Chechnya: 5 Things Men Should Know
3- Chechnya's geography gives us the word "Caucasian"Another thing men should know about Chechnya is that its geography amid the Caucasus Mountains lent itself to the racial identifier "Caucasian" despite the fact that its origins are dubious and that it has been fully discredited.
According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, this association was first made by the German anthropologist Johann Blumenbach in 1795, who extracted the term "Caucasian" and applied it to the white race because he believed the region was that race's ancestral homeland.
4- Stalin committed genocide on Chechnya during World War IIThe rebellious nature of the people of Chechnya has proven costly over the years, as it has generally been met with an iron-fisted response and resulted in the deaths of freedom fighters and innocents equally. Perhaps never was this so horrifically the case than in the wake of the Nazi retreat from Russia following the tide-turning battle of Stalingrad.
In February of 1944, Stalin, convinced that the people of Chechnya had collaborated with the German army, sought to teach them a lesson in Stalinist cruelty and ordered the deportation of over 386,000 native Chechen peoples to Siberian gulags. This act, which resulted in the deaths of at least one in three deportees, was finally declared in 2004 as an act of genocide by the European Parliament.
5- At one point, only the Taliban recognized Chechnya's separatist governmentThe last thing men should know about Chechnya concerns the shaky Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, the region's come-and-go separatist government.
Formed in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, many of its leaders have, over the years, operated under the protection of asylum in Europe and the United States, largely because it has struggled mightily to earn loyalty from within its own borders and acceptance at the international level. Legitimacy for any newly formed rebel government comes from official recognition by other governments and governmental bodies around the world, and in this regard the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria has run into major hurdles. At one point, the only other government in the world that formally recognized its existence was Afghanistan's Taliban — hardly the glowing stamp of approval to make Moscow reconsider its hard-line historical stance against Chechen autonomy.