Translated material
420 years together
The unity of Chechnya with Russia has been extended
On Sunday, three holiday dates were celebrated in Chechnya - the 420th anniversary of the establishment of good neighborly relations between Chechnya and Russia, the 190th anniversary of the city of Grozny and the 32nd anniversary of the current President of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov . Mr. Kadyrov, remembering that Tuesday is the birthday of another prominent politician, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, decided to give him a symbolic gift and renamed one of the central streets of Grozny, Pobeda Avenue, in his honor.“Today I can say with confidence that 99% of the population of the Chechen Republic trust Putin and support the leadership of Russia,” explained Ramzan Kadyrov. — As a sign of the gratitude of the Chechen people, Victory Avenue will henceforth bear the name of the national leader, Vladimir Putin. This is our tribute to a man who did so much for the country and for all of us."
The press secretary of the head of the Russian government, Dmitry Peskov, said that “in general, in Russia it is not customary to name any objects after current politicians” and that “Vladimir Putin himself has repeatedly spoken out on this topic and would prefer that there were no such initiatives.” . “But he cannot ban them either,” Mr. Peskov noted. “Such decisions are made by the authorities of the subject and are not subject to coordination with the center, so this is the decision of Ramzan Kadyrov alone.”
By this solemn date, Putin Avenue was finally restored, but many in Grozny remember well what it looked like after the storming of the city by federal troops in early 2000. From many houses built in the middle of the last century, only charred facades remained. From one of the symbols of Soviet Grozny, a massive monument to the Chechen, Ingush and Russian revolutionaries, who were lovingly called “Gikalo and two jackals” by the people after the name of the main character, only the base survived. True, it later turned out that the figures were simply removed to save them from bombing. Now they again proudly look into the prospect of a restored street, along the axis of which, as before the war, a well-groomed, clean boulevard is laid out.
This is not the first time that Putin Avenue has changed its name - in pre-revolutionary Grozny it was called Granichnaya Street, then 11 Augusta Street in honor of one of the important dates for the Soviet government of the bloody civil war in the North Caucasus, and then Victory Avenue. This meant, naturally, the victory in the Great Patriotic War won by the Soviet Union and the countries of the anti-Hitler coalition over Nazi Germany in May 1945.
The paradox was that although many Chechens in the ranks of the Soviet army went all the way from Brest to Moscow and back to Berlin and even received high awards, the people as a whole at that moment were perceived by official ideology and propaganda more as comrades of the defeated enemy than as co-authors Great Victory. The accusation of unreliability and connections with the occupiers, based on the principle of collective responsibility, unthinkable for most civilized countries, was partly based on very real stories - before and during the war between the USSR and Germany, serious uprisings took place in mountainous Chechnya, to suppress which even front-line forces had to be used aviation. In February 1944, Chechens and Ingush were subjected to total deportation to Kazakhstan and Central Asia, and Chechen-Ingush autonomy was abolished. Rehabilitation came only under Nikita Khrushchev in 1957.
During the period of de facto independence of Chechnya in the 1990s, Victory Avenue was renamed in honor of Isa Arsemikov, a physicist who for some time headed the armed forces of the Confederation of Peoples of the Caucasus and died in battle with the Chechen opposition, which opposed Dzhokhar Dudayev for Russia. But this name did not have time to take root - the street remained Victory Avenue.
Now Pobeda Avenue is named after the Russian Prime Minister, whose role in the history of Chechnya, of course, is not clearly perceived by all its residents. No matter how obvious the successes of restoration may be, grief for the dead relatives and destroyed homes will for a long time be more sincere than the rejoicing over the inclusion in the constitution of Chechnya of a line about its inviolable unity with the Russian Federation. Putin Avenue became the second street named after him in the North Caucasus: in 2003, one of the two streets in the mountain village of Olgeti in neighboring Ingushetia, restored after a flood, was named after the then Russian president.
Renaming in Chechnya is a fairly common and quite natural thing, given all the twists and turns of its recent history: even the flag of this republic has changed three times over the past ten years. Grozny itself, for example, became known as Dzhokhar-kala among supporters of independent Ichkeria after the death of President Dzhokhar Dudayev in 1996. When its pro-Russian president Akhmat Kadyrov was killed in an explosion at the Grozny Dynamo stadium in 2004, a group of his associates proposed renaming Grozny to Akhmat-Kala. As a result, it was decided to retain for the Chechen capital the name assigned to the Russian fortress of Grozny by the commander of the Caucasian Corps, General Alexei Ermolov, at the time of its founding in 1818.
The 190th anniversary of Grozny, which has been celebrated since the summer (the first stone was laid in the foundation of the fortress in the summer of 1818) and will, according to representatives of the mayor's office, be celebrated until the end of the year, is a more intelligible date than the 420th anniversary of the establishment of good neighborly relations. The fact is that there is very little information about contacts between Russians and Chechens at the end of the 16th century. And attempts to choose a day for the holiday of unity in any case are purely symbolic - especially considering that relations between Russia and the Chechens in reality have always remained at least very complex.
In addition to the above-mentioned Stalinist deportation and two wars, accompanied by the almost complete flight from Chechnya of the Russians living there and colossal casualties among the Chechens, there were another hundred years of almost continuous military operations on the left flank of the Caucasian cordon line from the end of the 18th to the second half of the 19th century, as well as a long a chain of clashes, uprisings, rebellions and other mutual grievances before and after the Great Caucasian War.
This, of course, in no way cancels the experience of interaction, friendship, cohabitation and military brotherhood. But when in 1982, the Chechen-Ingush regional committee of the CPSU, on the initiative of Secretary for Ideology Vitaly Vinogradov, proposed celebrating the 200th anniversary of the voluntary entry of Checheno-Ingushetia into Russia, this idea caused an active public protest, which, in fact, marked the beginning of a broad national movement, later painted in separatist tones.
Disciples and associates of the historian Vinogradov believe that he did not at all intend to subject to oblivion the tragic experience of the Caucasian War (and deportation, which they tried to remember less often in 1982), but wanted to emphasize precisely the unity of the Russian, Chechen and Ingush peoples. Even the date was chosen quite clearly: in 1781, part of the Chechen villages expressed their submission and took an oath to the Russian Empress.
But people who returned from exile only in 1957 were not convinced by the idea of celebrating “voluntary entry.” The holiday turned out to be a stone, the circles from which gave rise to a real storm. In 1991, at one of the rallies of many thousands in Grozny, Vitaly Vinogradov was declared an enemy of the Chechen people and was forced to leave the republic along with his many colleagues in scientific and teaching activities so as not to share the fate of the kidnapped and murdered rector of the Grozny University Viktor Kan-Kalik.
The 200th anniversary of voluntary entry was forgotten for a long time. After the 1994-1996 war, the first Russian President Boris Yeltsin said, when signing an agreement with the President of Ichkeria Aslan Maskhadov, that it was time to put an end to the 400-year-old enmity between the two peoples - thus, following the separatists, he was ready to count the history of the conflict back to approximately 1597 .
The current President of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, in his address to the participants of the Sunday celebration in Chechnya, went even deeper into history. “The year 1588 was not only the beginning of active political and trade contacts between the Chechen and Russian peoples. Then, for the first time, national cultures, traditions and customs were opened to each other, and feelings of mutual respect and interest arose, says the presidential congratulatory address. “Having gone through centuries and difficult trials, today all the peoples of Russia live and work in a single democratic state.”
Instead of the 200th anniversary of voluntary entry, the 420th anniversary of good neighborly relations is now celebrated. It is believed that in 1588, the “Okotsky” owner Shikh-Murza turned to the Russian Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich with a request for citizenship. In 1588-1589, a Chechen embassy went to Moscow, in which Shikh-Murza may have participated. True, this did not particularly contribute to his political career. A few years later, Shikh-Murza was killed, and many residents of the villages under his control were forced to flee to the protection of the Russian fortification of Terka at the confluence of the Terek into the Caspian Sea.
Terki was the second Russian fortress in this region. The first, in the middle of the 16th century, shortly after the conquest of the Astrakhan Khanate by Ivan the Terrible (1556), was founded by “free people” - Cossacks, who later became known as Terek Cossacks. It arose precisely in Chechnya, near the confluence of the Terek and Sunzha, apparently in the area of present-day Bragunov. According to historians of the Caucasus, not only Russians lived there, but also Chechens, Kabardians, Kumyks and even Circassians. Later, this town was razed by agreement between the Russian Tsar and the Turkish Sultan, but the Terek Cossack army remained an indispensable participant in the entire political, military and social life of the region for centuries.
Many believe that Shikh-Murza was not a Chechen, but a Kumyk, and if he was a Chechen, then “Okotskiy” - that’s what the Akkin Chechens, who now live outside the administrative border of Chechnya, were called then, mainly in the Novolaksky and Khasavyurt regions of Dagestan . There is also an opinion that 420 years ago he asked Moscow for protection from the Kabardians, and the Kabardians, as you know, already in 2007 celebrated the “450th anniversary of the entry of Kabardino-Balkaria into the Russian Federation.”
But, after all, the current date may not have been chosen so badly. The initial history of the Terek army, when the Chechens did not yet see in the few Cossacks a threat to agricultural colonization and military conquest, is more a history of community life than a history of confrontation. The first serious military clashes between Russians and Chechens began when Russia attempted to “stand firmly” on the shores of the Caspian Sea, in Dagestan. In July 1722, a detachment of Peter I's reitar fell into a Chechen ambush in the area of the current border of Chechnya and Dagestan. In response, the reformer tsar sent a punitive expedition of Kalmyks allied to him to Chechnya.