Case Studies

Commemorating “The Deportation” in Post-Soviet Chechnya The Role of Memorialization & Collective Memory in the 1994–1996 & 1999–2000 Russo-Chechen Wars

05.05.2008

Discusses the role of memoralization and collective memory in the 1994 to 1996 and 1999 to 2000 Russo-Chechen Wars. Roots of conflict between Russia and Chechnya; Collective memory of the deportation; Commemorations of the deportation in post-Soviet Chechnya.

Article excerpt:
Pp 101-107
The collapse of Communism in Eurasia has led to many events that few
analysts in the West could have predicted during the Cold War. One of
the most improbable of these events was the stunning military victory of
the tiny autonomous republic of Chechnya in the 1994–1996 war for
independence against the Russian Federation. In a David versus Goliath
struggle, bands of Chechen fighters took on the might of the Russian
army, often in open warfare, and over and over again defeated or
outmaneuvered Moscow’s better equipped, larger, professional armies.
While the former head of the Russian army, Defense Minister General
Pavel Grachev, boasted he could overwhelm the Chechen separatist
“bandits” with one air battalion in a matter of hours, the Chechen
debacle demonstrated to the world just how far the Russian army’s battle
effectiveness had deteriorated.

While the Chechens can officially claim to be victors in the first
Russo-Chechen war of the 1990s, there was in actuality no winner in this
bloody conflict. Scores of Chechen villages were destroyed, the Chechen
capital of Grozny was bombed to rubble in the heaviest bombardment
in Europe since the bombing of Dresden, tens of thousands of Chechens
and Russians living in Chechnya lost their lives, hundreds of thousands
more were made refugees, and the economy of the independent statelet
of Ichkeria, as Chechnya is now known, lies in utter ruin. Rather than
accepting autonomy within the Russian Federation, as the Republic of
Tatarstan has, for example, the Chechen people rallied behind such
leaders as Dzhokhar Dudaev, Aslan Maskhadov and Shamil Basaev, and
chose to fight the might of transcontinental Russia in a bitter struggle for
total freedom. The heavy cost of this independence for the Chechen
people has been incalculable in socioeconomic terms.
If the destruction from the first post-Soviet invasion was not
sufficient, the majority of the tiny Chechen Republic’s infrastructure
which was rebuilt after 1996 was totally obliterated by Russian bombing
raids and artillery bombardments in late 1999 and early 2000 that
surpassed even those of the previous war in their intensity. As of spring
2000 the Russian army is engaged in an even more destructive second
invasion of secessionist Chechnya, and few in the Kremlin appear to have
learned from the lessons of the first war. Despite the losses in life to their
own soldiers (the Russian government admits the loss of approximately
2,000 soldiers thus far in this second campaign, a number seen as rather
low by most outside analysts), the Russian government seems determined
to avenge its defeat in the previous Chechen War. To stunned Western
observers who are watching Russia engage in total warfare against
citizens it claims as its own, the second Chechen War has all the logic of
an American invasion of Vietnam to avenge its defeat at the hands of the
Viet Cong.

Not surprisingly, the collective amnesia concerning the losses in the
first bloody Chechen conflict which prevails in Russia today offers a stark
contrast to the Chechens’ salient collective memory of previous losses
and oppression suffered at the hands of their Russian foes. While much
has been written on the Russian government’s reasons for launching the
second post-Soviet Chechen War (in particular much has been made of
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s desire to exploit the war to
curry favor with a growing nationalist movement in Russia), very little
attention has been paid to Russia’s opponents, the Chechens, or their
reasons for twice going to war with the Russian army. Blithely described
as “terrorist bandit formations” by the Russian press and casually
dismissed as an “internal problem” byWestern politicians more intent on
courting the new Russian leadership than preventing mass human rights
Commemorating “The Deportation” in Post-Soviet Chechnya
abuses, the Chechens as a people have been largely overlooked by those
following the recent war.

Those who do study the Chechens tend to attribute their stubborn
resistance to the Russians merely to their centuries-long tradition of
warfare with the Russians. While there is a certain validity to claims of
this sort, it will be shown here that it is in fact the collective memory of
the more recent ethnocide this small people experienced at the hands of
the Soviet government in the 1940s and 1950s that has provided the
primary catalyst for the militarization of this Muslim society in the post-
Soviet context.

THE ROOTS OF CONFLICT
Analysts have partly explained the Chechen leadership’s decision to enter
into war with Russia in the 1990s by a martial tradition found among
this Islamic Caucasian highlander people who have long been known as
implacable enemies of Russia. This enmity with Russia is exacerbated by
the fact that the Chechens have a culture that glorifies weapons, with
strong codes of honor that often lead to blood vendettas. Indeed,
historically, no ethnic group on the north Caucasus flank has had as
violent a history of conflict with the Russians as the Chechens.
During the course of the nineteenth century, Chechen murids
(literally “students,” holy warriors belonging to Sufi clan-based orders)
fought a bloody war against the encroaching Russian Empire during
which many of these highlanders’ villages were burnt and their inhabitants
slaughtered by the invading Russian forces. The grave sites of slain
murids and sheikhs (Sufi religious leaders) continued to be memorials to
this struggle and sites of pilgrimage for devout Chechen Muslims
through the Soviet period, despite the authorities’ attempts to eradicate
such “primitive superstitious holdovers.” Visiting the site of a murid’s
tomb was both an affirmation of the Chechens’ Islamic identity during
a period of enforced Communist atheism and a link to their revered
ancestors. The collective memory of Russia’s brutal subjugation of the
Chechens’ ancestors was kept alive during the Soviet period despite the
fact that Chechen murids who had fought against Russia were described
in official Soviet texts as “fanatical reactionaries” and “bourgeois
bandits.”

It was not until the mid-nineteenth century, when Russian Viceroys
Vorontsov and Bariatinskii finished the task bequeathed to them by the
feared General Yermolov, that the redoubtable Muslim Chechen
mountaineers, the indigenous population of this Caucasian region,
sullenly surrendered to over a century of rule by the Russians and
Soviets. From the fortress of Grozny (which literally means “terrible” or
“menacing” in Russian), Yermolov’s armies had begun expelling the
Chechens from the plains and into the mountains. Yermolov’s famous
declaration, “I desire that the terror of my name should guard our
frontiers more potently than chains or fortresses, that my word should
be for the natives a law more inevitable than death,” is still remembered
by Chechens today.

This long memory of conflict with the Russians certainly played an
important role in many Chechen fighters’ decision to take up weapons
and fight against their people’s historic “other” during the 1994–1996
Chechen War. However, no event in the bloody history of relations
between the Chechens and Russians has had as lasting an impact on the
Chechens’ collective psyche as their tragic mass deportation from their
homeland to Central Asia toward the end of World War II. On 23
February 1944 mechanized divisions of the NKVD (progenitor to the
KGB) surrounded all Chechen villages and brutally herded the entire
Chechen population on to cattle cars for transportation from their home
republic to the plains of Kazakhstan, the taiga of Siberia and the
mountains of Kyrgyzstan, on the official grounds that they had collaborated
with the Wehrmacht during the German invasion of the USSR.
Thousands of Chechen mountaineers died on the sealed carts due to lack
of water and food, poor sanitary conditions and trauma, and thousands
more died in their inhospitable places of resettlement.
For twelve years the scattered Chechens languished as a non-nation
far from their Caucasian homeland. It was only with the death of Stalin
in 1953 and the rise to power of the reformist Soviet leader Nikita
Khrushchev that the Chechen people was permitted to return to the
Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR), which
they shared with their ethno-linguistic kin, the Ingush (who had also
been deported). Although the deportations were carried out by the
Commemorating “The Deportation” in Post-Soviet Chechnya
Soviet government, and neither Stalin nor NKVD chief Lavrentii Beriia
was Russian, this distinction was lost on the Chechens who saw the
deportation as the “final solution” to their years of determined resistance
to Russian rule. In the Chechen collective memory of the deportation,
it was the Russians who carried out this atrocity.

The collective memory of this event has shaped Chechen identity
to this day, and pundits who analyze the Chechen leadership’s relations
with neighboring peoples and territories (such as the newly independent
Republic of Georgia, the related Ingush, the partly Christian Ossetians,
Moscow and, most recently, the multi-ethnic republic of Dagestan in the
Russian Federation) must take this factor into consideration when
predicting the Chechens’ political and military actions. Interestingly,
today few in the West are aware of the salient nature of this tragic event
in forging contemporary Chechen society and its role in shaping this
people’s collective actions. An analysis of the deportation and the ways
in which Chechen ethno-national entrepreneurs have exploited this
traumatic event will provide a unique case study of the ways in which
victimized communities are shaped in a political, cultural and social sense
by memories of communal tragedy. It will also demonstrate the ways in
which the memorialization of a people’s tragedy can politically and
militarily mobilize threatened populations.

THE DEPORTATION AS CONTESTED HISTORY

As in much of Eastern Europe and the Middle East, nations and ethnic
groups of the Caucasus have competing ethno-national histories. The
Russian population of the northern Caucasus still tends to look upon the
Chechens as traitors to the Soviet homeland during World War II, and
many believe that the charges leveled against this people of mass treason
against the USSR during the Nazi invasion were valid. The official decree
announcing the abolition of the Chechen-Ingush ASSR (and the nearby
Crimean ASSR) published after the deportation stated:
During the Great Patriotic War ... many Chechens and Crimean
Tatars, at the instigation of German agents joined volunteer units
organized by the Germans and together with German troops
engaged in armed struggle against units of the Red Army....
Meanwhile the main mass of the population of the Chechen-Ingush
and Crimean ASSRs took no counteraction against these betrayers
of the Fatherland.

There is some historical basis for the charges of collaboration. Several
thousand Chechens fighting in the Red Army were captured by the
Germans and formed into hiwi (support) units in the Wehrmacht. In
addition, some Chechens had been in revolt prior to the invasion in
reaction to Stalin’s policies of collectivization. These were, however, the
exception, and thousands of Chechens loyally fought for the Soviet
homeland in the Red Army during the German invasion. Between
18,000 and 40,000 Chechens were mobilized to fight in the Soviet ranks
and many Chechens received medals and promotions for their heroism
during the war.5 The German army only invaded the Chechen region of
Malgobek, and most of Chechnya lay beyond the reach of the Nazis.

The Chechens, of course, have a countermemory of the events
surrounding the deportation, which is radically different from the official
Soviet version. Chechens are brought up on ritualized narratives of this
tragic event. In the tales of “the Deportation” the role of Chechen
collaborators with the Nazis is usually downplayed, Stalin’s treachery in
surprising the loyal Chechens and deporting them is stressed, and the
brutality of the actual deportation and resettlement in Central Asia is
recounted. Lost family members, such as an uncle who was shot for
moving too slowly toward collection points, a grandmother who died of
a heart attack on the trains to Central Asia, or a cousin who died on the
frozen steppes of Kazakhstan, are commemorated at this time. The older
generation that survived the deportation became in effect a living
memorial to this people’s communal tragedy and a repository of
memories and grievances which were handed down to new generations.
Almost all Chechens have a personal link to someone who died during
the deportation and exile of their people. This is underlined by the
common Chechen axiom, “Nothing is forgotten, nothing will be
forgotten,” which captures this people’s determination to keep the
memory of the deportation alive.

There were, of course, no public outlets for commemorating their
national tragedy during the Soviet era. Although the charges of mass
Commemorating “The Deportation” in Post-Soviet Chechnya
treason against the Chechens were dropped in 1956, allowing for their
repatriation, the Soviet government did not compensate the victims of
the deportation or allow open commemoration of this “irregularity” in
Socialist planning. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 there
has, however, been a renaissance of interest in the deportation and exile
period. An organization known as the Confederation of Repressed
Peoples was formed in 1990 to unite those nations deported by Stalin.
Newspaper articles in Chechnya began, for the first time, to bring to
light the horrors of the deportation, conferences were held on this event,
and books began to be published in both Russian and Chechen on this
once taboo subject.

After 1991, ethnic groups in the Russian Federation such as the
Buryats, Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, North Siberian minorities (in
particular the Evenks), Ingush, Yakuts and Chechens began to express
their identities and explore long-forbidden chapters in their Soviet past.
In many cases, these peoples’ history of victimization during the Soviet
period led to anti-Russian sentiments. The Russian population scattered
throughout the ethnically based republics and autonomous territorial
units within Russia and those who suddenly found themselves beyond
Russia’s borders in the Near Abroad (Blizhnee zarubezh’e, i.e. newly
independent former Soviet republics) reacted to this development with
increasing uneasiness. Most Russians had identified with the Soviet state
and were prone to see local, non-Slavic nationalisms in a negative light.
Russian lawmakers and officials in the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous
Republic (there were approximately 300,000 Russians and close to a
million Chechens and Ingush in Chechnya prior to the recent war)
tended to side with the central authorities in Moscow while Chechen
leaders began to espouse the cause of greater independence. In this
environment the Chechens’ increasing emphasis on commemorating the
deportation had both political and symbolic importance for Chechnya’s
relations with Russia.
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