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

SECTION 5
Chechnya 118
The failure of Moscow’s regional policy:
Chechnya’s struggle with Moscow, like that of Abkhazia and South Ossetia with Tbilisi, is
the result of the structural legacy of the USSR. As such, Chechnya is the most extreme example of
Russia’s ad hoc regional policy run aground. The struggle centers on the question of whether the
current state of dissolution of the Soviet Union is final. Chechnya, Abkhazia, South Ossetia and
other would-be secessionist regions of the successor states of the USSR, such as Transdniester and
Crimea, claim that it is not. Radical nationalist leaders in these regions argue that the successor states
have inherited all the ethno-political contradictions that brought down the Soviet Union. As a result,
a further round of national-territorial change is necessary.
In the Chechen case, the republics of the North Caucasus all shared a perception that their
small nations had been cheated by the administrative structure of the USSR. As a result of being
designated as autonomous republics and oblasts, rather than fully-fledged union republics, they had
been deprived of influence and status. At the same time other peoples, such as the Georgians,
Armenians, Azeris and the Balts, who were hardly more numerous than North Caucasians, and had
not enjoyed such a long period of independence from Russian rule, had been granted union republics
and all the associated privileges.
Indeed, the North Caucasus was the last strategic region to be incorporated into the Russian
Empire in the 19th century as Russia consolidated its position on the Black and Caspian Seas. In the
Caucasian Wars, the peoples of the North Caucasus held out against Russia for almost 40 years and
it was not until 1865 that the region was fully ‘pacified.’ From the end of the 18th century,
Chechnya was at the heart of this opposition to the expansion of the Russian Empire. The movement
of Sheik Mansur at the end of the 18th century, the struggle of Imam Shamil in the first half of the
19th century, the abrechestvo at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, 119 the
establishment of the emirate of Uzun-Khadzh during the Civil War, the anti-Bolshevik rebellions of
the late 1930s and early 1940s, and the partisan wars of the latter half of the 1940s were all part of a
long tradition of Chechen struggle for national liberation.
The collective trauma of the deportations of 1944 was simply one in a sequence of events
that shaped the psychology of the republic and its attitude towards Moscow. Significantly, Dzhokhar
Dudayev, the Chechen leader, was born the year of the deportation and spent his early years in exile
118 This section is based on Hill and Jewett, Report on Ethnic Conflict, pp.45-52. Vasil’eva and Muzaev, pp.58-67;
research conducted by Dr. Magomedkhanov prior to the war in December 1994; and interviews with North
Caucasian officials and those close to the governments of Russia and Chechnya, conducted by Dr.
Magomedkhanov, Fiona Hill, and other members of the SDI Project’s Working Group on the North Caucasus
between Spring 1994 and July 1995.
119 A movement of “Robin Hood”-type partisans.
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