Yesterday it was announced that the Chechen poet Shamil Arbinin (pictured), whose arrest we reported a year ago, has been sentenced to 10 years in prison (https://golosislama.com/news.php?id=39654). Another draconian sentence in Putin’s Russia does not surprise anyone anymore. This also applies to poets, as it has often been said that the Stalinist era is returning, when poets were imprisoned in labor camps.
What is remarkable about this news is something else. If such a sentence had been passed on a Chechen poet by a court in Moscow or any other ordinary Russian city, it would not have caused any surprise in today’s times. But the sentence to a Chechen poet for «events of the past» was pronounced by a court in Grozny. And it was pronounced against a person who lived peacefully in Russia and visited Chechnya to present his poetry, which suggests that he had some reason to feel safe. And now — not only 10 years, but specifically by the court in Grozny.
It is worth noting that this sentence coincided with Ramzan Kadyrov’s recent statement, in which he identified himself with those who fought against Ichkeria not only in the Second Chechen War, but also in the First Chechen War. Here’s what he said: «How did you fight in the first military campaign, the second military campaign? We won you. We defeated terrorism, extremism, we defeated all the institutions of the Western European states that sent you here, to the Chechen Republic, to dismantle the sovereign state of Russia» (https://t.me/RKadyrov_95/1983).
And this is indeed an important, programmatic statement, because until recently the unofficial ideology of Kadyrov and his supporters was based on the fact that in the first Chechen war, the Chechens were forced to fight for their freedom because they were victims of Yeltsin’s alcoholism on the one hand, and were deceived by their own leaders on the other. But in the second war, they had a leader in the person of Akhmat Kadyrov, who led them into an alliance with Putin, whose infantry he became.
Such an approach, among other things, allowed Ramzan Kadyrov to win over some participants or supporters of the resistance in the first war, or even at the beginning of the second war, who were disillusioned with the prospects of this resistance and believed in the «Akhmat-Hadji way». And now it turns out that when Akhmat Kadyrov, as the Mufti of Ichkeria, called for a jihad against Russia, he was either mistaken or an infiltrated agent carrying out a task to undermine the resistance from within. In any case, Kadyrov Jr. is now aligning himself not with the side to which his father and himself belonged (at least outwardly), but with those who fought against them.
With such an approach, it is not surprising that the Grozny court sentenced to ten years in prison a person who has long since ceased to participate in the resistance and de facto accepted the realities of Kadyrov’s Chechnya, while at the same time praising the heroes of the Chechen resistance of the past. It is known that in Kadyrov’s Chechnya there is another poet of this kind, but unlike Shamil Arbinin, he has not been heard from for a long time. However, such a sentence is a reason for reflection for him and many people with a similar biography.
All this happened a century ago. At that time, in order to win the civil war, the Bolsheviks accepted into their ranks many nationalists who had opposed them on the «fringes», but had reconciled themselves to defeat and later actively participated in the construction of the Soviet Union and the autonomous republics. In the 1930s, however, their past was revealed, and some of them were executed, others were sent to labor camps. And the sentencing of Shamil Arbinin in Kadyrov’s Chechnya looks like a step in this direction.
However, the question arises — does Ramzan Kadyrov himself remember which side he was on in the «first military campaign»?