Conflict in Chechnya: A Background Perspective

by

Patrick Armstrong*

November 1999

INTRODUCTION

Chechnya appears in the Western news every now and again, usually suddenly. It is back in the news today as, once again, Moscow is fighting a war there. Yet, what most Western coverage of Chechnya lacks is background. Because of inadequate background knowledge, Western reporting is full of speculation in which the unknown is fitted into pre-existing theories. Many pundits tell us that the war is really about oil, that the Caucasus is the scene of some new "Great Game" of rivalry. Others repeat Moscow Beltway rumours that Russia's leaders began the trouble for their own dark purposes. Still others use it as a stick with which to beat Russia and air their theories that Russians are savages who will never become civilized or that they are organically "imperialist" or "genocidal." What is missing is consideration of the possibility that the Chechens themselves might be actors - most reporting assumes they are puppets of somebody else. Who is Shamil Basayev and what does he want? Who is the international mujahid whose nom de guerre is Khattab? Why did they invade Dagestan in the summer? After all, if they hadn't, none of this would be happening today. To try to fit all this into neo-Cold War theories is to miss most of what is happening.

Actors in Chechnya are operating under the influence of numerous, home-grown, motives. This note will describe the three most important motives, which are often entangled, and which animate the minds of the Chechen fighters. Some of them want, as their final aim, an independent Chechnya. Some want to use an independent Chechnya as the secure base from which to re-create the short-lived Mountaineer Republic of 1918-21, which would include the North Caucasus republics in Russia, Abkhazia in Georgia and some (at least) of Azerbaijan. Still others want to convert the Chechens to the sect of Wahhabism and from a base in Chechnya establish a Wahhabi Imamate across the North Caucasus. For all these people, Russia is the enemy. All these motives are present in Chechnya today. These aims are quite independent of oil politics, Moscow Beltway machinations or historicist assertions about the Russian character.

INDEPENDENT CHECHNYA

The Chechens have been living in the piedmont and mountains of the eastern Great Caucasus range for as long as anyone knows. Initial contacts with the Russians were reasonably amicable - or as amicable as the relationship between two warrior peoples could be. Before the Nineteenth Century, the Russians did not encroach on Chechen territory and they presented an enemy with whom Chechen warriors could happily fight. This phase is described in Tolstoy's novella Cossacks. The first Russian-Chechen clash took place in 1722, when the inhabitants of a Chechen aul drove off a Russian cavalry patrol. Sheikh Mansur led a war against the Russians from 1785 to 1791.

But, at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, Chechnya was en route to something Russia wanted - the South Caucasus. Russia's entry point came when the Persians sacked Tbilisi and the helpless Christian Georgians appealed to Christian Russia for assistance. From their West Georgian base, the Russians gradually wrested control of the South Caucasus from the Persian and Ottoman Empires and pushed deeper into the mountains of the North Caucasus. To the Chechens, this was a threat and they fought. A religious movement combined with a great leader sustained their resistance. Sunni Islam had gradually spread through the Chechen territories from the late Seventeenth Century but it is generally agreed that the Chechens and other Mountaineers were not then very observant. Naqshbrandi Sufism arrived in the eastern Caucasus at the very time Russian forces were pressing into the Mountaineers' territory. It begat a movement to purify the practice of Islam and establish a theocracy based on the temporal rule of Naqshbandi initiates and, under the charismatic leadership of the Imam Shamyl, it became the unifying cause around which the Chechens and other Mountaineers united. Shamyl tried to create a coalition of all the Mountaineers, but the Ossetians never supported him and the Russians were able to block his attempts to establish contact with Circassia. His power, therefore, was confined to Chechnya and Dagestan. Even so, he was able to fight off everything the Russians sent during the Great Caucasus War (1834 to 1859), but the more numerous Russian forces, based on the two garrison towns of Vladikavkaz ("conqueror of the Caucasus") and Groznyy ("threatening") prevailed. At length Shamyl was forced to surrender and Chechnya, Ingushetia and Dagestan were attached to the Russian Empire. But a tremendous legacy of hatred was left, especially among the Chechens who had fought the hardest and suffered the most. Many Chechens and other Mountaineers went into exile in the Ottoman Empire where their descendants today form influential communities (Chechens form the bodyguard of the King of Jordan for example).

When the Russian Empire collapsed in 1917, the Chechens tried again and the Republic of the North Caucasus was proclaimed under the leadership of Tapa Chermoyev, a prominent Chechen. The Mountaineers fought against Red and White forces in the Civil War. The Whites overthrew the republic but, undeterred, the Mountaineers formed an Emirate of the North Caucasus in southern Chechnya in 1919 under Sheikh Uzun Haji, another Chechen. As a tactical provision, the Bolsheviks recognized and supported the Emirate against the Whites. When the White forces in the Caucasus were defeated in 1920, the Bolsheviks entered the North Caucasus, dissolved the Emirate and appointed Uzun Mufti of the North Caucasian Mountaineers.

Many Mountaineers welcomed the Bolsheviks, who seemed to sympathize with their aspirations and were, in any case, the enemies of their enemy. This soon changed as the Bolsheviks put the practices of "war communism" into effect. The Mountaineers rose in response. In August 1920 a new war began in the south of Dagestan. Almost immediately all of Dagestan and southern Chechnya was in revolt. By 1921, large Bolshevik forces were fighting this resistance.

On 20 January 1921, the Bolsheviks convened a congress of the Mountaineers in Vladikavkaz. Stalin, then Commissar for Nationalities, declared that the Bolsheviks supported sovereignty and independence for the Mountaineers. He proposed the creation of a Mountain Peoples' Autonomous Republic comprising the territories of the Chechens, Ingush, Ossetians, Kabardins, Balkars and Karachay, while Dagestan was to be an autonomous Soviet Republic. The assembly accepted this proposal, which accorded well enough with their aspirations and the fighting stopped.

But Stalin didn't really mean it. In November 1922, Chechnya was taken out of the Mountain Republic and made into an Autonomous Oblast of the Russian Federation - the beginning of a continuing process of re-definition and ever-diminishing freedoms. By 1924, the Mountain Republic had been dissolved in a similar fashion into national units inside the newly-created Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic and Abkhazia, the Mountaineer state in Georgia, lost its autonomy and was subordinated to Tbilisi in 1931. One by one the promises were broken. In 1929, the Soviet leadership decided to introduce collectivization in the USSR, starting with the North Caucasus. The Chechens immediately rose and serious fighting lasted from December 1929 to Stalin's relaxing of collectivization in March 1930. But, this was just a tactical retreat and the Soviet terror intensified in Chechnya, as elsewhere, through the 1930s. The Chechens never stopped fighting, but the legions of the NKVD, backed up by the Red Army, were able to keep their resistance small and scattered. The Chechens boast that the last abrek ("bandit of honour"), Khazaki Magomedov, died in combat against the communists in 1979.

Undeniably the greatest disaster to befall the Chechen people was the deportation of 1944. Stalin decided that now was the time to settle with them and he decreed that the entire people had been guilty of collaborating with the Nazis. On the night of 23/24 February 1944, every Chechen that the NKVD could locate was deported to Central Asia with a mortality rate, for the trip alone, of probably one in five. The Chechen-Ingush ASSR was dissolved and its territory added to the Stavropol Kray.

In his secret speech to the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, Khrushchev referred to the deportation and in July the residence restrictions against Chechens were lifted. In January 1957, the Chechen-Ingush ASSR was re-created, but for the first time the territory north of the Terek River was included in it. In an exemplar of Soviet-speak, the whole period from 1944 to 1957 was described in a Soviet history of the Chechen-Ingush Republic in this way:

In 1944 as a result of certain violations of Leninist principles of national-state construction and socialist legality, the Chechen-Ingush ASSR was liquidated. The 20th Congress of the CPSU corrected this violation.⁽¹⁾

When the USSR fell apart, the Chechens tried again. On 23 November 1990, a Chechen National Congress (CNC) passed a resolution calling for the sovereignty of the Republic and elected the highest-ranking Chechen in the Soviet Armed Forces, Major-General Jokhar Dudayev, the commander of a long-range bomber unit, chairman of its Executive Committee. The ruling partycrats in Groznyy either supported the coup attempt in August 1991 or were conspicuously silent. This was Dudayev's chance: and, through the CNC, he mustered the street power to force them to resign. Russian Vice-President Rutskoy and the Chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet Ruslan Khasbulatov (himself a Chechen) persuaded Yeltsin to oppose this and Russian police were sent to Groznyy; Dudayev's supporters prevented them from getting out of their aircraft. And so, when the USSR formally disappeared on 25 December, all the elements of the Chechen crisis were in place. Moscow had been shown to be powerless against Dudayev's supporters; Dudayev was determined on independence; Moscow was not ready to agree.

In the months that followed, Dudayev got his hands on most of the Soviet Army's weapons in Chechnya. This was a considerable amount - 50 or more tanks and other armoured vehicles, many artillery pieces, thousands of small arms and more than 200 aircraft (there had been an air-training centre near Groznyy and a tank training centre in Shali). With these weapons, Chechnya became a "great power" in the Caucasian context and able to export its dream of a Mountaineer Republic, especially to Georgia, already torn by civil war. Chechen fighters were instrumental in defeating the Georgians in Abkhazia in 1993 and fought for the Ossetians. President Gamsakhurdia had a friend in Dudayev and spent his exile there and ran his opposition to Shevardnadze out of that safe haven.

Contrary to what many editorialists claim today, Moscow did try to negotiate a settlement. By December 1992, Moscow and a delegation from the Chechen parliament had come to an initial agreement for an autonomous Chechnya within the Russian Federation. However, Dudayev was not interested in anything but full independence and he dissolved the parliament next year. With the failure of negotiations, Moscow began a phase of trying to ignore events in Chechnya - in any case, it had many more pressing problems. However, an important line was crossed that summer when Dudayev used force to suppress demonstrations against his assumption of supreme power. As Chechnya became more chaotic, Moscow tried to find or create an anti-Dudayev coalition. One after another its schemes failed. Then, probably in a mood of over-confidence, Moscow decided to use military force. This united the Chechens against their ancient enemy and, for the first time, the Chechens prevailed and drove Russia's power out.

By now, after two centuries, the Russians ought to know that there is no end to fighting Chechens. The Chechens have never wanted to be part of Russia and they have always fought for their liberties. They have been defeated, but only temporarily.

The North Caucasus Mountaineer Republic

But, for many Chechens, Chechen independence will not be the end of the struggle. The Chechen independence struggle has usually been carried out as part of a struggle for the independence for all the Mountaineers. There are many historical "what ifs" about this. Had both the western and eastern Mountaineers been able to unite in the Great Caucasus War, instead of fighting the Russians in sequence, there might be a Mountaineer Republic today with a UN seat. Or, had the USSR collapsed in the early 1920s, we would all have recognized an independent Mountaineer Republic. Or, as the Chechens often tried, had Chechnya been granted the status of an SSR, rather than an ASSR, we would all recognize an independent Chechnya today just as we all recognize an independent Estonia. Had Abkhazia retained its status as an SSR (which it lost in 1931), we would recognize it today. Instead, we, the world, recognized Stalin's and Khrushchev's cartography as of 1991 and we all say today that the Mountaineers are properly citizens of the Russian Federation, Georgia or Azerbaijan and not of their own state.

There have been at least three attempts to put the dream of an independent Mountaineer Republic into reality. Two have been mentioned above: the Murid Wars in the east and individual wars in Circassia and Abkhazia in the Nineteenth Century and the post-1917 attempt. When the Soviet Empire broke up in 1991, there was another attempt. This effort has proved to be the most successful and today both Chechnya and Abkhazia are de facto independent and serve as the "bookends," as it were, of the Mountaineer Republic-in-being.

In April 1991, a founding meeting of the Assembly of the Mountain People of the Caucasus was held in Sukhumi, Abkhazia. That November, delegates from the North Caucasus and Abkhazia formed the Confederation of Caucasian Mountain Peoples. The next October the Congress of the Caucasian Mountain Peoples met in Groznyy with delegates from Chechnya, Adygeya, Abkhazia, Ingushetia, Ossetia, Dagestan, Kabarda and Circassia and delegations from the Karachay, Akin Chechens (the Chechens who live in Dagestan) and Tatars (who live in Russia and Ukraine). From the beginning, the Confederation had the full support of Dudayev's Chechnya and possessed a military wing headed by Shamil Basayev, of whom we will hear more below. Basayev personally led a Chechen group in Abkhazia and fighters from the Confederation helped the Ossetians and Abkhaz in their wars against the Georgians.

The Mountaineer Republic-in-being today has its centre of gravity in Chechnya. Chechnya's first president, Jokhar Dudayev, believed an independent Chechnya would lead to a Mountaineer Republic and such a desire was present in the movement for Chechen independence from its beginnings. The second meeting of the Chechen National Congress in June 1991 authorized him to say:

The union of all Caucasian nations on an equal basis is the only possible way for the future. As we [Chechens] hold a central geographic, strategic and economic position in the Caucasus and have the necessary human potential, we must be the initiators of this future union.⁽²⁾

Therefore, the dream of the Mountaineer Republic and the memory of its early death at the hands of Russian Whites, Bolsheviks and Georgians after 1917, continues to animate the hearts of many Chechens. It has inspired them to fight for the Republic in Abkhazia and Ossetia against Georgians and in Chechnya and Dagestan against Russians. There has been talk about "liberating" Karabakh in Azerbaijan. It is, as it were, "the other shoe" of Chechen independence.

The Wahhabi Imamate

But what sort of independent Chechnya or Mountaineer Republic is it to be? Secular or Islamist? If the latter what kind of Islamist? The fighting in Chechnya has brought the word "Wahhabism" to public notice.

Wahhabism takes its name (one, it should be noted, used by its enemies) from Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703-91). From the interior of Arabia, the Najd, he began a movement to purify Islam, to cleanse it of a millennium's accretions and return it to what he saw as its ancient purity. An analogous Christian example might be the Puritans of the English Civil War and Protectorate. Al-Wahhab made an alliance with local rulers, the Saud family, which was based on the agreement that the two would support each other in their attempts to first, conquer Arabia and, second, spread the reformer's methods.

Al-Wahhab believed that over the years monotheism had become corrupted by polytheistic practices and, as is common with so many religious reformers, his movement is most differentiated from others by what it is against. What seemed to excite his passions most of all was Sufism. Sufis attempt to gain a mystical experience of God and honor the memories, and especially repugnant to al-Wahhab, the graves of leading saints and holy men. To al-Wahhab, this was idolatry and heresy and those who practiced such behavior were not true Muslims and to war against them was no sin.

The Saud/Wahhab alliance endured and so did its purpose. True to their notions of propriety, when they captured Mecca and Medina in 1805 and 1806, they destroyed all the tombs of saints and, it is said, even wanted to destroy the Prophet's tomb. But Ottoman forces from Egypt drove them back into the Najd. This defeat did not stop their aims and Abdul-Aziz ibn Saud (1880-53) brought the long project to fruition and, by the 1920s, had conquered the whole of Arabia. Wahhabism made a great appeal to the tribesmen of the wild interior of Arabia and the core of ibn Saud's armies were fanatic fighters passionately attached to Wahhabism. The hard core of his fighters - the Ikhwan ("brotherhood") - had always expected that the conquest of Arabia would be the prelude to the complete conquest of Dar-al-Islam and they objected to any hint of settling down on the part of ibn-Saud. They revolted and he put the Ikhwan down in bloody fighting in the 1930s. What followed was consolidation of Saud rule into the stable familyocracy of Saudi Arabia, and modernization based on oil wealth.

When the USSR collapsed, after decades of persecution and neglect, the situation of Islam was poor. Wahhabis, with lots of money from Arabia, moved in, provided Korans, built mosques and madrassahs and did other purely religious things. The people, hungry to return to the open practice of their religion, welcomed the missionaries. But, at the same time, the missionaries preached that their version of Islam was the only true one. Wahhabism directly confronts the traditional Sufism of the North Caucasus and it preaches that Sufism is incorrect and bad Islam. Helped greatly by the unemployment in Chechnya after the war, the well-financed Wahhabis have been able to gain many adherents in the last three years.

The leading Wahhabi field commander in Chechnya is a man who takes the nom de guerre of Khattab. Some say he is a Jordanian Chechen, others that he is an Arab, but all agree that, although he may have Chechen ancestry, he is a foreigner. Khattab has fought in Afghanistan, Tajikistan and was one of the field commanders in the Russo-Chechen war. He "made his bones" in a raid on the Russian brigade group in Buynaksk (Dagestan) in December 1997. He has formed an alliance with perhaps Chechnya's leading hero of the 1994 war, Shamil Basayev, and they have been running training camps in the safe haven of Chechnya. Basayev has been fighting to re-establish the Mountaineer Republic for several years. He led the Chechen forces in Abkhazia in the wars that obtained Abkhazia's de facto independence from Georgia. He was a leading field commander in the war against Russia and led the raid on the town of Budyonnovsk that reversed the course of the war in June 1995. He may have also fought in Afghanistan and Tajikistan.

The Wahhabis in Chechnya are fighting for a Wahhabi state there. They appear to have made their first attempt to construct the Wahhabi Imamate when they tried to take over Chechen city of Gudermes in July 1998. In the summer of 1999, they invaded Dagestan. In each case they seem to have overestimated their chances - they were driven out of Gudermes by Chechen government forces and out of Dagestan by federal Russian forces. In each case, they were met with the hostility of the local population (perhaps their memory of previous Wahhabi depredations was the reason why the inhabitants - or so Basayev says - helped the Russians to occupy Gudermes in November 1999). Their aim is to create a Wahhabi state right across the North Caucasus and, probably, after that in Abkhazia in Georgia. Inevitably, Shiite Azerbaijan would be their target after that. There is every reason to take their aims seriously - they have a lot of money and a lot of fighters and both Khattab and Basayev have amply proved their willingness to lead the fight from the front.

At the end of this short paper are a number of websites. Most of them are from Muslim sources hostile to Wahhabism. The reader is advised to take a look at them and learn that hatred of Wahhabis is quite strong - they are accused of making war on other Muslims to further their heretical aims. Indeed, in many Muslim states, the expression "Muslim extremist," so beloved of Westerners, refers to Wahhabis, and Wahhabis are often blamed for disturbances like the violence in Namangan Uzbekistan in December 1997 or murders like that of Dagestan's mufti, Saidmukhamed Abubakarov, in August 1998 and other car bombs in Chechnya.

A Chronology of Recent Events Related to Wahhabism in the former USSR

Because so little is known in the West about Wahhabism in the former USSR, this short chronology and list of websites is appended

10-11 Dec 97	Six members of Kyrgyzstan's Muftiat denounce Wahhabism.
14 Feb 14 98	Azerbaijan National Security Minister accuses intelligence services of unnamed states of trying to promote Wahhabism.
21 Feb 98	Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan muftis call for a ban on "new Islamic sects" especially Wahhabism.
14 Apr 98	Grenade attack on Groznyy mosque used by Wahhabis.
1 May 98	Uzbek parliament passes law imposing restrictions on religious groups; President Karimov speaks out against Wahhabis whom he accuses of seeking to turn Uzbekistan into a second Tajikistan.
7 May 98	Trials of suspected Islamic militants began in Namangan Uzbekistan. Allegedly Wahhabis, the defendants were accused of planning the violence in Namangan in Dec 97. President Karimov blames Afghan Wahhabis.
11 May 98	Kyrgyz Security Ministry claims Wahhabis active in Kyrgyzstan.
14-15 Jul 98	Fighting in Gudermes between detachments of Chechen National Guard and forces identified by Chechen official spokesmen as Wahhabis.
16 Jul 98	Chechnya President Maskhadov bans Wahhabism; also disbands Islamic special purpose regiment and subdivision of Shariya National Security Ministry claiming these fought against government forces in Gudermes.
17-18 Jul 98	Chechnya President Maskhadov expels five foreign nationals suspected of creating illegal armed formations and disseminating Wahhabi ideology; extends state of emergency for 10 days; mobilizes 5000 reservists.
2 Aug 98	Chechnya President Maskhadov in Istanbul criticizes unidentified Arab countries that seek to "provoke confusion" in Chechnya and "teach us Islam."
13 Aug 98	In interview in Izvestiya, the chairman of the Council of Muftis of Russia, Ravil Gaynutdin, says "the Muslim clergy of Russia is categorically opposed to Wahhabism".
17 Aug 98	Muftis of Dagestan, North Ossetia, Chechnya, Karachay-Cherkessia, Kabardino-Balkaria, and Ingushetia meet in Nazran; create Coordinating Council of Muslims of North Caucasus to promote revival of Islam, combat "harmful trends" (including Wahhabism) and contribute to the stabilization of the North Caucasus.
17 Aug 98	Three Wahhabi villages in Dagestan's Buynaksk Rayon declare their district to be an independent Islamic territory. 19th Dagestan State Council orders police to take "resolute action" to restore control over Wahhabi villages. 20th Basayev says he will protect Wahhabi villagers. 21st Dagestani Security Council acting Secretary Magomed-Salikh Gusayev declares Dagestan will treat any Chechen move to support Wahhabis as an act of war. 2 Sep Compromise reached between Dagestan government and Wahhabi villages: they withdraw declaration of independence in exchange for immunity from prosecution.
2 Oct 98	Chechnya President Maskhadov says USA is using Saudi Arabia as proxy to destabilize Caucasus through Wahhabism.
6 Jan 99	Chechen general wounded by bomb in Gudermes. He accuses Islamic radicals from unnamed Middle Eastern countries.
16 Feb 99	Explosions in Tashkent Uzbekistan kill 50 and injure 150; possibly assassination attempt on President Karimov. Wahhabis immediately blamed.
4 Apr 99	Uzbekistan Interior Minister Zakirdjon Almatov calls on converts to Wahhabism to turn themselves in, threatens "severe" punishment of those who do not.
9 Jun 99	Several defendants at trial for 16 Feb bomb attacks in Tashkent Uzbekistan admit to training in Chechnya under Khattab.
7 Aug 99	Basayev and Khattab lead invasion of Dagestan.
10 Aug 99	The "Islamic Shura of Dagestan" declares, from Groznyy, the restoration of an independent Islamic state in Dagestan and calls for support.
10 Aug 99	Leader of North Ossetia Muslims, Jankot-hadji Khekilayev denounces Wahhabi call to establish independent Islamic state in Caucasus.
12 Aug 99	Tatarstan Muslim Religious Board calls for halt in fighting in Dagestan and condemns participation of Muslim militants in fight against fellow Muslims.

Sources on the 1994-1996 War

Gall, Carlotta, and Thomas de Waal. Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus. New York: New York University Press, 1998.

Lieven, Anatol. Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.

Sources on the Current War

English language sources are not very good although anything by Gall, de Wall, or especially, Lieven is much better informed than most reports. Charles Blandy of the Royal Military College Sandhurst, is also very knowledgeable.

The reader who has followed me this far will have learned to be skeptical of accounts that talk about the "Great Game" or promulgate other geopolitical Beltway views. Two sources for Russian readers are: www.interfax.ru for Moscow's view and www.kavkaz.org for the Wahhabi view (site is apparently run by Movladi Udugov).

There is not a lot in English about the Chechens or the other Mountaineers but two books are:

Broxup, Marie Bennigsen, ed. The North Caucasus Barrier. London: Hurst, 1992.

Baddeley, John F. The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus. New York: Russell and Russell, 1969.

The real classic and admiring account of the life of the Imam Shamyl and the Great Caucasus War is The Sabres of Paradise by Lesley Blanch, now re-issued and available on Amazon.com.

Websites

· http://www.ahle-sunnat.org.uk/WAHABI.html (an attack on Wahhabism.)

· http://www.geocities.com/~abdulwahid/muslimarticles/dogs.html (Another attack on Wahhabism and a leader to other sites.)

· http://www.ummah.org.uk/islamic_institute/warning.html (Another attack on Wahhabism.)

· http://www.qss.org/articles/sufism/toc.html (A Wahhabi attack on Sufism.)

· http://www.sunnah.org/publication/salafi/tosos.htm (Counter blast to the above.)

· http://www.ahle-sunnat.org.uk/spy_1-7.html (a source claiming that Wahhabism was invented by the British in order to weaken Islam.)

· http://www.alharamain.org/wahabsm.htm (A pro-Wahhabi site).

· http://www.wm.edu/CAS/modlang/gasmit/ml250/fall97/zenz/Wahabism.html (A neutral account of Wahhabism.)

* Patrick Armstrong is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of The Journal of Conflict Studies.
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1. Sketches of the History of the Chechen-Ingush Republic, 1917-1970 vol II (Groznyy, 1972), p. 260.
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2. Marie Bennigsen Broxup, "After the Putsch, 1991," in Marie Bennigsen Broxup, ed., The North Caucasus Barrier (London: Hurst, 1992), p. 233.
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