main
The Eurasian Politician - October 2003
Anssi Kullberg, 1 Oct. 2003
The Sufi brotherhoods helped to preserve national identity and the society's ability to resist the conqueror's attempts to break it, and besides, they made underground and secret society activity possible. When people had been forced to hide religion and bring it to the private sphere of the families, politics soon followed suit. It was much harder for the KGB to penetrate and break the Chechen society, which cultivated honor and loyalty to family as most respectable virtues, than it had been in many other societies of the former Soviet Union.
The final inspiration for the national independence movement, however, came from European nationalism, according to which model the nations of Central and Eastern Europe, the Baltic countries, and the Balkans were revived and brought back to life from the freeze of the Cold War, as soon as the Perestroyka had given the opportunity. The reviving nations were not anyhow "new", as were not the national states these nations claimed. All these nations had been constructed and "imagined" complete during the 1800s boom of European nationalism, but they could be brought back from the freeze and "continued" only after the collapse of real socialism in late 1980s. Most nations mentally returned to those memories that they had from their previous period of freedom during the inter-war period.
Like the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, also the nations of the Caucasus existed in the 1800s as political constructions, and they, too, shared the short experience of sovereign statehood in the inter-war period. Also they returned to their memories of the 1910s and 1920s, when the Perestroyka allowed this. Chechen nationalism was mostly influenced by the development in the Baltic countries and in Georgia, but besides of that, there were the experiences of the independence struggle of the early 1900s, the immense trauma of Stalin's genocide, and memories of the several uprisings during the Soviet period. We will now shortly study these roots of the secular independence movement.
While the passivity of external powers had encouraged Russia to set out for a previously unheard-of ethnic cleansing and genocide to destroy the Circassians, the sudden interest shown by external powers to intervene in Russian-Caucasian affairs after the turn of the century seemed at last bring some new hope of freedom for the Caucasians. When the World War I was over, the Central Powers were committed to support the independence of the Caucasian countries. Turkey took upon the role of protector for the Muslim nations, while Germany came to the protection of Georgia. The Chechens renamed Grozny as Suyuchkala, and following the February 1917 revolution, they formed a National Assembly there. In May, the Central Committee of the Mountaineer Federation assembled in Vladikavkaz, and the Chechens were particularly active. In October, the North Caucasian delegations came to the conclusion of founding a shared federation in Shamil's old capital, the mountain town of Veden.
The Russians attacked the Chechens, first using Cossack troops in November, and they soon occupied Grozny. The leader of the Chechens, Sheikh Deni Arsanov, besieged the city, but in the middle of peace negotiations, he was ambushed and murdered by Russians at the railway station. The man who became his successor, was an Islamic conservative, Sheikh Uzun Haji. The Terek Cossacks aligned themselves with the Bolsheviks, who had usurped power in St. Petersburg, whereas the Chechens joined the front of the White Generals. In spite of the difficult situation, the Federation of the North Caucasus was founded on 2nd December, 1917, four days before the independence of Finland. The Federation aimed at covering all pro-independence nations from Dagestan to Abkhazia, in other words, from the Caspian to the Black Sea, forming a shield on the northern side of Georgia and Azerbaijan.
At first, the North Caucasian Federation put its goals modest, announcing that in the first phase it would accept an autonomous status as a part of Russia. However, against the odds of the Caucasian estimations, the Bolsheviks remained in power. Besides, the example of full independence declaration by Finland (on 6th December) encouraged other previously oppressed nations to follow suit, and thereby the North Caucasian Federation declared separating itself entirely and for good from Russia on 21st December, 1917. The government first assembled in Vladikavkaz, but later moved to Nazran. In March, the Bolsheviks recognized the right of the North Caucasus to independence, but they were against their "bourgeois" government.
When the Russian Civil War spilled over to the Caucasus, part of the Chechens joined the Red side, which was particularly due to the fact that the Terek Cossacks had defected to the White side, and the White Generals had gravely disappointed all pro-independence nations by arrogant and uncompromising Greater-Russian imperialism. The Chechen Reds were led by the 20-year-old Aslanbek Sheripov, who declared the Terek Soviet Republic founded in Pyatigorsk.
The Trans-Caucasian Federation was founded on 22nd April, 1918, but it soon disintegrated, when Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and the North Caucasus each declared independence. The first of them was the North Caucasian Mountain Republic (Gorskaya Respublika) on 11th May 1918. It was a secular federation, which was founded by the delegations of all North Caucasian peoples, including the Cossacks. The prime minister was a Chechen, Colonel Abdulmajid Tapa Chermoyev, who had grown wealth in the oil business in Grozny. Germany, France and Turkey recognized the independence of this new state de facto, and its representatives participated in the Conferences of Paris, London, and San Remo, in 1920.
However, the White army of General Anton Denikin crushed the Mountain Republic. Chechen Reds still continued to fight until their young leader Sheripov was killed on 11th September 1919. In September 1919, the secular Mountain Republic was replaced by the characteristically religious North Caucasian Emirate, led by Sheikh Uzun Haji. The Red Army crushed Uzun Haji's troops in February 1920. During the spring and summer 1920, the Bolsheviks also occupied Dagestan.
Caucasian resistance continued persistently, first in exile in Georgia. An eminent leader was received for the resistance movement from Turkey: Shamil's grandson Said Bey, who led the North Caucasians to make incursion back to Chechnya and Dagestan from Georgia. There they got thousands of men immediately join the struggle against the Bolsheviks. Resistance in Dagestan was only gradually oppressed, when Georgia had fallen to Bolshevik hands. Said Bey returned to Turkey, but local Avars and Chechens continued resistance in the Chechen mountains until 1925, when the perseverant leader of the resistance movement, Sheikh Najmuddin Gotsinski, was captured and executed. Still after this, guerrilla war continued in Dagestan until 1928, and in the Chechen Highlands until late 1930s.
Yet two more times the Chechens set out for full-scale armed uprising against the Soviet authority: In 1929-1930, the Chechens reacted against the collectivization policy by taking up into arms. In 1940-1942, the resistance movement was led by the nationalist poet and journalist Hasan Israilov, who was inspired by the Finnish Winter War, and the successes of the Finns against the Soviets in it. Israilov declared he would "turn Chechnya into another Finland". Soviet troops soon expelled Israilov's government, and the troops he had raised, into guerrilla warfare in forests, but they continued the fight for two years, and even got the former Chechen communist Mairbek Sheripov to join them. The Soviet Union ended up in bombing the whole area.
In 1944, Stalin decided to liquidate the whole Chechen nation, as well as Checheno-Ingushetia as a political entity. The Chechens were not the only people Stalin decided to destroy entirely, but especially in the case of the Chechens, the decision of annihilation was explained by the threat posed to the Soviet system by repeated Chechen uprisings, as well as the threat that the Chechens would have collaborated with the Germans, as well as the international (including Finnish) SS troops in 1942-1943, when they had advanced to the Malgobek hills in Ingushetia, and had made scout missions to the Chechen heartland, too.
The liquidation was executed in February 1944, on the Red Army memorial day, when all the population was expected to be in their villages, celebrating. According to the plan of the NKVD chief Lavrenty Beria, the troops of the secret service besieged the villages and imprisoned the whole Chechen population, shot all those who resisted, as well as pregnant women, elderly people and others who would not have endured the transportation. Extremely cruel massacres took place all over the republic, and the aűls, mountain villages, burned in flames for weeks. One of the best known massacres took place in the village of Khaibakh, where 700 villagers were burn alive in a granary. During the Dudayev period, one of the independence-declared Chechnya's countless memorials of the "Chechen Holocaust" was erected at the site.
The imprisoned population was loaded into cattle cars, and the railroad transportation to the remote freezing steppes of Northern Kazakstan took weeks. More than 60 per cent of the Chechen population were killed during the genocide: in the massacres, during the transportation, in concentration camps, and in Kazakstan, where many of the survivors died to hunger, cold, disease, and poisons that were hidden in the "humanitarian aid".
It was previously described, how the Sufi society held itself together and resistant by maintaining locality, family ties, and the privacy of faith. So, the Soviet state tried to liquidate the existence of the Chechen nation also as a memory. Mountain villages were burn to ashes. All the classical literature, poetry, archives, and memorials of the Chechens were destroyed. Gravestones were torn away, and in order to profane the memory of sanctity, they were used to build roads to the Russians, who were settled to the country after the deportation of the Chechens. Despite all this, the social bonds of the Chechens held their identity together even in the captivity in Kazakstan. There were stories told of the perseverance of the Chechens in the GULAG. The taips continued their existence and functioning far away from home, and the Chechens continued to know the history of their families, their mythical origins and ancestors seven generations backwards.
After Stalin's death (1953), when slightly more human times by Khrushchev had started, the Chechens were permitted, in 1956, to return to their homeland, and indeed most of them returned, buying back their exactly known houses or pieces of land from the Russians who had been settled there meanwhile. The Chechens reconstructed their land with remarkable speed and effort - especially keeping in the mind, that it was still Soviet dictatorship, and Chechens continued to be discriminated in every sense in the Soviet system. The returning Chechens brought with them also the bones of their relatives who had died in Kazakstan, in order to bury them in exactly known places in the family's own native land. Despite that the reputation of the Chechens was never rehabilitated in the eyes of the Russians, and heavy policy of Russification continued, in Chechnya itself, the mutual relations between Chechens and ethnic Russians remained relatively unproblematic.
In Dudayev's independent Chechnya (1991-1994) the newly declared state concentrated in a unique scale to cultivate the revival of memory, and erected everywhere in the country memorials of the genocide, as well as memorials to honor those "avengers" who had managed to remain in the mountains of the Chechen Highlands even during the deportation. According to Usmanov, they continued to guard the sacraments, so that the Russian occupiers would not dare to profane the sacred places. The old men who had belonged to these "avengers" enjoyed great respect in Chechnya of the 1990s.
Among those who returned to the homeland from Kazakstan, was also the 13-year-old Djokhar Dudayev, who had been an infant at the time of the deportation. Return to the native land must have had a deep impact on the teenager. Dudayev was an intelligent youth, but his university studies did not proceed in the Soviet system, so that he moved to a military career, which in the Soviet system could offer a non-political and honorable career for an ambitious youth. Although also in the military, ethnic Chechens were denied promotions into high positions, or strategically important duties, Dudayev managed to cheat the system by presenting himself as an Ossetian. In this way, he was first educated into a Soviet air force pilot, where he quickly advanced to the rank of a colonel. He served in the Afghan War, and finally ended up as a general to the position of commander of the 23rd Strategic Bomber Division in Tartu, Estonia.
In Tartu, Dudayev got interested in the democracy movement, national independence movement, and also studied the history of Finland and Estonia. It is generally believed that the years he spent in Estonia, made a decisive influence to promote Dudayev's conviction that also Chechnya should become an independent nation. In Tartu, Dudayev kept keen contact with his Estonian ideological brethren, and when the Moscow Kremlin ordered the 23rd Strategic Bomber Division to crush the independence movements of the Baltic countries, the commander of the base, Dudayev, rejected the order, and instead, supported the Estonian demonstrators, quit from the Red Army, and returned to his homeland, Chechnya. Great gratitude is felt for him in Estonia for this. There is a street named after him in Tartu, and at the doorway of the Barclay Hotel in the center, there is a marble memorial plate dedicated to Dudayev, in Estonian, Chechen, and English languages.
When Dudayev returned to Chechnya, the social protest movement and national revival, which had waken up by Perestroyka, were already active in Chechnya. The independence movement of the republic was by no means a private invention of Dudayev. He, however, happened to appear very suitable, when the Chechen National Congress argued about the leader Subsequently, he was elected to head the Congress.
Dudayev had several advantages in his favor: His background as a high-ranking professional military officer gave him reputation of a gazi, a manly hero the Chechens would recognize as their leader. Besides, being a soldier, he was apolitical, which was an absolute merit in the situation, where the old leaders of the Chechen-Ingush Soviet Republic were all communists whose reputation in the eyes of the people was disgraced by their careers in the CPSU (Communist Party). Dudayev was charismatic, and he was a very good speaker, who spoke well the Chechen language, which many of the party career communists barely spoke at all. Dudayev arrived to the country from Estonia, as a relative outsider and thereby impartial, which proved an advantage amidst rival taips and families. Estonia was also "west" of the Soviet Union, and so Dudayev could appear as a real cosmopolitan in Chechnya, as he also knew widely the history of the Baltics, Finland, and Western countries. On 27th October, 1991, Dudayev was elected president of Chechnya in a common and free election, where he had three rival candidates.
One month later, on 27th November, 1991, Chechnya declared independence as the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria. It strongly endeavored to fulfil all the criteria of an independent state, but remained without international recognition, although there was spirited discussion on this especially in the parliaments of the Baltic countries and Poland. (The Georgian government recognized the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, but at the time the Georgian government had been exiled by a bloody coup d'état in Tbilisi. Later the Taliban movement of Afghanistan announced they would recognize Chechnya, but because the Chechen government did not recognize the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan, President Maskhadov rejected the Taliban's recognition.) Chechnya appealed to the UN declarations on the right of self-determination of all nations and de-colonization, and in addition, it was argued for the declaration of independence, that Chechnya had been illegally and violently occupied by imperial Russia, and the Chechens had never accepted being part of Russia or the Soviet Union.
Then, what kind of a state the Chechens tried to set up? From the beginning it was clear that the goal of the independence movement was not an "Islamic state". It was modeled on the independence movements of the Baltic countries and other parts of Eastern Europe. Dudayev gave speeches praising the Finnish Winter War, like his predecessor Israilov had done, and the political rhetorics in Chechnya followed the same lines as among the intellectual leaders of the democracy movements across Eastern Europe. In spite of his military background, Dudayev belonged to the same reference group with Lennart Meri of Estonia, Vytautas Landsbergis of Lithuania, Václav Havel of the Czech Republic, Lech Walesa of Poland, Emil Constantinescu of Romania, Ibrahim Rugova of Kosovo, Zviad Gamsahurdia of Georgia, and Ebülfez Elchibey of Azerbaijan. They all were undoubtedly nationalists, and they spoke in language, which was more idealistic and with more pathos than the political rhetoric that the West had been used to by the time, but yet none of them was "extremist" of any sort.
The Constitution of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria makes it clear that Chechnya is meant to be a secular national state, which explicitly guaranteed the rights of minorities and religious freedom in its Constitution. The Constitution did appeal on the "Almighty", but did not name Him, which was generally, and probably correctly, interpreted as an intended willingness to understand the God of Muslims and Christians to be one and the same. This is in harmony with the teaching of the Koran, and even more, this tendency to syncretism is characteristic for Sufism, and suited well the traditions of Chechnya. Chechnya also explicated in its Constitution that the Republic must not have any official state ideology (or state religion).
To emphasize the equality of different confessions existing in the country, the Chechen state television purposefully showed also Christian and Jewish ceremonies. Also in Chechnya of early 1990s, the radical Islamists (IRP) were first skeptical or even directly hostile at the idea of national independence. They supported preservation of the Soviet Union, and later preservation of the unity of the North Caucasus (as a part of the Russian Federation). The relationship between religion and administration in Chechnya has been dominated by the adaat practice, based on tradition and customs, and not sharia, religious legislation.
Besides that the independence movement wanted Chechnya to be a secular (or syncretist) and religiously tolerant state, they made another conscious choice already on an early stage, when there was the question whether Chechnya should take its own path and demand independence alone, or whether it should try to unite and split from Russia some kind of a North Caucasian entity - perhaps inspired and led by Chechens like had been done in the times of the Murids, and in early 1900s.
In modern Russian domino theory, Russians have feared most the scenario where, like in the historical examples, the Chechen independence struggle would be joined by all the North Caucasus. After the horrible destruction of the Circassians in late 1800s, the North Caucasus can only unite in the leadership of either Chechnya or Dagestan. Russia took precautions for the threat so that the Russian military intelligence GRU created their own "North Caucasian Federation", which intended to undermine the national independence movements, to promote the agenda of the Islamist IRP, which had been founded in the control of the KGB, and to keep the North Caucasus at least formally under Russian sovereignty, in which case all possible concessions of autonomy could be cancelled later. The "North Caucasian Federation" was also used to recruit mercenaries, for example from Chechnya, to form strange mujahidin units to fight in the GRU-organized Abkhaz War against Georgians. Their salaries were paid through Transnistria, which has also been characteristic for GRU subversive operations since the end of the Cold War.
Dagestan, which headed the resistance struggle in the times of the Murid Wars, was in the 1990s clearly backward in regard to the national awakening. The "divide and rule" policy of the Soviet system had effectively managed to channel Dagestani political activity to internal republican power struggles - especially among the elites of the most powerful ethnic groups, the Avars, the Dargins and the Lezgins. Dagestan was ruled heavy-handedly by an old-fashioned communist, Mahomedali Mahomedov. The Circassians of the Northwest Caucasus were too weak, few, and scattered, to be for any considerable help, at least on an early stage. When even the closest ethnic brethren, the Ingush, wanted to split up from Chechnya, the situation was clear: Dudayev did not try to stop the Ingush. The Chechens could only trust in themselves. Uniting the North Caucasus would have been a much bigger challenge than an independent national state of Chechnya.
A national state still fitted in the frames of realism. In 1991-1994, the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria proved its ability to function, and its ability to reconstruct the country efficiently, in spite of very difficult circumstances. In 1994-1996, it proved its ability to fight and defend its territory by the means of modern, organized warfare. Finally, in 1997, it proved its willingness to follow the rules of Western democracy, and a clear majority of the Chechen people voted for a moderate secular independent state, when they voted for Aslan Maskhadov as their candidate for presidency.
* * *
[The separation of Ingushetia from Chechnya was mainly due to geopolitics: unlike the mountainous Chechnya, Ingushetia is mostly constituted by plains (except the southern mountains, which were indeed transferred into the control of Chechen troops), and it has never been possible to defend Ingushetia against militarily superior Russia with the same relative success that has been possible in Chechnya and Dagestan. The Chechens have, however, continuously enjoyed moral, economic and diplomatic support by the Ingush, and Ingushetia also continues to accommodate hundreds of thousands of Chechen refugees today. The situation has deteriorated radically in regard to human rights of the Chechen refugees since in spring, 2002, the Ingush President Ruslan Aushev was replaced with Putin's favorite, FSB General Murat Zyazikov.]
Anderson, Benedict, 1983: Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread
of Nationalism. Verso, London, 1983.
Gall, Carlotta & De Waal, Thomas, 1998: Chechnya - Calamity in the Caucasus. New York University
Press, New York & London, 1998.
Gammer, Moshe, 1998: The Russo-Chechen Conflict in Historical Perspective. Mehmet
Tütüncü (ed.): Caucasus: War and Peace. SOTA, Haarlem.
Grodzinska-Klemetti, Zofia, 2001, interview. The Alexander Institute, Helsinki.
Khan, Muhammad Iqbal, 1995: The Muslims of Chechnya. Struggle for Independence. The
Islamic Foundation, Joseph A. Ball Ltd., Leicester.
Leitzinger, Antero, 1995: Tshetsheenit.
Pohjois-Kaukasuksen historiaa ja Groznyin taistelu 24.1.1995 saakka.
Kirja-Leitzinger, Painosampo, Helsinki.
Leitzinger, Antero, 2000: The Circassian Genocide.
The Eurasian Politician, 2/2000.
Stone, Leonard, 2001: The International Politics of Central Eurasia. Central
Eurasian Publications On Line. http://leonardstone.8m.com/
Usmanov, Lyoma, 1999, correspondence.
Williams, Brian, 2000: The Ethnic Cleansing of the Chechens: An Analysis of the
1944 Deportation of the Chechens and the Role of Communal Trauma in the
Post-Soviet Russo-Chechen Wars. History and Memory, Vol. 12, No. 1, Summer
2000.
Williams, Brian, 2003: Jihad and Ethnicity in Post-Communist Eurasia. On the Trail
of Transnational Islamic Holy Warriors in Kashmir, Afghanistan, Central Asia,
Chechnya and Kosovo. The Global Review of Ethnopolitics, Vol. 2, No. 3-4,
March/June 2003, 3-24.