One of the jewels of the archive, which
Chechnya has received from France, are the reports of Europeans on the
situation in the Caucasus in 1917-1921, as well as documents about the
negotiations of Anton Denikin with mountaineers, said Mairbek Vachagaev,
a historian.
For a long time, the events in Northern Caucasus during
the Civil War were covered one-sidedly and require an independent study,
experts say.
The "Caucasian Knot" has reported that in June this year Mairbek
Vachagaev, President of the Association of Caucasian Studies in Paris,
handed over to the Archival Department of Chechnya 50,000 pages of
archival materials on history of the Caucasus, which he had copied in
France.
In November 1917, in the territory of Dagestan and highland districts of
the Terek Region of the Russian Empire the Mountain Republic was
proclaimed. The government of the republic was dissolved in the spring
of 1919, after the territory of Dagestan was occupied by troops of
General Denikin. From September 1919 to March 1920, the Islamic state of
North-Caucasian Emirate existed in the territory of Dagestan and
Chechnya.
The study of these documents helps to understand how Frenchmen, Germans,
Turks and Britons treated the situation in Northern Caucasus in
1917-1921.
According to Vachagaev, of particular interest are the documents about
the characteristics, which were issued to mountain leaders, as well as
the correspondence of mountaineers with European states. These materials
present a lot of new facts about the relationships of mountaineers with
Cossacks and Bolsheviks.