Savranskaya, ed., “The September 11th Sourcebooks Volume II,” 2–3.
15.
Cf. Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism, 389–390: “At the beginning of that month [July] a two-day Politburo meeting found
Brezhnev and Kosygin still favouring intense pressure on Dubček—to remove the people
in high office whom the Soviet leadership most objected to, and to crack down on the
mass media—whereas several others already favoured the use of force. They included
KGB chairman Yury Andropov and the Central Committee secretary (later to be minister
of defense) who supervised the military and military industry, Dmitry Ustinov.”
16.
Ion Mihai Pacepa, “No Peter the Great: Vladimir Putin is in the Andropov Mold,” National Review Online (September 20, 2004).
17.
Cf. Vladimir Solovyov and Elena Klepikova, Inside the Kremlin (London: W.H. Allen & Co Plc., 1988), 246: “We know, then, where to assign responsibility
for that occupation [of Afghanistan]. Although it took place in the last phase of
the Brezhnev era, the authorship of that deed must be ascribed to the empire’s regent,
Andropov (by that time all-powerful), his supporters, and others he could count on.”
18.
Cf. Vladimir Fédorovski, Le Fantôme de Staline (Paris: Éditions du Rocher, 2007), 227. Before he died Andropov had informed his
entourage that he wanted Gorbachev to succeed him as general secretary. The politburo,
however, ignored Andropov’s wish and chose, after four days of deliberations, the
seventy-three-year-old Chernenko. Andropov’s preference for Gorbachev, however, had
nothing to do with Andropov’s supposed “liberal” or “democratic” leanings. Andropov
wanted economic reforms (such as he had witnessed in Kadar’s Hungary), while maintaining
a repressive political regime. Gorbachev would later remain rather evasive about his
close relationship with the former KGB chief. In his conversations with the Czech
dissident (and study friend) Zdenĕk Mlynář he called Andropov “a very interesting
and complex personality. . . . Andropov definitely wanted to start making changes,
. . . but there were certain bounds he could not go beyond; he was too deeply entrenched
in his own past experience—it held him firmly in its grasp.” (Mikhail Gorbachev and
Zdenĕk Mlynář, Conversations with Gorbachev on Perestroika, the Prague Spring, and the Crossroads
of Socialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 50.)
19.
Borovik, The Hidden War: A Russian Journalist’s Account of the Soviet War in Afghanistan, 14.
20.
The related Chechens and Ingushes lived together in the Checheno-Ingush Autonomous
Socialist Soviet Republic. When the Ingush, who constituted a minority, did not want
to follow the Chechens on the road toward independence, the Supreme Soviet of the
Russian Federation founded, in June 1992, the Republic of Ingushetia.
21.
John B. Dunlop quotes the testimony of one of the victims, a Chechen communist, as
follows: “Packed in overcrowded cattle cars, without light or water, we spent almost
a month heading to an unknown destination . . . . Typhus broke out. No treatment was
available . . . . The dead were buried in snow.” According to Dunlop, “the local populace
of settlements at which the special trains stopped were strictly forbidden to assist
the dying by giving them water or medicine. In some cars, 50 percent of the imprisoned
Chechens and Ingush were said to have perished.” (John B. Dunlop, Russia Confronts Chechnya: Roots of a Separatist Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 68.)
22.
Eric D. Weitz, “Racial Politics without the Concept: Reevaluating Soviet Ethnic and
National Purges,” Slavic Review 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002), 3.
23.
Weitz, “Racial Politics Without the Concept,” 3.
24.
Georgi Derluguian, “Introduction,” in Anna Politkovskaya, A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches of Chechnya (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 20.
25.
Cf. Vicken Cheterian, War and Peace in the Caucasus: Russia’s Troubled Frontier (London: Hurst & Company, 2008), 258.
26.
