ABSTRACT
If the brutality of Russia's war of colonization in the Caucasus left a damaging imprint on the minds of Chechens and other mountain people for generations, by the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991 those same ethnic groups - and many others throughout the Soviet Union - had experienced the horrors of civil war after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the nationalization of land during the 1920s and 1930s, which preceded an artificial famine that starved millions, and state-sponsored deportations of entire ethnic groups during the 1940s.
