The following is an unemotional account of the deportation by a student who witnessed it:

In 1943 I arrived from Kokand to Grozny with the Petroleum Institute which had been evacuated to Kokand in 1942 at the time of the German attack. No real kolkhoz [Soviet collective farm] had been established in Chechnya though members of Zagotzerno [grain production], of Zagoskot [livestock production], and even kolkhoz presidents were present in the auls [villages]. It seemed that the peasants remained independent.
Gangs were active in the mountain auls. After the liquidation of the Chechen-Ingush Republic, the newspaper "Groznenskaya Pravda" wrote that since the establishment of the Soviet government, the gangs of Chechnya-Ingushetia had killed nearly 20,000 Red Army troops and Party members. During the war, when the Grozny Military School was evacuated to the Chechen mountains, the guerrillas killed 200 students.

At the end of 1943 there were rumors in the city of the projected deportation of Chechens and Ingush, but these rumors were mere whispers. In the second half of January and the first half of February 1944, special detachments of the NKVD began to arrive in American Studebaker lorries. The newspapers published an appeal to the population: 'Let us make an example of our roads and bridges', and 'let us help our dear and beloved Red Army in its manoeuvres in the mountains!' Thus the army occupied the mountains and each aul was supplied with its own garrison.

Then came the day of the Red Army: 23 February 1944. In the evening the Red soldiers built blazing fires in the village squares and there was singing and dancing. The unsuspecting villagers came to see the festivities. When they were assembled in the squares all the men were arrested. Some of the Chechens had weapons and there was some shooting. But resistance was rapidly eliminated. The men were locked up in barns and then a hunt began for those who had not gone out. The whole operation was effected in two or three hours. Women were not arrested but were told to pack their belongings and get ready to leave the next day with the children.

At the same time, in Grozny, students and housewives were mobilized. In the evening of 23 February, the director of the Institute came to the students' quarters and told us to assemble at 6 a.m. near the building of the Institute. We were to take some extra underwear, and food for three days. The students of the Pedagogical Institute also showed up. When we had assembled near the Institute we saw many Studebakers half-filled with Red Army soldiers. Then, according to a carefully prepared plan, we were stationed among the auls by groups of twenty to thirty men. When we arrived in the auls we were surprised by the silence. Half an hour after our arrival the lorries were filed with the men arrested the previous day and the women and children. They were then transferred to freight cars in Grozny. All Chechens and Ingush, without exception, were taken away. The Daghestanis were left: there were seven or eight of them in our aul.

The students' task was to take care of the farms until the arrival of immigrants from Kursk and Orel regions. We had to assemble and feed the livestock, store the grain, take care of stocks, and so on. Things were different in the mountain auls: after the livestock had been evacuated, the auls were set on fire in order to deprive the 'bandits' of their means of subsistence. For days one could see auls burning in the mountains. At the same time, an amnesty was promised to those who had escaped to the mountains if they returned. Some of them did return but they were also deported.

According to other eye-witnesses, groups of Chechens and Ingush were immediately shot. It was only the men, women and children whose loyalty inspired no doubts even in the NKVD who were deported. Only women were allowed to take some hand-luggage. The journey was no less tragic. The men transported in prison freight cars were deprived for days not only of food but even of water. Because of these privations and the lack of medical care (the freight-cars were so full that people were sitting on top of each other), there were mass epidemics. Jewish refugees from Central Asia reported that typhus had already started on the journey, killing half the prisoners.

The authorities tried to localize the epidemic to the Chechens and Ingush in order to get rid of them in a 'natural' way. The local population were strictly forbidden to help the dying by giving them food, water or medicine. Even simple displays of humanity were forbidden under threat of arrest. The present writer's efforts to discover even an approximate percentage of the Chechens and Ingush who had died or were executed in the course of this nightmare proved to be in vain. Eye-witnesses sometimes quoted such a high figure that one refused to believe that so frightful a slaughter could have happened. However, none of the witnesses I interviewed spoke of less than 50 per cent deaths.

The motive given by the Soviets to justify the deportation was collaboration with the Germans during the war was ridiculous. As already mentioned, the Germans never penetrated the territory of the Chechen-Ingush Republic during the War, and since the Chechen-Ingush were never enrolled in the Red Army, they could not serve in Vlassov's army. As to the government's claim that anti-Soviet detachments were active deep within Chechnya-Ingushetia, this is absolutely true. As the Soviet government was well aware from the experience of the Russian empire, armed resistance against a foreign conqueror was an old-established tradition in those parts long before Hitler or Stalin appeared. Indeed the Imamate of Shamil fell only sixty-three years before the installation of the Soviet government. It was for their . . . pursuit of freedom and independence that the Chechens and Ingush were destroyed and their republic was liquidated. On a small stretch of land in the Caucasus two worlds came face to face: a colossal police despotism and an enclave of true human aspiration. The struggle between good and evil, between democracy and totalitarianism, was being enacted in the Caucasian mountains for decades while the outside world remained largely ignorant and indifferent. Furthermore, the strategic position of the Caucasus made it imperative for the Bolsheviks to finish the task which the tsarist conquerors had left unfinished: to create in the Caucasus a new colonizing force combining military and police functions and incorporating subjugated natives who would be obedient in defending Soviet imperialist interests.