Copyright 1998 ABC-CLIO, Inc.  
Kaleidoscope

COUNTRY: Russia

PERSON: Dzhokar Dudayev

HEADLINE: Biographies

 


Until his death in April 1996, Dzhokar Dudayev was the leader of the breakaway Russian republic of Chechnya, a predominantly Muslim community situated in southern territory near the North Caucasus mountain range.  


Dudayev was born in 1944, the year his family was deported from the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic to Kazakhstan on the orders of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Of the 800,000 Chechens sent away because of Stalin's fears that the historically defiant people would collaborate with invading Nazi forces during World War II, almost a quarter of a million died in transit. Dudayev spent his childhood in northern Kazakhstan and attended Soviet military schools in his teens, took a Russian wife, and graduated from the Yuri Gagarin Air Force Academy in 1974. From 1987 to 1990, he commanded a division of Soviet bombers based in Estonia as a major general, the first Chechen in history to attain such a rank in the Soviet military. He earned a reputation as a commander tolerant of Estonian nationalist desires and refused to carry out central Soviet orders to close down the country's parliament and television stations.  


In 1990, his division withdrawn from Estonia, Dudayev retired from the Soviet Air Force and settled in Grozny, the Chechen capital, where he became the leader of the National Congress of the Chechen People, a nationalist opposition party. Following the abortive Moscow coup in August 1991 against Mikhail Gorbachev, Dudayev overthrew the leadership of the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic and unilaterally declared Chechnya independent from Russia. Russian troops sent by President Boris Yeltsin to put down the revolt were called back by a parliamentary order.  


Modeling himself on such past Chechen warrior sheiks as Imam Shamil, who fought a long war against czarist rule that was put down in 1864, Dudayev consistently flouted central Moscow control, survived many assassination attempts, and dodged a covert Russian effort to topple him. From 1991 he ran Chechnya as his outpost of organized crime, delving into arms and drug smuggling that spawned a class of rich Mercedes-driving hustlers and thugs who lived in "air houses" because the money that built them seemed to come from the air. A full-scale Russian invasion force, which entered the republic on Dec 11, 1994, has met with unexpectedly fierce resistance from Dudayev's fighters and Chechen volunteers, threatening to turn the conflict into a long and costly war on a scale with the Soviet war in Afghanistan. Dudayev was never very popular with the citizens of Chechnya but since the heavy-handed Russian assault on the republic and the verified atrocities committed by Russian soldiers, many of the survivors since voiced support for him. Dudayev, who had sworn to fight the Russians to the death, was killed by a Russian rocket around Apr 21, 1996 during a period of intensified airstrikes against Chechen strongholds.  


[Source: The New York Times]

LOAD-DATE: February 18, 1998
Copyright © 1998 LEXIS-NEXIS, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.