Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  Born in Ukraine, Viktor Chebrikov, an ethnic Russian, served at the Soviet front during World War II as a battalion commander. He became a member of the Communist Party in 1944 and earned a higher degree in engineering at the Dnepropetrovsk Metallurgical Institute after the war. In 1951 Che-brikov moved from engineering into full-time party work and served in various party administrative posts in the Ukrainian city and region of Dnepropetrovsk, rising to become second secretary of the Dnepropetrovsk Obkom (regional party committee) in 1964. In 1967 Soviet party leader Leonid Brezhnev, a native of Dnepropetrovsk, appointed Chebrikov to the post of head of personnel for the KGB (Committee of State Security) the Soviet security and intelligence apparatus. In 1968 Chebrikov became a deputy chairman of the KGB,

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  CHECHNYA AND CHECHENS

  and in early 1982 first deputy chairman, serving under Yuri Andropov. A Brezhnev loyalist, Che-brikov was elected to full membership in the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party at the Twenty-sixth Party Congress in 1981. In December 1982, with Andropov having succeeded Brezhnev as party leader, Chernenko took over as chairman of the KGB. He served in this post for the next six years, becoming a full member of the Politburo in 1985, where he remained until party leader Mikhail Gorbachev edged him out in October 1988. Chebrikov moved back into the party apparatus, serving as party secretary responsible for police and legal affairs, but his political conservatism put him at odds with Gorbachev, who had embarked on a program of far-reaching reforms, including limitations on the powers of the KGB. Chebrikov represented the Brezhnevite old guard of the Soviet bureaucracy, and although he apparently favored some sort of economic restructuring to increase the efficiency of the Soviet economy, he was not an advocate of any democratic political reforms. Less than a year later, in September 1989, Chebrikov was abruptly dismissed from his party post; from there he faded into obscurity. See also: BREZHNEV, LEONID ILICH; INTELLIGENCE SERVICES; STATE SECURITY, ORGANS OF

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Knight, Amy. (1988). The KGB: Police and Politics in the Soviet Union. Boston: Allen and Unwin. Knight, Amy. (1990). “The KGB and Democratization: A New Legal Order?” In The Soviet Empire: The Challenge of National and Democratic Movements, ed. Uri Ra’anan. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.

  AMY KNIGHT

  CHECHNYA AND CHECHENS

  The Chechens, who call themselves noxchii (singular noxchi or noxchuo) and their land Noxchiin moxk (“Chechen land”), are the largest indigenous nationality of the North Caucasus. They speak a language of the Nakh-Daghestanian, or East Caucasian language family that is native to the Caucasus, and have lived in or near their present locations for millennia.

  DEMOGRAPHY AND CUSTOMS

  Chechnya is a small territory of about 5,000 sq. mi. (13,000 sq. km.) corresponding to about 85 percent of the historical Chechen lands (the rest is in today’s Daghestan), with some non-Chechen steppe land added in the north. The lower North Caucasus foothills and adjacent plain including the capital city of Grozny (Soelzha-ghaala “Sunzha City” in Chechen, a name still much in use despite its official renaming to Djohar in 1996) are the most densely populated part of Chechnya. The Chechens numbered just over a million in mid-2000 according to a Danish Refugee Council census. Somewhat over half of the world’s Chechens live in Chechnya; most of the others are scattered throughout Russia, several tens of thousands live in Kazakhstan and nearby, and a few tens of thousands in Jordan, Turkey, and Syria.

  The ethnonymn noxchii is the self-designation of all speakers of Chechen on the north slope of the Caucasus Mountains but not of the Chechen-speaking Kisti on the south slope in Georgia. Though the Chechens and the neighboring Ingush have separate languages, national identities, and ethnonyms, they recognize an overarching ethnic unity (which also includes the Kisti) that they call vai naax, or “our people.” Chechen and Ingush are distinct languages and not mutually intelligible, but because of widespread passive bilingualism the two languages make up a single speech community in which each person speaks his or her own language and understands the other. Chechens recognize a larger supranational ethnic and political identity of laamanxoi (“mountain people”) that includes all the indigenous peoples of the North Caucasus.

  In the nineteenth century, Chechen society consisted of about 130 patrilineal exogamous clans (Chechen taipa), most of which fell into one or another of nine clan confederations or tribes (Chechen tuqam), each of which had its own dialect. The Nox-chmaxkxoi (or Ichkerians) of the central and eastern foothills were the largest and most powerful. The confederations had some mutual economic and defense obligations, and as Chechen resistance to Russian conquest solidified in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the other confederations began to take on the ethnonym noxchi on which the name of the Noxchmaxkxoi is based. The charismatic resistance leaders were Muslims, and one result of the war was solidification of a Chechen national consciousness with Sufi-based Sunni Islam as one of its components. The social and religious functions of clans are by now diminished, although the great majority of Chechens still observe clan exogamy. Islam was actively practiced throughout the Soviet period.

  CHECHNYA AND CHECHENS

  Prior to the Russian conquest, Chechen society was prosperous and egalitarian, with no social distinctions other than earned wealth and earned honor. There was no government, though the society was ruled by a strong and uniform code of law. Penalties were set by respected elders, and fines were collected or death penalties carried out by the victim or the offended family. (The misnomers “blood feud,” “vendetta,” and “vengeance” are commonly used of this decentralized system.) Traditional justice has served the Chechens through the Soviet and post-Soviet periods whenever civil justice has failed to function.

  Chechen social interaction is based on principles of honor, chivalry, hospitality, and respect, and on formality between certain individuals and families. Relations within the family are close and warm, but in public or when guests are present younger brothers are formal in the presence of older brothers and all are formal in the presence of their father. Behavior of men toward women, whether formal or not, is always chivalrous. Unlike some Muslim societies, Chechen women are and always have been free to associate with men in public, hold positions of responsibility in all lines of work, supervise men at work, and so on, but chivalry is strictly observed and creates social distance between men and women. An individual’s social standing depends largely on how well he or she shows respect and extends hospitality to others.

  From the middle ages to the sixteenth or seventeenth century, Chechen families of means built five-story defense towers and two-story dwelling compounds of stone in highland villages, usually one tower per village. Today, each tower is associated with a clan that traces its origin to that village, and each highland village is (or was until deportations in the Soviet era) inhabited by one clan that owns communal fields and pastures, a cemetery, and (prior to the conversion to Islam) one or more shrines. The majority of Chechen clans have such highland roots; a few lowland clans do not, and these are generally assimilated clans originally of other nationalities.

  The Chechen highlands, though the center of clan and pre-Muslim religious identity, supported a limited population and therefore traditional Chechen society was vertically distributed, with highlanders (herders) and lowlanders (grain farmers) economically dependent on each other. In cold periods such as the Little Ice Age (middle ages to mid-nineteenth century), highland farming became marginal and downhill movement increased. The

  Chechen women flee the village of Assinovskaya for neighboring Ingushetia, December 1999. © REUTERS NEWMEDIA INC./CORBIS late middle ages were a time of intensification in the forested foothills of Chechnya, when foothill towns were founded, ethnic identity as noxchi began to spread through the foothills, and the lowlands became the wealthier and culturally prestigious part of the society. The peak of the Little Ice Age coincided with the beginning of the Russian conquest of the Caucasus in the eighteenth and nineteenth ce
nturies, and the Chechen economy was destroyed as the lowlanders were expelled, their lands seized, and at least half of the lowland population slaughtered or deported to the Ottoman Empire (the Chechens of Jordan, Turkey, and Syria are descendants of these and postwar deportees).

  HISTORY, TREATIES, EXTERNAL RELATIONS

  In 1859 Imam Shamil, leader of the fierce Dagestani-Chechen resistance to Russian conquest, surrendered to the Russian forces. No nation or government surrendered, and in particular the Chechens did not surrender (and indeed had no government that

  CHECHNYA AND CHECHENS

  A Russian soldier aims his machine gun during Russia’s second war with Chechnya. © AFP/CORBIS could have surrendered) and have essentially never considered themselves legitimately part of Russia. Their best land was seized and given to Cossack or Russian settlers, and perhaps half of their surviving population was deported or coerced or deceived into emigrating to the Ottoman Empire. A large Chechen uprising in 1877-78 was put down by Russian military force. A North Caucasus state, the Mountain Republic, including Chechnya, formed in 1917 and declared its independence in 1918. Individual North Caucasian groups, including the Chechens, fought against the Whites in the Russian civil war. In 1920 the Red Army occupied the North Caucasus lowlands but then oppressed the population and a yearlong war in Chechnya and Daghestan ensued. A Soviet Mountain Republic (the North Caucasus minus Daghestan) in 1921 recognized the Soviet government on the latter’s promise (via nationalities commissar Josef Stalin) of religious and internal-political autonomy. But in 1922 the Bolsheviks attacked Chechnya (to “pacify” it), removed it from the Mountain Republic, and in 1924 “liquidated” the rest of the Republic. In 1925 there was another bloody “pacification” of Chechnya. In a 1929 Chechen rebellion against collectivization, the leaders created a provisional government and presented formal demands to the Soviet government, which officially promised Chechen autonomy but attacked again soon after. Probably at least thirty thousand Chechens were killed in purges connected with collectivization. In 1936 Chechnya was merged with Ingushetia into a hybrid Chechen-Ingush ASSR. In 1944 the entire Chechen and Ingush population was deported and the ASSR “liquidated.” They were “rehabilitated” in 1956 and the ASSR reinstituted in 1957. In 1991 Chechnya declared independence and Ingushetia separated off. The 1994-1996 Russian-Chechen War was initiated in part to prevent Chechnya’s secession. The 1997 Khasavyurt treaty after the war promised Russian withdrawal from and noninterference in Chechnya, a decision on independence after five years, and Russian aid in rebuilding the devastated country. (The wording implies Chechen independence; e.g. “The agreement on the fundamentals of relations between Russian Federation

  CHEKHOV, ANTON PAVLOVICH

  and the Chechen Republic being determined in accordance with generally recognized norms of international law shall be reached prior to December 31, 2001.”) This is the first treaty the Chechens have made as a nation. They honored it; Russia did not, but diverted aid funds, supported radical Islamists and militants, began planning to invade Chechnya in early 1999, and did so on a pretext in late 1999, initiating a destructive war designed to solidify political power in Moscow but otherwise still incompletely understood.

  The Chechen demographic losses of the twentieth century are: 1920-1921 Red Army invasion, nearly 2 percent of the population killed; collectivization in 1931, more than 8 percent; 1937 purges, more than 8 percent; mass deportation in 1944, 22 percent killed in the deportation process and another 24 percent dead of starvation and cold in the first two or three years afterward; 1994-1996 Russian-Chechen War, between 2 percent and 10 percent (figures vary), mostly civilians; a similar figure for the second Russian-Chechen War, begun in 1999; conservative total well over 60 percent. In the early twenty-first century many Chechens are war refugees or otherwise displaced. The overarching cause has probably been Russian official hate dating back to the nineteenth century when the Chechens were the largest and most visible of the groups resisting Russian conquest, fueled by continued Chechen nonassimilation and resistance. Besides many civilian deaths and refugees the two wars have brought numerous violations of Chechen human rights by Russian forces, destruction of the economy and infrastructure of Chechnya, open prejudice and violence against southern peoples across Russia, and a small but conspicuous radical Islamist movement in Chechnya. See also: CAUCASIAN WAR; CAUCASUS; DEPORTATIONS; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Avtorkhanov, Abdurakhman. (1992). “The Chechens and Ingush during the Soviet Period and its Antecedents.” In The North Caucasus Barrier, ed. Marie Bennigsen Broxup. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Dunlop, John B. (1998). Russia Confronts Chechnya: Roots of a Separatist Conflict. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Dunlop, John B. (2000-2002). Chechnya Weekly. Vols. 1-3. Washington, DC: Jamestown Foundation. «http://chechnya.jamestown.org/pub_chechnya .htm». Lieven, Anatol. (1998). Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press. Nekrich, Aleksandr M. (1978). The Punished Peoples: The Deportation and Fate of Soviet Minorities at the end of the Second World War. New York: Norton. Politkovskaya, Anna. (2001). A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya. London: Harvill. Uzzell, Lawrence A. (2003). Chechnya Weekly. Vols. 4ff. Washington, DC: Jamestown Foundation. «http:// chechnya.jamestown.org/pub_chechnya.htm». Williams, Brian Glyn. (2000). “Commemorating ‘The Deportation.’” Post-Soviet Chechnya History and Memory 12: 101-134. Williams, Brian Glyn. (2001). “The Russo-Chechen War: A threat to Stability in the Middle East and Russia?” Middle East Policy 8:128-148.

  JOHANNA NICHOLS

  CHEKHOV, ANTON PAVLOVICH

  (1860-1904), short-story writer and dramatist.

  Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was the author of several hundred works of short fiction and of several plays that are among the most important and influential dramatic works of the twentieth century. He was also a noted public figure who in his opinions and actions often challenged notions that were dominant in Russian social thought of the time.

  Chekhov was born the grandson of a serf, who had purchased his freedom prior to the emancipation of the serfs, and the son of a shop owner in the Black Sea port of Taganrog, a town with a very diverse population. He received his primary and secondary education there, first in the parish school of the local Greek church, and from 1868 in the Taganrog Gymnasium, where his religion instructor, a Russian Orthodox priest, introduced his students to works of Russian and European literature. In 1876 his father declared bankruptcy, and the family moved to Moscow to avoid creditors. Chekhov remained in Taganrog to finish at the Gymnasium. During this period, he apparently read literature intensively in the Taganrog public library and began to write works of both fiction and drama. In 1879 Chekhov completed the Gymnasium, joined his family in Moscow, and began study in the medical department of Moscow University.

  CHEKHOV, ANTON PAVLOVICH

  Novelist and playwright Anton Chekhov. © BETTMANN/CORBIS

  Chekhov later credited his medical education with instilling in him a respect for objective observation and attention to individual circumstances. While in medical school, at the suggestion of his elder brother Alexander, a journalist, Chekhov began to contribute to the so-called satirical journals, weekly periodicals that appealed primarily to lower-class urban readers with a mix of drawings, humorous sketches, and other brief entertainment items. By the time Chekhov finished his medical courses in 1884, he was already established as a successful writer for the satirical journals and was the primary support for his parents and siblings. Although Chekhov never entirely abandoned medicine, by the mid-1880s he devoted his efforts mainly to his career as a writer, gradually gaining access to increasingly serious (and better-paying) newspapers and journals, most notably in New Times, published by the influential newspaper magnate Alexei Suvorin, and then in various “thick journals.” Chekhov first appeared in a thick journal in 1888 with his long story “The Steppe,” published in the Populist journal Northern
Herald. From that point on, Chekhov received increasing renown as the most significant, if problematic, author of his generation. Through his objectivity and techniques of economy and implication, as well as the increasing seriousness and complexity of his themes, Chekhov emerged as a founder of the modern short story and one of the most influential practitioners of the form. Such works as “Sleepy,” “The Steppe,” “The Name-Day Party” (all 1888), “A Boring Story” (1889), “The Duel” (1891), “The Student” (1894), “My Life” (1896), and “The Lady with a Lapdog” (1899) rank among the greatest achievements of short fiction.

  In drama, after hits with several one-act farces but mediocre success with serious full-length plays, Chekhov emerged as an innovator in drama with the first of his four major plays, The Seagull (1895). Although the first production in Petersburg in 1896 continued Chekhov’s string of theatrical failures, a new production by the newly formed Moscow Art Theater in 1898, based on new principles of staging and acting, won belated recognition as a new departure in drama. Subsequent Moscow Art Theater productions of Uncle Vanya (staged 1899), Three Sisters (1901), and The Cherry Orchard (1904) solidified Chekhov’s reputation as a master of a new type of drama and led to the worldwide influence of his plays and of Moscow Art Theater techniques. In addition, Chekhov’s association with the Moscow Art Theater led to his marriage to one of the theater’s actresses, Olga Leonardovna Knip-per, in 1901.

  In addition to his strictly literary activity, Chekhov also was engaged in a number of the social issues of his day. For instance, he assisted schools and libraries in his hometown of Taganrog, Melikhovo (the village near his estate), and Yalta, and served as a district medical officer during a cholera outbreak while he was living at Melikhovo. He also initiated practical programs for famine relief during a crop failure in 1891 and 1892. Earlier, in 1890, he undertook the arduous journey across Siberia to the island of Sakhalin, which served at the time as a Russian penal colony. There Chekhov conducted a detailed sociological survey of the population and eventually published his observation as a book-length study of the island and its inhabitants, The Island of Sakhalin (1895), a work that eventually brought about amelioration of penal conditions. Most famously, Chekhov broke with his longtime friend, patron, and editor Suvorin over Suvorin’s support of Alfred Dreyfus’s conviction for espionage in France and opposed the anti-Semitic stance taken by Suvorin’s paper New Times.