I am posting a chronology I wrote in early 2000 about Chechnya. It deals
briefly with a number of the issues raised by recent posts on PEN-L. I will
serialize it in parts. Taken as a whole, it shows
--that Chechnya was not a part of Russia until the late 19th century, when it
was conquered after a bitter, bloody, genocidal conflict of many decades. So it
isn't a historic part of old Russia, either ethnically or geographically.
--that the Russian conquest was a typical brutal colonialist war, and
included the ethnic cleansing of many Chechens and the deforestation of a large
part of Chechnya.
--that in the early days of the revolution, the Soviet Union was feeling its
way to a new policy on the Caucasus, and carried out many reforms and a certain
recognition of the national rights of the local nationalities.
--that the Stalinist policy led up to the genocidal mass deportation of all
Chechens from Chechnya in 1944 (and the removal of Chechens from the Red Army,
including Chechens who had won medals in the fight against the Nazi invasion of
the Soviet Union).
-- that Yeltsin's interference with Chechen didn't wait until 1994, but was
carried out with brutality from 1991. The open war beginning in 1994 only marked
an escalation of the covert war that began in October/November 1991, and that
has never ended up to the present.
--that, contrary to colonialist sarcasm about the Chechen "Wonderland of
Independent Ichkeria", Chechnya never got recognized independence from Russia.
It merely got a couple of years of truce to the open warfare. The settlement of
the first period of open warfare, the Khasavyurt accords, left open the question
of Chechen sovereignty to be settled by 2001: but long before then the Russian
government had renounced the Khasavyurt accords. In the meantime, Chechen was
left without the authority needed to establish a functioning economy. It is
impossible to seriously analyze what happened in Chechnya without referring to
the effect of the devastation of the Chechen economy by Russian intervention,
blockade and interference, and without referring to the effect on the Chechen
people of the massive killings, torture in Russian "filtration camps", and
humiliation during the 1990s.
--that the Yeltsin-Putin war on Chechnya is part of a general series of
Russian imperialist activity towards the Caucasus, which includes playing off
one nation against another. For example, the Russian government played with the
the secession movement of Abkhazia against former Soviet Georgia. The Russian
government fished in troubled waters in order to get permission to establish
military bases in the guise of providing stability.
--that the rise of Chechen fundamentalism has gone hand-in-hand with Russian
colonialist invasion and brutality. Tsarist colonialist aggression gave rise to
an upsurge of religious passion in the resistance to Russia in the late 18th and
early 19th century as Chechens. And the Yeltsin-Putin war against Chechnya, from
1991 to the present, has dramatically contributed to the weight of
fundamentalism in Chechnya.
I hope this material will be useful to those who want to formulate a policy
on Chechnya that will help the class-conscious workers of all countries unite
and rebuild an independent class movement.
Recently there have been dozens of recent postings on Chechnya. I have
examined these postings, and I believe that the factual part of these postings
(not necessarily the conclusions drawn by the person(s) who have has posted
them) confirm the accuracy of this chronology. In turn I hope that this
chronology will be of help for people trying to work their way through the
material on Chechnya. At the time I prepared this chronology, I also reviewed
three books on Chechnya, written from different points of view (the authors
being the apologist of Russian imperialism Anatol Lieven, the Western
journalists Carlotta Gall & Thomas de Waal, and the cold-warrior John Dunlop),
and those reviews describe some of these issues in more detail. For example, my
review of Gall's and de Waal's book goes at more length into the issue of the
attitude of the Soviet Union towards Chechnya. Links to these works can be found
at www.communistvoice.org/00Chechnya.html
I start with part one, the history of tsarist conquest of Chechnya, with
some reference to other events in the Caucasus:
-------------------------------------
Important dates in
Russian-Chechen relations
-------------------------------------
Several thousand years ago:
. The ancestors of the Chechens arrive in the North Caucasus.
1550s to 1604:
. The Russian state begins serious attempts to enter the North Caucasus, which
however had to be given up until 1722
1722:
. There is the first major battle between Chechens and the encroaching Russian
state. Russian cavalry sent by Tsar Peter the Great to occupy a village in
eastern Chechnya is defeated. Peter the Great dies in 1725, and tsarist
expansionism in the region slows until the latter part of the century.
1783:
. The treaty of Georgievsk puts mainly Christian Georgia under Russian
protection: the Georgian monarchy had appealed to Russia as protection against
Persia, the Ottoman Empire and the Islamic peoples in the Caucasus. However,
Russia was for some time incapable of providing military help to Georgia.
1785-1791:
. Chechens, and also Dagestanis and some other Caucasian groups, fight Russian
expansionism. They were led by a Chechen Imam, Sheikh Mansur, who also sought to
impose a much stricter allegiance to Islam among the Chechens then they had
previously practiced. The Russian empire emerged victorious.
1801:
. Georgia is annexed by Russia, and the monarchy is deposed. There are several
revolts against Russian rule later in the century.
1816-27:
. Russian General Alexei Yermolov is given command over tsarist troops in the
Caucasus. He undertakes a savage policy of massacres, leveling of villages,
destruction of crops, and forcible removal of Chechens from the fertile Chechen
lowlands (thus blocking the previous migration of Chechens from the mountains to
the lowlands). His policies provoke new resistance, and to this day his name is
still an object of hatred among Chechens. Sometime after the mass deportation of
the Chechens from Chechnya in 1944, the Soviet state-capitalists under Stalin
honored this tsarist criminal with a statue in Grozny, which the Chechens
attempted to blow up in 1969 and finally tore down in 1991.
1817-64:
. These are the years of the fierce series of rebellions and conflicts called
the Caucasian War, in which the Chechens play a major role. Ultimately Russia
subjugates the Caucasus through devastating many of its peoples. A substantial
part of the Chechen population are killed, while many Chechens and other
Caucasian mountaineers are deported from their regions to elsewhere in the
Caucasus, or forced to leave the Caucasus entirely and settle in the Ottoman
Empire (Turkey). The tsarist forces could not achieve victory over the Chechens
so long as the forests provided cover for ambushes and guerrilla tactics, so the
Russian army systematically cuts down the main Chechen forests. The Chechen
landscape is permanently altered.
. Some of the classic Russian authors of this time picture the brutality of this
war. The most fervent example is Leo Tolstoy's novel Hadji Murat, which is a
fictionalized account of one of the most daring commanders of the Caucasian
rebels. Its spirit is illustrated by the following passage from a preliminary
draft:
"Russian military commanders, seeking to win distinction for themselves and
appropriate the spoils of war, invaded peaceful lands, ravaged villages, killed
hundreds of people, raped women, rustled thousands of cattle and then blamed the
tribesmen for their attacks on Russian possessions." (Cited in Susan Layton,
Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy,
p. 285)
. The most successful leader of the Chechen and Dagestani forces is the
legendary Imam Shamil. He is an Avar, which is one of the peoples in Dagestan;
indeed, the three main leaders of the Caucasian revolt are all Avars from
Dagestan (and so is Hadji Murat). He also seeks to impose a strict Islamic law,
with less success among the Chechens than in Dagestan. One historical account of
the Caucasian war points out that: "the religious revival in Daghestan coincided
with the Russian conquest; the infidel neighbour became the foreign oppressor,
and to the desire for spiritual reformation was added the yet stronger desire
for temporal liberty. " (John F. Baddeley, The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus,
p.237)
. Shamil also seeks to build up state or governmental institutions among the
Chechens, something which the Chechen tribes had not previously had. Contrary to
romanticized pictures of such revolts, he doesn't shrink from harsh, dictatorial
measures to enforce his decrees and preserve unity against the Russians.
1877-8:
. On the occasion of a war between Russia and the Ottoman Empire, there is a new
anti-Russian uprising in the North Caucasus, led by Haji Mohammed in Chechnya
and Ali-Bek Haji in Dagestan.
1890s:
. Oil is discovered in Grozny, Chechnya's main city, which by 1900 becomes
second only to Baku (presently the capital of Azerbaijan) as an oil city in the
tsarist empire. Later, Chechnya will be important both for oil extraction and
refining in the Soviet Union. Still later, oil extraction will decline quite far
by 1980, being less than half the output of 1911, but Chechnya will retain its
significance for the Soviet Union as a producer of special aviation oils, as a
major refining center, and as part of a major network of oil pipelines.
To be continued with the following sections:
Chechnya and the early Soviet Union
Exile--the mass deportation of the Chechens and Ingush: 1944-1957
After the return to Chechnya
The period leading to the first Chechen war: late 1980s to 1994
The first Chechen war: November 1994 to November 1996
>From the first Chechen war to the second: December 1996 to early 2000
--Joseph Green
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
wwww.communistvoice.org
