The Last Watch
Updated: 11 minutes ago
A story of the Karachay livestock guardian dogs — baskhan pariy
In November 1943, tragedy descended upon the Karachay people.
By decision of the Soviet authorities, the Karachays were forcibly deported from their homeland in the North Caucasus.
The official accusations concerned collaboration by part of the population with the German occupation authorities, resistance to the restoration of Soviet power, and “banditry”.
But the punishment was not imposed only on individuals accused of wrongdoing.
It encompassed an entire people.
Men.
Women.
Children.
The elderly.
According to the State Museum of Karachay-Cherkessia, 68,614 people were deported, mainly to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. The Karachays were among the peoples of the North Caucasus subjected to mass forced resettlement during Joseph Stalin’s rule.
The people did not leave their homes of their own free will.
They did not choose to abandon their land.
Nor did they willingly leave their animals behind.
They were taken away.
And behind them remained the houses.
The flocks.
And the dogs.
In the mountains of Karachay, a shepherd’s life had for centuries been unimaginable without the powerful local livestock guardian dogs, traditionally known as wolfhounds.
These dogs protected the flocks from wolves, bears and jackals. According to canine specialist Kazbek Magulayev, before the deportation there were around 1.5 million sheep in the Karachay Autonomous Oblast, and a sheepfold holding approximately a thousand animals was usually guarded by at least three wolfhounds.
When the people were deported, the dogs were left without their owners.
Some retreated into the forests and became feral.
Others were taken in along with the remaining livestock.
But among the memories preserved from those years is a story that Kazbek Magulayev would recount decades later.
He begins by saying that legends are told about the devotion of the Karachay wolfhounds.
And one of them tells of dogs that remained at their post.
Sometime after the deportation, a hunter came upon a cave.
Inside were numerous sheep skeletons.
At the entrance lay the remains of large dogs.
According to the account, what had happened gradually became clear.
The shepherd who owned the flock had been deported.
But his wolfhounds had stayed behind.
There was no one to lead them.
No one to give them commands.
No one to tell them what they should do.
But they knew.
The flock had to be protected.
The dogs led the sheep, now without their shepherd, to a safe place and continued to guard them.
Even when they began to starve.
According to the legend, they did not touch a single sheep.
They did not turn the animals they guarded into food for themselves.
They stayed with them until the very end.
We do not know their names.
We do not know their shepherd’s name.
The source does not specify exactly where the cave was.
Nor do we know when the hunter discovered it.
Only the story remains.
The sheep’s remains inside.
And the large dogs at the entrance.
Where a guardian ought to be.
Perhaps this is the hardest part of the story to comprehend.
The people were gone.
The shepherd would not return that evening.
There was no hand to stroke a dog.
No voice to praise it.
No reward.
And yet the work continued.
Not because someone was watching them.
But because, for these dogs, the flock remained their responsibility.
The person who had entrusted it to them had been forcibly torn from their lives.
But the task remained.
And they continued to fulfil it.
Until the end.
The return
Years passed.
After Stalin’s death in 1953, the period of de-Stalinisation began.
In February 1956, Nikita Khrushchev condemned the mass deportations in the so-called “Secret Speech” to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Restrictions imposed on some of the deported peoples gradually began to be lifted.
On 9 January 1957, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR adopted a decree restoring the national autonomy of the Karachay people. It also lifted the ban on Karachays returning to their former places of residence.
The people began to return.
To the mountains.
To the villages.
To the land from which they had been torn.
And here, in Kazbek Magulayev’s account, there is another small detail.
He says that among the first people to return in 1957 were Karachays who recognised, in now elderly wolfhounds, the puppies they had been forced to leave behind thirteen years earlier.
Some dogs had survived.
Some families saw again the animals that had once been theirs.
But the dogs in the cave did not live to see that return.
According to the legend, they remained where they had last been entrusted with a task.
To guard the flock.
And when, years later, the people once again took the road home, those dogs were no longer there.
Only the story remained.
Of dogs whose names are unknown.
Of a shepherd whose name is unknown.
And of a last watch that no one had ever called off.
The guardians remained at their post.
Until the very end.
Note on the historical context
The story of the dogs in the cave was told by Kazbek Magulayev to journalist Islam Tekeyev and published in “AiF-Stavropol” on 11 September 2020.
Magulayev himself presents it as one of the legends about the devotion of the Karachay wolfhounds. In the absence of a known archival document for this particular case, it should be understood as a historical memory and oral tradition preserved against the background of the documented events of the 1943 deportation.
The mass deportation of the Karachays in 1943, the subsequent lifting of restrictions in 1956–1957, and the restoration of their right to return are documented historical events.
Full legal rehabilitation of the repressed peoples in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic was established by the law of 26 April 1991.
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