RUSSIA'S TINDERBOX - Belfer Center for Science and International ...

1. Yeltsin’s March 1991 Visit to the North Caucasus
This first presidential visit to the region was the beginning of post-Soviet Russian policy
toward the North Caucasus and occurred at the height of the stand-off between Russian President
Boris Yeltsin and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev over the future balance of power in the Soviet
Union. To emphasize the primacy of the union republics over the union itself and to demonstrate
Russia’s sovereignty, Yeltsin made the Georgian-Abkhazian conflict a cause célèbre for the Russian
Federation and traveled to the Caucasus to conclude an agreement for its peaceful resolution.
Yeltsin’s trip greatly inflated expectations of a positive Russian intervention in regional conflicts.
2. The 1991 Law on the Rehabilitation of Repressed Peoples
These expectations and regional tensions were raised even higher in the aftermath of
Yeltsin’s visit, by the passage in April 1991 of the Law on the Rehabilitation of Repressed Peoples.
Although laudable, the Law’s proposition that those peoples who had been subjected to deportation
in the 1940s should have their former lands restored or receive compensation brought all the
territorial disputes in the North Caucasus into sharp focus. The impact of the Law on the individual
disputes is discussed in depth in Section IV.
3. The 1992 Creation of the Ingush Republic
Yeltsin’s visit and the Law on the Rehabilitation of Repressed Peoples were compounded in
April 1992 by the adoption of a decree by the Russian Parliament on the division of
Checheno-Ingushetia and the creation of a new Ingush Republic. This decree was confirmed in a
June 1992 law, which was passed without the provision of measures for its implementation and with
no decision taken on the ultimate territorial, administrative or governmental configuration of this
new republic. As a result, the law simply fostered conflict between the Ingush and Chechens over a
disputed district, Sunzhensky; and between the Ingush and the North Ossetians over the Prigorodny
district in North Ossetia, which had been transferred to the latter in the 1940s after the deportation of
the Ingush. Moscow’s failure to resolve the issue of Ingushetia’s borders led directly to the armed
conflict between Ingushetia and North Ossetia in the fall of 1992. The law also set, once again, a
precedent for changing the borders and the status of autonomous units in the Russian Federation,
thereby encouraging demands for more change from other republics and peoples.
4. Yeltsin’s Rehabilitation of the Cossacks
Significant change, however, came only for one group in the North Caucasus—the
Cossacks, and indicated the primacy of Russian-speaking groups over the North Caucasian peoples.
In 1992, Yeltsin issued a decree officially rehabilitating the Cossacks, followed in March 1993 by a
decree essentially restoring the Cossacks’ former status under the Russian Empire as territoriallybased
paramilitary units in the North Caucasus Region. 56 Yeltsin’s decrees on the rehabilitation of
56 March 15, 1993 Decree On the Reforming of Military Structures, Frontier and Interior Forces on the Territory
of the North Caucasian Region of the Russian Federation and State Support for the Cossacks.
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