| Ruling from Moscow, the Russian elite used different tactics at different times in an effort to "Sovietize" or "Russify" the various ethnic groups found within the USSR. Some of the "Sovietization" tactics involved the use of geographical space to influence the national identities of groups found at certain locations. At first, the communist leaders tried to subsume the Chechen nation within a larger organization--the Mountain Republic of the USSR which also included the Ingush, Ossetian, Kabardine, Balkar and Karachai peoples. Less than two years later Chechnya was transformed into its own separate republic. Chechnya went through several more Moscow led permutations until WWII. |
| There remained stiff opposition to Stalinist policies like collectivization. Toward the end of World War II, Stalin decided that the Chechens were not good Soviet citizens and had to be dealt with harshly. Stalin accused the whole nation of treason and aiding the Germans, who occupied Chechnya during part of the war. Stalin decided in 1944 to deport the entire population of Chechnya to Central Asia. His stated goal was to "liquidate" the Chechen nation, which officially ceased to exist. Russian and Dagestani settlers were moved into the houses of the deported. |
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In ways similar to the ethnic cleansing that would be carried out when Yugoslavia disintegrated in the 1990s, the Soviets tried to erase even the memory of the Chechen people from the landscape when they were expelled from their homeland. The new Russian inhabitants began to claimed their newly settled territory with the construction of statues such as the statue to General Alexander Yermolov in Grozny in 1949. Yermolov had been the brutal tsarist commander-in-chief of the Russian occupied Caucasian territories in the 19th century. During the 1950s, under Kruschev, the deportations were condemned as the Soviet Union tried to create a sense of normalcy after the authoritarian excesses of the Stalin era. In 1957, the Chechen republic was reestablished and 25,000 Chechen and Ingush expellees returned home, but the Russian and Dagestani settlers also remained. There was much tension and open conflict between the returning Chechens and Ingush and the settlers. This tension remained relatively contained until the collapse of the Soviet Union.
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Links for further reading: The
Soviet Mountain Republic |
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