According to Amin Osmayev, chairman of the national assembly of Chechnya, Chechen public organisations have been forced to tackle this issue as 'the federal authorities are afraid of discussing the issue for fear of sounding chauvinistic.'
This is the impression of those Cossacks and Russians from Chechnya who have appealed to 'the Kremlin, the government and other authorities' for security and protection from violence and infringements on their human rights and whose appeals have been ignored. 'The government must understand that it abandoned these people and all other Chechens in 1991 and it must answer for this policy,' announced Mr Osmayev.
'The priority of the authorities in Chechnya must be to recreate normal living conditions for all those who have left Chechnya,' according to Umar Avturkhanov, chairman of the Chechen National Accord Committee. However, according to Mr Osmayev, the current security level in Chechnya is quite low. Chechens are more or less protected from terrorists by their taips and the custom of vengeance. Russians, on the other hand, have no protection from terrorism.
What is more, according to Khamsat Salamov, chairman of the charity Peace. Charity. Morality and former imam at the central mosque in Grozny, it is important to teach Muslims, especially the younger generation, that 'Russians also live in Chechnya and should have the same rights as everyone else.'
At the moment there are very few Russians in the Chechen government. Chechens in Moscow believe this situation could be rectified by introducing a quota for the Russian population whereby Russians would have the same level of representation as they did in 1991. A statute on this must be inserted into the agreement outlining the balance of power between the federal government and that of Chechnya itself, as there is no mention of it in the new Chechen constitution. Interestingly, many republics are now choosing to reject such an agreement.
Chechens in Moscow believe there are about 100 thousand Russians who could return to their homes in Chechnya. However, as Mr Osmayev told a Rosbalt correspondent, there is no corresponding programme in Chechnya or Russia as to how this could be done. 'One can't help feeling that Russia has no national policy on this,' he said. According to Mr Avturkhanov, apart from the idea about giving Russians greater political representation in Chechnya, there are also other ways of bringing them back.
For example, administrative leaders in the Cossack regions of Chechnya such as the Naursky and Shelkovsky regions ought to be Cossacks (at the moment there is only a Cossack leader in the Naursky region). Chechen children should learn the Russian language, be taught about Russian culture and have the chance to obtain a higher education. In Mr Avturkhanov's opinion, it is absolutely essential that Russian oil workers and middle-level management return to Chechnya.
Such a desire is understandable. Russians appeared in Chechnya at the start of the last century. They mostly worked in the oil industry in Grozny and the oil plants. Cossacks appeared in Chechnya in the 16th century. In Soviet times Grozny became one of the biggest centres of oil refining. The Chechens were unable to maintain the complex technology of oil extraction and oil refining. The collapse of the oil industry in Chechnya, which had really been the mainstay of the Chechen economy, forced many of the Russian population in Chechnya and even many Chechens to leave. Then the Chechens found themselves a new source of wealth.
According to the census in 1989 there were about 400 thousand Russians living in Chechnya at that time. It is very difficult to say how many of those were killed during the regimes of Dudayev and Maskhadov. By 1992, according to the Russian Interior Ministry, 250 Russians had been killed in Grozny and about 300 had disappeared without trace. By 1994 Dudayev's followers had killed more than two thousand Russians. Thousands of other Russians abandoned their homes and fled to Russia. More than 250 thousand people had left Chechnya before the first military conflict.
Beatings, murders, robberies, rape, hostage takings, burglaries and forced eviction became everyday occurrences. It was genocide. Cossacks suffered the same kind of terrorism and almost all of them fled from the Naursky, Sunzhensky and Shelkovsky regions. Only 29 thousand Russians remained by the time the second military operation in Chechnya began (17 thousand of these were pensioners). Nobody knows how many of them are left now.
This is how Olga Selenkova, a member of the Grozny congress of Russian-speaking people, described the position of Russians in Chechnya: 'Life is very hard. Often people just abandon their homes and leave. Nobody buys their homes but when they return they are occupied by others. Or occasionally someone arrives to sell their flat and then disappears. Such occurrences are common in the Naursky and Shelkovsky regions. Whenever I try to talk about this problem people criticize me for trying to cause trouble. 70% of the Russian population in Chechnya are pensioners. The Russians here are therefore vulnerable. '
Here is a typical story of someone who had to flee from Chechnya. Anna Artemovna, who had worked all her life as a librarian in Grozny, left Grozny in December 1994 with her seriously ill husband. Chechen neighbours helped them to get to Ingushetia. Her husband had to have treatment for cancer but he died a year later. By this time Anna had heard from friends that the block of flats where they had once lived had been destroyed.
Four years later, after many appeals to the authorities while working illegally and sleeping where she could in the homes of acquaintances, Ms Artemovna finally received compensation for her lost property - RUR 12 thousand. The only place where she could buy a new home with this amount of money would be in the country where it is impossible to find work. And how would she survive without work on a miserly pension?
Many victims of the first war have still not received any compensation. According to a recent decree passed by the Chechen government, the sum of compensation has now risen to RUR 240 thousand, but only for those who have remained in Chechnya. Those who left Chechnya before 1994 have not been allocated any kind of compensation whatsoever. Ms Artemovna does not have children and her relatives in the Rostov Region struggle to make ends meet as it is. However, she has no intention of returning to Chechnya. 'Where would I go - to the remains of my home to begin a new life at sixty?' she asks.
Many other people have suffered a similar fate and say the same thing. There is, however, another factor. Although relations between Russians and Chechens were more or less neutral after the first Chechen war, there was rapid ethnic polarization after the second war. It is unlikely that Russians and Chechens will be able to live together peacefully now.
Chechens in Moscow have an unambiguous opinion of Aslan Maskhadov's fighters, whose resistance remains unbroken, and their terrorist acts against Russians. In an interview with the BBC, Said-Hasan Abumuslimov, a special envoy of Mr Maskhadov, said 'since the very beginning the Chechen Constitution and law on citizenship have unambiguously guaranteed people of Chechen nationality the same rights as Chechens themselves. There is no need to talk about a Russian population in Chechnya now, because during the two wars, as far as I am aware, practically the whole Russian population left Chechnya.' In other words, no people, no problem.
What kind of future does Chechnya have? 'Chechnya has been subjected to multiple outbursts of violence - a bloody conflict has been waged there for the last decade,' says Vladimir Goryunov, a member of the Council of the Association of Political Experts and Consultants. 'Chechnya went straight from Soviet rule to a wild outburst of ethnic lawlessness accompanied by inter-clan disputes.' 'It is currently impossible to establish Western style democracy there.'
The illusionary nature of attempts to alter Western public opinion on the situation in the republic is also obvious. This opinion is created by Western media, which strongly reflect the interests of their countries and political elites, who have no interest in acknowledging the 'democratization' of Chechnya. The situation there will remain an effective lever for pressurizing Russia for a long time to come. There will not be a long-term period of peace either. Every concession by Moscow has been followed by a short period of peace, but there is no point in expecting the long-term stabilization of the republic.
'This is why there is no chance of the Russian population returning to the republic,' continues Mr Goryunov. 'Everybody understands clearly that lawlessness in Chechnya may erupt again with new force at any moment. Russian refugees have not found either understanding or help in Russia and they are not going to return to the ashes of their former homes in order to risk losing everything again. '
Yana Amelina, Rosbalt, Moscow Translated by Nick Chesters/Robin Jones