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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 182 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 182, January 1995.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
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The invasion of the republic of Chechnya by Russian troops has highlighted the splits at the very top of that society. Nicolai Gentchev explains the background to Chechen independence |
This is not the first time that Chechnya has had a bloody showdown with the Russian empire. It was conquered in the last century and it took 300,000 Russian troops nearly 50 years to overcome the Chechens, which is one of the sources of their reputation for defiance. After Stalin destroyed his opponents in the late 1920s and 1930s he set about rebuilding the Russian empire and the Chechens were some of the first victims.
In 1944 the whole of the population of the Chechen nation was deported to the deserts of Kazakhstan. Stalin’s justification for this was that they had collaborated with the Nazis. This was a lie to disguise the fact that Stalin had to find a scapegoat for the suffering Russians endured during the second World War.
Every man, woman and child was put onto trucks to be deported. A third of the people died from hunger and cold on the journey. By the time they were allowed to return, many years later, only half of those that had been deported made it back. Virtually the whole of today’s adult population was either deported or born in exile. Ruslan Khasbulatov, the Chechen leader who led the Russian parliament until its forced dissolution by Yeltsin last October, was one of the two people out of 17,000 from his year who gained a place in higher education.
Small wonder that during the coup of August 1991 Chechnya declared independence from Russia. The Chechen supporters of the coup were overthrown in a popular uprising, and former Afghan general Djokhar Dudayev won a large majority in subsequent elections.
Hope lies with the millions who have rejected the nationalism used by Yeltsin to justify the invasion, and the hundreds of thousands who marched in 1991 in Moscow demanding ‘Hands off Lithuania’. If a mass opposition movement develops inside Russia, it will drive back both the so-called ‘democrats’ of Yeltsin and the motley alliance of Communists and fascists who currently pose as the main opposition to them.
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