Residents of Russia's North Caucasus region of Ingushetia are commemorating the victims of the 1944 Soviet deportation of Ingush and Chechens from the North Caucasus to Central Asia.
Commemoration ceremonies and public prayers were held in Ingushetia's mosques and cemeteries on February 23.
From February 23 to March 9, 1944, Soviet authorities deported almost all Chechens and Ingush -- an estimated 650,000 people -- to Central Asia, claiming they were collaborating with Nazi Germany.
The Kremlin-appointed leader of Ingushetia, Makhmud-Ali Kalimatov, at a special ceremony in the regional capital, Magas, called the deportation "a historic pain" for the Ingush people.
"Seventy-eight years ago, our people faced enormous injustice and political cruelty. Our people were forced out of their homes when thousands of members of the Ingush people were fighting on the fields of [World War II]," Kalimatov said.
As many as half of the deportees died either on the journey or due to the harsh conditions in which they were forced to live.
In 1957, four years after Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's death, the survivors were allowed to return to the North Caucasus.
In neighboring Chechnya, in 2012, Moscow-backed authoritarian leader Ramzan Kadyrov moved the Day of Grief and Remembrance from February 23 to May 10, the anniversary of the burial of his father, Akhmad Kadyrov, who was killed in a bomb attack in Grozny on May 9, 2004.
