Country: Russia

Group: Chechen

Date Finalized: 101/16/22

Team: Jhanz Marco Garcia (lead), Vianney Mancilla, Zaida Arellano Reyes, Hajer Rahee, Samuel Kniery,

Content Warnings: Mass deportation

Approximate Time Period: 1944-1957, 1991-2009

Chechens are a mostly Muslim ethnic group primarily living in the North Caucusus Mountains.The majority of Chechens live in Chechnya, a republic of Russia. After the October Revolution, the majority of Chechens opposed Soviet rule. The Chechens were given the autonomous zone Oblast in 1922 which eventually became the Chechen-Ingush ASSR in 1936 (Minority Rights Group, 2020). In 1929, Stalin’s attempt at collectivization resulted in the Chechen Rebellion (Brauer 2002). From 1939-1940, French and British supported separatist Chechen movements in the Caucuses (Burds 2007). On February 23, 1944 Joseph Stalin ordered the mass deportation of about 350,000 Chechens for allegedly collaborating with the Nazi Army (Campana, 2012). The outbreak of the First Chechen War caused hundreds of thousands of Chechens to flee the region, with approximately 25,000 returning to Kazakhstan (MRG 2015; Williams 2000). Following the Second Chechen War and the terrorist attacks in 1999, over 12,000 Chechens fled to Kazakhstan (Brauer 2002). From 2000-2009, tens of thousands of Chechens fled Russia and sought asylum in the EU (Sipos 2019). Over 325,000 Chechens have been displaced from Chechnya since 1999 as a result of war (Nichols, 2000). Chechens observe February 23 as their Day of Grief and Remembrance for the victims who perished and suffered from the mass deportations (Moghaddami, 2022).

Data Quality: Data quality for Chechens forced away in Russia is rated a 3/3 due to the wide availability of credible sources

Sources

  1. Brauer, Birgit. 2002. “Chechens and the Survival of Their Cultural Identity in Exile.” Journal of Genocide Research 4(3): 387–400.
  2. Burds, Jeffrey. 2007. “The Soviet War against `Fifth Columnists’: The Case of Chechnya, 1942—4.” Journal of Contemporary History 42(2): 267–314.
  3. Campana, A. (2012). The Chechen Memory of Deportation: From Recalling a Silenced Past to the Political Use of Public Memory. In P. Lee & P. N. Thomas (Eds.), Public Memory, Public Media and the Politics of Justice (pp. 141–162). Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137265173_8
  4. Minority Rights Group. (2020, December). Chechens. Minority Rights Group. https://minorityrights.org/minorities/chechens/
  5. Moghaddami, M. (2022, October 13). Deportation Remembrance Day of the Chechens and Ingush. https://folkways.today/deportation-remembrance-chechens-ingush/
  6. Nichols, J. (2000). The Chechen Refugees. Berkeley Journal of International Law, 18, 241.
  7. Sipos, Michal. 2019. “Informal Practices and the Street-Level Construction of Migrant Deportability: Chechen Refugees and Local Authorities in Polish Accommodation Centres for Asylum Seekers.” Journal of Ethnic & Migration Studies 45(7): 1168–84.