defense towers and two-story dwelling compounds of stone in highland villages, usually one tower per village. Today, each tower is associated with a clan that traces its origin to that village, and each highland village is (or was until deportations in the Soviet era) inhabited by one clan that owns communal fields and pastures, a cemetery, and (prior to the conversion to Islam) one or more shrines. The majority of Chechen clans have such highland roots; a few lowland clans do not, and these are generally assimilated clans originally of other nationalities.
The Chechen highlands, though the center of clan and pre-Muslim religious identity, supported a limited population and therefore traditional Chechen society was vertically distributed, with highlanders (herders) and lowlanders (grain farmers) economically dependent on each other. In cold periods such as the Little Ice Age (middle ages to mid-nineteenth century), highland farming became marginal and downhill movement increased. The
Chechen women flee the village of Assinovskaya for neighboring Ingushetia, December 1999. © REUTERS NEWMEDIA INC./CORBIS late middle ages were a time of intensification in the forested foothills of Chechnya, when foothill towns were founded, ethnic identity as noxchi began to spread through the foothills, and the lowlands became the wealthier and culturally prestigious part of the society. The peak of the Little Ice Age coincided with the beginning of the Russian conquest of the Caucasus in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the Chechen economy was destroyed as the lowlanders were expelled, their lands seized, and at least half of the lowland population slaughtered or deported to the Ottoman Empire (the Chechens of Jordan, Turkey, and Syria are descendants of these and postwar deportees).
HISTORY, TREATIES, EXTERNAL RELATIONS
In 1859 Imam Shamil, leader of the fierce Dagestani-Chechen resistance to Russian conquest, surrendered to the Russian forces. No nation or government surrendered, and in particular the Chechens did not surrender (and indeed had no government that
A Russian soldier aims his machine gun during Russia’s second war with Chechnya. © AFP/CORBIS could have surrendered) and have essentially never considered themselves legitimately part of Russia. Their best land was seized and given to Cossack or Russian settlers, and perhaps half of their surviving population was deported or coerced or deceived into emigrating to the Ottoman Empire. A large Chechen uprising in 1877-78 was put down by Russian military force. A North Caucasus state, the Mountain Republic, including Chechnya, formed in 1917 and declared its independence in 1918. Individual North Caucasian groups, including the Chechens, fought against the Whites in the Russian civil war. In 1920 the Red Army occupied the North Caucasus lowlands but then oppressed the population and a yearlong war in Chechnya and Daghestan ensued. A Soviet Mountain Republic (the North Caucasus minus Daghestan) in 1921 recognized the Soviet government on the latter’s promise (via nationalities commissar Josef Stalin) of religious and internal-political autonomy. But in 1922 the Bolsheviks attacked Chechnya (to “pacify” it), removed it from the Mountain Republic, and in 1924 “liquidated” the rest of the Republic. In 1925 there was another bloody “pacification” of Chechnya. In a 1929 Chechen rebellion against collectivization, the leaders created a provisional government and presented formal demands to the Soviet government, which officially promised Chechen autonomy but attacked again soon after. Probably at least thirty thousand Chechens were killed in purges connected with collectivization. In 1936 Chechnya was merged with Ingushetia into a hybrid Chechen- Ingush ASSR. In 1944 the entire Chechen and Ingush population was deported and the ASSR “liquidated.” They were “rehabilitated” in 1956 and the ASSR reinstituted in 1957. In 1991 Chechnya declared independence and Ingushetia separated off. The 1994-1996 Russian-Chechen War was initiated in part to prevent Chechnya’s secession. The 1997 Khasavyurt treaty after the war promised Russian withdrawal from and noninterference in Chechnya, a decision on independence after five years, and Russian aid in rebuilding the devastated country. (The wording implies Chechen independence; e.g. “The agreement on the fundamentals of relations between Russian Federation
CHEKHOV, ANTON PAVLOVICH
and the Chechen Republic being determined in accordance with generally recognized norms of international law shall be reached prior to December 31, 2001.”) This is the first treaty the Chechens have made as a nation. They honored it; Russia did not, but diverted aid funds, supported radical Islamists and militants, began planning to invade Chechnya in early 1999, and did so on a pretext in late 1999, initiating a destructive war designed to solidify political power in Moscow but otherwise still incompletely understood.
The Chechen demographic losses of the twentieth century are: 1920-1921 Red Army invasion, nearly 2 percent of the population killed; collectivization in 1931, more than 8 percent; 1937 purges, more than 8 percent; mass deportation in 1944, 22 percent killed in the deportation process and another 24 percent dead of starvation and cold in the first two or three years afterward; 1994-1996 Russian-Chechen War, between 2 percent and 10 percent (figures vary), mostly civilians; a similar figure for the second Russian-Chechen War, begun in 1999; conservative total well over 60 percent. In the early twenty-first century many Chechens are war refugees or otherwise displaced. The overarching cause has probably been Russian official hate dating back to the nineteenth century when the Chechens were the largest and most visible of the groups resisting Russian conquest, fueled by continued Chechen nonassimilation and resistance. Besides many civilian deaths and refugees the two wars have brought numerous violations of Chechen human rights by Russian forces, destruction of the economy and infrastructure of Chechnya, open prejudice and violence against southern peoples across Russia, and a small but conspicuous radical Islamist movement in Chechnya. See also: CAUCASIAN WAR; CAUCASUS; DEPORTATIONS; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Avtorkhanov, Abdurakhman. (1992). “The Chechens and Ingush during the Soviet Period and its Antecedents.” In The North Caucasus Barrier, ed. Marie Bennigsen Broxup. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Dunlop, John B. (1998). Russia Confronts Chechnya: Roots of a Separatist Conflict. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Dunlop, John B. (2000-2002). Chechnya Weekly. Vols. 1-3. Washington, DC: Jamestown Foundation. «http://chechnya.jamestown.org/pub_chechnya .htm». Lieven, Anatol. (1998). Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press. Nekrich, Aleksandr M. (1978). The Punished Peoples: The Deportation and Fate of Soviet Minorities at the end of the Second World War. New York: Norton. Politkovskaya, Anna. (2001). A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya. London: Harvill. Uzzell, Lawrence A. (2003). Chechnya Weekly. Vols. 4ff. Washington, DC: Jamestown Foundation. «http:// chechnya.jamestown.org/pub_chechnya.htm». Williams, Brian Glyn. (2000). “Commemorating ‘The Deportation.’” Post-Soviet Chechnya History and Memory 12: 101-134. Williams, Brian Glyn. (2001). “The Russo-Chechen War: A threat to Stability in the Middle East and Russia?” Middle East Policy 8:128-148.
JOHANNA NICHOLS
(1860-1904), short-story writer and dramatist.
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was the author of several hundred works of short fiction and of several plays that are among the most important and influential dramatic works of the twentieth century. He was also a noted public figure who in his opinions and actions often challenged notions that were dominant in Russian social thought of the time.
Chekhov was born the grandson of a serf, who had purchased his freedom prior to the emancipation of the serfs, and the son of a shop owner in the Black Sea port of Taganrog, a town with a very diverse population. He received his primary and secondary education there, first in the parish school of the local Greek church, and from 1868 in the Taganrog Gymnasium, where his religion instructor, a Russian Orthodox priest, introduced his students to works of Russian and European literature. In 1876 his father declared bankruptcy, and the family moved to Moscow to avoid creditors. Chekhov remained in Taganrog to finish at the Gymnasium. During this period, he apparently read literature intensively in the Taganrog public library and began to write works of both fiction and drama. In 1879 Chekhov completed the Gymnasium, joined his family in Moscow, and began study in the medical department of Moscow University.
CHEKHOV, ANTON PAVLOVICH
Novelist and playwright Anton Chekhov. © BETTMANN/CORBIS
