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About a fourth of Russians support Chechnya’s separation from Russia

Chechnya is taken by people not as “a territory of the Russian Federation,” but as “a time bomb.”

About a fourth of Russians (24%), “would be glad,” if Chechnya had separated from Russia, but this event “would not produce a special impression” on 27% of respondents, the Levada Centre sociologists found out. In the view of the experts, people do not take Chechnya as the Russian territory, because “the special order is in effect there.”

Other 13% of respondents “are ready to put up with” Chechnya’s separation from Russia, though they oppose it, the Kommersant daily cited the results of the sociological survey. It is noteworthy that 12% of pollsters are sure that Chechnya’s separation has actually taken place, the newspaper reported. Ten percent of respondents said that Chechnya’s separation from Russia should be confronted by all means, including by the military.

“Shooting weddings, the reports that Chechen law enforcers are working in other Russian regions, the conduct of the comers from Chechnya in big cities - all this causes concern among ordinary people,” Levada-Centre deputy director Alexei Grazhdankin told the Kommersant daily. The xenophobic moods keep growing, and people have the desire “to put up a barrier” from the whole North Caucasus, he noted. Chechnya “is taken by people not as a territory of the Russian Federation,” but as “a time bomb.”

“People witness that this is a territory with the special type of governance, the special order is being maintained there, people have the impression that the federal structures do not control what is happening there,” the sociologist believes.

“The norms of Russian law are not in effect in Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov is the tsar and god there, so people take it as a non-Russian territory,” MGIMO Professor Valery Solovey stated. “In the eyes of Russian citizens the residents of the North Caucasus enjoy unjustified privileges, do not obey to the Russian laws and impose their rules,” he said.

The sociological Levada Centre found out that 28% of Russian citizens believe that the monetary funds allocated to the republics of the North Caucasus “are mostly stolen,” 21% of allocations are spent “less inefficiently” than in other regions.