The Chechens, but not as Solzhenitsyn knew them Valentin Tudan, special to Prague Watchdog
The other day a Chechen friend (let us call him Ruslan) who has spent about seven years living in Europe told me an interesting story. Like many of his compatriots outside Russia who closely follow events at home and regularly communicate by telephone with family and friends, he has suddenly noticed that he is beginning to feel respect for Ramzan Kadyrov, though previously he viewed him as a criminal and upstart.
In course of the past year my friend has come to believe that Chechnya’s current leader has brought his people true prosperity. Although he has used harsh measures to do so, Kadyrov has succeeded in imposing order, in forcing the Chechens, who were mired in anarchy, to bow their heads to the sanction of the law and, most importantly, in solving their most painful problem – that of security – by curbing the arbitrary violence of the federal power structures.
As a result, Ruslan felt that he wanted to visit Chechnya, in order to see with his own eyes the wonderful changes that have taken place within the republic. He shared his plans with relatives on the phone, expecting that the news of his forthcoming arrival would be a source of overwhelming delight to his nearest and dearest, from whom fate had separated him for many a long year.
And here Ruslan experienced a shock. Instead of joy, he discovered fear. Everyone with whom he attempted to discuss the trip suddenly and heatedly began to try to dissuade him from making it. Little by little, Ruslan realized that people were afraid of the problems that would overtake them all at the moment he turned up in Chechnya.
These reactions had a sobering effect on my friend. “Nothing like this has never happened before,” he said. “One has only to read Solzhenitsyn in order to understand that even in exile the Chechens behaved like free people.”
Ruslan was educated as a historian, and he was once a fierce supporter of independence, though today he no longer feels his old enthusiasm. But at any rate the ideal of freedom – both the one he brought with him out of Chechnya, and the one that became filled with new meaning during his seven years of life in Europe – has not been overshadowed for him, but has remained an important and relevant part of his life. However, his case is something of an exception.
Most of the people who emigrated from Chechnya fled the hardships of war, which seemed to have no end. What those people needed was not freedom, but peace and prosperity for themselves and their children. Today, when a relative though very specific kind of order has been restored to Chechnya, when the war has rolled far back into the mountains and is barely felt in most of the republic’s towns and villages, those same people have come to put their trust in the new Chechen government and have begun to go home. Their return is a process which during the past year or so has increasingly acquired the character of a mass migration.
The case of Umar Khambiyev, one of the Moscow-backed Chechen government’s fiercest critics and formerly the Ichkerian presidential envoy to Europe, is fairly typical. Khambiyev was sure that he had left Chechnya for ideological reasons. He was part of Maskhadov’s government, and a consistent defender of an independent Ichkeria. But what was the meaning invested in the concept of "independence" during all the years when that slogan emblazoned the banners of the self-proclaimed republic?
First of all, a chance to secure freedom from the social and political order that developed in the Soviet era. That order was founded on the diktat of the type of government traditionally associated with Russia, one which promoted Russian-speaking professionals and bureaucrats to all the leading posts. The Chechens were left with secondary roles, at least in the areas connected with education, medicine, science, technology – all the fields that enjoyed such a high status in those years.
A second, equally important element was linked with the chance of obtaining legal status for adat, the ethical code of the mountain-dwellers – the “law of the ancestors” which included both traditional and Islamic norms of conduct and social life. For the most part these had been rejected by the Soviet government as remnants of tribalism, community-kin structure and elements of the alien legal system of Islam.
That social order was broken by Dudayev. The manner in which this took place is a separate issue. But the Chechens received an opportunity to manage their own state and live by their own laws. After the start of the second Chechen war, many were confident that the return of the Soviet format was inevitable, that Putin was the very incarnation of the Soviet system – with stringent measures he would re-establish the familiar system, once again putting the dominant positions into the hands of Chechnya’s Russian-speaking population for decades. It was precisely this to which many “Ichkerians” were unwilling to consent, as they had already tasted the right to own their native land.
But all the talk of the return of the “Russians” proved to be merely a scarecrow with which the Chechens frightened themselves and Europe.
Chechnya is still in the hands of the Chechens. They lead the republic, and in all the other posts the traditional ways are being revived, for better or for worse. That is why the demand for sovereignty and freedom (not in the fundamental sense of those concepts, but at the level of Dudayev’s slogans) is fully respected in Kadyrov’s Chechnya. That is why for most “Ichkerians” Chechnya is once again fit for human habitation.
In conclusion, I would like to observe that there is still a certain wariness in the behaviour of today’s Chechens. A female Russian human rights worker who recently returned from Grozny told me that fear is the dominant emotion in the republic, it pervades all conversations, it can be felt at the level of reflexes, when a person is afraid to say the wrong thing in his or her own kitchen.
However, she said that they voluntarily accept the Kadyrov regime with all its bullying and intimidation, believing it to be preferable to war, which has remained in their memory as their biggest nightmare. And yet for the Chechens family ties have always been a territory to which the government is barred entry. In the past, fear did not operate within the family. But now the inconceivable is happening there.
The picture is borrowed from the website Funny-animals-2007. (Translation by DM) (P/T) RELATED ARTICLES:
· Kadyrov has saved more than he killed (interview with Yulia Latynina) (PW, 2.11.2008)
· Chechnya in diaspora (PW, 26.6.2008)
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