“Bow your snow-capped head,
Submit, Caucasus: Yermolov is coming!
And the fierce cry of war has fallen silent:
All is subject to the Russian sword.
Like Batu’s horde,
The Caucasus will betray its forefathers,
Forget the voice of greedy strife,
And lay down its arrows of war.
To the gorges where you once nested,
A traveler will approach without fear,
And dark rumors will proclaim
The tale of your execution.
– A. S. Pushkin, “The Prisoner of the Caucasus”
The Old World
The Industrial Revolution profoundly changed the world, marking the arrival of the modern era. The old world gave way to a new one. This happened gradually; it is difficult to pinpoint a single specific moment.
What exactly was this old world, and what was life like in it? There were no clocks, and no one knew exactly what time it was or what year it was. Most often, people didn’t even know what year they were born in. Life was more closely tied to the natural cycles of the day and the year; people always felt and were aware of them. There was no internet or media, no roads or cars. The state played a much smaller role in people’s lives. There was less land registry, fewer property deeds.
The scale on which life unfolded was much smaller, more local, and corresponded to the human body. You walked a lot, felt gravity, the wind, the sun, sweated, and covered as much ground in a day as your legs or a horse would allow.
The main difference between the modern world and the old world is the spread of a materialistic view of the world. In the past, people understood that we do not live in a three-dimensional world, on a sphere rotating around the sun. Such facts are mostly irrelevant. What matters is what lies at the intersection of mental and physical realities—the place where our identities, human relationships, organizations, languages, and states reside. Everything, in fact. Bruno Latour defined this as a thin strip covering the Earth, calling it Gaia. In the old world, such a conception of reality was natural. In the new world, reality has become entirely physical.
Before the deportation, Chechnya belonged, in a significant sense, to the old world. The deportation was, among other things, an attempt to transfer it to the new world, while at the same time purging it of everything unnecessary, such as its own identity.
On the 23rd of February of 1944, the entire two nations of Chechens and Ingush were forcibly relocated to Central Asia and Siberia. More than 500 000 people were deported in a couple of days, with no time given for preparation. They were woken up early in the morning by around 120,000 NKVD soldiers and officers and weren’t allowed to take with them any belongings. Around a quarter of them died on the road, which took around two weeks, and another quarter died during the first year. The Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic was abolished, and a new Grozny Oblast established in its place.
My family comes from a mountainous village, Peshkha, and in a village not so far from it, Khaibakh, 800 people were burned alive in a barn as they were deemed too hard to transport due to bad road conditions.
Stalin named the operation “Lentil,” which is “Chechevitsa” in Russian, a cynical wordplay of “Chechen.”
The Enclosure of Communal Land
Many years ago, before the Modern Era, village life in many places was autonomous and self-organized. The land was communal, meaning it was held in collective use. In Europe, for example, it was divided into three categories—pastures, farmlands, and forests—all of which were defined as commons, or common land. Communal farmlands consisted of open fields divided into narrow strips that were cultivated by individual farmers. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England, and in the nineteenth century in the rest of Europe, the process of enclosing communal lands—the “enclosure of the commons”—began. This involved dividing land that had previously been in common use into separate plots, which were then immediately fenced off.
Communal land divided into distinct strips
Barriers set up
This was a radical change for the entire economy. Village life was transformed by the process of enclosure. Communal farming was directly linked to the structure of village life—it was a world of its own that began to crumble with the advent of enclosure. All rural self-government, including the courts, was based on a council of free landowners. They appointed village elders and judges and made all the important decisions regarding village life.
The role of the community diminished with enclosure; the state took over all of this. In general, there were fewer landowners, and many had no choice but to go to work for large landowners who had acquired significant tracts of land at auctions. Many were left with neither land nor work, and to avoid starving to death, they were forced to move to the cities, where factories had just begun to appear and workers were needed who were often desperate enough to live in slums. The proletariat began with landless people who had come to the city out of desperation.
The main reason given for enclosure was to increase the efficiency of farming, and, indeed, harvests did rise significantly. But the price of this was the destruction of the autonomous village with its local self-government and culture and way of life. The process led to the impoverishment of the population, famine, and mass migrations from villages to cities and to other countries.
The very improvement in farming efficiency became yet another reason for migration from the countryside to the city. Whereas before enclosure, seven out of ten inhabitants of the country were farmers, now fewer were needed. Before enclosure, farmers consumed most of the food they grew themselves. Afterward, most of what they sowed was sold.
In England, this process took about 200 years and gradually spread to other European countries, where a significant portion of the land was taken from farmers during the nineteenth century.
In the 1930s, it was the USSR’s turn. They, of course, devised the most horrific way to do this—collectivization. Here, in the 1930s, there was a lot of communal land. Farming was inefficient. The country was agrarian, and it needed to be industrialized urgently. Workers were needed, and food for them as well. Just as in Europe, landless peasants became these workers, and their food was now provided by the new “highly productive” farms. I see a clear connection between the processes of collectivization and the enclosure of the commons, yet collectivization was far more radical and brutal, leading to horrific consequences. Beyond the disruption of human communities, it also failed to increase efficiency and instead led to crop failures and famine. Overall, it resulted in the deaths of 12 million people from starvation, forced resettlements, persecution, and so on.
Collectivization in Chechnya
Historically, Chechnya also had a system of communal land use, at least for pastures and forests. It is possible that the well-known reverence for the forest here was linked to the need for its sustainable use.
Collectivization began here in 1929. It went like this: government officials would come and confiscate land, livestock, and tools from the local population. Everything the people owned was taken away, leaving them with only their homes and small plots of land. This immediately led to resistance. There were uprisings in many villages, the largest of which occurred in Goity, Shali, Benoy, and Galanchozh. Hundreds were killed and even more arrested during clashes with the army. The authorities sought a compromise by granting amnesty to those arrested. Often, the uprisings were provoked by security officers seeking to identify and eliminate the most active segment of the population. This continued for several years; during the uprisings, the rebels even occupied district centers and established people’s governments. On one occasion, a commission that arrived from Moscow agreed to the terms of the rebels in Shali, led by Shito Istamulov. Many local officials were dismissed and arrested, accused of excesses at the local level. But after some time, the leaders of the uprising were arrested or killed. Arrests, persecution, and exile intensified. As a result of the uprisings in Chechnya and Ingushetia, about 35,000 people were arrested. Ultimately, collectivization was declared premature and suspended.
The fact is that for people living in the old world, their homes and plots of land represented the entire world in which they lived their lives. Everything in the village was woven into a larger system of which they were a part. For example, the judicial authority was organized by people who owned land in the village. These people were self-sufficient; they did not need the state, and they did not benefit the state. They did not associate their lives with the USSR in any way. To integrate them into the state system, it was necessary to take their land away from them. This was the main goal of collectivization. It was an attempt to destroy local identity and integrate people into the imperial system. When people resisted this, it was decided to erase this identity by even more disruptive force—through deportation.
Deportation
Deportation has always been an effective means of destroying entire peoples. In the ancient world, it served as a more humane way of dealing with conquered territories than mass murder. Often, after a territory was seized in war, the local population was resettled elsewhere.
Deportation is a kind of Gulag for everyone, unlike the typical Gulag, which is more selective. Both the USSR and Germany behaved like ancient empires. It is rather strange that we are shocked by the horrors of the Gulag and the Holocaust. We expect people in the new world to be more humane. But just because some countries have intermittently followed a rule of law and many people enjoy advanced technologies doesn’t mean that human nature has changed or that the end of history has arrived. Even today, Pakistan can resettle 1.5 million Afghans, and the Saudis can dismember an unwelcome journalist. All these countries are just as much “slave-ocracies” as the majority of nations throughout history—and today. All of them, in essence, were organized crime groups, including the USSR.
A.G. Avtorhanov lists the reasons for the deportation of Chechen and Ingush:
Thus, the reasons for the destruction of the mountain peoples are:
The mountain peoples’ ongoing struggle for national independence and their de facto refusal to recognize the despotic system of the Soviet colonial regime;
Moscow’s desire to secure the Caucasus as a rear base in future clashes with the West against the inevitable pan-Caucasian national front against the Soviet metropolis;
The Soviet government’s clearly defined policy to bring the Caucasian oil economy—which was the leading and primary economy for the entire Soviet Union—under definitive imperial control;
Not only to keep the Caucasus as a strategic base free from internal danger and vulnerability, but to transform it into a reliable springboard for future expansion against Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, and India.
Such are the undeclared but indisputable motives guiding the Kremlin rulers in their policy of extermination of the Caucasian peoples. The first victims of this predatory policy were one million mountain peoples—Chechens, Ingush, Karachais, and Balkars.
The USSR can be characterized as a Gulag state. History is full of similar examples. The primary mission of such a state is the maintenance of power by repressing or eliminating people, both collectively and as individuals. At the same time, those who are being killed must also build the infrastructure for a system designed to continue the killing. The roads and canals they built, for example, were not needed to improve the lives of the country’s population, but to increase the production capacity necessary to strengthen the army—for repression abroad—and the secret police—for repression at home. Yes, one could even get rich, and even remain decent, by participating in the construction of the Gulag. But the most one could aspire to in such a place is to be the most decent cog in an inhumane system.
In general, the entire population of the country was enslaved, just as in the ancient world. After all, in the ancient world, not everyone was a slave in the literal sense. The most common form of slavery was mandatory seasonal labor, exactly like the harvest work done by students in the USSR.
The largest construction projects in the ancient world were carried out by slaves, and they were aimed at strengthening the system. Slavery was the only way to channel such a concentrated amount of human energy into a project needed by the empire. The largest construction projects in the USSR were carried out by slaves—prisoners of the Gulag—and a tremendous effort was made to concentrate human energy on these projects, which served the interests of a narrow circle of people.
Collectivization, and later deportation, were aimed at integrating people into this vast system.
What good did deportation bring?
Two things, at the very least. First, the Chechens realized that there was another world around them, and that they could no longer live in isolation. The children born in Kazakhstan were the first generation of Chechens to receive a mass education. Their parents, shocked by the deportation, demanded that they study hard so that their fate would not be repeated. Education would help them become part of the wider world and be protected from the danger of another blow to their small world. For example, the Khevsurs or Ubykhs were unable to do this.
Second, Chechens began to engage less in their favorite pastime—deadly land disputes. Before the deportation, practically everyone argued with their neighbor over a field or pasture, and very often these disputes led to murders. The most fortunate man turned out to be the one whose brother was killed during a dispute. In such cases, the killer would flee, and the surviving brother would inherit the land plots of both the killer and the slain brother. People frequently hatched plots and orchestrated provocations in order to seize extra land. That old world we spoke of at the beginning was, most certainly, no idyll.
Deportation and Identity
My Chechen friends and I once discussed whether a person, after death, still remembers the street where they grew up. To them, this seemed like a trivial matter. But it strikes me that if I were to lose that memory, I would cease to be myself; consequently—to some extent, at least—I must remember. This implies that the soul and the body are inextricably linked, and that your body “is” you. Every day you have lived “is” you. Therefore, your relationships with loved ones, friends, colleagues, neighbors, and everyone else with whom you interact constitute the very foundation of your personality. All of this creates a psychological reality—and that reality “is” your identity. The collective sum of these individual identities, and their interaction within a specific territory, constitutes national identity.
It is precisely this that makes Chechnya “Chechnya” and Kazakhstan “Kazakhstan.” Chechnya exists entirely within the minds of the Chechens, just as the entirety of Kazakhstan exists within the minds of the Kazakhs. It’s not just a patch of earth, but a web of relationships, including those to that patch of earth. They were not—indeed, could not be—deported into Kazakhstan; that is an impossibility. Nor is it possible to simply move there. It is a psychological reality, although embodied in a particular place and in particular relationships—one into which no outsider can truly penetrate. When the Chechens and Ingush were deported, they found themselves in a kind of “nowhere,” for the place where they ultimately arrived was utterly alien to them. The very purpose of the deportation was to obliterate their identity. And that objective was achieved. In the aftermath of the deportation, a full and complete restoration of their identity became impossible; only its ruins remained.
The fact that we managed to preserve our identity in its current form is a testament to the immense efforts of people who endured the most grueling of conditions. Indeed, it would be difficult to find another people who have insisted upon—and defended—their identity with such tenacity. As we have noted before: land was seized from many peoples, yet few resisted that seizure so fiercely—so desperately—that they were condemned to be completely erased from the map.
For this reason, I find it misguided when Chechens today—in their sincere efforts to become more religious—attempt to adopt a foreign cultural guise. My generation is often more inspired by foreign cultural symbols than its own tradition. They believe that by becoming like someone else, they will outgrow their provincial backwardness and thus draw closer to the transcendental. Yet, in their attempt to become someone else, they are, in essence, deporting themselves—severing ties with their own identity. Yes, traditions can evolve and change, but it takes time, and it’s different from the abrupt replacement that can be seen today. Ultimately, they do what the Chekists did, but to themselves, not others.
I recently heard an intriguing definition of the homeland: that it is graves that transform mere earth into a homeland. That, for instance, the entirety of Chechnya is a vast necropolis, which the current generation is duty-bound to guard. Furthermore—to borrow from Roger Scruton—the social contract in a free society involves not only the living but also the dead and the generations yet unborn. It is as if they, too, possess rights. If one extends these lines of thought further, one might even arrive at a definition of the human being. A human being is a creature that: 1) buries its ancestors and holds them in memory; and 2) tries to render itself worthy of being buried by its own descendants, and of being remembered by them after. We are all “homo sepeliendi”—the burying man.
Image Credit: The Jamestown Foundation
