The Eurasian Triangle. Russia, the Caucasus and Japan, 1904-1945

“Pacication” Ë 107

5.1 “Pacication”

In 1922 the three Southern Caucasian Soviet Republics were merged into one and then

incorporated as a constituent republic, the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet

Republic, of the newly created Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (Later, in 1936, the

Transcaucasian Republic was dissolved into the Armenian, Azerbaijan, and Georgian

Soviet Socialist Republics.) The Northern Caucasus was incorporated into the Rus-

sian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, the dominant constituent republic of the

Union. Much of the Northern Caucasus, however, underwent a complex process of re-

gionalization: the Mountaineer Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, created in 1921,

spawned various autonomous units (such as Balkar, Chechen, Kabardian, Karachai,

and Ingush), which, in 1924, were incorporated into the Northern Caucasus Krai (Re-

gion).

This administrative Sovietization did not mean that the Caucasus was politically

Sovietized; indeed, rebellions against Soviet rule continued, for although the Soviet

government had conquered the Caucasus, it could not easily “pacify” the region. Soon

after the Civil War ended, rebellions again came to characterize the Caucasus. As one

Russian historian has noted: “Rebellions in Chechnia, Dagestan, TerekOblast’and

Transcaucasia for all practical purposes did not subside, one growing into the next.

The Civil War in the Caucasus was protracted and complex. The Soviet government

only succeeded in containing the rebellions by March 1922, and rebellions continued

to are up in 1925 and in the 1930s, with no end in sight.”⁴With respect to Muslims,

pacication of the Caucasus proved much harder than that of Turkestan because the

former, unlike the latter, had few native Muslims on the Soviet side: the Mountaineer

Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was completely dominated by (mostly Chris-

tian) Ossetians and Russians.⁵As another historian has noted, “From 1922 to 1943,

the history of Chechnia and Dagestan was an almost uninterrupted succession of re-

bellions, counter-expeditions and ‘political banditism’ ” with uprisings occurring in

1924, 1928, and 1936.⁶Even in non-Muslim areas, the insurgency died hard: as late as

the summer of 1921 the People’s Army of the Northern Caucasus, the Kuban Insurgent

Army” (led by M. A. Przheval’skii), and other units were operating many thousands

strong, some of whom were coordinating with similar movements in Ukraine.⁷

4 N.E. Eliseeva, “Chechnia: vooruzhennaia bor’ba v 20-30-e gody.”Voenno-istoricheskii arkhiv, no. 2
(1997), 123.
5 Alex Marshall,The Caucasus under Soviet Rule(London-New York: Routledge, 2006), 163.
6 Marie Bennigsen Broxup, “The LastGhazawat: The 1920–1921 Uprising,” inThe North Caucasus
Barrier: The Russian Advance towards the Muslim World, ed. by Marie Bennigsen Broxup (London:
Hurst, 1992), 143.
7 Tat’iana Simonova, “Ustanovlenie Sovetskoi vlasti na Severnom Kavkaze, 1918–1921 gg.”Dialog
2001, no. 12, 67.