This is the second part of my chronology of Russian-Chechen relations. It deals
with the history of the Chechens during the Soviet Union. The third part will
deal with the 90s, and show in particular the continuity of Yeltsin and Putin's
policy on Chechnya.
Some comments have been raised on part one of the chronology, which
dealt with the Tsarist conquest of the Caucasus, to the effect of why worry
about the atrocities against Chechnya, since history is always bloody; why worry
about the history of oppression anyway, since history is always oppressive; why
support national rights for Chechens unless one likes their current leadership;
how could there be national rights in Chechnya because the population wasn't
purely ethnic Chechen; and so forth.
But this is not the way the Bolshevik revolution thought of matters.
One had to remain conscious of the history of exploitation and oppression in the
past, if one wanted to overcome it. And in particular, Lenin stressed the
importance, in uniting the proletariat, of ensuring the right to
self-determination and/or other national rights for all the nationalities. He
didn't think the Caucasus was an exception for this. So while the Bolshevik
revolution was still alive, it gradually felt its way to providing various
rights for the Caucasian nationalities.
Under Stalinist state-capitalism, however, monstrous crimes were committed
against the nationalities, including the mass deportation of the entire Chechen
population. This is ethnic cleansing on a vast scale, complete with many deaths
during the deportation process itself, and police supervision of the deportees
in their new place of residence. No socialist regime could ever do such a thing.
And yet Stalin did it not just to the Chechens, but to a number of other small
nationalities. All this shows that the revolution had died out in the Soviet
Union, and that there is nothing in common between Stalinism and communism.
But even mass deportation didn't end the issue of Chechen national rights. If
almost two decades of total removal didn't suppress the Chechen national
question, surely Putin's war isn't going to do so either. The question will
fester on and on, poisoning the situation in the Caucasus and even in Russia,
until Chechnya really obtains the right to national self-determination, and
conditions that allow it to re-establish a viable economy and its own political
institutions. The right to national self-determination isn't a panacea, of
course, but it is a necessary part of any solution. The reason this right has
been denied, isn't because it would be hard to grant it, but because the Russian
government regards the entire Caucasus as its sphere of influence, and is
neither going to grant national rights to the Chechens and nearby peoples, nor
give up its cyncial policy of playing off one people against another in Georgia,
Azerbaijan and Armenia. It is up to the Russian working masses to insist on a
new policy, but to do so, it will have to organize a new movement independent of
the old movements that speak in its name.
One person asked about the proletarian movement in Chechnya. As I mentioned
before, the economy of Chechnya has been devastated, especially the modern
sector of the economy. Under those circumstances, there has been massive
deproletarianization in Chechnya. This is one of the features helping the
spreads of fundamentalism. The longer the war against Chechnya proceeds, the
harder it will be for the Chechen working masses to assert themselves
Joseph Green
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
www.communistvoice.org
IMPORTANT DATES IN RUSSIAN-CHECHEN RELATIONS
Part two of three
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Early revolutionary history of Soviet Union and then
consolidation of Stalinist state-capitalism
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1917:
. The Bolshevik revolution overthrows the tsarist empire. The Chechens fight
such counter-revolutionary forces as the white armies of General Denikin. But
the different social forces among the Chechens take different attitudes to the
new regime; there are stormy relations between Chechnya and the Soviet Union;
and certain sections of the population revolt at certain times. As well, the
revolutionary forces themselves are feeling their way to new policies; there are
different views about the relation of the national question to socialism; and
this too complicates matters. Two major trends stand out. On one hand, based on
Lenin's theories about the importance of the right to national
self-determination, not just under capitalism but in a countries that have
overthrown the old capitalist regime, for the first time the rights of the
Chechen nationality and the Chechen common people receive serious attention from
Russia. But on the other hand, as the revolution dies away, and the Soviet Union
degenerates into a Stalinist, state-capitalist regime, anti-Chechen chauvinism
is revived, and by 1944 Stalin condemns the entire nationality.
1920s:
. An alphabet is devised for the Chechen language: previously documents were
written in Arabic, and less than 2% of Chechens could read or write. A number of
books and magazines appear in the Chechen language, and there is a dramatic
spread of literacy. There is a policy of bringing Chechens into the local
administration. At the same time, the degeneration of the Russian revolution,
which that leads to its death and the establishment of a state-capitalist
regime, affects the North Caucasus as elsewhere in the Soviet Union.
1930s:
. Stalin's forced collectivization makes a mockery of the Leninist plan of
voluntary collectivization. As well, no account was made of the particular
social and class conditions in Chechnya. As a result, there was serious unrest
in 1929-1930, and army troops are sent in to suppress it. After that, there is
some readjustment of Soviet policy, but tension and repression remain, sometimes
dying down and sometimes flaring up. The Stalinist purges of the 1930s are
reflected in mass arrests of Chechens.
. At the same time, the rapid economic development in the Soviet Union
presumably draws numbers of Chechens into modern economic life.
1936:
. The Ingush and Chechen autonomous regions are merged into a single Autonomous
Republic of Chechnya and Ingushetia. The USSR was officially the "Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics", with each of the "union republics" supposed to have
the right to self-determination. But the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic was
not a "union republic" of the Soviet Union, but an autonomous republic inside
the Russian "union republic", and thus without the right of self-determination
with respect to either the USSR or Russia. This is the legal pretext for
Russia's present denial of the right to self-determination to Chechnya, and this
pretext is also upheld today by the U.S. government and the European Union. This
is somewhat analogous to Kosovo.Kosovo was not one of the six constituent
republics of now-dissolved Titoist Yugoslavia, each of which was supposed to
have the right to self-determination, but only an autonomous region within the
Serbian republic. This is the basis on which the UN to this day refuses to grant
the right to self-determination to Kosovo.
1937:
. The major Soviet purges of this year eliminate many of the Chechens who work
in administrative or leading conditions. This and other purges, by undermining
the secular Chechen leadership that was developing, may well have helped pave
the way for the later religious revival.
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Exile -- the mass deportation of the Chechens and Ingush:
1944-1957
-----------------------------------------------------------
February 1944 (in the latter part of World War II):
. Essentially all Chechens and Ingush, then about half a million people, are
deported to Soviet Central Asia, mainly to Kazakhstan. This includes not just
residents of the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic, but Chechens and Ingush no
matter where they lived. The autonomous republic is eliminated, and all traces
of the Chechen and Ingush peoples are removed from the area. This is a
reactionary, criminal act of ethnic cleansing, done on the basis of a secret
decree. It is carried out in a savage way, and accompanied with several
massacres of Chechens.
. The Chechens are arbitrarily resettled into different villages and localities;
they are denied freedom of movement among these localities; they are subject to
police supervision; and they are basically restricted to laboring jobs. In the
first years, they suffer particularly badly from lack of sufficient food and
shelter, resulting in the death of many deportees.
. Aside from the Chechens and Ingush, there are other mass deportations between
October 1943 and June 1944, such as the Karachays, the Balkars, the Kalmyks, and
the Crimean Tatars. The Volga Germans had met this fate in August 1941.
June 25, 1946:
. A public decree of the Stalinist regime finally mentions the deportation of
the Chechens and Ingush, attempting to justify it as punishment for fighting on
the side of the Nazis. Such an attempt to eliminate a nationality altogether as
collective punishment is fascistic in any case, but the rationale given is
actually a mere pretext. The Nazis had tried to woo various of the peoples in
the Caucasus, particularly the Islamic peoples, but they hadn't achieved too
much in this regard, especially when considered in light of the considerable
unrest in the Caucasus prior to the war. For that matter, the Nazis had also
sought to woo the other Soviet nationalities, including the Russians. The Soviet
army did have a problem with Chechen desertions, but mainly because it put
Chechens into Russian-speaking units where they couldn't understand the language
and where they were forced to eat pork. On the other hand, there were 30,000
Chechen and Ingush soldiers in the Soviet army; many had won Soviet decorations
for their valor in World War II, and a few had become "Heroes of the Soviet
Union"; and Chechen soldiers took part in the famous defense of the Citadel at
Brest-Litovsk where a small Soviet unit, surrounded in the German blitzkrieg of
the early days of the war, held out for over a month against overwhelming odds.
Far from the deportations helping the war against the Nazis, they were a major
crime that undermined the moral legitimacy of the Soviet regime, which was why
they were originally kept secret. Indeed, such was the savage logic of the
deportations that Chechen soldiers had been stripped from the Soviet Army during
the war in order to send them as deportees to Central Asia.Meanwhile there had
been problems maintaining oil production in the Grozny area because Chechen
workers had been deported.
1953:
. In the years following Stalin's death in 1953, travel restrictions and police
supervision on the Chechens gradually ease, and other conditions of the exile
improve. There is eventually a Chechen weekly newspaper, a Chechen-Ingush Art
Theater, books published again in the Chechen language, etc. Meanwhile, by 1955,
and especially after the 20th CPSU Party Congress in 1956 where Khrushchev
denounced Stalin, tens of thousands of Chechens illegally return to Chechnya and
demand the return of their old dwellings.
. At the same time, the regime tries to have Chechens sign statements that they
would not seek "the return of property confiscated at the time of their
deportation and that they would not return to those places from which they had
been deported."
1957:
. A decree removes the charge of fascist collaboration from the Chechens and
Ingush and allows their return. (The Balkars, Karachia and Kalmyks also were
able to return to their homelands. On the other hand, while the collective
condemnation of the Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars and Meskhetian Turks is
rescinded, they are not allowed to return to their former areas.) The Chechen
return is supposed to take place gradually over four years until 1960, but the
Chechens and Ingush rush back to their homelands. A Chechen-Ingush republic is
re-established, although Russian-speakers are for some time a majority in this
area and dominate the republic. There is friction over the status and conditions
for the returnees, the attitude of the republic towards them, etc.
. The exile undoubtedly left strong marks on the Chechen people, providing a
strong long-term reinforcement for nationalist and religious feelings. It also
spread them throughout Kazakhstan and other areas of the Soviet Union (not all
of them returned). It affected the class structure of the Chechen population, no
doubt considerably proletarianizing them. This, and their additional contacts
around the Soviet Union, no doubt facilitated the later large-scale development
of Chechen migrant labor: large numbers of Chechen young men, facing
unemployment, became seasonal workers who sought summer work outside Chechnya
and returned to their families in winter.
----------------------------
After the return to Chechnya
----------------------------
1960s-80s:
. Chechens and Ingush gain greatly in number by comparison to Russians and other
ethnic groups in the Chechen-Ingush republic, eventually becoming a majority
again, and gradually gain more influence. But their economic situation
deteriorates, leading large numbers of Chechen youth to become seasonal workers,
searching for work elsewhere in the Soviet Union during the summer.
1982:
. The Soviet regime in the Chechen-Ingush republic organizes a celebration of
the 200th anniversary of the supposedly voluntary union of Chechnya and Russia.
This is a travesty of history, and it is an example of how the state-capitalist
regime appealed to tsarist oppression of the subject peoples to justify its own
denial of national rights to these peoples.
to be continued
