After Deportation

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of the period from deportation and exile to the Chechen separatist movement of the early 1990s. While life in exile had changed people, many North Caucasians had yet to come to terms with unresolved traumas upon their return to their homeland in the second half of the 1950s. The problem was not a “lack of Sovietization,” as some Russian historians infer, but the fact that the discrimination and injustice experienced by these peoples under Stalinism could not be discussed at any time during the late Soviet era. There might have been an occasion for a true reconciliation with history and with Russia at the end of the 1980s and in the early 1990s, during the period of “glasnost” and “perestroika” under Gorbachev and Yel’tsin, when a clear reckoning was held concerning the crimes during the Stalinist era. However, this opportunity was tragically missed in the course of resurgent Chechen nationalism and the wars that Russia waged in the 1990s and 2000s against this small Caucasus republic.