Rewriting of History

From 1973 the coloniser justified the deportation and did not let the Chechens speak of it or of the military seizure of the region, and from 1979 it imposed a "concept" of "the 200th anniversary of the voluntary entry of Chechen-Ingushetia into Russia" and persecuted the historians who disputed it. At a meeting of the region's occupation administration on 27 March 1973 one of its leaders, Bokov, justified the eviction of 1944: "All this, in our view, forced the government to take this extreme measure in order to put an end to the anti-Soviet actions of the political bandit groups [the authorities' name for armed opponents], which found shelter among a significant part of the Chechen-Ingush population", and the minutes of the same meeting named the bearers of "nationalist" ideas one by one: "the writer Khalid Oshaev, expelled from the party, the former deputy director of a plant Kostoev B., the university lecturer and candidate of sciences Vagapov Ya."^[1]. Historian A. B. Kuznetsova writes that at the discussion of the two-volume "Essays on the History of the Chechen-Ingush ASSR" in 1973 the speakers criticised the "belittling" of the role of the Russian people and the works of the historian V. I. Filkin, "while not a word was said at the discussion about the deportation"^[2]. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write that the region's occupation administration launched a persecution of the Chechen intelligentsia "under the guise of a discussion around the 'concept' of the 200th anniversary of the voluntary entry of Chechen-Ingushetia into Russia", whose author was considered to be the archaeologist Vinogradov, and he "relied even on the authority of the CC of the CPSU [the central authority in Moscow]"^[3]. In February 1979 L. I. Lavrov, a historian of the Academy of Sciences, wrote on instructions from his superiors a review of the "Justification Memorandum" for the jubilee: the oaths of the 18th century "did not lead to the actual entry of the region into the Russian Empire, since even after the oaths no officials of the tsarist administration appeared there", and "the planned celebration of the jubilee, in the light of the above, appears historically unjustified"; historian V. P. Krikunov, who published the memorandum in 1990, writes: "The first copy of the memorandum got lost and, when the question of whether or not to celebrate the 200th 'jubilee' was being decided, was not taken into account (or rather, it was taken into account, and that, evidently, is why it got lost)"^[4]. Historian Viktor Shnirelman writes: "In those years Vinogradov became the chief adviser of the obkom of the CPSU [the region's occupation administration] on ideology and social sciences, which in effect made him the first censor of scholarly and publishing activity in the republic"; "Such Chechen and Ingush historians as M. N. Muzaev, A. Z. Vatsuev, Ya. Z. Akhmadov, Kh. Akiev, Ya. S. Vagapov, Kh. S. Akhmadov and others were subjected to persecution"; the 1977 book by the linguist Kyuri Chokaev, "The Language and History of the Vainakhs", "was declared in the obkom… a model of 'rabid nationalism', and the entire print run was destroyed on the spot"^[5]. Historians D. B. Abdurakhmanov and Ya. Z. Akhmadov also write that for disagreeing with the "concept" "there were officially pilloried [publicly disgraced] … the Chechen-Ingush State University lecturer F. P. Bokov, professors N. P. Gritsenko and V. P. Krikunov"^[6]. Shnirelman writes that Vlasov, head of the region's occupation administration, reproduced the concept "in his speech at the III plenum of the Chechen-Ingush obkom of the CPSU on 14 July 1979" and "gave instructions to propagate it widely in the local media", and in 1982 the jubilee of the "voluntary entry" was combined with the 60th anniversary of the republic: "On this occasion the republic was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labour; its leaders received awards too. In particular, Vlasov was presented with the Order of Lenin"^[5]. On 29 June 1984 the region's occupation administration recorded in its minutes on the work of the Institute of History, Sociology and Philology: "Vagapov Ya. S., Akhmadov Ya. Z., Vatsuev A. Z. permit themselves politically harmful judgements, dispute the scholarly validity of the concept of the voluntary entry of the Chechens and the Ingush into Russia"^[6]. Historians D. B. Abdurakhmanov and Ya. Z. Akhmadov write that only in 1990 did "the same organ of the CPSU revoke its decision concerning the institute and its staff as mistaken"^[6].