Operation Lentil (Caucasus) - Aftermath

Aftermath

The Checheno-Ingush ASSR was dissolved and transformed into Grozny Oblast, which included also the Kizlyarsky District and Naursky Raion, and parts of it were given to North Ossetia (part of Prigorodny District), Georgian SSR and Dagestan ASSR. Most of the empty housing was given to refugees from war-raged western Soviet Union. Abandoned houses were settled by newcomers, only the Mountain Jews and Meskhetian Turks, both of which groups had previously lived in the area, refused to settle in foreign houses. Names of repressed nations were totally erased from all books and encyclopedias. By the next summer, a number of Chechen and Ingush placenames were replaced with Russian ones; mosques and graveyards were destroyed, and a massive campaign of burning numerous historical Nakh language books and manuscripts was near complete. Many families were divided and not allowed to travel to each other even if they found out where their relatives were. Some of Vainakh settlements were totally deleted from maps and encyclopedias. Many gravestones were destroyed in places that were renamed to be given Russian names, along with pretty much the whole library of Vainakh medieval writing (in Arabic and Georgian script) about the lands and peoples of of Chechnya and Ingushetia and their peoples (leaving their ancestors and the world depleted of what was more or less the only source of central Caucasian literature and historical texts, except for sparse texts about them that were written by Georgians).