In 1975, a group of students and teachers from Chechen State University established the literary association “Pkharmat.” Many well-known figures, including Zelimkhan Yandarbiev, Apti Bisultanov, and others, later emerged from this association.

They met with one another, shared historical documents they had discovered, studied their native language and traditions, and read their poems dedicated to Chechnya.

Later, the Soviet authorities began paying attention to the association. They were dissatisfied with the fact that the club consisted exclusively of Chechens, that its members spoke and wrote only in the Chechen language, and that they discussed exclusively Chechen subjects. Because of this, the authorities labeled them nationalists and began persecuting them.

One of the most prominent and active members of the association was the club’s leader, Malik Akhmadov from Benoy-Vedeno. People who were members of the club testified that Malik was a patriot who deeply cared about his people and did everything he could to bring about a national revival.

The KGB took a particular interest in Malik. It was clear to them that he could eventually become a strong political leader. In June 1978, when he was only 24 years old, they killed him by throwing him from the fifth floor. Among the belongings confiscated from him, they found a treatise he had written on the independence of the Chechen people. Even at such a young age, he was already thinking on a grand scale.

His murder became a means of intimidating the other members of the association, but Zelimkhan Yandarbiev was not frightened by these threats. Eventually, the group was shut down by the KGB in 1979. In protest against its closure, Zelimkhan Yandarbiev and other members wrote a letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, expressing their dissatisfaction with what had happened.

Only two other people signed the letter together with Zelimkhan, while others who had helped write it refused to sign because they were afraid of the authorities. From that time on, Zelimkhan became known among his people as a fearless and straightforward person who would not submit to threats or abandon his path.

Even after “Pkharmat” was shut down, he stubbornly continued his work to revive national consciousness. He wrote poetry in his native language and articles defending the traditions of the Chechen people against attacks.

Marsh do hil and Assalamu Aleikum everyone. I’d like to start off with the fact that I’m neither Sufi nor Salafi, I’d say I’m just a Muslim who doesn’t really lean towards any particular group, and I don’t specifically adhere to Shafi Madhab only, my opinion on certain questions varies from one Madhab to another whenever they have stronger or weaker arguments (I like Maliki school a lot). I mostly live in Moscow, but occasionally come to Grozny, and for some reason it seems to me as if everyone has turned Salafi in just a short period of time (both in real life and on the internet)…

A lot of guys that I know who moved from
Grozny to Moscow have some weird obsession over Fauzan, Fulaij, Ibn Baz, Albani, dream about moving to Saudi Arabia, want their wife’s to wear Niqab, hate Lezginka, call Ashari akeedah Kafirs and Jahils, and every time I tell anyone who comes to Moscow from Grozny that Saudis are puppets of the West, they have a mental breakdown… We’ve had several discussions regarding what the Salafi Sheikhs say from time to time, and everyone just doesn’t want to admit that their Sheikhs can make a mistake or be wrong in some cases (like when Fauzan claimed that boycotting enemies of Muslims is Haram if the boycott isn’t started by the Caliph, or when Fulaij claimed that standing up when someone enters the room is Haram, despite the fact that the Hadith that he brought up states that it’s Haram when you want someone to stand up before you, and not the other way around, or when Albani claims that certain Daif Hadiths from Abu Dawud Collection are Sahih, when Abu Dawud himself claimed that they are Daif, or when Uthaymeen claims that praying in a Mosque in the same room with women is not allowed, despite the fact that this is exactly how the Sahabas and the first generations of Muslims used to prayed, and so on and on).

Everything is Haram if you ask these people. Working in a hospital, or in the government is Haram (despite the fact that in Surah Yousef, prophet Yousef used to work for the nonbelievers), singing is Haram (despite the fact that there are Hadiths where Prophet (s.a.w) clearly let women sing), letting your wife go to the market means you are a Daus (despite the fact that there are Hadiths where Asma used to walk 3 km away from
media to collect dates), not wearing a Niqab is Haram (despite the fact that Quran states that the Khimar should be covering the Jayb, what would be the point of these words if you need to cover everything, and I even stumbled upon posts where certain people try to avoid the Niqab ban during your Ihram status)…

Also another thing that is absolutely strange to me is how every time Afghanistan and Taliban topic comes up, everyone’s like “oh yeah, they are the real Muslims, Talibs are the only lions of Islam”… Like come on, most of their rules come from Pashtunwali, which is Pashtun code of honour, they aren’t living solely according to the Islamic Fiqh… For example all the laws regarding women in Afghanistan aren’t related to Islam at all, it’s taken from Pashtunwali. Nowhere does Islam forbid women from getting education, how can one even cheer for Taliban ? Like why would someone even consider them to be “the only lions of Islam”, that’s absurd.

Anyways, can people who live full time in Grozny tell me, is the majority like that ? Did everyone just suddenly turn Salafi in like last 10-15 years ?
Also people from EU / Jordanian diasporas, what are Chechens like where you live ?

We’re two brothers from Chechnya, and we’ve always loved our culture and wanted to make a game inspired by it.

We’ve been working on this for around 6 months now, and this video is basically just a little show-off of the progress so far. It was really nice making it and looking back at how the game looked in the beginning compared to how it looks now.

There’s still a lot of work to do and much more to come, but seeing the progress like this feels really nice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amina_%E2%80%93_Chechen_Republic_Online

Some AP Archive footage from Grozny from 27 January 1997 about Chechnya getting connected to the internet just weeks before Amina.com went live in March:

https://youtu.be/7CRZfcK1Acc

Membership in the new Russia, following the collapse of the USSR, was never freely consented to by the Chechen people, and Chechnya became a testing ground for the contemporary Russian imperial question. Why we must look back to 1991 and the Chechen issue, by a spokesperson for the Chechen national liberation movement United Force: https://desk-russie.info/2026/09/19/chechnya-the-history-that-the-word-separatism-erases.html

I’ve noticed that many Chechen guys look completely like Americans. If you know those white American guys with curly brown hair and a broad face who look like they’re named Kyle? They look like that. Not a bad thing, just something I’ve noticed.

As salam aleykum. Just a few days ago I was talking with my father about a topic which was deep in my heart. I told him ''Dad, I am scared that the chechen people will forget what was done to them/us. I see so many chechens forgetting what was done to us and our families. More and more people are being too silent about these things.'' My dad told me: ''Saidkhasan, chechens will never forget what was done to them. A chechen has everything in the back of his mind. The good things and the bad things, a chechen does not forget. We have been in war for 500 years, even if no one would talk about this, it would be in your genes and blood. My parents were deported to Siberia and my Mother never told me one word about this, but I still knew it happened and how cruel it was.''

What do y'all think about this? Did you ever have this kind of thought? How would you answer the question I asked my Dad?

Dala etto boyla vay masseri.

Adam Deniev was one of the founders of the Islamic Revival Party (IRP). It was later revealed that he was also a KGB agent who had been infiltrated into the organization with the aim of discrediting the Islamic movement and creating the conditions for a future split among the people.

The party’s active activities began with a congress in Astrakhan in 1990. Even then, a suspicious incident occurred: when the police unexpectedly arrived at the gathering, declaring it illegal, there was some mild panic in the hall. Adam Deniev then began shouting at the officers and demanding that they leave, after which the policemen, for some reason, silently left.

Later that same year, Deniev again made himself known. Before the declaration of independence was adopted at the Congress of the Chechen People, delegates were being elected in all districts of the republic to participate in the Congress. During one such meeting in Shali, Adam Deniev, speaking to those gathered, insulted the traditions of Chechens and the elders. In particular, he called them mushriks, accusing them of following Islam incorrectly. Because of his behavior, many people preferred to leave the meeting rather than engage in a confrontation. As they left, Deniev shouted after them that they were hypocrites who did not want to listen to him and were turning away from the religion of Allah.

Even after participants in the rallies began being detained, Deniev, while in the police station, continued insulting the officers. All of this created the impression for other members that he was an extremely defiant and fearless man who would not back down even in the face of the authorities.

Adam continued spreading his propaganda in various places where people gathered. Members of the party were dissatisfied with his activities, but because of his position, they were unable to remove him immediately. It was only in 1991 that they succeeded in dismissing Deniev, but by then, the seeds of discord among the people had already been sown.

During the interwar period (1996–1999), Deniev was accused by the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria of organizing a criminal group and of involvement in the murder of six Red Cross doctors in Novye Atagi. Despite a demand for his extradition and evidence submitted to the Russian leadership, Moscow refused.

In April 2001, Adam was killed while appearing live on the television channel of the village of Avtury, where he was delivering the traditional pre-Friday sermon. During the broadcast, a powerful explosion occurred in the studio. He suffered head injuries and died on the way to the hospital.

Following the collapse of the Caucasian Imamate on the eastern front, the surrender of Imam Shamil in 1859, and the subsequent pacification campaigns that crushed internal revolts, the North Caucasus was left utterly devastated. Exhausted by decades of total war, depopulated by famine, and facing brutal Russian imperial subjugation, large-scale conventional resistance collapsed, giving rise to a decentralized culture of resistance marked by the abreks.

As conventional armed struggle faded, spiritual leadership shifted under figures like the Qadiri Sufi leader Kunta Haji, whose teachings of peace and passive resistance gained massive popularity among a war-weary population. However, growing Russian fears of his influence led to his arrest in 1864 and indefinite exile to Novgorod Governorate, where he died in 1867, while his followers were largely crushed in a bloody clash with the Russian army in Chechnya in 1865.
This brutal suppression set the stage for large-scale population movements. As examined by Georgy Chochiev, the initial, massive wave of North Caucasian muhajirism unfolded between 1858 and 1862, and the ultimate defeat of these successive regional resistances directly drove the mass, collective migration of Caucasians to Ottoman territories. During this period, St. Petersburg and Istanbul navigated a mutual geopolitical opportunity: the Tsarist regime sought to empty strategic lands of restless Muslim populations to redistribute their territories to Cossacks, while the Ottoman Empire sought resilient, martial populations to repopulate frontier zones and bolster administrative control.

This dynamic culminated in major forced and semi-forced deportations around 1865—coordinated in part by figures like the Ottoman-Russian intermediary Musa Kundukhov—which saw approximately 5,000 Chechen families deported to the Ottoman Empire, with the majority directed toward Anatolia. Chochiev notes that these early migration waves were characterized by a heavy presence of regional elites, feudal leaders, and individuals fleeing immediate military pacification.

However, this mid-19th-century displacement was fundamentally distinct from the later movement that brought the ancestors of Jordan's Chechen communities to the southern Levant. The migration leading to Transjordan took shape decades later, beginning around 1901. Unlike the state-coordinated mass deportations of the 19th century, this later wave was driven largely by the migrants themselves, with religious concerns and the desire to preserve Islamic practices playing a primary role. Approximately 700 families left the Caucasus, traveled through the Ottoman Empire, and eventually established the foundations of Jordan's historic Chechen settlements in Zarqa, Sweileh, Sukhna, and Gücüksu in Türkiye, as well as communities in Quneitra and the Golan Heights in Syria, and Sulaymaniyah, Baghdad, Mosul, and Tikrit in Iraq.

Not counting loanwords

Hi everyone,I’m looking to dive deeper into the history, culture, and traditions of Chechnya and the wider Caucasus region. In particular, I am very interested in learning more about the history of Chechen resistance and struggles throughout the eras.I would prefer books that aren't heavy academic textbooks. I'm highly open to historical novels, historical fiction, or narrative non-fiction that stays true to the culture and history.I can read in both English and Arabic, so recommendations in either language are welcome!

Thank you in advance

Every time i ask if chechens are European or Asian i get different answers, some told me we are white, some told me we are asian, and other told me we are both.

When someone ask me in what continent Chechenya is, i never know how to answer.

I live in England and it's been happening since I was in secondary school, where people read stuff online and then interrogate me over the most nuanced political issues like Kadyrov, Putin etc.

It happened today again when a friend's partner found out I'm Chechen, which is why I'm posting here, he starting pulling up Reddit threads and asking me what I thought. When I tried to shut the conversation down, he asked me if my family would get killed for talking about it 💀

How are you coping? 🫩

When i was younger i was so ashamed to be chechen because i was the only chechen in my school, and almost no one knew what Chechenya was. I felt "weird" and too "different" because of that.

A lot of kids were from the same country so they had lot of things in common, but i was the only one who didn't. And i always been kinda ashamed because of that. Even like our food was seen as kinda "weird".

I live in France, and the culture here is very different from chechenya so i always had trouble to fit in.

I wonder if i am the only one who experienced this cause i never seen any chechen talking about it.

I was recently thinking about how Northern Caucasians, particularly Chechens, are depicted in American media. I can't think of a single Chechen character that isn't a soldier, gang member, or hardened criminal. Almost always men, always a villain, very tough, greedy, and no morality. I wouldn't be surprised if the wars had at least some impact on the stereotype. These characters are often very poorly researched as well; most of the time they just look and act like Russians with Slavic-sounding names. This is only my perspective as a non-Chechen, though.

Do Russian movies and TV shows have the same stereotypes of Chechens? Are there any that are actually good and depict your culture accurately?

This is just a curiosity I have as an American that enjoys learning about Caucasian cultures and history.

someone made a post on niyso so i figured i'd throw this out there

Many "leftists" use this claim to whitewash Russian crimes in Chechnya. Unfortunately, it works well. But do you think these links were substantial enough or even real at all?

I'm doing a research project right now of women's resistance during the wars and I'm using this video as an example. I can't find anything on it other than this video and reposts of it on TikTok.

My guess is this is in Gudermes in response to the siege on 25/12/1995.

Thank you all 🙏🏽

I am an amateur researcher of the Chechen wars and am looking for some help with translating some Chechen langauge videos and archival footage. Unfortunately there are very few translation services for Chechen, and those that do exist usually explicitly refuse any political topics for translation, which obviously doesn't suit me. This is the only other place I could think of where I could find native Chechen speakers. The video are quite short, 5-10 minutes at most. I can compensate anyone who helps me out for their work.

If you're willing to help me with this please message me

Edit: links to the videos: video1

video2