Ingush people

• 1. Introduction

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  The Ingush take their outside name from Angusht, a medieval village in the Tarskoye Valley whose name means a place where the horizon is seen. By the end of the 17th century that village had grown large. The Ingush call themselves Ghalghai. They live mainly in the Republic of Ingushetia in the central Caucasus. Smaller communities live in the Prigorodny District and the town of Vladikavkaz, both now in North Ossetia. Older chronicles knew them as Durdzuks, Gligvi and Kists, so one people hides behind several names. This documentary follows three questions. Who were the ancestors that Georgian and Greek writers glimpsed in the mountains? How did a people with a fierce reputation for independence live under empires, and what did one empire try to do to them? And what do their stone towers, their unusually hard language and their layered faiths say about who they are?

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• 2. Keepers of the Pass

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  In the 4th-3rd millennium BC, two Bronze Age cultures, Maykop and Kuro-Araxes, spread across the North Caucasus, and Ingushetia lay where they overlapped. Some early sites there, such as the Lugovoe settlement, show a blended character. From such roots grew the Koban culture, usually dated to the 12th-4th centuries BC. Scholars link the first Proto-Ingush groups to the Koban tribes.

  In the second half of the 1st millennium BC, Koban tribes formed a large union. Ancient writers called it Malkh, and Georgian sources called it Dzurdzuketi. Its people, the Dzurdzuks, controlled the Darial Gorge, the main passage across the Caucasus, and kept close ties with the early Georgian state. The Georgian chronicler Leonti Mroveli says that Pharnavaz, the first Georgian king, married a woman of the Dzurdzuk tribe. Their son was Saurmag, a name meaning dragon. After his father's death, Saurmag took the throne. When he learned that Georgian nobles wanted to kill him, he fled with his mother to his maternal uncles in Dzurdzuketi. The writer Lucian names one ruler of the union as Adirmakh. An Abkhaz researcher reads that name through the Ingush language as the owner of the power of the sun.

  At the start of the 2nd century BC, the Seleucid king Antiochus III invaded the North Caucasus and defeated the union. After its collapse the shared Koban names vanish from the records. Between the 1st century BC and the 1st century AD, the descendants appear under tribal names such as Khamekits, Serbs, Dvals, Sanars, Masakhs and Isadiks. In the 1st century AD, the Greek geographer Strabo wrote in his Geographica of the Gargareans, who lived beside the Amazons, and of the Gelae. Several scholars connect both peoples to the Ingush. In the 7th century the chronicle Ashkharhatsuyts mentions the Ingush as Kusts, also spelled Kists.

  From the late 9th to the early 13th century, the Ingush belonged to Alania, a kingdom with a mixed population. Ingush researchers place its capital, Magas, in the area of modern Magas and Nazran and the villages of Yandare, Gazi-Yurt, Ekazhevo, Ali-Yurt and Surkhakhi. Settlements there stand in groups within sight of one another. In each group one large, fortified and complex settlement dominates, while smaller ones cluster around it. Researchers tie this nested pattern to strong tribal survivals.

  The Mongols conquered the North Caucasus plain in 1238-1240 and folded it into the Ulus of Jochi. In 1395 Tamerlane's campaign destroyed the Alan association for good, and the surviving population withdrew into the mountains. There they built fortresses east and west of the Darial, and new communities formed that led to the modern peoples of the North Caucasus. Villages lined up along local gorges and merged into territorial communities called shahar. By the end of the 16th century the main Ingush societies had formed. From the Darial eastward stood Dzherakh, the Kistins, the Fyappins or Metskhalins, Chulkhoy, the Khamkhins, the Tsorins, the Akkins and the Orstkhoy. To the south lay Merzhoy and Tsechoy, and southeast of the Tsorins lay the Malkhins.

  Soon after Timur left, the Ingush began to move back down toward the plain. At first these were scattered military actions meant to stop nomadic peoples from settling there. A legend recorded in the mountain village of Pkhamat by I. A. Dakhkilgov describes eminent men of several communities gathering to unite the country. They agreed to take one name, Ghalghai, to end their feuds and to move out in an organized way. The oldest lowland settlements, Akhki-Yurt and Angusht, arose in the upper reaches of the Sunzha and Kambileevka rivers. Settlement there probably happened in the 16th-17th centuries and sped up from about the 1730s, after the Kabardians left.

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• 3. Oaths and Cossack Villages

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  A large crowd gathered near the foothill village of Angusht from the 4th to the 6th of March 1770. There 24 Ingush elders swore allegiance to the Russian Empire. The clearing was called Barta-Bos, which means Slope of Agreement. The German academician J. A. Güldenstädt attended and described the scene in his Journey through Russia and the Caucasus Mountains. Relations did not change much after the oath. Both sides treated such oaths as treaties between allies.

  The land between the Terek and Sunzha rivers mattered to Russia because the road to Georgia crossed it. Ingush had settled there no later than the end of the 17th or start of the 18th century. Güldenstädt counted many Ingush villages along the Sunzha and Kambileyevka. Angusht was the center of a district called Great Ingush. Settlers from it founded a colony called Small Ingush, centered on the village of Sholkhi.

  In 1781 people from the Angusht region founded the village of Nazran, where the Nazranka meets the Sunzha. The Ingush call it Nyasare. In the same year the Russian quartermaster L. L. Städer noted an Ingush outpost on that spot. In May 1784 the Vladikavkaz fortress rose near, or perhaps on, the Ingush village of Zaur, to secure a reliable route to Georgia. Vladikavkaz grew into one of the most important cities of the North Caucasus.

  In July 1830 two Russian columns under Major General Abkhazov marched into mountain Ingushetia through the Darial and Assa gorges. The people of Eban resisted courageously. Baron Rosen wrote to Count Alexander Chernyshyov on the 12th of November 1836. He reported that the highlanders of the Dzherakh, Kist and Galgai societies had been briefly subdued. District courts and a civil system followed. In July 1832 Rosen himself led another punitive expedition, with Ossetian and Georgian detachments. The trigger was the murder of a bailiff named Konstantinov by people of the village of Khuli. Many Ingush villages were destroyed, fields were ruined and large numbers of livestock were stolen.

  The Ingush joined several Chechen uprisings, two different ones in 1822 and another in 1840. In 1840 two Ingush societies, the Galashians and the Karabulaks, swore allegiance to Imam Shamil in Urus-Martan. General Pavel Grabbe reported on the 30th of March 1840 that the Galgai and Kists were in great agitation. Some Karabulak and Ingush villages were too, and they were helping the rebel secretly or openly. The 1840s and 1850s mark the peak of the Caucasian Imamate, and a number of Ingush societies belonged to it. The Eclectic Review wrote in 1854 that the Ingush, Chechens and Karabulaks fought a war against the encroaching Russians. Of their stubbornness it said: "Often defeated, they always rise again."

  From the late 1840s to the late 1850s, a chain of Cossack villages was built across the flat part of Ingushetia. The Ingush were expelled from lowland villages to the mountains and foothills. Administration shifted repeatedly after that. In 1860 Ingushetia formed the Ingushskiy Okrug within the Terek Oblast. In 1870 it merged with the Ossetinskiy Okrug into the Vladikavkazsky Okrug. In 1888 that district was disbanded and the Ingush-Cossack Sunzhensky Otdel took its place. In 1909 the Sunzhensky Otdel split into the Sunzhensky and Nazranovskiy okrugs. The 1897 census counted 47,409 Ingush in the Russian Empire, a figure that later Soviet censuses would multiply many times over.

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• 4. Exile and Return

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  On the 1st of May 1923, the first newspaper in the Ingush language, Serdalo, was published. That same year Zaurbek Malsagov developed an Ingush alphabet based on the Latin script. New schools opened in the villages of Gamurzievo, Bazorkino and Yandare, while Muslim madrasahs kept working. The 1926 census counted 74,097 Ingush in the USSR, and the 1939 census counted 92,120.

  German forces entered the North Caucasus in 1942 and were stopped at two Checheno-Ingush cities, Malgobek and Ordzhonikidze, which is the present Vladikavkaz. Then came the 23rd of February 1944. On that day the Ingush and Chechens were falsely accused of collaborating with the Nazis. On Joseph Stalin's orders, both entire populations were deported in Operation Lentil. They were sent to Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Siberia, while most of their men were fighting at the front. The Checheno-Ingush ASSR was abolished, and Ingush territory was split between a new Grozny Oblast and the Georgian SSR.

  The first phase used American-supplied Studebaker trucks, modified with compartments for submachine guns above the deportees to prevent escapes. The historian Norman Naimark writes that troops loaded villagers onto trucks. Many deportees remembered them as Studebakers fresh from Lend-Lease deliveries. In his words, "Those who could not be moved were shot." He puts the total deported at "496,460 people." Deportees were gathered at railway stations and then moved in cattle cars. Up to 30 percent of the population died on the journey or in the first year of exile. The Prague Watchdog claims that about half of the Chechens and Ingush died in the early years from hunger, cold and disease. In 2004 the European Parliament classified the deportation as genocide.

  The linguist Johanna Nichols notes that the reason was never clarified. In her view the cause "seems to have been Stalin's wish to clear all Muslims from the main invasion routes." She ties this to a contemplated attack on Turkey. She adds that the Chechen and Ingush lost at least one quarter, and perhaps half, of their population in transit.

  Shepherds high in the mountains escaped the roundup. They joined forces and formed rebel groups that kept attacking Russian forces in Ingushetia. According to one account, major groups were led by Akhmed Khuchbarov, the Tsitskiev brothers and a woman sniper named Laisat Baisarova. The same account says the last male rebel was killed by KGB officers in 1977, while Baisarova was never captured or killed.

  Checkheno-Ingushetia was restored in 1957, and the Ingush returned. Ossetian voices in the early 1990s argued that two Stavropol districts, Naur and Shelkovskaya, had been added to it instead of the Prigorodny District. Yet the transfer of those districts cannot be counted as compensation. The 1959 census counted 105,980 Ingush. In 1973 the Ingush organized a rally in Grozny demanding the return of Prigorodny, the high point of their campaign for their own statehood. The census of 1979 counted 186,198 Ingush, and the 1989 census counted 237,438. From 1988 informal movements appeared in Ingushetia, among them Nijsxo, Däqaste and the People's Council. They aimed at Ingush statehood inside the Russian Federation. On the 26th of April 1991, the 1st Congress of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR adopted a law. Its title was On the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repressions, and it formally rehabilitated the Ingush. The same law became a catalyst for justice toward millions of other citizens of the former Soviet Union.

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• 5. A Republic Under Strain

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  In 1992 a law created the Ingush Republic as part of the Russian Federation. In October and November of that year, a dispute with the Ossetian side over the Prigorodny District escalated into armed clashes. The Russian prosecutor's office reported that 583 people died, among them 350 Ingush and 192 Ossetians. It counted 939 injured, 457 of them Ingush and 379 Ossetian, and 261 missing, 208 of them Ingush and 37 Ossetian. Between 30 and 60 thousand Ingush were forced to move from Vladikavkaz and the Prigorodny District into Ingushetia.

  In 1995 the new capital of Ingushetia was founded and named Magas. It shares its name with the Alanian capital that Ingush researchers locate in this territory. The decades that followed brought a long run of attacks and killings in the republic. On the 22nd of June 2009, a car bomb badly hurt the president of Ingushetia, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, and killed three of his bodyguards. On the 17th of August 2009, a suicide bomber drove a truck full of explosives into a police base in Nazran. He killed 21 Ingush police officers.

  Some of the dead were critics of the authorities. On the 31st of August 2008, Magomed Yevloyev was shot in the temple. He was a journalist, lawyer and businessman who owned the news website Ingushetiya.ru and was known for harsh criticism of the Russian regime in Ingushetia. His name is engraved on the Journalists' Memorials in Bayeux, France, and in Washington D.C. On the 25th of October 2009, the businessman and dissident Maksharip Aushev was killed, and his body carried over 60 bullet holes. The U.S. Department of State honored him posthumously in 2009.

  On the 26th of March 2019, thousands of people in Ingushetia protested against a border deal with neighboring Chechnya. They denounced the land swaps in the agreement and called on Yevkurov to resign. On the 25th of June 2019, Yevkurov announced his resignation after almost 11 years in office. Protests continued, and many Ingush boycotted the elections that followed.

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• 6. A People Without Lords

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  Approximately 350 clans live in Ingushetia today, and every clan and every member is viewed as an equal. Traditionally the Ingush have been a classless society built on clans and unwritten law. Unlike their neighbors in the Caucasus, they rarely had social superiors or inferiors. Each village was governed by its own senior family members and answered to no neighboring village. Only in great danger did the villages unite for common defense, under the combined elders. Military merit brought no special privileges, and there were no civil titles that gave anyone official influence over fellow tribesmen.

  Leonti von Städer traveled from the Mozdok fortress toward the inner Caucasus in 1781. He described the Ingush as "outwardly free, fierce and serious." He added that their feelings showed openly and that they calmed down fairly quickly. Any sign of fear, in his telling, they treated as the worst of faults.

  Even the poorest Ingush, by tradition, treated a guest with a tact that seemed aristocratic beside the manner of a Russian peasant. A complex code of conduct and folk customs shaped this behavior. Hospitality could override hostility. An Ingush might consider it a sacred duty to kill an enemy. Yet he would defend that same enemy with his life if the man became a guest in his house.

  The Prussian scholar Peter Simon Pallas visited the Caucasus in the late 18th century. He wrote that the Galgai or Ingush call themselves Lamur, meaning mountaineers. Their speech sounded to him "as if their mouths were full of stones." He called them honest and brave, and subject only to their elders or priests. They were, he wrote, the only nation in the Caucasus among whom the shield was still part of the equipment. Their shields were made of wood covered with leather, bound with iron hoops and oval in form. A short knotty pike served as a weapon and also held the gun in its forked branches, so the marksman could aim more accurately.

  Professor G. F. Debets recognized the Ingush anthropological type as the most Caucasian among Caucasians. Other Soviet scholars, among them N. Y. Marr and E. I. Krupnov, wrote that the Caucasian type is preserved better among the Ingush than among any other North Caucasian nation.

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• 7. Language and Ancestry

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  Johanna Nichols specializes in Chechen and Ingush. She once admitted her surprise that Ingush was "the most complex language of my sample." It beat even polysynthetic languages such as Seneca, Lakhota and Halkomelem. Ingush is not polysynthetic. Its complexity comes from large inventories of sounds, cases and tenses, a verb with a high degree of inflection, and many classification systems. Producing a grammar of it took thirty years.

  Nichols stresses that Ingush and Chechen are distinct languages and are not mutually intelligible. Because Ingush speakers widely understand some standard lowland Chechen, the two function to some extent as a single speech community. The Georgian historian and linguist Ivane Javakhishvili proposed a name for the wider family. He wanted Ghalghai, rather than the invented terms Nakh or Vainakh, to label the whole group. It would cover Ingush, Chechen and Bats, the language of the Tsova in Georgia. He pointed to the ancient Gelae of Greek and Roman geographers, whom he equated with the modern Ghalgha.

  The 11th-century Georgian chronicler Leonti Mroveli traced the word Caucasian to a Vainakh forefather named Kavkas. Professor George Anchabadze of Ilia State University reads that genealogy in a particular way. In the Georgian tradition, he says, the Vainakhs are the most Caucasian people of all the Caucasians. Nichols has used language to link the modern peoples of the region to the ancient farmers of the Fertile Crescent. She suggests that those farmers were proto-Nakh-Daghestanians. Nichols is quoted on the Nakh-Dagestanian languages. She calls them "the closest thing we have to a direct continuation" of the community that gave rise to Western civilization.

  About 89 percent of Ingush carry the Y-DNA lineage J2, which is reported as the highest known frequency in the world. J2 is closely associated with the Fertile Crescent. Studies of Alu insertion markers found that Caucasus populations vary less than those of any other world region except Sahul. Within the Caucasus, the Ingush showed much lower variability than any other group. Their mitochondrial DNA also showed unusual patterns. The researchers concluded that some feature of Ingush population history, or of the particular sample, must explain it.

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• 8. Towers, Shrines and Mosques

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  The name Ghalghai is most often linked to the word ghala, meaning tower or fortress, so it reads as people of towers. The caucasologist Ruslan Buzurtanov says that every Ingush settlement held an architectural triad of a tower, a church and a necropolis. Stone building in mountain Ingushetia is traced as far back as 8,000-4,000 BC, with cyclopean masonry at Egikal, Targim, Doshkhakle and Leymi. The towers and churches stood lower on the slope than the necropolis, the town of the dead.

  Combat towers usually had five to six levels under a stepped pyramidal roof. The entrance was on the second floor. The roof above it was conical and carried a cross made of stones and a keystone that formed the floor of the next level. Such conical stone crosses are found only on Ingush towers. Window arches had no keystone and were cut from solid blocks. The Soviet archaeologist E. I. Krupnov wrote about these towers in his book Medieval Ingushetia. He called them "in the true sense the pinnacle" of the architectural and building mastery of the region's ancient population.

  Around 3,000 BC the Ingush dead lay in underground stone cists. These were later grouped into pyramids, then became half underground, and by the early Middle Ages stood above ground. Most of the stone necropolises and churches east of the Terek were partly or fully destroyed in Soviet times, especially after the exile of 1944. Colonists brought to Ingushetia after 1944 are said to have looted the burial towers.

  Brightly colored silk and wool garments survived inside the multi-tiered stone crypts that families used as mausoleums for centuries. Leather footwear, belts, knives, combs, mirrors, wooden bowls and cups, and musical instruments lay there too. Women's culture shows in ornate jewelry, including eight-lobed temple rings, and in the tall horn-shaped headdress called the kurkhars, apparently unique to Ingush women. Another central craft was isting, the making of felt carpets and wool textiles with symbolic ornaments, historically done by women and tied to dowries. Popular instruments include the dachick-pandyr, a kind of balalaika, and the kekhat pandyr, an accordion generally played by girls. The mirz ponder is a three-stringed violin, and the zurna is a type of oboe.

  The Tkhaba-Yerdy church shows how belief layered over belief. It began as a pagan temple. Before the 8th-9th centuries it was remodeled into a Christian church, with crosses and reliefs added while the pagan petroglyphs stayed. According to the historian Bashir Dalgat, Georgian missionaries reached Ingushetia around the 10th century. In the 18th century the scholars Güldenstädt and Pallas visited the church. A monk told them that documents there were written in gold, blue and black letters. They also noted an inscription in Gothic letters over the doors.

  The Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary appeared in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It said the Ingush were mostly Sunni Muslims but included Christians and pagans. It added that the Ingush showed special reverence for human skeletons in a stone booth near Nazran. Legend ascribed them to the Nart people, incorruptible for 200 years until the Russians arrived.

  Islam reached the ancestors of the Ingush as early as the 8th century. Arab campaigns against the Khazars and Alans ran through the Darial and Derbent gorges. A bronze eagle called the Eagle of Suleyman, from the tower settlement of Erzi, probably came as a military trophy from this period. It is the oldest accurately dated bronze product of Islamic art. It served as the village's coat of arms and passed to the eldest family member in each generation. The name of the village of Dzheyrakh is associated with the Arab commander Jarrah ibn-Abdullah. Ingush legends tie the spread of Islam to another commander, Abu Muslim.

  Some researchers link Islamization to the Mongol-Tatar presence on the plain, especially under Khan Uzbek, who ruled from 1312 to 1340. The mausoleum of Borga-Kash, built in 1405-1406, stands near his supposed headquarters. According to other sources, the lowland Ingush began accepting Islam in the 16th century, and it spread widely in the 18th. Prince Vakhushti Bagrationi wrote that at the beginning of the 18th century the Angusht society was Sunni Muslim. In the first half of the 19th century Imam Shamil helped root Islam among the Ingush. His Naqshbandi tariqa became the ideology of the Imamate, and the Karabulaks and Galashians followed his teachings. Today the Ingush are Sunni Muslims who follow the Shafi'i school and belong to two Sufi orders, Qadiriyya and Naqshbandiya.

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