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Introduction.
The Chechens and their western neighbors the Ingush are distinct ethnic
groups with distinct languages, but so closely related and so similar that
it is convenient to describe them together.
The term "Chechen" is a Russian ethnonym taken from the name
of a lowlands Chechen village; "Chechnya" is derived from that.
(Both words are accented on the last syllable in Russian.) This term evidently
entered Russian from a Turkic language, probably Kumyk (spoken in the northern
and eastern Caucasian plain). The Chechens call themselves Nokhchi (singular
Nokhchuo). Similarly, "Ingush" is not the self-designation but
a Russian ethnonym based on a village name; the Ingush call themselves
Ghalghay. Demography.
1989 census figures: 956,879 Chechen; 237,438 Ingush. The Chechens are
the largest North Caucasian group and the second largest Caucasian group
(after the Georgians). Location, settlement.
The Chechen and Ingush lands lie just to the east of the principal road
crossing the central Caucasus (via the Darial Pass), extending from the
foothills and plains into alpine highlands. The lowlands enjoy fertile
soil, ample rainfall, a long growing season, and a small oilfield. Neighbors
to the east are the various peoples of Daghestan (many of them speaking
languages related to Chechen); in the plains to the north, the Turkic-speaking
Kumyk and (as of the last three centuries) Russians; to the west the Ingush
and to their west the Ossetians, who speak a language of the Iranian branch
of Indo-European; to the south (across the central Caucasus range) the
southern Ossetians and the Georgians.
There are two true cities in Chechen and Ingush territory: Grozny (pop.
about 400,000 until 1995), the modern Chechen capital founded as a Russian
fort during the Russian conquest of the Caucasus; and Vladikavkaz (pop.
about 300,000; known as Ordzhonikidze in Soviet times) in the Ingush highlands
at the Ingush-Ossetic territorial boundary, also originally a Russian military
fort and founded to control the Darial pass. Nazran in the Ingush lowlands
was traditionally and is now a large and important market town. The cities
had substantial Russian and other non-Chechen-Ingush population; Vladikavkaz
was mixed Ingush and Ossetic with significant numbers of Russians and Georgians.
(Groznyj has now been destroyed and mostly depopulated by Russian bombing.
Vladikavkaz and the adjacent Ingush lands were ethnically cleansed of Ingush
in late 1992.) All Russian governments -- czars, Soviets, post-Soviet Russia
-- have used various means to remove Chechen and Ingush population from
economically important areas and to encourage settlement there by Russians
and Russian Cossacks; hence the mixed population of the cities and lowlands.
Language.
The Caucasus has been famed since antiquity for the sheer number and
diversity of its languages and for the exotic grammatical structures of
the language families indigenous there. This diversity testifies to millennia
of generally peaceable relations among autonomous ethnic groups. Chechen
and Ingush, together with Batsbi or Tsova-Tush (a moribund minority language
of Georgia) make up the Nakh branch of the Nakh-Daghestanian, or Northeast
Caucasian, language family. There are over 30 languages in the Northeast
Caucasian family, most of them spoken in Daghestan just to the east of
Chechnya. The split of the Nakh branch from the rest of the family took
place about 5000-6000 years ago (thus the Nakh-Daghestanian family is comparable
in age to Indo-European, the language family ancestral to English, French,
Russian, Greek, Hindi, etc.), though the split of Chechen from Ingush probably
dates back only to the middle ages. The entire family is indigenous to
the Caucasus mountains and has no demonstrable relations to any language
group either in or out of the Caucasus. Like most indigenous Caucasian
languages Chechen has a wealth of consonants, including uvular and pharyngeal
sounds like those of Arabic and glottalized or ejective consonants like
those of many native American languages; and a large vowel system somewhat
resembling that of Swedish or German. Like its sister languages Chechen
has extensive inflectional morphology including a dozen nominal cases and
several gender classes, and forms long and complex sentences by chaining
participial clauses together. The case system is ergative, i.e. the subject
of a transitive verb appears in an oblique case and the direct object is
in the nominative, as is the subject of an intransitive verb (as in Basque);
verbs take no person agreement, but some of them agree in gender with the
direct object or intransitive subject.
97% or more of the Chechens claim Chechen as their first language, though
most also speak Russian, generally quite fluently. Chechen and Ingush are
so close to each other that with some practice a speaker of one has fair
comprehension of the other, and where the two languages are in contact
they are used together: a Chechen addresses an Ingush in Chechen, the Ingush
replies in Ingush, and communication proceeds more or less smoothly. Chechen
was not traditionally a written language. An orthography using the Russian
alphabet was created in the 1930's and is used for various kinds of publication,
although for most Chechens the chief vehicle of literacy is Russian. Traditionally,
as in most North Caucasian societies, many individuals were bilingual or
multilingual, using an important lowlands language (e.g. Kumyk, spoken
in market towns and prestigious as its speakers were early converts to
Islam) for inter-ethnic communication; any literacy was in Arabic. Russian
has now displaced both Kumyk and Arabic in these functions. Particularly
if the Chechen and Ingush economies continue to be destroyed and unemployment
and mass homelessness continue to undermine the social structure, there
is danger that Chechen and Ingush will be functionally reduced to household
languages and will then yield completely to Russian, with concomitant loss
of much of the cultural heritage.
History.
The Chechens have evidently been in or near their present territory
for some 6000 years and perhaps much longer; there is fairly seamless archeological
continuity for the last 8000 years or more in central Daghestan, suggesting
that the Nakh-Daghestanian language family is long indigenous. The Caucasian
highlands were apparently relatively populous and prosperous in ancient
times. From the late middle ages until the 19th century, a worldwide cooling
phase known as the Little Ice Age caused glacial advances and shortened
growing seasons in the alpine highlands, weakening the highland economies
and triggering migrations to the lowlands and abandonment of some alpine
villages. This period of economic hardship coincided with the Russian conquest
of the Caucasus which lasted from the late 1500's to the mid-1800's. In
all of recorded history and inferable prehistory the Chechens (and for
that matter the Ingush) have never undertaken battle except in defense.
The Russian conquest of the Caucasus was difficult and bloody, and the
Chechens and Ingush with their extensive lowlands territory and access
to the central pass were prime targets and were among the most tenacious
defenders. Russia destroyed lowlands villages and deported, exiled, or
slaughtered civilian population, forcing capitulation of the highlands.
Numerous refugees migrated or were deported to various Muslim countries
of the middle east, and to this day there are Chechen populations in Jordan
and Turkey. Since then there have been various Chechen rebellions against
Russian and Soviet power, as well as resistance to collectivization, anti-religious
campaigns, and Russification.
In 1944 the Chechens and Ingush, together with the Karachay-Balkar,
Crimean Tatars, and other nationalities were deported en masse to Kazakhstan
and Siberia, losing at least one-quarter and perhaps half of their population
in transit. Though "rehabilitated" in 1956 and allowed to return
in 1957, they lost land, economic resources, and civil rights; since then,
under both Soviet and post-Soviet governments, they have been the objects
of (official and unofficial) discrimination and discriminatory public discourse.
In recent years, Russian media have depicted the Chechen nation and/or
nationality as thugs and bandits responsible for organized crime and street
violence in Russia.
In late 1992 Russian tanks and troops, sent to the north Caucasus ostensibly
as peacekeepers in an ethnic dispute between Ingush and Ossetians over
traditional Ingush lands politically incorporated into North Ossetia after
the 1944 deportation, forcibly removed the Ingush population from North
Ossetia and destroyed the Ingush villages there; there were many deaths
and there are now said to be up to 60,000 refugees in Ingushetia (about
one-quarter of the total Ingush population). In developments reminiscent
of today's invasion of Chechnya, in the weeks leading up to the action
the Ingush were depicted (inaccurately) in regional media as heavily armed
and poised for a large-scale and organized attack on Ossetians, and the
Russian military once deployed appears to have undertaken ethnic cleansing
at least partly on its own initiative. (My only sources of information
for this paragraph are Russian and western news reports. Helsinki Watch
is preparing a report for publication in early 1995.)
The invasion of Chechnya presently underway has meant great human suffering
for all residents of the Chechen lowlands, including Russians, but only
the Chechens are at risk of ethnic cleansing, wholesale economic ruin,
and loss of linguistic and cultural heritage. Religion.
The Chechens and Ingush are Sunni Muslims of the Hanafi school, having
converted in the late 17th to early 19th centuries. Islam is now, as it
has been since the conversion, moderate but strongly held and a central
component of the culture and the ethnic identity.
Economy, customs.
Traditionally, the lowlands Chechen were grain farmers and the highlanders
raised sheep. At the time of Russian contact the lowlands were wealthy
and produced a grain surplus, while the highlands were not self-sufficient
in food and traded wool and eggs for lowlands grain.
Chechen social structure and ethnic identity rest on principles of family
and clan honor, respect for and deference to one's elders, hospitality,
formal and dignified relations between families and clans, and courteous
and formal public and private behavior.
Kinship and clan structure are patriarchal, but women have full social
and professional equality and prospects for financial independence equivalent
to those of men.
Academics, writers, artists, and intellectuals in general are well versed
in the cultures of both the European and the Islamic worlds, and the society
as a whole can be said to regard both of these heritages as their own together
with the indigenous north Caucasian artistic and intellectual tradition.
Social organization.
Until the Russian conquest the Chechens were an independent nation with
their own language and territory but no formal political organization.
Villages were autonomous, as were clans. Villages had mutual defense obligations
in times of war, and clans had mutual support relations that linked them
into larger clan confederations (which generally coincided with dialects).
Each clan was headed by a respected elder. There were no social classes
and no differences of rank apart from those of age, kinship, and earned
social honor.
Select bibliography Anonymous.
1992. Ethnic cleansing comes to Russia.
The Economist, November 28, 1992, p. 60.
Blanch, Lesley. 1960.
The Sabres of Paradise. New York: Viking. Comrie, Bernard. 1981.
The Languages of the Soviet Union. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Conquest, Robert. 1970.
The Nation Killers: The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities. London: Macmillan.
Critchlow, James. 1991.
"Punished peoples" of the Soviet Union: The continuing legacy
of Stalin's deportations. Helsinki Watch Report. New York-Washington: Human
Rights Watch. Friedrich, Paul, and Norma Diamond, eds. 1994.
Encyclopedia of World Cultures, vol. VI: Russia and Eurasia/China. Boston:
G. K. Hall & Co. Gamkrelidze, T. V., and T. E. Gudava. [Various dates.]
Caucasian languages. Encyclopedia Britannica (e.g. in 1979 edition, Macropedia,
vol. 3, pp. 1011-15; in 1992 edition, vol. 22, pp. 736-40, under 'Languages
of the world').
Nekrich, Aleksandr M. 1978.
The Punished Peoples. New York: Norton. Nichols, Johanna. 1994.
Chechen. Ingush. In Rieks Smeets, ed., The Indigenous Languages of the
Caucasus, vol. 4: Northeast Caucasian Languages, pp. 1-77 (Chechen), 79-145
(Ingush). Delmar, NY: Caravan Books. Wixman, Ronald. 1980.
Language Aspects of Ethnic Pattern and Processes in the North Caucasus.
(University of Chicago Department of Geography Research Paper no. 191.)
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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ho are the Chechen?
