Paper long abstract:

Historic past of the North Caucasus reflected in narratives in which minority and majority peoples encapsulate their visions of human experience during World War II has spawned myths where an outright lie interspersed with half truths; so fictional and literal accounts of the past are worthy of sustained theoretical and practical consideration.

Narratives are subjective construals by which communities reinvent facts to build up identity, support their "own truth", maintain the feeling of unity and division from "others". My aim, as a linguist, is to produce the sociolinguistic analysis of narratives concerning the participation of highlanders in World War II and the deportation of some North Caucasus peoples to Central Asia. The objectives are to investigate the contents, concepts, structure of events and actions, the language and discursive forms of narrative texts explaining causal sequences and connections of past events in the North Caucasus. The study is based on thorough exploration of written history accounts and aural narratives of people from the North Caucasus.

The verbalized picture of the North Caucasus realities forms a distorted ideological image which presents story-objects, actions, events, time and place in a perverted way. To well-established myths belong idle speculations that during World War II most of Caucasians fought on the side of the enemy; that Caucasians massively left their parts, joined the ranks of armed gangs involved in robberies and murder; that Caucasians welcomed German troops with bread and salt; that only Caucasians fought in the Eastern legions of the Wehrmacht. These mythological narratives are not borne out by real facts.

Another conceptual domain of conflict-generating narratives that I will trace is deportation of highlanders. By governmental decrees of Stalin, entire communities of Karachays, Chechens, Ingush and Balkars were exiled to Central Asia. Mortality of the deportees amounted from 30% up to 50%. Biased narratives explain the reasons for deportation of entire populations of southern European part of the country: revenge, "punitive measure" for performances Highlanders had against authorities in different years, the collective punishment for the collaborations of some individuals with Germans, as well as securing and strengthening the southern borders of the State, etc.

The conclusion made postulates that history accounts are compelling language tools which connect past with present and future and lead to a better understanding of societal development.