Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov

Infobox Writer
name = Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov


caption = Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov
birthdate = c. 1908-10
birthplace = Lakha Nevri, Chechnya, Russian Empire
deathdate = death date and age|1997|4|24|1908|10|23|mf=y
deathplace = Munich, Germany
occupation = Historian, Political scientist
genre = Academic publishing
subject = Chechen society, Soviet history

Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov (Russian Абдурахман Геназович Авторханов) (c. 1908/10 - April 24, 1997) was an acclaimed Chechen nationalist and historian in the fields of the USSR and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Biography

Avtorkhanov's date of birth is unknown. According to his memoirs he was born between 1908 and 1910 in the small Chechen village of Lakha-Nevri, which was destroyed by Soviet troops during the deportation of the Chechen and Ingush population in 1943. [A. Avtorkhanov. "Memuary" [Memoirs] (Frankfurt/Main: Possev-Verlag, 1983), p. 5.] He was given the last name of Avtorkhanov in 1923 when he was registered for an orphanage.

The young Avtorkhanov enthusiastically joined the Communist Party in 1927 and served as a high-ranking party functionary. He later wrote:

This was my authority, my party, my apparatus. The social philosophy of Marxism — the creation of a classless social life with economic abundance; the spiritual philosophy of Marxism — the reign of unlimited creative freedom in science, art and literature without any censorship; the legal philosophy of Marxism — the liquidation of the use of violence by man against man and the gradual dying away of the apparatus of that violence: such were our ideals.
When I came to the party apparatus, it still professed those ideals. I was ready to serve them loyally and faithfully, regardless of all the inevitable costs and failures of that great experiment. [A. Avtorkhanov. "Memuary" [Memoirs] (Frankfurt/Main: Possev-Verlag, 1983), p. 160]

He graduated from the elite Moscow Institute of Red Professors with a major in Russian history in 1937, during which time he wrote six books on the history of the Caucasus [A. Avtorkhanov. "Tekhnologiya vlasti" [The Technology of Power] (Frankfurt/Main: Possev-Verlag, 1983), back cover] .

On the night of August 11, 1937, virtually all intellectual, religious, spiritual, and other Chechen and Ingush leaders, as well as many ordinary Chechens and Ingush, were arrested — in all, 13,000 men and women, or 3% of the population of the Chechen-Ingush region. Most of them were executed afterwards.

Then virtually all Communist Party and State leaders of the region were arrested at the session of the Chechen-Ingush "obkom" (oblast committee) on October 10. Avtorkhanov was invited to that session as a member of the Chechen-Ingush establishment; he was arrested and groundlessly accused of preparing an armed uprising, espionage, counterrevolutionary propaganda, etc. Some of those accusations carried the death penalty.

He was in jail under investigation for four years while interrogators tortured him to make him confess his fabricated "crimes". Once he was brought out for execution and stood among the others before the firing squad, but at the last second was pushed out from the row by one of the executioners. According his own words, when he found himself alive, he vowed to fight Soviet power for the rest of his life. Finally, in 1942, the Supreme Court found him not guilty and he was released.

The NKVD assigned him to infiltrate the anti-Soviet Chechen movement in which his school friend Khasan Israilov was a leader, but Avtorkhanov joined the uprising instead, and crossed the front line to propose to the Nazis an alliance with the Chechen Resistance against the Soviets. [A. Avtorkhanov. "Memuary" [Memoirs] (Frankfurt/Main: Possev-Verlag, 1983), pp. 611ff.] The Nazis rejected the proposal, and Avtorkhanov began to work for Nazi propaganda, writing articles for various newspapers published in Russian by and for emigrants and defectors as well as works on the Caucasus.

After the war ended, in 1948 Avtorkhanov began working for the US Army Russian Institute in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany. Eventually he became a professor, the dean of political science department, and the chairman of the Academy Board. He lectured in the Institute until his retirement in 1979.

He did not forget his vow and managed to combine his academic activity with his fight against Soviet power. Sometimes, that two activities came into conflict.

Avtorkhanov was a cofounder of the Institute for the Study of the USSR in Munich and participated in the creation of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in 1951. He wrote numerous books and articles on the history and core issues of Communism. Ironically, there were occasions when he had to hide his authorship not only from the Soviets but from the American government. Thus in the early 1970s he, being an American Army employee, was prohibited from publishing his anti-Soviet works because of U.S. policy at that time, so he published using pseudonyms, some of which still remain unknown. Avtorkhanov's book "Staline au pouvoir" ("The Reign of Stalin"), published in French in 1951, described Stalin's reign of terror. [http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj/1961/no004/coates.htm] . His book "Stalin and the Soviet Communist Party" is regarded as a primary source for the political background of Stalin's rise to power. He was one of the first authors to claim, in his 1976 book on Stalin's death, that Stalin had been murdered by Lavrentiy Beria and other Soviet top leaders.

A few months before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Avtorkhanov was granted honorary citizenship by the Chechen-Ingush ASSR, although his name and legacy had been discredited in the Soviet Union since his defection. The Chechens and the Ingush admired Avtorkhanov and his writings.

At the time of the First Chechen War he maintained a correspondence with the Chechen president Dzokhar Dudayev. He also urged peace negotiations on Russian President Boris Yeltsin. He died shortly after the end of the war, in 1997.

Quotes

We worshiped false gods and they deceived us... Neither our fathers nor we ourselves, in the intoxication of the Proletarian Revolution and behind the smokescreen of its social demagogy, were able to see its brutish core. [A. Avtorkhanov. "Memuary" [Memoirs] (Frankfurt/Main: Possev-Verlag, 1983), p. 755.]

Bibliography

(Russian Wikipedia has a more complete list.)
* К основным вопросам истории Чечни: к десятилетию Советской Чечни [Fundamental Issues of the History of Chechnya] (Grozny, 1930)
* Alexandre Ouralov (pseud.), "Staline au pouvoir" (Paris: Les Iles D'Or, 1951); tr. Alexander Uralov, "The Reign of Stalin" (London: Bodley Head, 1953)
* Технология власти (München: ЦОПЭ, 1959); tr. "Stalin and the Soviet Communist Party: A Study in the Technology of Power" (New York: Praeger, 1959); 2nd ed. Frankfurt/Main: Possev-Verlag, 1976; 3rd ed. 1983
* "The Communist Party Apparatus" (Chicago: H. Regnery, 1966)
* Загадка смерти Сталина: заговор Берия [The Mystery of Stalin's Death: Beria's Plot] (Frankfurt/Main: Possev-Verlag, 1976); 5th ed. 1986
* Сила и бессилие Брежнева [The Power and Powerlessness of Brezhnev] (Frankfurt/Main: Possev-Verlag, 1979); 2nd ed. 1980
* Мемуары [Memoirs] (Frankfurt/Main: Possev-Verlag, 1983)
* От Андропова к Горбачеву: Дела и дни [From Andropov to Gorbachev] (Paris: YMCA-Press, 1986)
* Ленин в судьбах России: Размышления историка [Lenin in the Destiny of Russia] (Garmisch-Partenkirchen: Prometheus-Verlag, 1990)
* (coauthor) "The North Caucasus Barrier: The Russian Advance Towards the Muslim World" (New York: St Martin, 1992)

Notes

External links

* [http://www.lib.ru/POLITOLOG/AWTORHANOW/tehnologiq.txt "Stalin and the Soviet Communist Party" online text (in Russian)]
* [http://www.amina.com/article/avtorh.html "The Chechens and the Ingush" article by Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov]
* [http://www.hrono.ru/biograf/bio_a/avtorhanov.html Biographical Entry (in Russian)]