Iradi SSR in the Second World War
The Iradi SSR in the Second World War covers the part played by the Iradi Soviet Socialist Republic in the Soviet war effort of 1941–1945. The republic sent men, cavalry remounts, wool, leather, food and antimony to the front, and received evacuated factories, refugees and deported peoples.[1]
Men and horses
Iradi men were mobilized into the Red Army. In late 1941 the republic raised the Iradi National Cavalry Division, about 4,000 riders on their own horses, which was mauled on the Don in 1942 and disbanded. When the army came back in 1944 for the Chongtor breeding stallions, the breeders hid them (see 1944 Wartime Mobilization Strike).[1]
The home front
Factories evacuated from European Russia were rebuilt in Kobozev and Talas, and they became the base of Kobozev's engineering industry. Volga Germans and peoples of the North Caucasus were deported into the republic; most left after their rehabilitation in the late 1950s. Malaria spread from the irrigation channels during the war and was eliminated by 1960.[1][2]
About 3,000 children evacuated from besieged Leningrad in 1942, known in Irad as the Leningrad baldary ("Leningrad children"), were placed in children's homes in Kobozev and Talas and taken in by families of Talas and the Chu valley, as the villages had fed the deported Koryo-saram in 1937. A few hundred stayed and married into Iradi families, and their reunions in Talas continued until the 2010s.[3]
Memory
Victory Day (9 May), a Soviet holiday, was dropped by the 1993 Holidays Act (see Public holidays in Irad). In Nurzhan it is marked with a parade by the Russos and the veterans' associations, and the 2014 riot at the NurGaz Stadium followed the Nurzhan parade (see Kara-Ak derby); in Talas, which remembers the requisitions and the 1944 strike, the day is muted. Historians sum up the difference as a war of factories and the front in Nurzhan and a war of requisitions in Talas.[2]
References
- ^ Talas State University Press (2011). Iradistan: A History of the Iradi SSR, 1925–1991. Talas, pp. 112–140.
- ^ Eurasian Political Quarterly (2015). 'Two Wars: Memory of 1941–1945 in Nurzhan and Talas.' Vol. 22, Iss. 2, pp. 64–83.
- ^ Talas Herald (9 May 2012). 'The last reunion of the Leningrad children.' Talas.