A court in Chechnya on Tuesday banned a volume of an encyclopedia that describes the violence-wracked province as a land of bandits, the province’s human rights ombudsman Nurdi Nukhadzhiyev said.
Nukhadzhiyev filed the complaint about the Bolshaya Encyclopedia, claiming an entry on Chechnya distorts history and smears its people.
A court in Grozny agreed and ordered the volume that contains the offending entry seized from circulation and blacklisted.
Chechnya is one of three unstable, violence-wracked provinces in Russia’s predominantly Muslim North Caucasus region.
Authorities say an Islamist insurgency carries out regular attacks on police as they fight for independence from Moscow.
Critics say police brutality, torture, kidnappings, and extra-judicial killings drive residents to support the insurgency.
A group of experts from the Institute of Oriental Studies at the Russian Academy of Science wrote in a report to the court that the encyclopedia’s authors “were clearly trying to turn Russian public opinion” against the Chechens.
Tera, the publisher, was unavailable for comment.
“By the end of the 1870s almost all Chechen men were ... bandits, who hid their criminal activities behind a mask of nationalist demagogic words,” the encyclopedia claims.
Nukhadzhiyev also criticized the encyclopedia for presenting anecdote as historical fact when it claims the Chechens prepared “a white horse with a golden saddle” as a gift for Hitler as his army invaded Russia.
The Zavodskoi court in Grozny sent the ruling to Russia’s Justice Ministry for the volume to be blacklisted, Nukhadzhiyev said.
Critics say the blacklist also contains innocuous Islamic literature, the possession of which authorities use as a pretext to crack down on residents.
Bolshaya Encyclopedia, which contains a total of 62 volumes, has been published since 2006 and now printed 150,000 copies.
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