The
zachistka embodied more than a military practice, however. It was a
mind-set. And this was exemplified in the proliferation of the word itself. In the same way that the term
ethnic cleansing (
etnicko ciscenje’) was coined in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, the term
zachistka found a distinct voice in the Russian popular vocabulary and in the official addresses and speeches of military and government personnel. By late 1999, the use of
zachistka in the press and everyday speech had reached an infectious and alarming level. From September 1999 to 2005,
zachistka appeared 787 times in the headlines of Moscow’s central newspapers in relation to the second war in Chechnya.4 In the text of the papers, it appeared 10,730 times. From the verb
zachistit’,
zachistka was used in the literal sense to describe the cleaning of pipes, the sanding or smoothing out of metal, the cleaning of paint or corrosion from surfaces,5 or the dusting away of sand and dirt to uncover archeological objects.6 It was also used to describe the sweeping up of objects – autumn leaves, snow, coal, or rubbish – into a corner. The prefix
za suggests concerted movement and the stress is on
cleaning up or
cleaning out as the operative implication.7 Within six months of the beginning of the first Chechen war, however,
zachistka was being employed by the Russian armed forces as military slang. It was linked euphemistically to the idea of cleaning out
human beings – in this case, suspected Chechen rebel fighters and their alleged civilian supporters. No longer neutral or inoffensive,
zachistka became congruent with the practice of gathering or sweeping, in the literal sense, Chechen men and women into fields, factories, or schools to be checked, detained, or executed, usually on the outskirts of a targeted village. In this respect, the idea of harvesting or cleansing the land is reminiscent of the metaphor adopted in Hitler’s Germany – that of
volkische Flurbereinigung (cleansing of the soil), also adopted from agricultural terminology.8 Versions of the word were linked to the cleansing of space, not the human body as such – the “gentle sweep” (
miagkaia zachistka), the “total sweep” (
total’naia zachistka),9 the “continuous sweep” (
sploshnaia zachistka),10, the “repeat sweep” (
povtornaia zachistka),11 the “ethnic sweep” (
ethnicheskaia zachistka),12 the ‘military sweep’ (
boevaia zachistka),13 the “fire/artillery sweep” (
ognevaia zachistka),14 and the “targeted sweep” (
adresnia zachistka).15
https://books.google.com/books?id=xGqYD ... ning&hl=en