Ingushetia

• 1. Introduction

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  Ingushetia holds a distinction that defies easy explanation: it is one of the poorest, most conflict-scarred republics in Russia, and yet, as of 2017, it also has the highest life expectancy in the entire country. Covering just 3,600 square kilometers, it is the smallest of Russia's non-city federal subjects. Its capital is the town of Magas; its largest city is Nazran. At the 2021 Census, its population was estimated at 527,220 people. This small republic in the North Caucasus of Eastern Europe has been fought over, depopulated, occupied, and renamed so many times that its very name carries centuries of contest. The Ingush call their homeland Ghalghaaichie. Russian geographers call it Ingushetia. How a single people survived empires, genocides, and insurgencies to become, by one World Health Organization measure, among the longest-lived populations on Earth is a story worth listening to closely.

• 2. A Name Borrowed and Kept

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  Angusht, an ancient Ingush village, gave its name to a people and then an entire republic. The Russian word for the Ingush derives from that village, and the Georgian suffix -eti was added to form Ingushetia. In the Ingush language the name is Ghalghaaichie, from the words for fortress or town and their inhabitants. In the 1920s and 1930s, scientists debated whether the correct form was Ingushiya rather than Ingushetia, a minor linguistic dispute that reflected a much larger argument about whether this people would have the right to name themselves at all. The Ingush refer to themselves as Ghalghaj. Their language shares a very high degree of mutual intelligibility with neighboring Chechen, a closeness that would prove both a source of solidarity and a cause of political entanglement across the centuries that followed.

• 3. Conquest and Colonization

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  On the 13th of June 1810, a document signed by General-Major Delpotso and representatives of just two Ingush clans became the basis for Russia's claim that the Ingush had voluntarily joined the empire. Most other clans resisted. The following year, a Russian envoy of German origin named Moritz von Engelhardt arrived in the mountains with promises of Tsarist benefits. The Ingush representative replied: "Above my hat I see only sky." Goethe later used the encounter in his 1815 poem "Freisinn," or free spirit. Resistance did not save the villages. On the 29th of June 1832, Baron Rozen reported in a letter that within two days he had exterminated seventeen Ingush villages near Targim. By the late 1840s and through the 1860s, Ingush settlements were being systematically renamed: Ghazhien-Yurt became Stanitsa Assinovskaya in 1847; Akhi-Yurt became Stanitsa Sunzhenskaya in 1859. At least ten villages in total were erased and given Russian or Cossack names. Russian General Aleksey Petrovich Yermolov, who commanded forces there, wrote to the Tsar that the Ingush were "the most courageous and militaristic among all the highlanders." He argued they should not be alienated, but rather separated from the Chechens. The colonization proceeded anyway, mixing extermination with resettlement. By 1865, it was estimated that eighty per cent of the Ingush had left their homeland for the Middle East, driven by a Tsar who told them Muslims should live under Muslim rulers. Many died in the deserted territories where they arrived.

• 4. The 1944 Deportation

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  On the 23rd of February 1944, while the majority of Ingush men were fighting on the front lines of World War II, NKVD units swept through the Chechen-Ingush ASSR in an operation disguised as military exercises. Joseph Stalin had accused the Ingush and Chechen peoples of collaborating with the Nazis. American historian Norman Naimark later wrote that deportees remembered their trucks as Studebakers, delivered fresh via Lend-Lease over the Iranian border. The vehicles had been specially modified with three submachine gun-nest compartments above the passengers to prevent escapes. At railroad stations, the deportees were loaded onto cattle carts. In total, according to the numbers cited from the operation, 496,460 people were removed from their homeland and sent to Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Siberia. Up to thirty per cent of the population perished during the journey or within the first year of exile. The European Parliament classified the deportation as genocide in 2004. Those who escaped, including shepherds who had been high in the mountains on the day of the operation, formed rebel groups that fought back against Russian forces for decades. Major groups were led by Akhmed Khuchbarov, the Tsitskiev brothers, and an Ingush female sniper named Laisat Baisarova. The last male rebel was killed by KGB officers in 1977. Baisarova was never captured or killed. American professor Johanna Nichols, a specialist in Ingush philology, argued that the likely reason for the deportation was Stalin's desire to clear all Muslims from the main invasion routes in a contemplated attack on Turkey.

• 5. Return and New Conflict

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  After thirteen years of exile, the Ingush were permitted to return to their homeland, but not to Ordzhonikidze, known also as Vladikavkaz, or to the Prigorodny District. Most of Ingushetia had been resettled by Ossetians, and a portion of the region had been formally transferred to North Ossetia. Returning Ingush were forced to buy back their own homes from Ossetian and Russian occupants. The accumulated injustices led to a peaceful Ingush protest in Grozny on the 16th of January 1973, which Soviet troops crushed. In 1989 the Ingush were officially rehabilitated alongside other peoples subjected to Soviet repressions. When Chechnya declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, the Ingush chose a different path: they seceded from the Chechen-Ingush Republic but joined the newly created Russian Federation, hoping Russia would resolve the land dispute with Ossetia. Instead, Ossetian nationalists orchestrated violence that Helsinki Human Rights Watch characterized as ethnic cleansing, forcing over 60,000 Ingush civilians from their homes in the Prigorodny District in October and November 1992. Pro-Russian general Ruslan Aushev, a decorated veteran of the war in Afghanistan, was appointed as the republic's first president to contain the conflict.

• 6. War at the Doorstep

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  When the First Chechen War began in 1994, Ingushetia was flooded with refugees. According to the United Nations, for every citizen of Ingushetia, one refugee arrived from Ossetia or Chechnya. The Second Chechen War, which started in 1999, brought even more: at its peak in the year 2000, there were 240,000 refugees from Chechnya and 60,000 from North Ossetia in a republic of roughly that same total population. In 2001 Aushev was forced from the presidency, replaced by Murat Zyazikov, a former KGB general. Violence escalated. According to a Russian news agency, an ethnic-Russian school teacher's murder in Ingushetia was committed by two soldiers, one ethnic Russian and one ethnic Ossetian. Issa Merzhoev, the Ingush police detective who identified the murderer, was shot and killed by unknown assailants shortly after. In June 2004, Chechen and Ingush rebels raided government buildings and military bases across Ingushetia. At least 90 Ingush people died, including the republic's acting interior minister Abukar Kostoyev and his deputy Zyaudin Kotiyev. Moscow responded by sending in an additional 25,000 MVD and FSB troops, tripling the special forces presence. On the 31st of August 2008, Magomed Yevloyev, opposition leader and owner of the website ingushetiya.ru, was killed by Russian security forces. After Zyazikov was dismissed later that autumn, his successor Yunus-Bek Yevkurov reported that attacks on policemen fell by forty per cent and abductions by eighty per cent.

• 7. Warrior Heritage

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  During World War I, 500 Ingush cavalrymen from a regiment of the Wild Division attacked the German Iron Division. Tsar Nicholas II sent a telegram on the 25th of August 1915 to the Governor-General of the Tersky region describing what happened: the Ingush regiment had attacked "like an avalanche," supported by the Chechen regiment. The result, as the Tsar described it, was 4,500 killed, 3,500 taken prisoner, and 2,500 wounded. The Iron Division, which had "aroused fear in the best armies" of Russia's allies, ceased to exist in less than an hour and a half. Professor Johanna Nichols, who specializes in Ingush philology, observed that in all recorded and reconstructable prehistory, the Ingush have never undertaken battle except in defense. That pattern runs through the sources: Imam Shamil attacked Ingushetia in 1829 hoping to convert the Ingush to Islam and gain strategic allies, but Ingush forces defeated him and repulsed two more attempts in 1858. Against the Russian conquest they ultimately could not prevail; according to the Russian officer Fedor Tornau, the Ingush had no more than six hundred warriors facing far larger forces. The fortress that Russian General Yermolov built on the site of the Ingush village of Zaur he named Vladikavkaz, meaning ruler of the Caucasus. That name has outlasted empires.

• 8. Life in the Mountains

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  In the pre-pandemic year of 2019, life expectancy in Ingushetia matched the WHO estimate for Switzerland at 83.4 years. Ingushetia is described by demographers as a Russian "blue zone." Unemployment in the republic is estimated at around 53 per cent, and poverty is a major issue. The mountains that define its geography stretch in a 150-kilometer band from north to south: the Forest Ridge, reaching up to 1,540 meters inside Ingushetia; the Pasture Ridge at up to 2,400 meters; the Rocky Ridge at up to 3,100 meters; and the Lateral Ridge, where Mt. Shanloam rises to 4,453 meters, the republic's highest point. The natural resources include oil reserves over 60 billion tons according to the source, marble, timber, granite, thermal medical water, and mineral springs at Achaluki. The Ingush predominantly follow the Shafi'i Madhhab of Sunni Islam with strong Sufi influence, associated with two traditional orders: the Naqshbandi brotherhood of Deni Arsanov and the Qadiriyyah tariqa linked to Kunta-Haji Kishiev. Ingush State University, the first institute of higher education in the republic's history, was founded in 1994 in Ordzhonikidzevskaya. The Constitution of the Republic of Ingushetia was adopted on the 27th of February 1994, just two years after the republic itself came into existence on the 4th of June 1992.