On 23 February 1944, Stalin ordered the
deportation of the entire Chechen and Ingush population to Siberia and

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More than half of the 500,000 people who were forcibly transported died
in transit or in massacres committed by Soviet troops. Those who
survived the journey were left to face starvation and disease in the
harsh winters of Siberia and Central Asia.Overnight, Chechnya and Ingushetia were
emptied of their native inhabitants, and within days an entire people
had been erased from their ancestral land. Every reference to Chechnya
was removed from official maps, records and encyclopaedias.
Sixty years after the event, in 2004, the European Parliament passed a motion to recognise this catastrophe as Genocide.

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