Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 26 – Thirty years
ago, Boris Yeltsin signed a law passed by the RSFSR Supreme Soviet calling for
the rehabilitation of those nations Stalin had repressed by allowing them to
return to their homelands and providing them with compensation for their
losses. It also banned any propaganda efforts directed against such peoples and
the recovery of their lawful rights.
But three decades later, Boris
Sokolov says, not a single one of its provisions has been enforced. And
consequently, a measure which raised so many hopes among those who were deported
and whose autonomies were suppressed, remains a source of tension in many parts
of the Russian Federation (graniru.org/Society/History/m.281621.html).
According to the Russian historian,
the act had only one single practical consequence: it sparked the war between
the Ingush and the Ossetians over the Prigorodny District next to the North
Ossetian capital of Vladikavkaz. Inspired by the law, Ingush who had been
expelled from there during Stalin’s deportation returned in massive numbers to
claim it.
The Prigorodny District had been
part of the Chechen-Ingush ASSR prior to the deportations, and the Ingush
reasonably assumed that the 1991 law meant that they should be allowed to live
there and that it should again become part of what had become the Ingush
Republic. They were quickly and violently disabused.
Yeltsin, instead of enforcing the
law he had signed, sent in police and interior troops to support the Ossetians,
an action that left more than 400 Ingush and 100 Ossetians dead and that
remains a source of dispute to this day. (On the Prigorodny District conflict’s
echoes now, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2020/11/ingush-court-allows-appeal-of-ban-on.html.)
Of course, Sokolov observes the 1991
law contained within it two poison pills that made it impossible to fulfill: it
said the deported peoples had the right to return but that their return must
not disturb any people who had moved into their lands, and it failed to appropriate
funds to compensate anyone.
As a result, it was a “purely propagandistic”
measure. But propaganda measures can have consequences both immediate as in the
Prigorodny District war and longer-term. And the 1991 law features one
provision that may cause Moscow problems no matter how much the current powers
that be refuse to acknowledge it.
That provision is the definition of
repressed peoples. The 1991 law specifies that repressed peoples are “nations,
nationalities or ethnic groups or other historically evolved cultural-ethnic
communities, for example, the Cossacks, in relation to whom according to ethnic
or other membership were carried out at the state level policies of slander and
genocide.”
And in their case, it continues, this
was accompanied by their forcible resettlement, destruction of their
national-territorial formations, redrawing of national-territorial borders, and
the establishment of a regime of terror and force in the places of their
special settlement” beyond their historical homelands.
That provides a basis for claims by
far more groups than just those usually listed as “the punished peoples” and for
a wholesale reordering of the political system of the Russian Federation. Not
surprisingly, the Kremlin doesn’t want to think or talk about this, but on this
anniversary at least some of these victims and their descendants are.
Among them are the Cossacks and
especially the Ingush. On the former, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2021/02/russians-again-worried-about-cossack.html;
on the latter, https://gazetaingush.ru/politika/yakub-patiev-realizaciya-zakona-eto-ne-reshenie-odnogo-dnya-i-dazhe-goda-zdes-neobhodim.)
