Moscow Mistakenly Continues to View North Ossetia as Its Ally in the North Caucasus, Ingush Writer Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, February 26 – Just as many in Europe and the US view countries in other regions whose populations are predominantly Christian as more likely to be on their side than those with non-Christian majorities, so too Russians have long considered the predominantly Orthodox Christian Ossetians as Russia’s “advance post” in that Muslim area.

            That has had the effect of leading the central Russian government not only to tilt in South Ossetia’s direction but also to overlook Ossetia’s actions both toward other North Caucasus republics and their Muslim populations and against Moscow as doing World War II when far more Ossetians joined the Germans than did Ingush.

            It may now have an additional and possibly more compelling reason to back North Ossetia: its desire to continue to project Russian influence and power into South Ossetia, the breakaway republic whose de facto independence Vladimir Putin engineered by invading the Republic of Georgia in August 2008.

            As a result, Ingush commentator Magomed-Rashid Pliyev says, North Ossetia’s  neighbors in general and Ingushetia in particular have suffered from Ossetian imperial ambitions and the Russian authorities have responded either by ignoring what the Ossetians have been doing or blaming their victims (6portal.ru/posts/изнанка-форпоста-россии-на-северном/).

            Many know about the conflict between North Ossetia and Ingushetia in 1992 over the former’s refusal to follow Soviet law and return the land that Ossetia absorbed from Ingushetia when the latter was disbanded at the time of the deportation of the Ingush in 1944. But fewer are aware of the pre-history of that policy.

            “With the disintegration of the Mountaineer Republic and the formation of the Ingush and Ossetian autonomies [in the 1920s], Pliyev says, “Ossetia openly began to aspire to Ingush lands in order to create in the North Caucasus ‘Greater Alania.’” Ossetian leaders called for the forcible resettlement of Ingush and the formation of the binational Chechen-Ingush republic to make it more difficult for the Ingush to block Ossetian moves.

            With deportation, he continues, “the alliance of Ossetia and Stalin or Stalin and Ossetia continued to follow its plan for the seizure of Ingush territories. In 1949, Ossetia leaders spoke openly about how Stalin had allowed Ossetia to increase its territory “up to 50 percent” and treated that as something permanent.

           

            When the Ingush deportees were returned and their republic was restored, the commission overseeing the restoration of the Chechen-Ingush ASSR, which was headed by Armenian Anastas Mikoyan, decided not to give back to the Ingush either the Prigorodny or the Malgobek districts. And Ossetia blocked the return of Ingush to these areas.

            According to Pliyev, the Ossetians routinely exploited Moscow’s positive feelings toward them as a Christian republic in a sea of Muslims even when they violated Soviet law and demonstrated against Moscow as they did violently in 1980. And they got away with it because Moscow didn’t want to lose its “advance post” in the region.

            Despite Ossetian claims, “Ossetia has never been an advance post of Russia: neither in tsarist Russia nor in the Soviet period.” Compelling documentation of one aspect of this is a new book by Lors Darlyasky, Ossetians in the Service of the Third Reich (in Russian; Moscow: 2019).

            Among the facts he produces one is especially damning. A list of prisoners in Soviet camps at the end of 1941 who had behaved in a traitorous fashion during the German advance was headed by Ossetians. More people from that nationality worked for the Nazis than any other up to that point. There were no Chechens, Ingush, ethnic Russians or Jews on the list.

            Yet, Pliyev says with regret, Stalin deported the Ingush and the Chechens but continued to view as have his successors Ossetians as Russia’s reliable allies.

            Meanwhile, in another development that likely points to Ingushetia’s weakening position with respect to Moscow, regional experts whom Kavkaz-Uzel surveyed said that Ramzan Kadyrov had restored the public commemoration of the date of the deportation of the Vaynakh peoples in his republic because, he again feels himself in a strong position (kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/346360/).