Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
18
Chechnya
Chechnya is an uncomfortable subject, and objective information is nearly
impossible to come by. Even calling the blood spilling that continues there a
“war” can provoke hours of debate. The fate of this region in the Northern
Caucasus Mountains is the most controversial subject in today's Russia—and in
many ways, the most important.
Chechens make up one of nearly 100 ethnic groups with no relation to Slavic
Russians scattered in the slopes and valleys of the Caucasus Mountains. Rus-
sians fought for dominance over the region in the 18th and 19th centuries, and
technically “won” in 1859; but Chechens in particular continued to bristle at
Russian rule, and guerrilla bands repeatedly attacked Russian colonizers. Dur-
ing the Russian Revolution and ensuing civil war, the Bolsheviks won over
many Chechens with promises of greater autonomy and religious freedom.
These promises were quickly forgotten, however, and Chechens staged upris-
ings against Soviet rule.
Stalin was so panicked by Chechen hostility toward Moscow that he accused
the entire Chechen population of collaborating with the Nazis and exiled them
all to concentration camps in Kazakhstan in 1944. They were allowed to return
home only under Khrushchev's thaw 13 years later, to find Chechnya “Soviet-
ized,” with an ethnically diverse population, a university, and a busy airport. The
Chechens assimilated back into their homeland, which was by then a province
within the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic. But the indignity of
exile remains seminal in Chechens' modern memory, and pent-up rage over
that and other Russian offenses simmered for decades. The late-1980s inde-
pendence movements in other Soviet republics fueled the ambitions of a few
Chechens, led by Dzhokhar Dudayev, to establish their own sovereign state.
But Chechnya remained a republic within Russia when the Soviet Union col-
lapsed. Dudayev encouraged resistance against Russian police, and amid
increasing violence in the region, then-President Boris Yeltsin ordered troops
into Chechnya in December 1994.
Neither side seemed ready for what happened next. The Russian army
turned out to be so demoralized and financially crippled that its troops suc-
cumbed in battle after battle to ragtag Chechen bands. The Russian populace
2
eastern Europe between the two powers.
Hitler invaded anyway, plunging the
Soviet Union into a war that would cost
the country 27 million lives, more losses
than any other nation suffered in World
War II. The Great Patriotic War, as Rus-
sians call it, brought the 900-day siege of
Leningrad (see the sidebar “The Siege of
Leningrad,” in chapter 14) as well as grue-
some battles at Stalingrad and Kursk that
helped break the back of Hitler's forces.
Genuine grief mixed with nervous relief
gripped the country when Stalin died in
1953, as many feared that life without this
