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From War to Victory: Narratives from the Past in Chechnya (1999-2021)
Despite the end of a full-scale military operation in 2000, armed and terrorist attacks continued to occur in Chechnya, where a new republican government and memorial policy was formed. The lifting of the counter-terrorist operation (CTO) on 16 April 2009 not only marked the end of the acute phase of the guerrilla war, it also put forward the need to solve the conflict of memories associated with the active combat phases of 1994–1996 and 1999–2000. Collective memory in Chechnya after 1999 is marked by the preservation of traumatic experiences of the past, including the collective stigmatisation of the Stalinist Deportation in 1944 and the growing national consciousness between1994–1996. Since 1999, the mobilisation of Chechen national history in the context of armed hostilities and their aftermath has led to the establishment of a hegemonic narrative of “victory” as the dominant norm. In this article, the author analyses the conflicts that exist between the official narrative of the authorities and private memories of respondents, based on a synthesis of 100 interviews collected between 2017 and 2022.Ch