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

inflammatory rhetoric, others have resulted in sporadic or sustained violent conflict—as in the case
of the dispute between North Ossetia and Ingushetia over the Prigorodny district of North Ossetia.
In response to the constant threat of violence, some attempts at conflict management and
resolution have been made by local and federal authorities. These attempts have been most notable
in Dagestan, which is the most ethnically diverse of the North Caucasian republics. The federal
government in Moscow has occasionally dispatched special missions to Dagestan and granted
subsidies and concessions to key groups. In general, however, the Dagestani government and sociopolitical
groups have taken the initiative in conflict management and have presented themselves as
mediators between the many ethnic groups.
In Dagestan and elsewhere in the North Caucasus two key events have played a major role in
fomenting conflict: the 1943-1944 deportations and the April 1991 Law on the Rehabilitation of
Repressed Peoples.
1. The Deportations of 1943-1944, and their Aftermath: 72
Between November 1943 and March 1944, the Karachai, Ingush, Chechen and Balkar
people, along with other minority groups from across the USSR (including the Volga Germans,
Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks and Meskhetian Turks) were deported to Central Asia and Siberia as
punishment for suspected collaboration with invading German forces during the Second World War.
The autonomous administrative units of the individual peoples were dissolved, and the territory
transferred to other units. Members of other national groups were resettled in the deportees’ former
homes and on their lands.
The first people to be deported in the North Caucasus were the Karachai, 69,267 of whom
were transported to Central Asia in November 1943 and their autonomous oblast’ abolished. They
were followed in February 1944, by the Chechens and the Ingush. The territory of the Checheno-
Ingushetia ASSR was divided among the Georgian SSR, the North Ossetian ASSR and Stavropol’
Krai. In all, 387,229 Chechens and 91,250 Ingush were deported—the latter from their four small
districts of Nazran, Malgobek, Prigorodny and Mozdok. 73 These districts were transferred to the
jurisdiction of North Ossetia. In the wake of the deportations, Ossetians from the South Ossetian AO
in Georgia were forcibly relocated to the Prigorodny district, while Russians, Ukrainians and other
North Caucasian groups were settled on the rest of the territory. In Dagestan, Kumyks, Laks and
Avars were moved onto the land of a Chechen sub-group known as the Chechen-Akkintsy (30,000
of whom were also deported to Kazakhstan), and their district, the Aukhovsky district, was
72 The seminal work on the deportations is Aleksandr M. Nekrich, The Punished Peoples: The Deportation and
Fate of Soviet Minorities at the end of the Second World War, W.W. Norton & Company (New York, 1978).
73 In the 1920s, the Chechens and the Ingush had separate autonomous oblasts. The oblasts were merged in
January 1934 to create the Chechen-Ingush autonomous oblast’. Its status was upgraded to an autonomous
republic in 1936.
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