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On October 27, 1991, the Chechens chose Djohar Dudayev, a former Soviet general, as their president. Moscow immediately contested the legitimacy of the elections. Five days later Dudayev declared the independence of Chechnya. President Yeltsin reacted on November 8, 1991, by declaring a state of emergency in Chechnya and sending 2,500 troops of the Interior Ministry and the KGB to the rebellious republic. These troops were blocked at Grozny airport by thousands of demonstrators. Fearing an escalation, Moscow decided to withdraw its troops. The Soviet Union was at that time in complete turmoil and would disintegrate some weeks later. The government was therefore more concerned with other, seemingly more urgent problems. But when, in 1994, the situation had calmed down, Moscow once again turned its attention to the rebellious republic in the North Caucasus that for three years had been de facto independent. Hoping to resolve the problem by a simple coup d’état Moscow supported, in November 1994, a rebellion by rival Chechen factions against the government of Dudayev. The putsch, however, failed and the Russian government, which denied being involved in the coup, was embarrassed by the fact that seven hundred regular Russian soldiers were among the captured rebels. After this humiliation Yeltsin decided to attack, and in the beginning of December 1994 Russian troops invaded Chechnya. Quite unexpectedly, however, these troops met with a fierce resistance.

The Russian government had totally underestimated the power of Chechen nationalism. This nationalism was the result of two factors. The first was the relatively late incorporation of the Chechen (and ethnically related Ingushi)^[20] nation into the Russian empire. Chechnya was only incorporated in the 1860s, after a long and protracted colonial war of conquest that took more than thirty years. A second and even more important source of the Chechen drive for independence was the persecution of the Chechen nation by Stalin’s regime. On February 23, 1944, Red Army Day, Stalin deported the Chechen population for alleged treason. Four hundred thousand Chechens—old and young, men, women, and children—were put in trains and trucks and transported in the freezing cold of the barren winter to unknown destinations in Siberia, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. A quarter of them, up to 100,000–125,000 Chechens, died in transit or after their arrival due to the harsh conditions.^[21] It was an example of ethnic cleansing with clear racist undertones. Officially, however, racism was absent in the Soviet Union. Eric D. Weitz wrote:

The Soviets explicitly and loudly rejected the ideology of race. . . .^[22] Yet at the same time, traces of racial politics crept into Soviet nationalities policies, especially between 1937 and 1953. The state not only repressed overly fervent and potentially dangerous expressions of nationalism and deported entire national groups. In the Stalin period especially, particular populations were endowed with immutable traits that every member of the group possessed and that were passed from one generation to the next. The particular traits . . . could lead to round-ups, forced deportations, and resettlement in horrendous conditions. Under Iosif Stalin, the Soviets practiced—intermittently, inconsistently, to be sure—racial politics without the overt concept and ideology of race.^[23]

Only in 1957, in the time of Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization, were the deported Chechens allowed to return to their home country. This deportation is deeply engraved in the Chechen national consciousness. Most of the Chechen leaders in the 1990s were born in exile. The gruesome Chechen fate, suffered at the hands of Stalin and his executioners, had fundamentally, and probably definitively, compromised any Chechen loyalty to the Russian state. “There is perhaps a special emotional state,” wrote Georgi Derluguian, “known only to the peoples that have been subjected to genocide in the past—the ‘never again!’ sentiment that reduces the whole world to the dilemma of survival. It provided the extraordinary determination and moral edge to the Chechen fighters in the first war.”^[24] The Russians, however, never having come to terms with the crimes of their Stalinist past, had no understanding of the grievances of the Chechen nation.

Chechnya: Russia’s Whipping Boy