Following Hitler’s invasion of the USSR in 1941, however, continued acts of sabotage and desertions of Chechen and Ingush draftees from the Red army were declared to be of a pro-Nazi character. So long as he was on the defensive, Stalin could do nothing. But by late 1943 and early 1944, thanks in large part to a massive supply of lend-lease weapons and machinery from the United States, the tide turned. For Stalin, this meant it was time to permanently solve the problem of the Chechens and other problematic peoples in the Caucasus along lines proposed by diverse czarist generals, but never implemented: ethnic cleansing.
The Vysl, or Deportation, was mounted on the night of February 23-24, 1944—and under the cover of celebrations associated with Red Army Day. By February 29, NKVD boss Lavrentii Beria was able to send Stalin the following, chillingly mechanical telegram:
“I report the results of the operation of resettling Chechens and Ingushi. The resettlement was begun on February 23 in the majority of districts, with the exception of the high mountain population points…. 478,479 persons were evicted and loaded onto special railway cars, including 91,250 Ingush. One hundred and eighty special trains were loaded, of which 159 were sent to the new designated place.”
The “designated place” was the midwinter wasteland of Central Asia and Siberia, and by the time the trains arrived in central Kazakhstan about a quarter of the people packed into the boxcars perished either of cold, starvation, or typhus spread by unburied corpses. Still more died after the survivors were dumped off the trains and told to fend for themselves in the middle of the harsh Central Asian winter.
Reduced from some 400,000 in 1940 to some 200,000 or so at the end of WWII, the Chechen population soon surged. In 1959 the number of Chechens throughout the USSR stood at some 420,000. By 1970 that number had grown to 612,000. A decade later, the number had grown to 755,000. By the time of the last Soviet census in 1989, the Chechens were counted as being just shy of a million souls. And the vast majority of those were no longer living in Kazakhstan or elsewhere in Central Asia—but in the re-created (and slightly truncated) Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic in the Russian Federation.
The process of return began in the immediate aftermath of Stalin’s death in 1953, and then gathered steam in 1956-57 when Nikita Khruschev moved to rehabilitate most of the nationalities suppressed by Stalin. In 1957 alone, 48,000 Chechen families returned to their ancient homeland in the Caucasus from Central Asian exile. And, if the Chechens had been lacking the concept of nation before the traumatic events of 1944, they no longer had any doubts about who they were now: a self-conscious community set apart from all the other nationalities that made up the USSR. They had been branded as traitors and thieves and outcasts, but knew themselves to be survivors. It is worth quoting the Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn about his impressions of the exiled Chechens during his own banishment to a Gulag work camp in Soviet Khazakhstan in the 1950s:
“There was one nation which would not give in, would not acquire the mental habits of submission—and not just individual rebels among them, but the whole nation to a man. These were the Chechens… I would say that of all the special settlers, the Chechens alone showed themselves unbroken in spirit. They had been treacherously snatched from their home, and from that day they believed in nothing… The Chechens never sought to please, to ingratiate themselves with the bosses; their attitude was always haughty and indeed openly hostile… And here is the extraordinary thing: Everyone was afraid of them. No one could stop them from living as they did. The regime which had ruled the land for thirty years could not force them to respect its laws.”[3]
By the 1970s and 1980s, a new type of Chechen was emerging: Gone was the rustic and traditional peasant; in his place was the educated shepherd and the philosophical farmer, as well as the modern version of the traditional Chechen abreg, or noble bandit—now involved in a wide range of illegal, Chechen-network dealings across the span of the USSR. Banished from Soviet society by Stalin, the Chechens had created their own, which had all the characteristics of the “family” sort of structure one associates with the Mafia. In effect, they were becoming a fifth column deep within the Russian Federation and the USSR, aching for collective revenge for the horrors Stalin had visited upon them. As the octogenarian Chechan Mafia boss character Makhmud explains in Martin Cruz Smith’s Red Square, the Russians (meaning the Soviet authorities) “deserve everything that happens to them. They deserve us.”[4]
And then came the long summer of 1991 and the break-up of the USSR, followed by the extended Chechan-Russian showdown about the real meaning of “sovereignty” and “independence.” The cast of major players and walk-on characters and rogues’ gallery involved in the sustained debate and debacle is long and confusing. There was Gorbachev appointee Doku Zavgaev, who had declared Chechnya independent (or sovereign), only to be removed in September 1991. There was Umar Avtorkhanov, a former police major from northern Chechnya who never acknowledged the declaration of independence and sovereignty as valid, and who subsequently became the point man for Russian money and arms sent to Chechnya to destabilize and then overturn the secessionist regime. Then there was Bislan Gantemirov, strongman from Chechnya’s “second city” of Urus Martan, who first was appointed mayor of Grozny, then broke with the president to fight alongside Russian forces, only to be reappointed mayor by them, until he was removed on charges of embezzlement. Ruslan Labazarov was a released murderer who served as a presidential chief bodyguard until lending his gang to Ruslan Khasbulatov, the former Duma speaker until Yeltsin’s bombing of the Russian Parliament in October 1993. In another category entirely were Shamil Basayev, the computer salesman-cum-volunteer guerilla in the Abkhaz war, who was to become the most celebrated (or notorious) field commander among scores of celebrated Chechen fighters, and Colonel Asian Maskhadov, who resigned his position in the artillery corps of the Russian Army to return to Chechnya and build up a fighting force to defend the independence of the wayward state.
Then there was the person and personality of the mercurial and contradictory Chechen president, General Djohar Dudayev.
A child of the deportations of 1944, Dudayev returned to Chechnya with his family in 1957 and proceeded to embrace the Soviet version of affirmative action with zeal, enjoying an upwardly mobile career trajectory through the Soviet military—even if he had to conceal his nationality.[5] Rising to the level of Air Marshall in the Soviet Air Force with a wing of strategic nuclear bombers under his command, Dudayev had married an Estonian Russian and had had so little to do with his native land and language during the last three decades of the existence of the Soviet Union that many questioned his bona fides as a Chechen. Some suggest that Dudayev’s reckless nationalism may in part have been based on an attempt to overcompensate for his lack of comfort in what might be referred to as traditional Chechen skin.
3
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
5
Cf. Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal,