Historical Memory and Political Mobilisation: the Case of contemporary Chechnya

During the two decades that followed the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Autonomous Republic of Chechnya at Russia’s southern periphery has experienced two bloody armed conflicts (1994–1996; 1999–2009) (Tishkov 2001; Gammer 2006; Le Huérou et al. 2014). This paper explores the causal links between historical memory, radicalisation and conflict. As a case study, it investsigates the memory of the Stalinist deportation of the quasi-entire Chechen population (1944–1957) and its significance for the socio-political processes in post-Soviet Chech-nya. Comparing two key moment in the collective memory of the deportation (1944 and 2014) it argues that changes in the local, national and international context greatly impacted on the causal relationship between historical memory and conflict in this respective moment. increasingly au-thoritarian government, which promotes its own, russified version of Chechen history. On the one hand, in a situation of state-collapse and nationalist mobilisation in the 1990s, the unifying myth of the deportation was an important factor in the process of radicalisation and separatism. In the 2010s, on the other hand, the the deportation has at least in the public space losts its mobilising role, after being co-opted by an increasingly authoritarian government. The paper draws on data collected from local (Chechen) journals and newspapers, interviews, social media and diaries. It departs from a relational approach to conflict analysis (della Porta 2018; Alimi, Bosi, and Demetriou 2012; Tilly and Tarrow 2015; Hughes and Sasse 2016), focusing on actions (here: the instrumentalisation of the past) as a result of the larger socio-political context (here: the collapse of the Soviet Union, nationalist mobilisation, state collapse), and of interactions and alliances of the actors involved. Located at the intersection between conflict- and memory studies, the paper thus adds valuable insights to the study of the pre-war period in post-Soviet Chechnya, and in general to the concep-tual discussion about the link between historical memory and conflict.