That nationalism is an antidote for imperialism is amply demonstrated by the Chechens. The approximately 750,000 Chechens are a largely Islamic people living in the northern Caucasus region just west of the Caspian Sean. Chechnya (or the Chechen Republic) encompasses about 6,000 square miles (a bit larger than Connecticut). Imperial Russia began in 1783 a campaign to conquer the Chechens that went on for so long and was so fierce that the Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov wrote in 1832 of the badly outnumbered Chechens, "Their god is freedom, their law is war." Even after Russia finally established control in the mid-1800s, rebellions were a regular event. It seemed to the Russians, as one military governor warned, that the czar "would find no peace as long as a single Chechen remains alive."1 The same might have been said about the peace of commisars. During World War II, Moscow deported the entire Chechen population, about 400,000 people, to the east and away from the invading Germans. Stalin suspected the Chechens might assist the Germans under the old theory that my enemy's enemy is my friend. Even though one-third of all Chechens died during their time in the gulag (an acronym for the Main Directorate of Corrective Labor Camps), they remained defiant. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago (1973), "There was one nation that would not give in...[to] submission and not just individual[s]..., but the whole nation to a man. These were the Chechens.... And here is an extraordinary thing everyone was afraid of them. No one could stop them from living as they did. The [Soviet] regime which had ruled the land for thirty years could not force them to respect its laws."2 The Chechens were allowed to return to their native land in the mid-1950s but remained restive. Once the USSR dissolved, the Chechen quest for self-rule redoubled, and in a ferocious clash that cost between 60,000 to 100,000 lives, they achieved a level of autonomy in 1996. After a brief interlude, fighting resumed in 1999, and in early 2000 they were again overrun by Russian arms. The struggle continues, however, as it has for over two centuries. Current Russians leaders, like czars and commissars before them, must think ruefully of their attempts to subdue the Chechens, a people whose national anthem goes in part: We were born at night, when the she-wolf whelped. In the morning, as lions howl, we were given our names. In eagles nests, our Mothers nursed us To tame a stallion, our Fathers taught us.... Granite rocks will sooner fuse like lead, Than we lose our Nobility in life and struggle.... Never will we appear submissive before anyone, Death or Freedom we can choose only one way.... We were born at night, when the she-wolf whelped. God, Nation, and the Native land.... Notes 1. Quoted on the Web site of Consortium News, February 7, 2000. 2. Solzhenitsyn is quoted in Edward Kline, "ASF Chechnya Brief," on the Web site of the Andrei Sakharov Foundation. | 
2002 McGraw-Hill Higher Education