The beginning and end of the Chechnya issue

Chechen is a territory of the Russian Federation. It is located on the north side of the Caucasus Mountains and is adjacent to Georgia across the mountains. It covers an area of ??about 15,000 square kilometers and has a population of more than 100. Ten thousand. The capital, Grozny, was developed on the basis of the Grozny Castle established in 1818. The Chechens are brave and good at fighting and believe in Islam.

The earliest records about the Chechens were before the beginning of the 7th century. The term "Chechen" originally originated from the name of the village "Great Chechnya" on the Argon River, and later gradually became the ethnic name of the Chechen nation. Chechens call themselves "Nakhchos", which means "common people". The Chechens were invaded by the Mongol-Tatars in the 13th century and ravaged by the armies of the Timurid Empire in Central Asia at the end of the 14th century. It was not until the disintegration of the Golden Horde in the 15th to 16th centuries that Chechens began to migrate from the mountains to the plains. From the 16th to the 19th century, Islam began to be introduced into Chechnya. At the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries, Chechnya began to become the object of competition among the three empires of Persia, Ottoman, and Russia. Since then, Chechnya has experienced a bloody and brutal war that lasted for more than two centuries.

In the 19th century, Tsarist Russia incorporated Chechnya into its imperial territory in 1895 after nearly half a century of war in the Caucasus. The Chechen Autonomous Prefecture was established in November 1922. In January 1934, Chechnya merged with its western neighbor Ingushetia, and in December 1936 it became the Chechen-Ingushetia Autonomous Republic. During World War II, the Soviet government forcibly moved many Chechens out of their homes on the pretext that they cooperated with the German invaders. At that time, more than 387,000 Chechens were deported to Central Asia and Siberia. It was not until January 9, 1957 that the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union decided to restore the organization of the Chechen-Ingushetia Autonomous Republic and place it under the jurisdiction of the Russian Federation.

On September 6, 1991, shortly after the "August 19" incident in the Soviet Union, Dudayev, a major general of the Soviet Air Force and a Chechen, overthrew the local Soviet regime by force. In October, Chechnya held presidential and parliamentary elections of the Republic of China, and Dudayev was elected president. In November, on the eve of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Dudayev decreed the establishment of a "sovereign state", the Chechen Republic, and quickly organized the Chechen National Guard. Since then, Chechnya has neither signed the 1992 Russian Federation Treaty nor participated in the 1993 Russian parliamentary elections, and has gone further and further on the road to "independence."

In order to safeguard national unity and territorial integrity, the Russian authorities sent troops to Chechnya in December 1994. However, the Chechen armed forces refused to lay down their weapons, causing the civil war to last for 20 months. Dudayev was killed in the war. At the end of 1996, after Chechen illegal armed forces caused two major hostage-taking incidents in Russia, the Russian army was forced to withdraw from Chechnya. In January 1997, after A. Maskhadov was elected president of the Chechen Republic, he still insisted that Chechnya was an "independent country." In May 1997, the Russian Federation and Chechnya signed a treaty on the principles of peace and mutual relations. However, Chechen leaders have never given up their claim to "independence."

In order to completely solve the Chechen problem, the Russian federal authorities dispatched 100,000 soldiers in 1999 to blockade Chechnya and launch military strikes. After aerial bombing and ground encirclement and suppression, most of the illegal Chechen armed forces were eliminated, and the Russian army controlled almost all of Chechnya. However, the remaining illegal armed forces in Chechnya have been broken into pieces, adopting guerrilla tactics inside and outside Chechnya, and frequently carrying out assassinations and terrorist activities. Especially in the past two years, Chechen illegal armed elements have been rampant and have continued to cause terrorist attacks, causing a large number of casualties and property losses.

On October 23, 2002, dozens of Chechen militants took more than 800 audience members and performers hostage at the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow. Three days later, Russian special forces successfully rescued most of the hostages after releasing sleeping gas into the theater, but 130 hostages still died. The Russian army immediately launched a large-scale clearing operation in Chechnya.

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The earliest records about the Chechens were before the beginning of the 7th century.

The term "Chechen" originally originated from the name of the village "Great Chechnya" on the Argon River, and later gradually became the ethnic name of the Chechen nation. Chechens call themselves "Nakhchos", which means "common people". The Chechens were invaded by the Mongol-Tatars in the 13th century and ravaged by the armies of the Timurid Empire in Central Asia at the end of the 14th century. It was not until the disintegration of the Golden Horde in the 15th to 16th centuries that Chechens began to migrate from the mountains to the plains. From the 16th to the 19th century, Islam began to be introduced into Chechnya. At the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries, Chechnya began to become the object of competition among the three empires of Persia, Ottoman, and Russia. Since then, Chechnya has experienced a bloody and brutal war that lasted for more than two centuries. In the 19th century, Tsarist Russia incorporated Chechnya into its imperial territory in 1895 after nearly half a century of war in the Caucasus. The Chechen Autonomous Prefecture was established in November 1922. In January 1934, Chechnya merged with its western neighbor Ingushetia, and in December 1936 it became the Chechen-Ingushetia Autonomous Republic.

The Chechens have always been brave and good at fighting. They have never submitted to Russian rule, and the national independence movement has never stopped.

1. Stalin Era:

In the late 1920s, the Soviet Union launched Stalin’s “comprehensive collectivization” and industrialization movement, integrating agricultural production into the state at the expense of farmers’ interests. On the track of centralized planning and management, the agricultural collectivization movement was forcibly implemented throughout the country and "rich peasants" were divided. In Russia, ordinary poor farmers cannot afford to raise horses, but because the Chechens are engaged in nomadic herding, almost every household has horses. In this way, work teams composed of Russian workers often classify horse-owning Chechens as "kulaks" and not only confiscate their property but also destroy them. This almost absurd division aroused widespread resistance among the Chechens. According to statistics, from 1929 to 1935, 286 rebellions against the establishment of collective farms broke out in Chechnya alone. In December 1929, March-April 1930, and March-April 1932, the Soviet army carried out encirclement and suppression operations in Chechnya more than once. It was not until 1936 that the situation stabilized. But there were always small gangs operating in Chechnya-Ingushetia until the German invasion.

On February 23, 1944, an emergency order from Commander-in-Chief Stalin was sent from Moscow, the capital of the Soviet Union, to evacuate all Muslim residents from these two areas. From then on, "Chechnya" was wiped off the map of the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Red Army immediately dispatched, encircled all villages and towns, burned their homes, drove the old, weak, sick and disabled Chechens onto the road in the severe cold, and distributed them to various parts of the Soviet Union. Anyone who hesitated to act was killed on the spot. The great ethnic migration turned into a genocide. Half a million people died from shooting, whipping, cold, starvation and disease. The tragic and inhumane scene will never be forgotten. The living people were deported to the coldest Siberia and the desolate Central Asian steppes. According to Stalin's national transformation plan, this nation was never allowed to recover and completely disappeared from the world overnight because the Soviet government decided not to retain the stubborn Chechen nation. . The Ministry of Civil Affairs of the Soviet Union was notified to withdraw the name of Chechnya from all relevant materials, such as government documents, yearbooks, maps and the Soviet Encyclopedia, because this place has never existed in the world, and the powerful Soviet Union turned a nation into a ghost. , evaporated from the earth. In 2004, the European Parliament passed a resolution that the 1944 annihilation of Chechnya in the former Soviet Union was the worst act of genocide in the twentieth century.

2. The Khrushchev Era:

In the summer of 1956, Khrushchev made a report criticizing Stalin’s personality cult that shocked the world at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Union. , one of the evidences is that Stalin violently deported the Chechen and Ingushetia minorities during World War II and forced them to move to Kazakhstan and other parts of Central Asia in large numbers. On January 9, 1957, the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union decided to restore the Chechen-Ingushetia Autonomous Republic and place it under the jurisdiction of the Russian Federation.

3. The Brezhnev era

Although the entire Soviet Union was in a stage full of problems during the Brezhnev era, from the late 1950s to the late 1980s, The Chechen people have spent the most stable thirty years.

The central government of the Soviet Union gave Chechnya-Ingushetia a large amount of economic assistance and subsidies, and the capital Grozny gradually developed into an industrial city. Among all ethnic groups in the entire Soviet Union, Chechens had the highest birth rate, and the Chechen population also recovered and grew rapidly.

However, in the "quiet seventies", Chechnya still showed its differences: the crime rate in this republic was extremely high, and there were a lot of idle and idle people. In January 1973, mass riots occurred in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya. On February 13 after the incident, Andropov, Chairman of the Soviet National Security Council, pointed out in a report submitted to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: "Between 1958 and 1972, the Ministry of Internal Affairs agencies were detained in accordance with the law for various criminal acts. There are 115,455 persons held criminally responsible, that is, one out of every six city residents... It should also be noted the large number of unemployed residents (about 30,000 people) and military service evaders, by the way, in Grozny. Among the most active participants in mass riots, unemployed people accounted for almost half. "It can be imagined that in the most peaceful 14 years from the 1960s to the 1970s, one sixth of the urban residents of a nation. (including women, children and the elderly) were punished for criminal offenses, and one-tenth of the city's inhabitants (Grozny had a population of about 300,000 at the time) were left idle under the Soviet system where the government guaranteed full employment.

4. The Gorbachev Era

Although Chechnya has gone through the "golden age" of Chechnya's history from 1957 to 1989, "the national grievances and Stereotypes, prejudices and even discrimination have always existed in this country and have been passed down from generation to generation. They burst out with the collapse of the repressive machinery, and some leading radical figures who feel that the 'day of success' has arrived are doing everything possible to incite them." This cannot but cause serious consequences. consequences. Successive leaders of the late Soviet Union ignored the ethnic issues existing in their country. Especially during the Brezhnev era, the top leader actually believed that the ethnic issues had been resolved and a "new historical communist community - the Soviet people" had been formed. As a result, they have relaxed their vigilance on ethnic issues. Leaders of ethnic minorities in the countries that joined the Soviet Union took the opportunity to train cadres of their own ethnic groups to replace cadres of other ethnic groups, laying the foundation for the future disintegration of the Soviet Union. Nationalism has a tenacious vitality. Once the pressure disappears, it will burst out like galloping lava, causing disaster.

Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, also failed to realize the seriousness of the Soviet Union’s national problem. Until 1988, Gorbachev believed that there were no serious ethnic problems in the Soviet Union. However, Gorbachev was really unlucky. He happened to encounter the flood of global nationalist thoughts in the twentieth century. Since a similar situation had never occurred in the Soviet Union and there was no experience to follow, the main leaders of the Soviet Union at that time lacked the necessary preparations for the suddenly highlighted ethnic issues. First, they did not pay the necessary attention; and when the situation got out of control, they Panic, losing ground, changing orders day and night, focusing on one thing and not that.

When the country was in chaos and the countries that had joined the Communist Party were becoming independent one after another, on June 8, 1991, the National Congress of the Chechen People held its second meeting and announced the establishment of an independent "Chechnya-Indo-Cuba" What a peaceful country." However, it must be pointed out that the "independence" declared by Chechnya at this time refers to independence from the Russian Federation, not from the Soviet Union. In other words, Chechnya hopes to become a member state of the Soviet Union, rather than a truly independent country. It was only the subsequent disintegration of the Soviet Union that turned Chechnya into a real independent demand.

5. The stage when Yeltsin took real power:

The "819" incident occurred. In order to cooperate with the "Emergency Committee", the Chechen authorities arrested the "thinker" Yandarbiye of the Chechen separatist forces. husband. The arrest of Yandarbiev caused a riot among some people. Those who participated in the riot occupied the Soviet Union Grozny Municipal Committee Building and turned it into their own headquarters. The failure of the powerful agencies to contact Yeltsin resulted in the state's powerful agencies doing nothing.

The gangsters became more and more unscrupulous in the face of the inaction of powerful institutions, and the leader of the Republic of Korea Zafzaev was ousted from power.

On August 28th and 29th, armed gangsters blocked the streets and squares of Grozny and seized the Republic of Korea Ministerial Conference, the Radio and Television Center and the airport building. Yeltsin, who had gained power in Moscow at that time, and Khasbulatov, chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet (note that Ruslan Khasbulatov was a Chechen, but he firmly opposed Chechen independence) sent a group of "radical democrats" An investigative committee was formed to go to Chechnya to hold talks with militants. At that time, Russia's "radical democrats" regarded Dudayev's gangsters as "democratic forces." Therefore, the report of this committee read as follows: The opposition proposed that the Supreme Soviet dissolve itself and elect Chechnya - -The President of Ingushetia and the Republic of Ingushetia then demanded the dissolution of the Government of Ingushetia. "The demands of the democratic forces are well-founded. Any further delay in these demands will lead to civil war and inter-ethnic wars in the region."

Because they were against the "Emergency Committee", the Chechen gangsters received approval and support from Moscow's "radical democrats". On September 4, Dudayev announced that the Supreme Soviet of Russia had been overthrown. On September 6, a group of armed thugs occupied the Chechnya-Ingushetia Supreme Soviet building, and people's representatives who tried to resist were beaten. , Chairman of the Grozny City Soviet V. Kutsenko died on the spot. As for Kusenko's death, there are different theories. Some say he committed suicide by jumping off a building. The Investigative Committee of the Russian Parliament concluded that Kusenko, who was nearly sixty years old, was thrown out of the window of the Soviet building by thugs. Thrown to death. On September 15, the Supreme Soviet of Chechnya was forced to declare its own dissolution.

On October 27, 1991, the "National Congress of the Chechen People" led by Dudayev held "elections" for the president and parliament in its self-demarcated areas. Dudayev " Elected President of Chechnya. The first presidential decree he subsequently issued was to declare Chechnya a sovereign and independent country on November 1, 1991.

At 19:30 on December 25, 1991, the flag of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the Soviet Union fell over the Kremlin for more than 70 years, and the Soviet Union officially disintegrated.