On 11 December 1994 Russian forces were sent into Chechnya "to restore the constitutional order" after three years of tension and uncertainty. "Why can't we carry out an operation in our country like the US did in Haiti?" demanded Kremlin hawk Oleg Lobov when warned of the possible consequences. Whether the attitudes of the war-party were shaped by contempt or historical ignorance, the use of force turned a minor distraction into a major conflict.
The Chechen fighters denied the federal authorities a rapid victory. The generals and politicians leading the campaign had to face the unaccustomed scrutiny of Russia's new media and parliament. A small but articulate minority in Moscow opposed the operation from the outset and mounting casualties extended public disaffection: a year later Boris Nemtsov, young governor of the Nizhny Novgorod Region, gathered a million signatures on a petition against the war. Finally, after 18 months of armed conflict and uneasy ceasefires, the stalemate was officially acknowledged.
Following Yeltsin's re-election as President of the Russian Federation (and a last outburst of fighting), an agreement was reached with Chechnya's leaders in August 1996. Federal troops were withdrawn, and a five-year moratorium imposed on any discussion of the republic's disputed status. The war had been a terrible and disturbing lesson for the reformers.
A mere ten years earlier the USSR was a nuclear superpower and serious rival to the West. The rapid dissolution of the Soviet bloc and the emergence of more than a dozen new states from the USSR was "in retrospect a remarkably non-violent process"1 – only in Chechnya (and distant Tajikstan) did the transition result in war. The end of the fighting offered a new start, both to Russia and Chechnya. For a time it seemed that the brutal military campaign had been a singular lapse, one last appalling aberration in a momentous period of change that saw the end of the Cold War, the defeat of communism, and the beginning of market reforms in the old Soviet Union.
In January 1997 Asian Maskhadov was chosen President of Chechnya in elections that international monitors agreed were free and fair. In May that year he met President Yeltsin and they signed a treaty that further confirmed the end of hostilities. Both sides seemed determined henceforth to resolve their differences by non-violent means. This commitment to democracy and diplomacy justified Russia's admission to the Council of Europe in 1996. In international eyes Chechnya remained within the Russian Federation, and was thus also regarded as part of a wider Europe.
However, others drew a different lesson from the first military campaign. If such an operation were repeated, the government was advised, the forces sent into Chechnya should be properly led and co-ordinated; and this time public opinion, the media and parliament would have to be effectively prepared and managed. When Anna Politkovskaya began reporting for the popular bi-weekly Novaya gazeta in summer 1999, Yeltsin was selecting a new prime minister. The little-known Vladimir Putin's candidacy benefited from a widespread feeling that the country needed firmer government, that the new business magnates, the so-called oligarchs, should be reined in and that the Federation's 89 restive regions and republics ought to be brought back under control. With parliamentary elections soon to be held, a rapidly escalating sequence of events provided an opportunity for Yeltsin's protégé to give a dramatic demonstration of such firmness – fighting in Daghestan, terrorist explosions in Moscow and the second deployment of federal forces in Chechnya on I October 1999.
JOHN CROWFOOT