Khasan Israilov
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| Хасан Исраилов Khasan Israilov |
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| Born | 1910 Nachkha, Galanchozh, Chechnya |
|---|---|
| Died | December 29, 1944 |
| Occupation | Guerrilla fighter, Journalist, Poet |
Khasan Israilov (Chechen: Хасан Исраилов) (1910 - December 29, 1944) was a Chechen nationalist, guerrilla fighter, journalist, and poet who led a Chechen and Ingush rebellion against the Soviet Union from 1940 until his death in 1944.
Khasan is regarded as the most influential Chechen guerrilla leader during the Second World War, and he is considered a national hero for many Chechens. His failed uprising, combined with an abortive German plot to undermine Soviet control over the North Caucasus, is believed to be a primary reason for Stalin's forced deportations of most Chechens and Ingush to Central Asia.
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[edit] Early life
Khasan was born in 1910 in the village of Nachkha in Galanchozh, Chechnya, as the youngest of six brothers in a family descended from the legendary rebel leader Imam Shamil. He completed study at a local Islamic school before joining Komsomol, the youth wing of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1919. Graduating from a communist secondary school in Rostov-on-Don in 1929, Khasan entered the ranks of the Communist Party, and in 1933 he was sent to Moscow's Communist University of the Toilers of the East.
As a student Khasan wrote plays and poetry, and he became a correspondent for the Moscow newspaper Krestianskaia Gazeta (Farmer's Newspaper). His scathing articles attacked Soviet policy in the North Caucasus, which he felt was plundering Chechnya by the Party leadership. In 1931 Khasan was arrested on charges of "counterrevolutionary slander", and was sentenced to ten years in prison after he had written an editorial accusing certain Party officials of "looting and corruption", but after two years Khasan was released, rehabilitated, and allowed to return to his university after several of the Party members Khasan had accused were charged with corruption.
Returning to Moscow Khasan met with other Chechen and Ingush students, including Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov and his elder brother Hussein, and they came to the conviction that a continuation of Soviet policy toward Chechen and Ingush Autonous Oblasts would inevitably lead to popular uprisings. In 1935 Khasan once again fell into legal troubles when his signature was found on a student petition critical of Soviet policy in the North Caucasus, and he was sentenced to five years' forced labor in Siberia. Khasan was released early in 1939 and he returned to Chechnya to work as a barrister in Shatoy.
[edit] Rebel leader
In 1940, after hearing of Finland's resistance against Soviet aggression, Khasan formally broke with the Soviet Union when he wrote a letter to the Chechen Communist Party leadership stating:
"I have decided to become the leader of a war of liberation of my own people. I understand all too well that not only in Checheno-Ingushetia, but in all nations of the Caucasus it will be difficult to win freedom from the heavy yoke of Red imperialism. But our fervent belief in justice and our faith in the support of the freedom-loving peoples of the Caucasus and of the entire world inspire me toward this deed, in your eyes impertinent and pointless, but in my conviction, the sole correct historical step. The valiant Finns are now proving that the Great Enslaver Empire is powerless against a small but freedom-loving people. In the Caucasus you will find your second Finland, and after us will follow other oppressed peoples."[1]
By February 1940 Khasan and his brother Hussein had established a guerrilla base in the mountains of south-eastern Chechnya, where they worked to organize a unified guerrilla movement to prepare an armed insurrection against the Soviets. Under the name "Provisional People’s Revolutionary State of Checheno-Ingushetia", the brothers convened 41 different meetings in summer 1941 to recruit local supporters, and by the end of midsummer of that year they had over 5,000 guerrillas and at least 25,000 sympathizers organized into five military districts encompassing Grozny, Gudermes, and Malgobek.
Khasan had planned the insurrection to begin on January 10, 1942, but a stalled German advance, combined with poor communication between the hundreds of guerrilla units spread throughout the region, aborted his plans. Soviet counter-insurgency efforts were also stymied by the mountainous terrain - Soviet bombing raids twice attacked suspected mountain hideouts of Chechen guerrillas in spring of 1942, but the mountain guerrillas escaped the sustained attacks virtually unscathed.
By January 28, 1942, Khasan had decided to extend the uprising from Chechens and Ingush to eleven of the dominant ethnic groups in the Caucasus by forming the Special Party of Caucasus Brothers (OKPB), with the aim of a pan-Islamic 'armed struggle with Bolshevik barbarism and Russian despotism'. Khasan also developed a code among the guerrilla fighters to maintain order and discipline, which stated:
• Brutally avenge the enemies for the blood of our native brothers, the best sons of the Caucasus;
• Mercilessly annihilate seksoty [secret agents], agents and other informants of the NKVD;
• Categorically forbid [guerrillas] to spend the night in homes or villages without the security of reliable guards.[2]
The Germans made concerted efforts to reach a concerted effort with Khasan, but they found his refusal to cede control of his revolutionary movement to the Germans, and his continued insistence on German recognition of Chechen independence, led many Germans to consider Khasan as unreliable, and his plans unrealistic. Although the Germans were able to undertake covert operations in Chechnya - such as the sabotage of Grozny oil fields - attempts at a German-Chechen alliance floundered.
By 1943, as the Germans began to retreat in the Eastern Front, the mountain guerrillas saw their fortunes change as many former rebels defected to the Soviets in exchange of amnesty. On December 6, 1943 German involvement in Chechnya ended when Soviet spies infiltrated and arrested the remaining German operatives in Chechnya.
Stalin had realized the vulnerability of the Caucasus and the strategic oil reserves in Chechnya, and by late 1943 he had made plans to deport the peoples of the North Caucasus as he viewed them as potential fifth columnists. By a decree of the Supreme Soviet on March 7, 1944, entitled 'On the Liquidation of the Checheno-Ingush ASSR and the Administrative Reorganization of the Territory’, Stalin alleged that the peoples of the North Caucasus were responsible for mass collaboration with the Germans, despite the fact that an estimated 157,000 Chechen and Ingush conscripts had fought in the Red Army against Nazi Germany, and many had fought all the way to the liberation of Berlin. On the night of February 23, 1944 Lavrentiy Beria personally carried out the Chechevitsa, the forced deportation of the Chechens and Ingush to Central Asia. Beria went on to issue a verbal order that any Chechen or Ingush found 'untransportable should be liquidated' on the spot, and under this pretext thousands were summarily executed. Victims of typhus, which had reached epidemic proportions, were immediately executed, as were pregnant women and the elderly; another example of Soviet excesses came in the Chechen village of Khaibakh, where more than 700 Chechens were locked in a stable and burnt alive. Chechen literature and manuscripts were also burned by the Soviets, and food and water supplies were poisoned to eliminate any that stayed behind.
[edit] Death
Khasan had managed to elude the deportations, although his entire family had been either deported or executed outright, and he was rendered extremely vulnerable to capture. Although forced confessions from colleagues led the NKVD to many of Hasan's weapons and equipment, he eluded arrest for the next ten months hiding from cave to cave as a fugitive, burdened by the weight of the deportation of his people. In a Top Secret communication among Soviet officers, it was reported that Khasan had been killed, his corpse photographed and identified on December 29, 1944. All photographs of Khasan Israilov and information related to his death are kept in the secret archives of the Russian FSB even today.
Soviet secret police units would continue to hunt the remnants of the Chechen guerrilla opposition in the North Caucasus until 1953.
