| Abstract | During the course of the nineteenth century, Chechen murids (literally "students," holy warriors belonging to Sufi clan-based orders) fought a bloody war against the encroaching Russian Empire during which many of these highlanders' villages were burnt and their inhabitants slaughtered by the invading Russian forces. The grave sites of slain murids and sheikhs (Sufi religious leaders) continued to be memorials to this struggle and sites of pilgrimage for devout Chechen Muslims through the Soviet period, despite the authorities' attempts to eradicate such "primitive superstitious holdovers." Visiting the site of a murid's tomb was both an affirmation of the Chechens' Islamic identity during a period of enforced Communist atheism and a link to their revered ancestors. The collective memory of Russia's brutal subjugation of the Chechens' ancestors was kept alive during the Soviet period despite the fact that Chechen murids who had fought against Russia were described in official Soviet texts as "fanatical reactionaries" and "bourgeois bandits."
In the process of passing on transgenerational stories of the "chosen trauma" there is a certain mythologizing of the event as it becomes a part of a people's collective memory. Many Chechens now claim that half of their nation died during the deportation and exile, and stories passed on from one generation to another of mass slaughter, "genocide" and the deaths of "hundreds of thousands" of Chechens have become part of the Chechen national mythology.(39) According to one account of the 1994-1996 Chechen conflict, "[t]he exile in Central Asia left deep wounds and made a new generation of Chechens, whose grandparents had died fifty years before, that much more prepared to go to the edge in conflict with Russia."(40) Groups with a collective memory of past victimization certainly respond to real or perceived threats to their community differently from those who have not experienced such traumas. The post-Holocaust Jews of Israel are the most obvious example of a community that has been shaped by memories of its tragic history, but the Palestinians' communal memory has been shaped in similar ways by the tragedy of al-naqba (the disaster), the expulsion and flight of around 750,000 Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, while today's Armenians are also deeply affected by their communal memory of genocide in the Ottoman Empire in 1915. Thus, after the slaughter of Armenians by Azerbaijanis in the Azerbaijani town of Sumgait in February 1988, just prior to the outbreak of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict, one Armenian claimed that "Sumgait exacerbated everything...the genocide of 1915 is always in front of our eyes, a reason for our seriousness. The road toward massacre is always a possibility."(41)
In light of these events it is not surprising that, after the Chechen retreat into the southern mountains, Russia's generals in Grozny were prepared for a determined Chechen counterattack on Grozny-Djohar designed to coincide with the anniversary of the deportation.(73) Precautions were also made throughout the Russian Federation against a surprise repeat of Basaev's raid into Russia during the previous war which might be timed to coincide with this symbolic date. At the time of the writing of this article, the Russian hopes for a quick "pacification" of the Chechen guerrillas and the absorption of Chechnya into Russia seem remote indeed. A Russian source recently reported that "[t]he full integration of the Republic of Chechnya into the Russian Federation is impossible -- it is hindered by historical memory, the experience of the past decade's two wars and the peculiarities of Chechen mentality, customs etc."(74) The Chechens' historical experience would seem to bear out this gloomy prognosis, as one Chechen spokesman recently concluded: "At the end, the Chechen nation will defeat Russia, because we fought them for 400 years. And my children's attitude towards Russia and Russians is more negative than my own."(75) Thus, as Russia once more engages in brinkmanship with the secessionist Chechens and resumes the bombing of civilian centers so emblematic of the 1994-1996 Chechen War, those in charge of this military operation would benefit from an understanding of the salient nature of the Chechens' collective memory of past victimization at the hands of Russia and the ways in which this memory will certainly shape their views of their northern neighbor for decades to come.
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