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Urus-Martan (Chech. Martanthe, Khalkha-Marta) is a city in the Chechen Republic of the Russian Federation. The administrative center of the Urus-Martan district. The city is located on both banks of the Martan River (Terek basin), 18 km south-west of Grozny (along the road). On the territory of the city, south of its center, the Tangi River flows into the Martan River. The Roshnya River flows along the western outskirts of the city, which flows into the Martan River to the north of the city.
According to various historical sources, Urus-Martan
on the Marta River was founded in 1708-1713 by various Chechen teips
from Nokhchoi Mokhk, in particular, Gendargena teip.
The
author of the work Toponymy of Chechen-Ingushetia, Chechen
ethnographer Akhmad Suleimanov, believes that the word “March” is
translated as abundant.
In addition, the Chechens have their
own masculine name "Martanak", formed by the combination of the
words "Mart-na (x) -k (onah)", translated as "generous-people-man"
or "a man of generous people." In the colloquial speech of the
Chechens, there are also such expressions as "Mangalhoin March"
("Lunch of the mowers"), "Pkhyor-March" ("Dinner", etc.).
According to the historian Y. Elmurzaev, since the end of the 18th
century it has become a major political and craft center of
Chechnya.
Urus-Martan was created on the basis of three auls:
Marta, where the Gendargeneans lived, Roshni, the abode of the
Peshkhois, and Dzhargan, where the Benois were concentrated. The
most significant role in these places before the creation of
Urus-Martan and after was also played by the Gendargene people.
According to historical data, representatives of this taip lived not
far from Nashkh in the Charmakh tract, in the village of Khilakh.
They did not move beyond the Argun River, but occupied the flat
lands of the Terechye and beyond the Terek River.
In 1722,
under the pressure of the Russians, the Gendargeneans were forced to
retreat to Sunzha, where they laid the aul of Chacha. In 1758, it
was completely destroyed by troops under the command of Fraundorf.
In the same year, the Gendargeneans retreated to their ancestral
farms. At this place, along with the farmsteads of Benoitsev and
Peshkhoytsev, Urus-Martan was subsequently founded.
On May 3,
1810, 10 kilometers north of the village, on the Sunzha River, at
the confluence of the Martan River, the troops of the Russian Empire
laid the Ust-Martanovsky redoubt, which existed for several months.
In the first half of the 19th century, the village was destroyed
several times by the tsarist troops. So, on February 1-5, 1822,
Urus-Martan and the neighboring village of Goity were exterminated
by a Russian detachment under the command of Colonel Grekov. Amanats
were taken from the auls. In January 1825 Grekov again ravaged the
villages of Goity, Urus-Martan, Gekhi. During January-February 1826,
during the expedition under the command of General Yermolov,
villages along the river were destroyed. Argun, Martan (including
Urus-Martan), Gekhi. In August 1832, a 10-thousand-strong Russian
detachment under the command of General Baron Rosen destroyed the
villages along the banks of the Martan (including Urus-Martan),
Goity, Argun, Basse rivers. In January 1837, an expedition under the
command of Major General Fezi, with the participation of 8 hundred
Ingush and Ossetian militias, passed through the auls of Little
Chechnya, destroying Urus-Martan along the way: “During the return
journey, more than 1000 sakels were burned along the Martan Gorge
and several hundred along the Tenginsky. On the next day, the
destruction of the remaining sakel, stocks of bread and fodder ended
... ”. From 7 to 10 July 1840, General Galafeev's detachment ravaged
the auls of flat Chechnya in the direction: Starye Atagi - Chakhkeri
- Goyty - Urus-Martan - Gekhi. This unit included Lieutenant M.Yu.
Lermontov.
Until 1840, Urus-Martan played a less important
role in the social and political life of Chechnya than the larger
and much earlier founded neighboring villages of Gekhi, Starye
Atagi, Aldy, and Chechen-Aul. At the beginning of 1840, the foreman
(elective head of the village) of Urus-Martan Issa Gendargenoevsky
received Akhverdy Magoma, an associate of Imam of Dagestan Shamil,
who, after a heavy defeat in Akhulgo in the summer of 1839, with
several close associates and members of his family was hiding in the
mountains of Chechnya. On March 7, 1840, a congress of the Chechen
people was held in Urus-Martan, at which Shamil was proclaimed the
Imam of Chechnya and Dagestan.
On August 3, 1848, Adjutant
General Vorontsov laid the foundation for a Russian fortress in the
center of Urus-Martan, which existed for several years.
In
the 1860s, one of the largest grain markets in Chechnya appeared in
Urus-Martan.
In 1881, 12 Chechen flat villages of the Grozny
district, grouped around Urus-Martan, came out with a petition to
open an agricultural school with teaching in Russian. The
representatives of the same Chechen villages left for the second
time with a similar petition in 1895. The rural societies that put
forward this petition undertook to build on their own a school
building designed for 160 students, houses for teachers, workshops,
to allocate 400 acres of arable land from the public land fund of
Urus-Martan and to build a school farm on it with all the necessary
outbuildings, equipment , draft animals, etc. In addition, the
societies were obliged to provide the school with all the necessary
educational equipment and, through a voluntary additional taxation,
to collect 5,600 rubles annually for the maintenance of the school.
However, these funds were not enough to support the school, and the
application contained a request for an annual subsidy of 3,500
rubles from the treasury. The petition was rejected.
At the
beginning of the 20th century, there were 35 trading establishments,
45 water mills, 6 bakeries, 20 brick-tile and 15 sawmills in the
village.
On January 15, 1918, a national congress
opened in Urus-Martan. The Chechen oil industrialist, officer and
public figure Abdul-Mezhid (Tapa) Ortsuevich Chermoev, who pursued a
policy of rapprochement with the Cossacks in the summer and autumn
of 1917, was booed by the congress participants and pushed into the
background by Chechen radicals. A respected lawyer, former
lieutenant colonel of the imperial army and social democrat
Akhmetkhan Mutushev (1884-1943) was re-approved as the head of the
new composition of the Chechen National Council. The influence of
the clergy on the Council increased significantly. An influential
group of sheikhs (Bilu-Khadzhi Gaitaev and Solsa-Khadzhi Yandarov
from Urus-Martan, Sugaip-mulla Gaisumov from Shali, Ali Mitaev from
Avturov, Abdul-Vagap-Khadzhi Aksaysky, Yusup-Khadzhi Koshkeldinsky,
etc.) demanded the theocratic a form of government in which the
supreme power was to belong to the Council of the highest clerics -
ulema. They were openly supported by the most conservative part of
secular leaders, headed by Ibragim Chulikov. The influence of the
clergy was so strong that the new Chechen National Council began to
be called in an "Islamic" way - Mejlis.
In 1920, the first
Komsomol circle was organized in the village.
On January 15,
1923, a congress of the Chechen people was held in Urus-Martan, at
which the creation of the Chechen Autonomous Region was proclaimed.
The congress was attended by a delegation from Moscow headed by the
Chairman of the Presidium of the USSR Central Executive Committee M.
Kalinin.
On August 25, 1925, an operation to “disarm the
population and remove the vicious and bandit element” began in
Chechnya, which ended on September 12. In total, about seven
thousand Red Army soldiers with 240 machine guns and 24 guns were
involved in it. In addition, the operation commander had two
aviation detachments and an armored train at his disposal.
Tactically, the troops, as well as the operational groups of the
GPU, were divided into seven groups operating in pre-designated
areas. The First Revolutionary Combat Detachment of the Chechen
Region under the command of Dzhu Akayev was formed especially to
participate in the operation. During the operation, Urus-Martan was
subjected to shelling and air strikes for three days. Sheikhs
Solsa-hajji Yandarov (the founder of one of the virda of the
Naqshbandi Sufi tariqat) and the qadi of Urus-Martan Bilu-Khadzhi
Gaitayev surrendered to the authorities. Yandarov was soon released
by the authorities, and Gaitayev was shot.
In 1944, after the
deportation of the Chechens and Ingush and the liquidation of the
Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, the village of
Urus-Martan was renamed into Krasnoarmeiskoe. By the decree of the
Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR dated April 10, 1957,
the village was returned to its former name.
First Chechen
war
In July-August 1994, the group of the former mayor of Grozny,
Bislan Gantamirov, who was the commander of the troops of the
pro-Russian Provisional Council of the Chechen Republic (Armed
Forces of the Chechen Republic), opposed to the president of the
unrecognized Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, D.M.Dudaev, established
control over the city of Urus-Martan and most of Urus- Martanovsky
district, abolishing the prefecture formed by Dudayev (district
executive department of the President) of the district. The new
administration of the Urus-Martan district was headed by Yu. M.
Elmurzaev. In the fall of 1994, the director of the Federal Grid
Company of the Russian Federation S. Stepashin spoke at a rally of
supporters of the Chechen Armed Forces in Urus-Martan. During the
summer and autumn of 1994, Dudayev's armed formations carried out
several attacks (one of them with the use of tanks and artillery) on
opposition groups located in Urus-Martan and its environs. The
Gantamirovites, in turn, seized the Ichkerian checkpoint on the
southern outskirts of Grozny and undertook, with the support of
Russian tanks and helicopters, two unsuccessful assaults of the
Chechen capital (October 15 and November 26, 1994).
With the
outbreak of the first Chechen war, Urus-Martan was declared by the
federal government to be controlled by Russia and a "zone free from
hostilities." Until the end of the first Chechen war, most of the
city's inhabitants remained opponents of the Ichkerian militants.
The backbone of the pro-Russian administrative and law enforcement
bodies, formed in 1995-1996 in the Chechen Republic, were precisely
the Urus-Martanites. In Urus-Martan itself, voluntary armed
self-defense detachments were created, carrying out night patrols on
the streets of the city and assisting the local police department.
On December 15, 1994, Dudayev's militants (who had the goal of
preventing the elections of the head of the republic, originally
scheduled by the Russian authorities for December 17, but started
specifically five days earlier - December 12) seized administrative
and public buildings in the city center (military enlistment office,
district police station, communications center, boarding school, a
new building of the district administration and others), as well as
a recently built bridge across the Martan River in the southern part
of the city. The militants were driven away from the bridge by local
residents on the same day. The next day, a crowd of local residents
broke into the military enlistment office and freed it from the
militants. After that, the crowd moved to the building of the raypo
(the building of the regional consumer cooperation), which was
occupied by Ruslan Gelayev's group, but was stopped by shots in the
air. At the same time, another part of the city's residents
attempted to free the new administration building, but was also
stopped by shots into the air, while one of the Urus-Martanites died
from a ricocheting bullet. In the following days, local residents
blocked all the main streets of the city with barricades, as a
result of which the movement of the militants' vehicles became
impossible. A week later, the militants were forced to leave the
city.
On June 8, 1996, unidentified persons (presumably
Ichkerian militants) fired at the car of the head of the Urus-Martan
district administration, Yusup Elmurzayev, from automatic weapons
when he was driving out of the gate of his house. As a result of the
attack, the head and three of his guards were killed. One of the
attackers was fatally wounded by the return fire of a local police
officer who happened to be a witness of the incident, whose corpse
was later found during the combing of the area. The deceased
militant turned out to be a native of the village. Alkhan-Yurt,
Urus-Martan district.
On January 29, 1996, on the
Urus-Martan-Alkhan-Yurt road, Chechen militants captured two
Orthodox priests - the rector of the Church of the Archangel Michael
in Grozny, Father Anatoly (Chistousov) and an employee of the
Department of External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate,
Father Sergius (Zhigulin). These priests negotiated in Urus-Martan
with the field commander Akhmed Zakayev on the release of a Russian
prisoner of service. According to Russian media, the priests were
abducted by a group of armed men under the direct leadership of the
well-known field commander Doku Makhaev, who had previously attended
the talks in Urus-Martan.
On October 14, 1996, Urus-Martan
was blocked by a detachment of militants led by Ruslan Gelayev.
After a night clash of militants with the city militia on October
15, power in Urus-Martan passed into the hands of supporters of the
Ichkeria government.
By the middle of 1997, Urus-Martan came
under the rule of an armed formation of Islamic radicals, the
Urus-Martan Jamaat, which was not controlled by the President of the
CRI A. A. Maskhadov, and was led by local natives, the Akhmadov
brothers. They removed from office the mayor of Zargan Malsagova,
who was elected in the elections at the beginning of the year, as
well as the qadi of the district. Militant bases were set up in and
around the city. Sharia law was introduced, corporal punishment was
used for drinking alcohol (40 blows with sticks), and there were
attempts to introduce the wearing of hijabs by women in public
places (in particular, bus and taxi drivers were forced to drop off
women who did not wear clothing covering the whole body). In the
summer of 1999, on the central square of Urus-Martan, the death
sentence of a Sharia court was first publicly carried out, which
ordered the execution of a resident of the neighboring village of
Gekhi, who had killed an elderly woman and her 16-year-old
granddaughter for the purpose of robbery. The second public
execution took place after the start of the Counter-Terrorism
Operation, in November 1999.
Second Chechen war
During
September 1999, Russian aviation twice inflicted missile and bomb
strikes on the outskirts of Urus-Martan: first, the fields of the
Gorets state farm between Urus-Martan and Alkhan-Yurt were fired
upon, then a dairy farm between Urus-Martan and the village of Tangi
was attacked -Chew. On October 2, 1999, in the afternoon, Russian
aircraft launched several missile and bomb strikes (including with
the use of cluster munitions stuffed with warheads in the form of
needles) on the fields of the Gorets state farm on the northwestern
outskirts of Urus-Martan, administrative buildings in the center and
residential sector in the southern (Kalanchakskaya street,
Kalanchakskiy lane, Svobody street) house: Kerimovs, Tapayevs and
Goytavyhs), in the northeastern part of the city (1st
Aslambek-Sheripov street, Obyezdnaya) house: Zakrievs, Musaevs,
Gebertayevs , Erzhapovs, 7th school and transshipment from / for
"Gorets".
On October 4, 1999 in Urus-Martan, a Russian Su-24MR
reconnaissance aircraft, which was flying over the terrain at low
altitude, was shot down by a Strela-2 portable anti-aircraft missile
launched by one of the militants from the roof of the district
Palace of Culture. The commander of the crew, Konstantin Stukalo,
was killed, navigator Sergei Smyslov managed to eject and a few
weeks later was liberated by federal troops with the assistance of
loyal people from the local population. According to another
version, the navigator was exchanged for the earlier captured
brother of the leader of Islamic Jamaats, Arbi Barayev.
In
the weeks that followed, federal troops continued to "liberate" the
city. The shelling was carried out from artillery pieces, using
rockets from the "Tochka-U" surface-to-surface class ships of the
Caspian Sea.
When the front line approached, at the end of
November - beginning of December 1999, the formations of the
"Urus-Martan Jamaat" left the city without a fight, leaving to the
south, to the mountains. In early December 1999, Russian troops
entered the city. The federal troops that occupied the city included
units of the pro-Russian Chechen militia, formed by Bislan
Gantamirov. Residents who fled in October-November to Ingushetia and
to the neighboring villages of Goity, Goiskoye, Goy-Chu, Martan-Chu
began to return to the city. District and city administrative bodies
were created from among local residents. The school and the district
hospital were opened. However, the real power in the city and in the
region belonged to the federal military for a long time. Until 2005,
a curfew was in effect, the city was surrounded by checkpoints of
federal units (the checkpoint on the road to Martan-Chu is still
functioning - February 2011).
On November 29, 2001, on the
central square of Urus-Martan, Aiza Gazueva, approached the
commandant of the Urus-Martan district, Major General Heydar
Hajiyev, who at that time was heading from the building of the
district administration to the building of the commandant's office
(they were at different ends of the square), called him and she
immediately detonated an explosive device attached to her body. As a
result of the explosion, Gazueva herself, Gadzhiev and two Russian
servicemen guarding him were killed, another was wounded. Her
husband fought on the side of the militants in Grozny.