In 1928, two hundred and eighty five oil-workers from Grozny and Baku left the North Caucasus for the traditional place of Russian penal servitude - the Island of Sakhalin. They were sent out by the decree of ‘Narkomprom' (Peoples' Commissariat of Industry) to develop the oil industry in this remote region of the country. This event took place at the beginning of the first year of a Five-Year plan adopted by the proletarian state. The plan presupposed conducting a Cultural Revolution that was part of a bigger plan of economic development of the state under the leadership of an institution which was called the ‘State Plan' (Gosplan). Cultural (religious) and economic dimensions of social life in Russia were intermixed in the politics of early Soviet epoch.
The Socialist revolution of 1917 in Russia changed world history but failed to change the inter-ethnic controversies inside the Russian state. The revolution declared an economic increase by means of industrialisation of the country and the furnishing of equal rights for Russians and its non-Russian and Non-Orthodox minorities. It soon became clear that its first task would be achieved by means of compulsory industrialisation of the mainly agrarian population of Russia and forced hard labour, and the second task, through the unification of cultural and religious life of the peoples of the former Russian Empire. Improperly chosen models and political instruments maintained the systemic application of the principle of a delayed conflicts policy which is now bearing its bitter fruits after the dissolution of the USSR. Unfortunately it was not a practice invented by malicious Bolsheviks but a practice which was common in the Eurasian political space. Otherwise it is impossible to realise why pogroms, deportations, replacement and other manifestations of the negative right of a state did not evoke collective action and international cooperation against its application.
As for Russia the practice is rooted back in the Russian conquest of the Caucasus - Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. In 1817 the Caucasus was declared as being conquered, after which the first 25 year long Caucasus war began. It is interesting to admit that the Vainakhs tribes (Chechens, Ingush, Kists and Batzbis) which were nominally under the rule of the abolished Kartl-Kahkety Kingdom (Georgia) were peacefully inclined towards Russians. They were slow in joining the Dagestan Muslim military forces under the leadership of Imam Shamil, and only the compulsory character of Russian rule in the region incited them against Russians as infidels and violators.
With the discovery of oil in Baku and Grozny in 1823 and in order to keep these lands, the government mobilised the local Orthodox population, represented in the region by the Greben Cossacks and the Ossetians, using financial incentives and the formation of a loyal, semi-military unity: the Terek River Cossacks Garrison. The government granted the lands of defeated aborigines to the Garrison, destroying friendly connections between the Caucasus Muslims, and the Orthodox and Slavic peoples in the South of the Russian Empire.

Later, in the 1840's, when oil enterprises started to work, the government gave the right to manage oil-lands distribution to Cossacks as a payment for their loyalty and service. Because of war and insurgent activity in the region the indigenous population could not get employment in state companies and they looked for support from the private oil sector or succeeded to get a job in railway construction, which was constructed primarily for oil transportation demands. Chechens and Ingush were only employed by private oil-businessmen. Some of them contributed to the development of world oil-technologies. The first industrial method of oil extraction from deep pits was invented by a Chechen Labazan in a ‘Chechen laboratory' of the private businessman Akhverdov. The ethnic division of manpower influenced economic competition between the two types of oil-extracting groups - those of state and private. Further transition to an industrial oil-extracting economy and increasing demands for oil required more manpower, but the Cossacks who were settled by the government on the better, previously Chechen owned lands and who benefited from them in agrarian products and oil, were not ready to employ Muslims because of economic and ethnic rivalry. The migration of the Russian and Orthodox populations started. Various documents of that time variegate evidence of the consequences of rivalry between the Muslim and Orthodox populations, expressed in an endless chain of conflicts, quarrels, fights, robbery, murder and collective militant action where the intensity of such conflict was only reduced during the periods of the Russo-Japan war and the First Russian revolution. During the Civil War which exploded after the revolution of 1917, Chechens demanded the expulsion of Cossacks from the historically traditional territories of Vainakhs, otherwise threatening the government with sabotage of the restoration of the oil industry and railway communications with the Cossacks and threatening to build a separate Cossack state in the region. Not willing to lose important resources the government of a newborn Soviet state deported the Terek Cossacks from the lands granted to them by the Tzar and liberalised religious policy for the Muslims. But soon came the "five- years of atheism" during which a majority of religious leaders filled up the prison camps of Siberia, the Far East and the North of Russia. An especially cruel blow was dealt to Muslim religious traditions and communities which were practically destroyed.
At the beginning of WWI a new wave of religious liberation in the North Caucasus appeared. In 1944 oil was discovered in the region of the lands of the Volga Tatars and the mines were announced as ‘the second Baku'. They became ‘an insurance policy' for the government and granted it freedom to act fearlessly against the wilful oil-Muslims in the North Caucasus. The ‘mild' exchange policy which started in 1928, turned into total deportation of Chechens and Ingush to Kazakhstan. They were replaced with Cossacks, Ossetians, and Russians and their territories given to them. It is important to acknowledge that among the four Vainakh peoples the only two that were subjected to deportation were the ‘oil-peoples' (Chechens and Ingush).
Oil, Islam and the rebellious ethnic groups of the deported peoples became the main mobilising force in the early 90's. The dissolution of the USSR gave the ‘oil-locals' a chance to renew political discussions on restoring historical justice toward them. After two recent wars in the region the Chechens got what they wanted: the taxes from oil-extraction, a mono-ethnic (Cossacks, Russians and Ossetians left their homes in Chechnya) society of the Chechen republic where Islam is the dominant ideology. But pacification under these conditions cannot be regarded as a proper solution, the situation in the region in general and Chechnya in particular still does not look stable, and the ghost of a delayed conflict policy still haunts this part of the Russian Federation. International and Russian political thought is in a helpless state in this particular case, as well as in many others when dealing with conflict of this kind. And the main lesson of the bloodshed in the North Caucasus is that the apolitical practice of delayed conflicts production should be stopped and analysts should investigate innovative approaches to the problem.

*Galina Khizrieva, Assistant Professor, Institute of Cultural Studies, Moscow, Russia. khizriyeva@yahoo.com