and cooperative organization. His vision of a future peasant Russia is described in his utopian novel Journey of My Brother Alexei to the Land of Peasant Utopia (1920). This work later became instrumental in his downfall. His studies on the optimal size of agricultural enterprises are of interest even today. Chayanov’s theory of the peasant mode of production challenged the Marxist interpretation of differentiation of the peasantry into classes by positing the idea of a cyclical mobility based on the peasant family life cycle. Chayanov’s ideas have survived him. His work after his arrest was rediscovered in the West in the mid-1960s. His pioneering study of the family labor farm now claimed the attention of agricultural sociologists, anthropologists, and ethnologists working on developing countries where the peasant economy remains a predominant factor. In spite of the problematic nature of part of his work, it is generally seen as an important contribution to the development of the theory of peasant economy. See also: AGRICULTURE; PEASANT ECONOMY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bourgholtzer, Frank, ed. (1999). “Aleksandr Chayanov and Russian Berlin.” Journal of Peasant Studies 26 (Special Issue). Harrison, Mark. (1975). “Chayanov and the Economics of the Russian Peasantry.” Journal of Peasant Studies 2(4):389-417. Kerblay, Basile. (1966). “A. V. Chayanov: Life, Career, Works.” In Chayanov, Aleksandr V., The Theory of Peasant Economy, eds. Daniel Thorner, Basile Kerblay, R. E. F. Smith. Homewood, IL: Richard Irwin (American Economic Association). Millar, James R. (1970). “A Reformulation of A. V. Chayanov’s Theory of the Peasant Economy.” Economic Development and Cultural Change 18:219-229.
(b. 1923), Soviet party and police official; head of the KGB from 1982 to 1988.
Born in Ukraine, Viktor Chebrikov, an ethnic Russian, served at the Soviet front during World War II as a battalion commander. He became a member of the Communist Party in 1944 and earned a higher degree in engineering at the Dnepropetrovsk Metallurgical Institute after the war. In 1951 Che-brikov moved from engineering into full-time party work and served in various party administrative posts in the Ukrainian city and region of Dnepropetrovsk, rising to become second secretary of the Dnepropetrovsk Obkom (regional party committee) in 1964. In 1967 Soviet party leader Leonid Brezhnev, a native of Dnepropetrovsk, appointed Chebrikov to the post of head of personnel for the KGB (Committee of State Security) the Soviet security and intelligence apparatus. In 1968 Chebrikov became a deputy chairman of the KGB,
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and in early 1982 first deputy chairman, serving under Yuri Andropov. A Brezhnev loyalist, Che-brikov was elected to full membership in the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party at the Twenty-sixth Party Congress in 1981. In December 1982, with Andropov having succeeded Brezhnev as party leader, Chernenko took over as chairman of the KGB. He served in this post for the next six years, becoming a full member of the Politburo in 1985, where he remained until party leader Mikhail Gorbachev edged him out in October 1988. Chebrikov moved back into the party apparatus, serving as party secretary responsible for police and legal affairs, but his political conservatism put him at odds with Gorbachev, who had embarked on a program of far-reaching reforms, including limitations on the powers of the KGB. Chebrikov represented the Brezhnevite old guard of the Soviet bureaucracy, and although he apparently favored some sort of economic restructuring to increase the efficiency of the Soviet economy, he was not an advocate of any democratic political reforms. Less than a year later, in September 1989, Chebrikov was abruptly dismissed from his party post; from there he faded into obscurity. See also: BREZHNEV, LEONID ILICH; INTELLIGENCE SERVICES; STATE SECURITY, ORGANS OF
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Knight, Amy. (1988). The KGB: Police and Politics in the Soviet Union. Boston: Allen and Unwin. Knight, Amy. (1990). “The KGB and Democratization: A New Legal Order?” In The Soviet Empire: The Challenge of National and Democratic Movements, ed. Uri Ra’anan. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.
The Chechens, who call themselves noxchii (singular noxchi or noxchuo) and their land Noxchiin moxk (“Chechen land”), are the largest indigenous nationality of the North Caucasus. They speak a language of the Nakh-Daghestanian, or East Caucasian language family that is native to the Caucasus, and have lived in or near their present locations for millennia.
Chechnya is a small territory of about 5,000 sq. mi. (13,000 sq. km.) corresponding to about 85 percent of the historical Chechen lands (the rest is in today’s Daghestan), with some non-Chechen steppe land added in the north. The lower North Caucasus foothills and adjacent plain including the capital city of Grozny (Soelzha-ghaala “Sunzha City” in Chechen, a name still much in use despite its official renaming to Djohar in 1996) are the most densely populated part of Chechnya. The Chechens numbered just over a million in mid-2000 according to a Danish Refugee Council census. Somewhat over half of the world’s Chechens live in Chechnya; most of the others are scattered throughout Russia, several tens of thousands live in Kazakhstan and nearby, and a few tens of thousands in Jordan, Turkey, and Syria.
The ethnonymn noxchii is the self-designation of all speakers of Chechen on the north slope of the Caucasus Mountains but not of the Chechen-speaking Kisti on the south slope in Georgia. Though the Chechens and the neighboring Ingush have separate languages, national identities, and ethnonyms, they recognize an overarching ethnic unity (which also includes the Kisti) that they call vai naax, or “our people.” Chechen and Ingush are distinct languages and not mutually intelligible, but because of widespread passive bilingualism the two languages make up a single speech community in which each person speaks his or her own language and understands the other. Chechens recognize a larger supranational ethnic and political identity of laamanxoi (“mountain people”) that includes all the indigenous peoples of the North Caucasus.
In the nineteenth century, Chechen society consisted of about 130 patrilineal exogamous clans (Chechen taipa), most of which fell into one or another of nine clan confederations or tribes (Chechen tuqam), each of which had its own dialect. The Nox-chmaxkxoi (or Ichkerians) of the central and eastern foothills were the largest and most powerful. The confederations had some mutual economic and defense obligations, and as Chechen resistance to Russian conquest solidified in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the other confederations began to take on the ethnonym noxchi on which the name of the Noxchmaxkxoi is based. The charismatic resistance leaders were Muslims, and one result of the war was solidification of a Chechen national consciousness with Sufi-based Sunni Islam as one of its components. The social and religious functions of clans are by now diminished, although the great majority of Chechens still observe clan exogamy. Islam was actively practiced throughout the Soviet period.
CHECHNYA AND CHECHENS
Prior to the Russian conquest, Chechen society was prosperous and egalitarian, with no social distinctions other than earned wealth and earned honor. There was no government, though the society was ruled by a strong and uniform code of law. Penalties were set by respected elders, and fines were collected or death penalties carried out by the victim or the offended family. (The misnomers “blood feud,” “vendetta,” and “vengeance” are commonly used of this decentralized system.) Traditional justice has served the Chechens through the Soviet and post-Soviet periods whenever civil justice has failed to function.
Chechen social interaction is based on principles of honor, chivalry, hospitality, and respect, and on formality between certain individuals and families. Relations within the family are close and warm, but in public or when guests are present younger brothers are formal in the presence of older brothers and all are formal in the presence of their father. Behavior of men toward women, whether formal or not, is always chivalrous. Unlike some Muslim societies, Chechen women are and always have been free to associate with men in public, hold positions of responsibility in all lines of work, supervise men at work, and so on, but chivalry is strictly observed and creates social distance between men and women. An individual’s social standing depends largely on how well he or she shows respect and extends hospitality to others.
From the middle ages to the sixteenth or seventeenth century, Chechen families of means built five-story
