The Chechen Wars

Russia, both during the imperial era and the subsequent Soviet communist period, conquered and dominated its neighbors on all sides, either assimilating those nations outright or turning them into client “republics.” In 1991, after the fall of the communist regime, many of those nations regained their independence, including Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic states. The situation in the Central Asian republics remained unstable, however. Some areas, such as Kazakhstan and Turkestan, gained full independence, while many of the smaller areas did not, even though they had a distinct and separate cultural and ethnic identity from that of Russia. The single most troubling area has been Chechnya, the site of two long and brutal wars within the last two decades.

Chechnya has been a problem for Russia for many years. Its people are mostly Muslim, followers of Islam, and not ethnically Russian; yet, during the Soviet era, the government, the intelligentsia, and economic power were almost 100% Russian. The Chechens have never accepted Moscow’s rule and have been a thorn in Russia’s side for centuries. This problem boiled over in December 1994, when Russian forces invaded, supported by heavy aerial and artillery bombardment. The war raged on for over a year until a negotiated cease-fire stopped the bloodshed. The war resulted in the deaths of between 5,000 and 14,000 Russian troops, along with roughly the same numbers of Chechen fighters, with many times that number wounded or missing. The real toll was on the country itself. Grozny, the capital, was almost completely leveled as a result of the bitter fighting there. Estimates of civilian casualties range as high as 100,000 killed, with many more wounded and at least a half-million made homeless and/or displaced.

It is evident that the First Chechen War was an immense human tragedy. It was universally unpopular with both the Russian public and the armed forces. Many of the troops sent into Chechnya were raw and untrained. This contributed both to the high casualty rates on both sides and to the massive numbers of civilian deaths, as poorly trained soldiers attempted to solve the problems of fighting guerillas by applying sheer firepower indiscriminately. Russian army morale was at rock-bottom because of this as well as the question that hung in the air: What are we doing here?

This was, in fact, an excellent question. Russian policy since the 1991 revolution had been to let the various republics and ethnic enclaves achieve their independence if they so desired. Yet, Russia and Chechnya never signed a formal treaty to that effect. While Chechnya, under the leadership of former Soviet general Dudayev, declared its independence as early as 1991, it was never recognized by Russia. The result was that Russia’s military intervention in the First Chechen War was touted by its leaders as an internal police action rather than an invasion and conquest of a sovereign nation.

The treaty ending the First Chechen War did not solve the problem. The country was essentially non-functional, and the regime was unable to establish its authority outside the capital, Grozny. The result was the infiltration of fighters and terrorists from a wide variety of organizations. These groups fought each other and the regime for control. Cross-border raids and insurgent incursions into Russia and other neighboring states eventually provoked Russia's counterintelligence strategies and propelled forces into invading Chechnya once again in the year 2000. An entire decade of mostly low-level warfare followed, during which rival insurgent groups fought each other as well as the Russian invaders. This period was characterized by guerilla warfare, such as the placement and detonation of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), kidnappings, targeted assassinations, and terrorist attacks inside Russia, such as the 2002 Moscow theater crisis that left all 40 attackers dead as well as 130 of the hostages. The Second Chechen War is now considered over, but it resulted, as had the First Chechen War, in thousands of combatant deaths and tens of thousands of noncombatant deaths, injuries, and loss of homes.

The Chechen crises have been seen by the world mostly as Russia trying to exert control over a part of its former empire. Russia has also had to placate its citizens because of the high casualty toll imposed on its soldiers, not to mention the moral outrage at the carnage caused. As Gerber and Mendelsohn (2013) observed, “Russians have been divided regarding the proper policy solution to the war, with growing numbers supporting non-military solutions” (39). One justification given by the Russian government for its interventions in Chechnya and Georgia is that those nations harbored significant numbers of ethnic Russians and that in the case of Chechnya in particular, those persons were being mistreated and deprived of their civil rights. However, this is an understandable reaction to the fact that during the Soviet era, ethnic Russians were imported into almost all the client republics and given positions of authority, privilege, and power over the subject peoples. The backlash against the former Russian bosses after independence was a consequence of that.

It is clear that the Russian wars in Chechnya were a tragic mistake and resulted in not only hundreds of thousands of deaths, but the near-destruction and destabilization of an entire country. Chechnya, now a largely lawless area that is a haven for all sorts of terrorist groups, is now a much bigger threat to Russian security than a functional, independent Chechnya ever would have been. Vladimir Putin rose to power largely on the promise that he would take care of the Chechen problem, but over the course of ten years, all that he managed to do was make it even worse. The ruined graveyard that is Chechnya today is the fault and the legacy of Russia.

Work Cited

Gerber, Theodore P., and Sarah E. Mendelson. "Casualty Sensitivity in a Post‐Soviet Context: Russian Views of the Second Chechen War, 2001–2004." Political Science Quarterly 123.1 (2008): 39-68.