanyurt), others to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Those allowed to return in 1957 found their homes destroyed and their cemeteries dug up.
Over the longer arc of the Soviet "resettlement of the mountain peoples onto the plains" (1956–1975), the Kumyks lost roughly half of their historical territory. Officially alone, 2,020 hectares of Kumyk ploughland and pasture were transferred away: 960 hectares to the Gunibsky district, 810 to the Akushinsky, and 250 to the Laksky. During the land-claims protests of 1988–1992, roughly one hundred Kumyks were killed.
Who was Daniyalov
Abdurakhman Daniyalovich Daniyalov (1908–1981), an Avar by ethnicity, was the head of Soviet Dagestan through the Stalin and Khrushchev years: Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the Dagestan ASSR (1940–1948) and First Secretary of the Dagestan Regional Committee of the CPSU (1948–1967). It was Daniyalov who organised the 1944 deportation of the Kumyks and the settlement of their lands by other peoples. After retirement he defended a doctoral thesis in history and in 1975 published the monograph The Construction of Socialism in Dagestan, 1921–1940.
How Daniyalov explained the policy himself
Looking back in that book on the 1921 decision to organise Dagestan as a territorial rather than a national autonomy — that is, without carving out distinct national autonomies for Kumyks, Avars, Lezgins and the rest — Daniyalov wrote:
When the question of the national structure of Dagestan was debated, the decision was taken to establish not a national but a territorial autonomy there. In this the Party was guided by three considerations. First, this was necessary for economic reasons. Had it been decided to grant national autonomy even to the principal peoples of Dagestan (the Avars, Dargins, Kumyks, Lezgins, Laks and Tabasarans), the main riches of Dagestan — its ploughlands and pastures — would have gone to the Kumyks, because they lay on their territory…
A rare first-person admission: one of the chief architects of Dagestan's territorial rearrangements himself spells out that the "economic reasons" of that era amounted to the need to redistribute Kumyk ploughland and pasture in favour of other peoples of Dagestan, rather than vest them with their own native population. The very same logic would frame, twenty-three years later, the 1944 deportation and the subsequent postwar resettlement of highland peoples onto the Kumyk plains.
Sources
- Daniyalov A. D. The Construction of Socialism in Dagestan, 1921–1940: Key Problems. Moscow: Nauka, 1975, p. 42 (in Russian). Google Books.
- Ibragimov M.-R. A. The Deportation of the Population of Dagestan during the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945) and Its Ethnocultural Consequences. Makhachkala: Institute of History, Archaeology and Ethnography, Dagestan Scientific Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 2011. 90 pp. (in Russian).
- Osmanov A. I. Agrarian Transformations in Dagestan and the Resettlement of the Mountain Peoples onto the Plains (1920s–1970s). Makhachkala, 2006, p. 293 (in Russian).
- Gadzhiev Adil-Gerey. Tarki, Kyakhulay, Alburikent: History, Problems, Solutions. Makhachkala, 1999, p. 10 (in Russian).
- Yusupova G. I., Gasanov M. M., Alibekova S. Ya. Transformations in the Consciousness of the Youth of the North Caucasus under Globalisation. Makhachkala: Dagestan Scientific Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 2006, p. 173 (in Russian). ISBN 5-94434-082-7.
- Aliev K. M. Kumyk Encyclopaedic Dictionary. Makhachkala: Delta Press, 2012 (in Russian). ISBN 978-5-903454-67-9.
- The 1944 Deportation and the Contemporary Problems of the Kumyks of Tarki: Proceedings of the 4th Civic Forum. Makhachkala, 2016, p. 17 (in Russian).