Russian Genocide of Chechens

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After World War II, the genocide of Jews by the Germans across German-occupied territory was on everyone’s minds. Although it was a horrible event in recent history, the Holocaust was not the only genocide of that period. Joseph Stalin ordered 400,000 Chechens and Ingush to be deported to Siberia and central Asia to be put into labor camps on February 23, 1944 (“Greetings from Grozny”). The genocide of the Chechen population has been a terrible event and other genocides around the world should be stopped by efforts of individuals and the United States government.
This area has been subject to genocide since the Second World War. Chechnya is a small region in the Northern Caucasus mountain range in southwest Russia. (“Chechnya”). It is near the Caspian Sea. The genocide of the Chechen people began in 1944 when Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union, began “moving whole nationalities like chess pieces on the board” (Pereltsvaig). On November 23, 1990, Chechnya declared itself an independent nation (“Greetings form Grozny”). The reasons Stalin caused this genocide were thus: he needed laborers to extract resources from Siberia, and to grow the economy he needed to move workers to wherever a spot was empty (Pereltsvaig). If Stalin had not started this genocide almost seventy years ago, modern events such as the Boston Marathon Bombing may never have occurred. Over 150,000 Chechens were killed in the 1990s (freechechnya.org). President Yeltsin of Russia declared war on Chechnya and subsequently caused the deaths of 100,000 Chechens and the Chechen president before having Russian forces pushed out of Chechnya (Dupuis). In 1997, Vladmir Putin bombed and destroyed 90% of the capital city of Grozny before invading and captu...

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