Chechnya: the Soviet Past

The Soviet authorities made sure Chechen-Ingushetia remained a backwater of deep political conservatism and thinly disguised Russian chauvinism. Official policy required that the First Party Secretary, the local head of the KGB, the local police chief and all the top administrators in the oil industry should be ethnic Russians. Despite this, Leonid Brezhnev's ideologist Mikhail Suslov launched a campaign against 'anti-Russian' sentiment in the press and academia in Chechnya in the early 1980s. Suslov sponsored the ideas of the Russian historian Vitaly Vinogradov, who said thatt the Chechens and Ingush had willingly joined the Russian empire in the reign of Catherine the Great in an act of 'voluntary union'. Six Chechen historians who contested this point of view were harassed. In 1982 the republic had to go through the charade of official celebrations of the 200th anniversary of the 'voluntary union.'

The Chechens and Ingush were second-class citizens who found it extremely hard to get higher education or advance in prestigious professions. The pilot Hussein Khamidov got his flying licence only after studying in four different institutes and taking correspondence courses: `If there was the slightest flaw or the smallest obstacle they didn't let you in,' he said. `They didn't even make Chechens bus drivers, especially on important routes.'

Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal, Calamity in the Caucasus