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Vakhi Surkho for the SNA CHECHENPRESS, April, 2nd 2008
In the light of the theories of the ethnogenetic and civilisational development of mankind.
What is happening in Chechnya and the rest of the Caucasus today? What motivates the Chechens in their struggle? There can only be one answer to these questions. There is an ongoing jihad in the Caucasus – a fight for the right of the Caucasus Muslims to determine their own order in life. It is the struggle which is fuelled by their faith and the memories of their glorious ancestors, the struggle in the blaze of which a Caucasus nation is being forged.
The problem is that as soon as an organism shows some activity, its body is immediately attacked by parasites which begin to suck its blood. In our case it is a vast army of loud mouths, heralds on both sides of the barricades. They parasitize on the struggle of the Chechen people for whom this is not a whim or amusement but a grim reality.
It is clear that if the Chechen people had remained still in the chains of the Russian slavery, quietly and calmly living the rest of its days as a single nation, there would not have been such a noisy crowd around it with all their clamour and the din.
Let us consider the issue from a different angle. What was the real reason for the confrontation between Chechnya and Russia? It is often reiterated on both sides that religious extremism was at the heart of this confrontation. ‘Russia is an Orthodox country, an assignee of the Byzantium and its ideology’. ‘Chechnya is the advanced post of the Islamic world’. ‘The Caucasus is the place where the interests of these two civilisations have come into conflict’. These and other truisms have become fixed in the consciousness of an average man.
All the above happens in real life, of course, but it is much more complicated than the picture presented. If Russia was defending the interests of the Orthodox, why has it occupied Ukraine and Belarus, then? Why has it so mercilessly suppressed throughout the centuries the popular uprisings in Ukraine? Why would it first conquer and then bring to the heel and steep in blood the Christian Lithuania and Poland? If Muslims hate the Orthodox power so much, why did Kazan and Astrakhan, Siberia and Central Asia surrender to it without much resistance? (With the exception of the Bukhara and the Khivy Khanates)
The Cossacks swept through those Muslim territories like it was a stroll. Why then since the day of their conquest and until today there have not been any uprisings in the history of those Islamic lands whereas there have been countless uprisings in the Christian lands of Poland and Ukraine – generation after generation? Why had Muslims – Tatars and Bashkirs – not rushed to help their brothers in the Caucasus, who had been fiercely resisting the Russian Empire and its colonial appetites whereas a lot of Russians and Poles had come over to the Chechens? These are all questions which require answers.
Reality and its adequate assessment always present a problem. It is so much more problematic when the assessment is about war events when there are two sides of a coin, two conflicting opinions. And if we are talking about a popular liberation struggle, the myths and different interpretations around it are manifold, because the number of different imperatives in it, as the case of a civil war, is greater than in a war between two different states or blocks.
Human bio-energy is the only driving force of all social and political processes in the world. But it is not the bio-energy of one individual, but of an ethnic group, a social group which possess some single averaged out stereotypical behaviour. In other words, it is the bio-energy of a people. I think that for any sensible person this is an indisputable fact. One could, of course, argue about the decisive role of a charismatic personality or, conversely, of a ‘passionary’ people in the events, but this is yet another story. I think that these are two sides of one coin. The fact is that a leader can acquire charisma and fulfill himself only among a ‘passionary’ people. Whereas it is religion, in other words, ideology, an idea that drives and directs this energy of a people. But in the people which does not possess this concentration of ethno-biological energy religion on its own, as an idea, cannot be the driver of an inert mass.
The bio-energy of ethnic social groups, therefore, in other words, of peoples – is the driving force of all social processes, and wars, in particular. Understanding the nature of ethnic groups and the nature of their relationships is the corner stone in the understanding of the essence of interethnic wars.
There is no doubt that all Russian-Chechen wars have always been and still are interethnic by nature. The different faiths of the conflicting sides only increase the degree of tension in this struggle. But it is also a fact that given the circumstances of their historic development the two peoples were bound to clash even if they had been followers of the same religion as in the example of Ukrainians and Poles. And as the answer to the military events and social and political processes in the Caucasus lies in the force of this tension of the bioenergy of the peoples involved in it, we need to turn to ethnology as the science which studies ‘ethno-genesis’ – the process of formation and development of peoples.
I would like to curb from the outset the sceptical attacks of the notorious ‘religious sceptics’. These guardians of ‘true faith’ think that the Koran contains ready answers to all the questions in the world, whereas all sciences are a heresy and rubbish. The Koran provides clear indications to the faithful only as far as their worship of the Creator is concerned. As far as everything else in concerned the Koran simply determines the principles and the criteria according to which a Muslim should independently develop his own existence. The first Muslims were famous for their respect for the sciences. A disregard for the sciences by subsequent generations has accounted for the present state of Muslims as colonial and post colonial peoples.
For a man in the street the science of ethnology has come to be associated with the fashionable theory of ‘passionarity’ by Lev Gumilev. The Russian historian and ethnologist had made his own considerable contribution to the science but it did exist before him and will continue to exist after him. I know that Lev Nikolaevich was a proponent of the idea of Russia as a great power in his academic and literary works but this is of no consequence to us. Everyone should be a patriot of his country. We put aside everything which has anything to do with the Eurasian idea and take only the dry model of ethnic development as a scientific theory. Whatever our pious ‘nihilists’ might say and despite the fact that the theory itself has a number of disputable aspects, it would be wrong to reject the model of evolutionary development of ethnic groups proposed by Lev Nikolaevich. This would be as absurd as to deny the well-known patterns which are characteristic of the nature of other organisms created by Allah.
In reality a birth of a people – is not like a birth of sons to a legendary hero ethnarch [ethnic hero], in our case, to Turpal-Nokhcho. Such legends are a simplified explanation of the complex process which is a birth of a people. A birth of a people is when a people previously unknown or forgotten (a relict) all of a sudden informs the world of its existence, i.e. stands out by its life rhythm which is filled with such an energy that it becomes the talking point of everyone, not simply the neighbouring nations. This moment could be called a ‘passionary’ impetus. ‘Passionarity’ is an overflowing biological energy of certain individuals who set a whole people in motion.
It is noteworthy that our distant ancestors who had created the legend of Turpal-Nokhcho really understood how this process develops and had managed to convey it in a very graphic and vivid way: ‘Tu’rakh skh’adul’jlu I sujnash sanna, Turpala-Nochkhokha sk’abo’vla nokhchij’ (‘The Chechens descended/came from Turpal-Nokhchi like sparks come from a blade’). This phrase perceives the energy impact required to produce sparks as a necessary condition for the birth of a people.
I consider the year 1722 (23) the starting point of such a ‘passionary’ impulse for the modern day Chechens. That year during the Derbent campaign of the Russian Emperor Peter the Great in a large scale battle near Enderi (Bajtog’ekh’) the Chechens successfully defeated a military division composed of regular and irregular cavalry units under the command of General Veterani.
(To be continued)
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