Chechnya

The mountains and the Terek

Chechnya lies on the northern flank of the Greater Caucasus, whose crest forms its southern border with Georgia. Its other neighbours are the Russian republics of Dagestan and Ingushetia and the rest of Russia to the north. It runs from the mountains through the valleys of the Terek and Sunzha rivers to the semidesert Nogay Steppe.^[1]

Most people are Chechens, who, like their Ingush neighbours, are Muslim and speak a language of the Nakh group. From the 1830s to the 1850s Chechens and other Caucasian mountain peoples resisted the Russian conquest under the Muslim leader Shamil, until he was captured in 1859. The fighting along the Terek frontier is the background to Leo Tolstoy’s novel The Cossacks.^[1]

Soviet autonomy, and exile

The Bolsheviks created a Chechen autonomous region in November 1920. In 1934 it was merged with the Ingush region, and two years later the combined territory became a republic.^[1]

During the Second World War, Stalin accused the Chechens and Ingush of collaborating with the Germans. Both peoples were deported en masse to Central Asia, and their republic was dissolved. They were later allowed to return, and under Khrushchev the republic was restored in 1957.^[1]

Independence and two wars

As the Soviet Union collapsed, Dzhokhar Dudayev, a Chechen former Soviet air force general, seized power in August 1991. He was elected president in October and in November declared Chechnya independent, which Russia did not recognise. In 1992 Checheno-Ingushetia split into two republics.^[1]

Russian troops invaded on 11 December 1994 and took Grozny in March 1995, but guerrilla resistance went on. Dudayev was killed in 1996, and in May 1997 Russia’s president, Boris Yeltsin, and the new Chechen president, Aslan Maskhadov, signed a peace treaty that left Chechnya’s status undecided. Britannica estimates that up to 100,000 people in Chechnya died and more than 400,000 fled their homes in the 1990s.^[1]

Russian troops returned in late 1999, after Prime Minister Vladimir Putin blamed Chechen separatists for apartment bombings in Russia that killed scores of civilians; Britannica notes that Chechen involvement was never proved.^[1] Grozny fell in 2000, and much of the city was razed; estimates of the dead in the second war range from 25,000 to 200,000.^[2] Chechen militants seized a Moscow theatre in 2002, and in 2004 Chechen rebels carried out the Beslan school siege in North Ossetia.^[1][2]

The Kadyrov era

In 2003 Chechen voters approved a new constitution that gave the republic’s government greater powers while keeping it inside the Russian Federation. Its Moscow-backed president, Akhmad Kadyrov, a former separatist, was killed in a bomb blast in 2004.^[1][2] With Putin’s backing his son, Ramzan Kadyrov, became president in 2007. In April 2009 Russia’s president, Dmitry Medvedev, announced the end of counterinsurgency operations, although violence continued sporadically.^[1]

Under Kadyrov, Chechnya has been relatively stable and firmly under his control.^[2] Human rights groups accuse him of using kidnapping, torture and murder against opponents, which he denies.^[1] The United States has put financial sanctions on him, accusing him of a systematic campaign of repression, and Reporters Without Borders lists him among its “predators of press freedom”; the BBC notes that Chechnya has no opposition media.^[2]