Sorry to have taken so long to submit to your interrogation, Steven.:-)
1) About those figures: 500,000 Chechens outside Chechnya, only 300,000 in it. I should specify that those figures have been hotly disputed. For example, a Chechen friend of mine (a historian), just e-mailed me, to protest the 500,000 number, which he says was "plucked out of thin air." He says he has concluded that there are still about 800,000 Chechens in the republic. In his opinion, the number has been deliberately underestimated, to give the impression that the only people left there are those who collaborate with the "bandits" -- and hence bombing them is okay. May sound paranoid, but think about it. What is going on now is very close to ethnic cleansing. And there have been no censuses of the population in recent years. Very hard to do, when people spend a good part of their time refugee-ing here and there. Close to 100,000 have already piled into neighboring Ingushetia (the only region that will take them!) again. (Interesting! In Moscow, and other Russian cities, they are trying to drive out
earlier Chechen refugees,back into Chechnya, while newer Chechen refugees, already in Chechnya, are trying to get out of it.)
So you can see why the numbers range all over the place! We can assume , however, that there are approximately 800,000 Chechens in all.
There used to be at least 250,000 Russians (and other so-called "Russian-speakers", e.g., assimilated Armenians) in Chechnya, as well. One estimate now puts them at 30,000 -- most of them poverty-stricken retirees, who have no place else to go, and who have suffered more than anyone else, not so much from Chechen "persecution," as from the Russian bombing. (They don't have extended families, or relatives in "safe" villages. Not that there are any safe villages left right now.)There are also some Nogais (formerly nomadic people) native to the region, just a handful, and a sprinkling of other Caucasians.
What do you mean when you ask whether the refugees are "inclined to assimilate"? The Chechens are already "assimilated." They all speak Russian (many better than their own -- very difficult, by the way -- language); until the war, they had plenty of schools, libraries, a university, etc., and plenty of intellectuals (many of the latter have fled, while the former were destroyed in the war); and Chechens always travelled to find seasonal work outside the republic (high unemployment), etc. They are not representatives of some savage mountain tribe, as you might think from reading Russian accounts.
Best to think of Chechens as "former Soviet citizens," like Uzbeks, Ukrainians, Kazakhs, Tatars, Moldovans, Mordvins, etc.,etc. Soviet ideology did have one positive side: it preached (even though it often did not practice) the "brotherhood" of all the Soviet "nations." And ethnic Russians constituted only 49% of the total population.
Ethnic Russians, however, constitute 83% of the population of the Russian Federation, and hence the danger posed by rampant "Great Russian chauvinism" (as Lenin used to call it) has increased. Chechens -- and other "blacks" (Caucasians) -- are discriminated against. Hence, many Chechens are not made to feel comfortable, to put it mildly, in their place of refuge, and would prefer to go home -- if "home" were at all liveable, which at present it is not.
Joan
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