At the end of the day, the demonstrators refused an official order to disperse. Fires were lit in Revolution Square, sheep were roasted and crates of vodka brought in. The meeting continued in freezing cold for three days and nights while speaker after speaker denounced the injustices suffered by the Ingush under Soviet rule. One of the former deportees described seeing his bewildered mother with a baby in her arms kicked out of her house in 1944 by a Russian officer. In exile in Kazakhstan the ground had been so hard that it was difficult to dig graves for the families who died of cold and starvation. ‘I am glad’, the speaker concluded, ‘that I saw this with my own eyes so that my anger will never fade away.’ According to the KGB transcript of the meeting, a woman shouted from the speakers’ platform:
We have no mosques. We opened a mosque in Grozny but the authorities closed it. But this does not stop us praying. We Ingush believe in Allah. He listens to us and will help us. When we were in Kazakhstan, we prayed every day and asked Allah to punish those responsible for our misfortunes. He heard us. One after another they died or passed from the scene - Stalin, Beria, Malenkov, Molotov and Khrushchev. We will continue to pray secretly every day.
Two senior Party figures, Mikhail Solomentsev, the Russian Prime Minister, and Nikolai Shchelokov, the Soviet Interior Minister, were urgently despatched to Grozny to bring the demonstration to an end. At a meeting of Party activists, Solomentsev berated the local leadership for its inertia and cowardice. The regional Party Committee was disbanded and the local KGB and police chiefs dismissed. Though Solomentsev declared that the Politburo wished to end the demonstration without violence, the demonstrators continued to refuse to disperse. In a show of force the square was surrounded by soldiers and the entrances blocked by troop carriers and lorries, but the demonstrators were assured that if they dispersed no action would be taken against them. A hundred or so KGB agents were sent to mingle with the crowd and persuade them to leave. Some did, but the majority remained. Fire engines then drenched the crowd with freezing water from their hoses, and a combination of soldiers, KGB units and militiamen drove most of the demonstrators from the square. About 400 initially stood firm in the centre of the square but were finally beaten with rifle butts and truncheons into buses to be driven to detention by the KGB. Other mass demonstrations in Chechnya-Ingushetiya took place in Nazran, Malgobek and Sunzhensk.
27
The Centre ordered an immediate investigation. As when dealing with dissidents elsewhere in the Soviet bloc, a series of FCD illegals posing as outside sympathizers were sent to Grozny and other parts of Chechnya-Ingushetiya to make contact with leaders of the demonstrations. AKBAR, STELLA, SABIR, ALI and STRELTSOV were given Iranian passports, MARK, RAFIEV, DEREVLYOV and his wife DEREVLYOVA Soviet identity documents, KHALEF a Turkish passport, and BERTRAND a French passport.
28
A year earlier BERTRAND, posing as a French archaeologist, had succeeded in winning the confidence of the leading Russian dissident, Andrei Sakharov, privately described by Andropov as Public Enemy Number One.
29
In Grozny and Ordzhonokidze BERTRAND passed himself off as an academic from the University of Montpellier who had been invited by the Soviet Ministry of Higher Education to study the teaching of French and other foreign languages in the Soviet Union.
30
DEREVLYOV was later tasked with trying to penetrate the entourage of Pope John Paul II.
31
Based on intelligence from the illegals and other sections of the KGB, Andropov made a preliminary report to the Politburo in April 1973 on the reasons for the January unrest. He paid a grudging tribute to the efficiency with which the protests had been organized. The discipline and secrecy preserved beforehand by thousands of demonstrators had meant that no advance warning had reached the authorities. Andropov acknowledged frankly that the influence of the official Islamic directorate of the northern Caucasus was ‘minimal’: ‘As there are no official mosques, religious ceremonies are carried out secretly by believers.’ Real influence lay with the unauthorized mullahs who ‘do not stop believers joining the Party or the Komsomol as long as they remain true to the teachings of Islam. This they do.’
The KGB had successfully put pressure on many of the participants in the demonstration to make public statements of repentance. But, Andropov admitted, the vast majority of the population had been deeply impressed by the demonstration and were in favour of it:
The situation is such that [the January demonstration] could be repeated. The causes have not been eliminated. The local population is prejudiced against the Russians whom they hold responsible for all their troubles and misery. The expulsions in 1944 and the dominant influence of the Russians are the main causes of their hostility . . . There is also strong resistance to Russian culture and a feeling amongst the people that they do not want to mix with Russians. The palaces of culture, clubs, libraries, lecture rooms, theatres and other places of enlightenment are literally empty.
32
The KGB believed that disciplined and secretive Sufi brotherhoods were present in every town, street and village of Chechnya-Ingushetiya. The only authority which the people respected was that of the religious elders. Disputes were settled in Islamic courts and Soviet law ignored.
33
In reality, though the Centre refused to admit it, most KGB officers had given up hope of extending to the northern Caucasus much of the system of social control which they exercised in Russia. As a former KGB officer in Chechnya-Ingushetiya has since acknowledged, except when pressured by the Centre, the local KGB usually accepted the traditional system of justice administered by the Chechens themselves rather than insisting on the enforcement of Soviet law: ‘Otherwise, on the occasions when for some reason we really
had
to get a result, no one would even have talked to us.’
34
The most visible sign of the strength of Sufism during the 1970s was continued mass pilgrimages, despite official attempts to prevent them, to the Sufi holy places which were particularly numerous in the northern Caucasus. Many pilgrimages were accompanied by religious songs and dances, often performed with a fervour which the authorities condemned as frenzy. A Soviet study concluded in 1975:
Collective fanaticism and religious exaltation may reach high levels of paroxysm when the pilgrims, believers and unbelievers alike, including the students, sing for hours the litanies of the
zikr
- ‘There are no gods but God’. Pilgrims come from everywhere, from the villages and the cities, and when they return home, they sing religious songs and behave as active propagandists of holy places.
35
The KGB reported one occasion on which 40,000 pilgrims gathered at the tomb of the Sufi saint Hay Imam in Azerbaijan.
36
Even the destruction of religious monuments did not always deter the pilgrims. When the Uzbek authorities blew up the holy rock at Parpiata, the Muslim faithful constructed a pyramid from the remains, which they continued to venerate.
37
Moscow’s concern about the loyalty of its Muslim subjects in both the Caucasus and central Asia was heightened at the end of the 1970s by the ‘Islamic revolution’ in Iran and the beginning of the war in Afghanistan. In February 1979 Ayatollah Kazem Shari’atmadari broadcast from Tehran, ‘The Iranian people’s triumphant struggle constitutes a turning point in the history of world struggles and the best model to follow by the oppressed Muslim peoples of the world.’ As an Azeri Turk from Tabriz, Shari’atmadari probably had particularly in mind the oppressed Muslims of Azerbaijan.
38
The KGB active-measures campaign to discredit Shari’atmadari, prompted by his appeal to Soviet Muslims, probably contributed to his disgrace three years later.
39
In 1980 the Chairman of the Azerbaijani KGB, Yusif Zade, publicly denounced the ‘infiltration of foreign agents across our borders’ (an indirect reference to Iranian attempts to export the Khomeini brand of fundamentalism into Azerbaijan) and the ‘anti-social activity’ of ‘sectarians’ and ‘reactionary Muslim clergy’ (the traditional Soviet codewords for the Sufi brotherhoods and unauthorized mullahs).
40
The Azerbaijani journal
Kommunist
declared two years later that the rise in unauthorized ‘religious activity’ was ‘a direct consequence of the political-religious movement taking place in Iran’.
41
Reports from Azerbaijan and elsewhere in the Soviet Union
42
blaming Iran for an increase in ‘anti-social’ activity by Sunni as well as Shia Muslims cannot be taken entirely at face value. The KGB invariably tended to see foreign conspiracy as a major explanation for outbreaks of ‘ideological subversion’ within the Soviet Union. A special department was set up in the KGB Fifth Directorate ‘to fight the ideological subversion from foreign Muslims and the activities of the Islamic clergy’, as well as ‘to expose the negative aspects of religious observance’.
43
In September 1981 the Politburo adopted a resolution proposed by the KGB on ‘Measures to counter attempts by the adversary to use the Islamic factor for purposes hostile to the Soviet Union’.
44
An FCD directive approved by Andropov a month later instructed foreign residents ‘to devise and carry out offensive active measures to eradicate the anti-Soviet actions of hostile Islamic forces abroad, to expose their ties with Western special [intelligence] services, to bring a halt to their anti-Soviet actions, and to expose the contradictions and disagreements amongst the leaders of the Islamic movement and to use them in active measures’. To achieve these tasks, it would be necessary to establish ‘permanent surveillance’ of leading foreign Muslims with ‘strong anti-Soviet views’ and to place agents in Islamic organizations of all kinds. A working group containing members of ten foreign intelligence departments was set up under the chairmanship of the FCD deputy head, Yakov Prokofyevich Medyanik, to draw up a detailed plan of action for the period 1982-85 to ‘counter attempts by the West to use the Islamic factor against the USSR’ .
45
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 and the war which followed (discussed in the next chapter), however, proved a fundamental obstacle to the KGB’s attempts to extend Soviet influence in the Islamic world. On 14 January 1980 the UN General Assembly passed a resolution calling for ‘immediate, unconditional and total withdrawal of foreign troops’ from Afghanistan by a majority of 104 to 18 votes. KGB active measures proved powerless to prevent further hostile votes.
46
Similar UN resolutions were passed by massive majorities every year until Gorbachev finally agreed to withdraw Soviet troops in 1988.
47
The war also strengthened Moscow’s doubts about the loyalty of its Muslim subjects. In late February 1980, after some central Asian troops in Afghanistan had gone over to the
mujahideen
, Moscow began withdrawing Muslim troops and replacing them with Russian units. The central Asian press switched from propaganda celebration of the supposed ‘friendship’ between Soviet Muslims and their Russian ‘Elder Brother’ to emphasizing the ability of the ‘Elder Brother’ to eliminate ‘traitors’ and maintain law and order. There was an unprecedented flood of articles and publications eulogizing ‘our brave Chekisty’ and the proud legacy of ‘Iron Feliks’.
48
The deputy head of the Tajik KGB, A. Belousov, reported that the CIA’s aim in the war in Afghanistan was not merely to defeat the Red Army and the Communist regime but ‘to destabilize the central Asian republics of the USSR’.
49
Abroad, the ambitious FCD programme to extend Soviet influence in the Islamic world rapidly degenerated into a damage limitation exercise designed to stifle as many Muslim protests against the war in Afghanistan as possible. The Centre was reduced to reporting as successes cases where its agents at international Islamic conferences had managed to prevent the tabling of critical resolutions on the war.
50
But the official Soviet representatives also suffered many setbacks. At the meeting in Mecca of the Supreme World Council of Mosques in 1983, the head of the Soviet delegation, Grand Mufti Shamsutdin Babakhanov, tried in vain to keep Afghanistan off the agenda. The Centre claimed that he had won the consent of delegates from Jordan, Libya, Tunisia and the United States, but that the Saudi royal family had insisted on discussing the role of Soviet troops in the war.
51
Vladimir Kryuchkov told a conference of FCD departmental heads early in 1984, ‘. . . Anti-Soviet pronouncements from reactionary Muslim organizations have intensified.’
52
Despite the formidable problems created by the war in Afghanistan, the main threats to the maintenance of Soviet authority in the Muslim regions were internal. Islamic religious practice obstinately refused to go away, while the proportion of Muslims in the Soviet population increased steadily throughout the middle and later years of the Cold War. Until the 1950s ongoing Slav immigration had seemed to guarantee Moscow’s continued dominance of Muslim areas. From the late 1950s onward, however, there was net Slav emigration from most of the Muslim republics. Simultaneously the Muslim birth rate began to outstrip that of the Slavs. Between 1959 and 1979 Muslims increased from less than one-eighth to one-sixth of the total Soviet population. By the 1988/89 academic year half of all primary schoolchildren came from Muslim backgrounds.
53