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Speaker 1: This Day in History Class. It's a production of I

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Speaker 1: Heart Radio. Hi again everyone, It's Eves and welcome to

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Speaker 1: This Day in History Class, a show where history waits

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Speaker 1: for no One. Today is February. The day was February

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Speaker 1: nineteen forty four. The Stalinist regime ordered the Chechens in

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Speaker 1: the English to be deported to Central Asia and Siberia,

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Speaker 1: accusing them of collaboration with the invading Nazis. The Chechens

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Speaker 1: in English are Northeast Caucasian ethnic groups. Together, the groups

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Speaker 1: are known as the Wynock. People's hostilities and violence between

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Speaker 1: the Chechens in Russia date back centuries. In the nineteen

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Speaker 1: twenties and nineteen thirties, after the Soviet Union was formed,

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Speaker 1: the Chechens resisted Stalin's collectivization and Ovietization policies, but in

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Speaker 1: nineteen thirty four, the Soviet government merged the Chechen and

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Speaker 1: English Autonomous o Blast into a single political administrative entity.

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Speaker 1: That entity became the Chechen English Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic

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Speaker 1: in nineteen thirty six. Encouraged by Soviet defeats in the

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Speaker 1: Winter War against Finland. In late nineteen thirty and early

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Speaker 1: nineteen forty, Chechen nationalist Cassan. Israel Law led a rebellion

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Speaker 1: of Chechen and English people's against the Soviets. The uprising

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Speaker 1: gained momentum, and by the time of the German invasion

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Speaker 1: of the Soviet Union in nineteen forty one, the movement

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Speaker 1: had gained thousands of fighters and sympathizers. In nineteen forty two,

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Speaker 1: Maryribek Schipav, another leader in the Chechen insurgency, joined forces

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Speaker 1: with israel Law. It was rumored that the Germans assisted

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Speaker 1: the Chechens in their rebellion, but many historians denied that

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Speaker 1: this claim is true. The rebellion lasted until nineteen forty form.

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Speaker 1: In February of that year, Labyrincy Barrier, the head of

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Speaker 1: the n k v D, ordered that the Chechens in

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Speaker 1: English be deported to remote areas in the Soviet Union.

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Speaker 1: N k v D stands for the People's Commissariat of

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Speaker 1: Internal Affairs. The n k v D was a government

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Speaker 1: organ of the state and secret police. During the Second

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Speaker 1: World War, Stalin implemented many systems of deportation and forced transfers.

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Speaker 1: There were the Gulag forced labor camps, and there were

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Speaker 1: massive deportations of ethnic minorities. Part of the n k

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Speaker 1: v d's responsibilities were to imprison and deport political and

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Speaker 1: ethnic enemies of the Soviet Union. The deportation of the

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Speaker 1: Chechens in English was known as Operation Checha visa for

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Speaker 1: Operation Wintal. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin accused the groups of

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Speaker 1: collaborating with the Nazis, even though no substantial evidence to

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Speaker 1: support this claim has ever been discovered. The deportations began

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Speaker 1: on February twenty ninety four, when the deportees were given

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Speaker 1: basically no time to gather their belongings. The number of

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Speaker 1: people deported varies by source, but it's usually estimated at

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Speaker 1: anywhere between four hundred thousand and six hundred thousand people.

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Speaker 1: Through the rest of February and into March, families were

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Speaker 1: loaded onto trains and forcibly transferred to places like Kazakhstan.

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Speaker 1: In Siberia, the terrain and Chechen resistance in the mountains

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Speaker 1: slowed the deportation, and the conditions and the cattle trainings

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Speaker 1: and freight cars were terrible. There was no running water

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Speaker 1: or heat, and people were hungry and subject to infection.

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Speaker 1: The deportees were put into so called special settlements. Over

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Speaker 1: the next thirteen years, they were overseen by the n

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Speaker 1: k v D and we're not able to leave their

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Speaker 1: villages past a short distance. They had to perform hard

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Speaker 1: physical labor. Estimates put the number of Chechen and English

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Speaker 1: deaths from the deportation and exile at up to two

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Speaker 1: hundred thousand. The TOUCH in English A S s R

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Speaker 1: was dissolved in ninety four, but it was restored in

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Speaker 1: nineteen fifty seven after Nikita Krushchev came to power. The

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Speaker 1: Chechens in English began returning to their homelands by the thousands.

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Speaker 1: There they found their land and homes occupied or deteriorated,

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Speaker 1: and they continued to face a snate conflicts. I'm Eve

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Speaker 1: Jeff Coote, and hopefully you know a little more about

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Speaker 1: history today than you did yesterday. If you know you

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