Chechnya

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Chechnya sits wedged between the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea in a corner of Eastern Europe that has refused, for centuries, to be governed by anyone who arrived uninvited. The republic covers roughly 16,500 square kilometers, a territory smaller than many single American counties, yet its name has surfaced in some of the most violent and consequential conflicts of the modern era. Its capital, Grozny, was rebuilt from rubble. Its population, now over 1.5 million, is among the most ethnically homogenous in Russia, with Chechens making up 96.4 percent of residents according to the 2021 census. And its language, Chechen, belongs to a family that American linguist Johanna Nichols has described as the closest living continuation of the cultural and linguistic community that gave rise to Western civilisation.

  How did a republic smaller than many provinces become the site of two post-Soviet wars, a disputed independence, and a governance crisis that international human rights bodies have compared to a totalitarian state? And what does a land whose people were forcibly deported in their entirety during World War II, who lost more than 60 percent of their population in the process, look like today? Those are the threads this documentary follows.

• 2. Ancient Roots

  ›

  Traces of human settlement near Lake Kezenoyam date back to 40,000 BC, making the North Caucasus one of the longest continuously inhabited regions on earth. Cave paintings, tools, and other archaeological evidence confirm habitation across roughly 8,000 years. By 3000 BC, the wheel had appeared, along with horseback riding, metalwork in copper, gold, silver, and iron, and the production of armor, daggers, and arrow tips. Settlements near sites including Nasare-Cort, Muzhichi, and Ja-E-Bortz document a material culture that developed long before any outside empire took notice.

  George Anchabadze of Ilia State University has written that the Vainakhs, the ancestral people of the Chechens and Ingush, are the ancient natives of the Caucasus. Their legendary forefather, according to the 11th-century Georgian chronicler Leonti Mroveli, was a figure named Kavkas, from whom the word Caucasus itself derives. That lineage places the Chechen people not as latecomers to their land but as its named originators.

  Johanna Nichols's linguistic research connects the modern Nakh peoples to the ancient farmers of the Fertile Crescent, arguing that the Nakh-Dagestanian languages represent the nearest living heir to the community that planted the seeds of Western civilisation. Whether or not that claim is accepted in all its scope, the point stands that the Chechen language and people carry a documented presence in the Caucasus that spans millennia before the first Russian soldier arrived.

• 3. Islam as Resistance

  ›

  Russian Emperor Peter the Great first moved to extend Russian power into the Caucasus in 1722, launching a war against Safavid Persia that briefly delivered much of the Caucasian territory into Russian hands. The deeper conquest came later, after successive treaties, including the Treaty of Gulistan following the Russo-Persian War of 1804-1813 and the Treaty of Turkmenchay in 1828, progressively stripped Persia of the region. As Russian forces moved south and east, they encountered mountain tribes who had no intention of yielding.

  Islam had spread among the Chechens over several centuries, partly because it positioned itself as the religion of liberation from a Tsardom that labelled the Nakh tribes as bandits. One of the most dramatic expressions of this fusion of faith and resistance was Mansur Ushurma, a Chechen sheikh of the Naqshbandi Sufi order, who led a rebellion aimed at establishing an Islamic state in the Transcaucasus under Sharia law. He was ultimately betrayed by the Ottoman Turks, handed over to the Russians, and executed in 1794.

  The fight did not end there. From 1834 to 1859, Imam Shamil, a Muslim-Avar commander, waged a prolonged war against the Russian imperial army in what became known as the Murid War. When Shamil was captured in 1859 at the aul Gunib, he left command to Baysangur of Benoa, a Chechen fighter who had lost one arm, one eye, and one leg. Baysangur broke through the Russian siege and continued fighting for another two years before being captured and killed. The Russian Tsar spared Shamil's life hoping the gesture would end resistance in the North Caucasus. It did not.

  By the late 1860s, the Russian tsarist regime shifted tactics and offered Chechens and Ingush passage to the Ottoman Empire. An estimated 80 percent of both peoples accepted or were compelled to leave the Caucasus. The resistance that remained converted from open warfare to insurgent tactics.

• 4. Deportation and Genocide

  ›

  On the 21st of December 1917, Ingushetia, Chechnya, and Dagestan declared independence from Russia and formed a single state called the United Mountain Dwellers of the North Caucasus. Tapa Tchermoeff, a Chechen statesman, became its first prime minister. The state was recognized by major world powers of the time. By 1921, Russian forces had invaded, absorbed the new country into the Soviet state, and sent its government into exile.

  Under Soviet rule the territory was reorganized as the Checheno-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. In the 1930s, Ukrainians fleeing famine settled in the republic permanently and survived because of it. Then came 1944. Although more than 50,000 Chechens and over 12,000 Ingush were fighting against Nazi Germany on the front line, including multiple Heroes of the USSR such as Khanpasha Nuradilov and Movlid Visaitov, the entire Chechen and Ingush nations were accused of collaborating with Germany. The charges, prepared by NKVD officer Bogdan Kobulov, were later shown to be largely fabricated.

  During Operation Lentil, 496,460 people were loaded onto trucks, many of them American Studebakers fresh from Lend-Lease deliveries, and transported to the Kazakh SSR. American historian Norman Naimark has written that those who could not be moved were shot. Over 60 percent of the deported Chechen and Ingush populations perished. In 2004, the European Parliament recognized the deportation as an act of genocide.

  The survivors were allowed to return after 1956 during de-Stalinization under Nikita Khrushchev, but the republic they came back to had changed. Russian migrants had settled in their family homes. The republic's boundaries had been redrawn. Russification policies required Russian-language proficiency for advancement in the Soviet system. Even the commander of the 255th Separate Chechen-Ingush regiment, Movlid Visaitov, the first Soviet officer to make contact with American forces at the Elbe River, had been deported alongside everyone else.

• 5. Two Wars, Brief Independence

  ›

  After the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, ex-Soviet Air Force general Dzhokhar Dudayev led the Chechen National Congress in a push for recognition as a separate nation. On the 1st of November 1991, Dudayev's Chechnya issued a unilateral declaration of independence. Boris Yeltsin's Russian Federation refused to accept it, arguing in part that Chechnya was a major hub in Russia's oil infrastructure and that its secession would encourage other republics, including Tatarstan, to follow.

  The First Chechen War ran from 1994 to 1996. Despite overwhelming numerical superiority in troops, weapons, and air support, Russian forces could not establish permanent control over the mountainous terrain. The Budyonnovsk hospital hostage crisis in 1995 shocked the Russian public. In April 1996, Dzhokhar Dudayev was killed by Russian forces using a missile fired from a warplane after his position was identified by triangulating the signal from a satellite phone he was using. Chechen rebel forces led by Aslan Maskhadov then retook Grozny. Boris Yeltsin declared a ceasefire and signed a peace treaty, and Russian troops withdrew.

  Parliamentary and presidential elections in January 1997 brought Maskhadov to power for a five-year term. During the brief independence that followed, kidnapping became the principal source of income countrywide, procuring over 200 million US dollars across the three-year period. In 1998 alone, 176 people were kidnapped, 90 of whom were released according to official accounts. On the 25th of October 1998, Shadid Bargishev, Chechnya's top anti-kidnapping official, was killed in a remote-controlled car bombing.

  The War of Dagestan began on the 7th of August 1999. A series of apartment bombings in September killed around 300 people in several Russian cities. Russian ground forces launched a new offensive in October. On the 5th of February 2000, Russian forces killed 60 Chechen civilians during a mop-up operation in the district of Aldy. After the recapture of Grozny in February 2000, the Ichkerian government collapsed.

• 6. The Kadyrov Era

  ›

  Akhmad Kadyrov, the former mufti of Ichkeria who had switched sides to support Moscow, was elected president in an internationally monitored election on the 5th of October 2003 with 83 percent of the vote. OSCE monitors subsequently reported ballot stuffing, voter intimidation by Russian soldiers, and the exclusion of separatist parties. On the 9th of May 2004, a landmine planted beneath a VIP stage and detonated during a parade at a football stadium in Grozny killed him.

  His son Ramzan Kadyrov, who had run his father's security force, became caretaker prime minister in 2005 and was appointed president in 2007. He has governed since. Human rights organizations including Human Rights Watch and the American organization Freedom House have documented high-level corruption, systematic torture, and what Freedom House called in 2009 one of the most repressive societies in the world, placing Chechnya alongside Burma and North Korea on its list. Memorial, the Russian human rights group, has described Chechnya under Kadyrov as a totalitarian regime.

  In 2017, Novaya Gazeta reported that a number of people were extrajudicially executed on the night of the 26th of January 2017, publishing a list of 27 names while noting the list was incomplete. Reports from the same period described concentration camps, including one in the town of Argun, where gay men were detained and subjected to violence. The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe documented the 2017 attacks in a 2021 report, with rapporteur Foura ben Chikha calling them the single most egregious example of violence against LGBTI people in Europe in decades. Kadyrov's spokesman Alvi Karimov told the news agency Interfax that gay people simply do not exist in the republic.

  In December 2021, up to 50 family members of critics of the Kadyrov government were abducted in a wave of mass kidnappings beginning on the 22nd of December. Freedom House has documented what it calls a total transnational repression campaign reaching Chechen exiles outside Russia, including assassinations and digital intimidation.

• 7. Life Inside the Republic

  ›

  The 2021 census counted 1,510,824 people living in Chechnya, up from 1,268,989 in the 2010 census. Chechens make up 96.4 percent of that population, a figure that reflects decades of outmigration by Russian and other non-Chechen residents. Russians, who numbered 296,794 in the 1959 census representing 49.4 percent of the republic's population, numbered just 18,225 in 2021.

  Sunni Islam is practiced by 95 percent of those polled in Grozny in 2010, with most following either the Shafi'i or Hanafi schools of jurisprudence. By 2011, the republic contained an estimated 465 mosques, including the Akhmad Kadyrov Mosque in Grozny with capacity for 10,000 worshippers, along with 31 madrasas and an Islamic university named Kunta-haji.

  Unemployment stood at 67 percent in 2006 and fell to 21.5 percent in 2014. The total budget revenue for 2017 was 59.2 billion rubles, of which 48.5 billion came from federal grants. Oil once drove the economy: in the late 1970s Chechnya produced up to 20 million tons annually, a figure that had fallen to below 2 million tons before the First Chechen War and dropped further to 750,000 tons by 2001.

  Chechnya's life expectancy ranks among the highest in Russia, though the pattern is unusual. In 2020 the republic recorded the deepest fall in life expectancy of any Russian region, only to record the biggest rise the following year. Rural life expectancy in Chechnya substantially exceeds that of its cities, which inverts the pattern seen in most of the country.

  From April 2024, all music performed in Chechnya must fall within a tempo range of 80 to 116 beats per minute to comply with what authorities describe as Chechen traditions. Borrowing musical culture from other peoples is not permitted under the rule.