RUSSIA AND THE CHECHENS: ETERNAL FOES?

This pamphlet was written by a group of five scholars at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences in order to demonstrate the falsity of the stereotyped idea according to which Russia has been continuously at war with the Chechens for 400 years. It is a pity, given the power of the myth of eternal Russo-Chechen enmity and the political importance of dispelling it, that the print run of the pamphlet was just 200.

The authors do not, of course, deny the reality of the devastating Russo-Chechen wars of the 19th and 20th centuries. But they point out that there have also been long periods of peaceful interaction between Russians and Chechens.

The first 300 years of co-existence between Chechens and Russian settlers in the Caucasus, from the 16th through the 18th centuries, involved episodic contacts, mainly for trade. War began only when Russia decided for geopolitical reasons to incorporate the Northern Caucasus directly into its empire. But even this did not "turn the Chechens into irreconcilable enemies of Russia." They could have been reconciled with the Soviet system on the basis of the autonomy permitted them in the 1920s, had it not given way to Stalin's repressions, culminating in the deportation of the Chechens in 1944.

"There was not, and is not, a single anti-Russian movement in the Northern Caucasus," conclude the authors, "let alone any kind of permanent war stretching over the centuries."

Система ценностей чеченцев