Lessons Learned From Russia’s Battles With Ethnic Militants Chechnya To The Moscow Theater Incident

13 Pages 3176 Words

Lessons Learned from Russia’s Battles with Ethnic Militants Chechnya to the Moscow Theater Incident

The Russian Empire began the effort to impose state power over Muslim enclaves in 1722, following its first military encounter with Chechen fighters. The Chechens engaged and chased out a cavalry force sent by Peter the Great. Two centuries later the Soviet Union continued the process, with elaborate plans to depopulate large areas being discussed at the highest levels of government; Evangelista writes, “The proposal to abolish the Cheno-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR) and expel its population was discussed at a meeting of the Politburo on February 11, 1943.”1 Russian Tsars, dictators, and presidents did their best to distract, dilute, and destroy hegemonic Islam.

With all its evil designs on global conquest, the USSR actually did something positive – it forestalled militant Islam. Through its intelligence agencies, Soviet Russian leadership was acutely aware of the growing problem with jihadi radicalism. The Soviets endured international criticism for clearing large areas of Muslims; but ethnic pogroms were really nothing new. As Matthew Evangelista wrote in The Chechen Wars, Will Russia Go the Way of the Soviet Union?, “The Russian government during the tsarist era carried out three major deportations, setting the precedent for Stalin’s genocidal actions against the Chechen people in the 1940s.”2

Russia’s spy agency, the KGB, informed Joseph Stalin that Islamic militants presented a looming problem. The policy of enforced atheism had evidently bounced off Muslims, who continued to practice the tenets of Islam in secret. Knowing that oppressed religious practice is the fertile soil of revolution, Stalin ordered entire Muslim areas depopulated, with the former inhabitants moved by train and then widely dispersed. Stalin took advantage of every excuse to round up and deport Muslims. In Chechnya,...