Ib Faurby in co-operation with Märta-Lisa Magnusson: "The Battle(s) of Grozny", Baltic Defence Review, No. 2 1999 (original) (raw)
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Chechnya, a tiny republic of around 17,000 square kilometers located on the northern edges of the Greater Caucasus mountain range, has become a symbol of post-Soviet turmoil and war. Civil unrest, religiously-inspired extremism and terrorism, economic decline and criminality, and incessant insurgency and counterinsurgency has plagued this North Caucasian republic since the early 1990s. Most of Chechnya’s destruction is caused by two subsequent invasions by Russian armies and the ruthless violence deployed by them since the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s. Yet the roots of the conflict date back to the gradual dissolution of the Soviet Union at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s. Back then, what has come to shape Chechnya’s political landscape – and its relations with Moscow – crystallized as Chechnya along with the rest of the Soviet successor territories slipped into deep economic and political crisis. Indeed, the dissolution of the Soviet Union paved the ground for separatism as newly established Chechen elites sought to fill the power gap left after the withdrawal of Soviet authorities. The crisis of political legitimacy was coupled with an unprecedented economic crisis, an outcome of the decline of Soviet centralised economy and Chechnya’s efforts to secede from the rest of Russia. Against this background, as the following lines show, the outbreak of hostilities between the Russian center and its Chechen periphery became inevitable, which ultimately resulted in what came to be known as the First Russian-Chechen War (1994–1996).
Even with Vladimir Putin having made, as it turned out retroactively, a strategic wager on the Kadyrov clan, it appears that Moscow has never (2006) abandoned its tried and true system of checks and balances. For instance, Bislan Gantamirov, perhaps the most noteworthy “opposition leader” in modern Chechen history, along with some pro-Russian political figures, was long kept in Chechnya as a trump card that could be played as needed if the former mufti, Ahmad Kadyrov, were to become unmanageable. They had been promised a brilliant future in politics, but were told that their time simply had not yet come.
Chechnya is a strategic country for Russia because it is located in the North Caucasus, a region considered at the same time a barrier and a bridge between Europe and Asia. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union Chechnya and the entire North Caucasus have been affected by political, sociocultural and economic problems exploded in local conflicts and insurgency. This paper firstly gives an overview of the Russian – Chechen relations during the last centuries with the purpose to understand the roots of the problems that caused the conflict. Successively, this article investigates Ramzan Kadyrov's leadership and management of Chechnya and tries to answer the question if a stable and authoritarian regime such as that imposed in the Chechen Republic is better than a failing democratic process. Also, this paper aims at establishing if Chechnya after the war and the reconstruction process could be considered a stable country or the Kremlin's next failure.
The first Russo-Chechen War ended in a clear Chechen victory and Russian Withdrawl (tough the russians re-invaded the breakaway republic in 1999). Why did it end that way? Analysing Russian and Chechen strategy, the article concludes that although numerically inferior, the Chechens demonstrated superior military leadership and the ability to adapt to the exigencies of war, while the Russians fought the war according to what they believed the Chechens were doing, not according to what they actually did. In other words, the Russian failure of strategy and the Chechens understanding of Russians shortcomings enabled the rebels, finally, to overcome the disparity between their forces and the Russian army, and bring the later to an untenable situation - not only politically, but militarily as well.