Seventy-five years ago this past Saturday, Soviet NKVD and Red Army soldiers, acting on the orders of General Secretary Josef Stalin, began Operation Lentil, also known in the region as Aardakh.

Stalin had ruled that the entirety of the Chechen and Ingush populations were traitors, collaborating with the Nazi soldiers that had invaded the Soviet Union but never reached the Vainakh lands. Nearly half a million people were loaded into industrial railcars and shipped off from their ancestral homeland, bound for Central Asia. Within a year, more than one-third of them would be dead.

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