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From 1824 until 1859, Imam Shamil led the Muslim peoples of the North Caucasus in a long, bloody war against the Russian invaders. The Russians won by sheer force of numbers, and by carrying out a policy of relentless, destructive total war from fortress towns such as Grozny, founded in 1818 by the Russian general, Alexander Ermolov. After the surrender of Shamil, the Commander-in-chief of the Russian forces, Prince Bariatinski declared "in the name of the Tsar, the Russian government leaves you forever free to profess the faith of your fathers... The authorities in charge of your government will exercise their authority according to the shariat [Muslim written law which regulates the civil, social, and family life of all believers] and the adat [Muslim customary law which varies from people to people]." But, as Richard Pipes wrote in The Formation of the Soviet Union, "The Chechens and Ingush presented a special problem. Inhabiting the nearly inaccessible mountain ranges bordering on Dagestan, they were always, from the Russian point of view, a troublesome element. Unassimilable and warlike, they created so much difficulty for the Russian forces trying to subdue the North Caucasus that, after conquering the area, the government felt compelled to employ Cossack forces to expel them from the valleys and lowlands into the bare mountain regions. There, faced by Cossack settlements on one side, and wild peaks on the other, they lived in abject poverty tending sheep and waiting for the day when they could wreak revenge on the newcomers and regain their lost lands."
Beginning in 1859, many Chechens were deported to or sought haven in the Ottoman Empire. (A Chechen diaspora exists to this day in Turkey, Jordan, and other successor states of the Ottoman empire.) Even after Shamil's surrender, the Caucasian War continued on a reduced scale until 1864, and there continued to be intermittent outbreaks of armed resistance to Russian imperial rule in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, most notably in 1877-78.
In May 1918, seizing the opportunity offered by the Russian revolution, the peoples of Dagestan and the North Caucasus formed a North Caucasian Republic and declared their independence. For the next three years, as civil war raged in the former Russian empire, a fierce struggle was waged for control of the Caucasus.General Denikin, the leader of the anti-Bolshevik Volunteer Army attacked and defeated the forces of the North Caucasian Republic, but in the fall of 1919 Sheikh Uzun Haji organized a North Caucasian Emirate in the mountains of Chechnya and led the anti-Denikin resistance. Denikin was forced to withdraw. The Bolsheviks, who earlier cooperated with Sheikh Uzun Haji, installed a regime of military occupation. This led to a new outbreak of fighting in August 1920.
In January 1921 in Vladikavkaz, a Congress of Mountaineers was convened, and, with the personal participation of Stalin, a Soviet Socialist Autonomous Mountain Republic (including the Chechens, Ingush, Ossetins, Kabardians, Balkars, and Karachai) was established. The Republic's constituent assembly accepted Soviet sovereignty in return for recognition of the shariat and adat as the basic law of the Republic, full autonomy of the Republic in domestic affairs, and the transfer to the Republic of territory which had been taken from Mountain peoples by the Tsars.
In November 1922, Chechnya was detached from the Mountain Republic and given the status of an Autonomous Oblast of the Russian Federation, one step in the progressive erosion of Bolshevik pledges to respect the mountain peoples' autonomy. The collectivization campaign of 1929 sparked a new cycle of rebellion and repression. In 1934, the Chechen and Ingush Autonomous Oblasts were merged, and in December 1936, prior to the adoption of a new Soviet Constitution, their status was elevated to a Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR). However, the purges of 1936-38 led to the execution and imprisonment of thousands of Chechens and the stiffening of anti-Soviet sentiment.
In January 1940, Hassan Izrailov assumed the leadership of the Chechen anti- Soviet guerillas, declaring in a letter to the Soviet leaders: "For twenty years now, the Soviet authorities have been fighting my people, aiming to destroy them group by group: first the kulaks, then the mullahs and the `bandits', then the bourgeois-nationalists. I am sure now that their real object is the annihilation of our nation as a whole."
After the German army invaded Russia in June 1941, Chechen guerilla actions and Russian countermeasures intensified.
The Soviet census of 1939 had counted 407,690 Chechens and 92,074 Ingush; altogether some 400,000 Chechens and Ingush were deported to Soviet Central Asia, the majority to Kazakhstan. It is estimated that 30% or more died during their detention and transport from the Caucasus or within the first year of their forcible resettlement. The decree ordering the deportation and abolishing the Chechen-Ingush ASSR was dated March 7, 1944. It explained the action as follows: During the Great Patriotic War, and especially during the time the German-Fascist army was operating in the Caucasus, many Chechens and Ingush betrayed their motherland, went over to the side of the fascist occupiers, enlisted in detachments of saboteurs and spies sent by the Germans into the rear of the Red Army, in response to German orders formed armed bands to fight against Soviet power, for several years have also taken part in armed actions against the Soviet authorities, and for a long time without engaging in honest work have conducted bandit raids against the collective farms of neighboring regions, robbing and killing Soviet people. Therefore, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet orders:1. Deportation to other regions of the USSR of all Chechens and Ingush living on or adjacent to the territory of the Chechen-Ingush ASSR, and liquidation of the Chechen-Ingush ASSR. ...
On February 25, 1956, in Khrushchev's speech to the 20th Party Congress exposing Stalin's crimes, he mentioned the Chechens among the peoples deported toward the close of World War II, commenting: "no reasonable man can grasp how it is possible to make whole nations responsible for hostile activity, including women, children, old people, Communists and Komsomols, to use mass repression against them, and to expose them to misery and suffering for the hostile acts of individuals or groups of individuals."On July 16, 1956, following Khrushchev's signal, the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet issued a decree abolishing the legal restrictions that had been imposed on the deported Chechens, but specifically ruled out claims for return to their homeland and restitution of confiscated property.
On January 8, 1957, a further decree of the Presidium reconstituted the Chechen-Ingush ASSR, and cancelled the ban on the return of Chechens and Ingush. The horror of their mass deportation and the misery of their resettlement regimen in Kazakhstan and Kirghizstan have not been forgotten or forgiven by the Chechens.
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