Grandparents and grandchildren in a mountain village, Dagestan. Photo by CC-by-NC-2.0: Dagestan Mountains and People Partnership / Flickr. Some rights reserved.On 4 August 2018, tens of thousands of mourners gathered in the Chechen village of Geldagen to bury Yusup Temerkhanov. Thousands more sent their condolences via WhatsApp. Temerkhanov died in a Siberian prison hospital during a 15-year sentence for the murder of Yuri Budanov. A Russian army colonel, Budanov had been convicted in 2003 for the kidnapping and murder of Elza Kungayeva, a Chechen woman, during the Second Chechen War. He was released on parole in 2009 – and shot dead in Moscow two years later.
Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, who was present at the funeral, said in his eulogy that Temerkhanov’s guilt hadn’t been proven and that he had been unjustly convicted. But the crowd of people in Geldagen had gathered to honour the memory of the man who had become the embodiment of a nation’s revenge for the rape and murder of a young Chechen woman by a Russian war criminal.
For one part of the Russian Federation, General Alexey Yermolov, the man who conquered the Caucasus in the 19th century, and Colonel Yuri Budanov are the heroes. For the other, it’s Imam Shamil, the man who led the resistance to Russia’s designs on the Caucasus, and Yusup Temerkhanov who are the good guys. In 200 years of Russian conquest in the Caucasus, let alone the 25 years of post-Soviet history, this frontier has always been there.
