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Another participant, Vil Kikot from Moscow State Law Academy, referred to the historical relations between Chechnya and Russia, “in the light of which Russia must seem to be a cruel enemy to Chechens.”^[34] He asked for what reason it was impossible for Chechnya to secede from Russia, and he referred to the peaceful secession of Norway from Sweden in 1905.^[35] He could also have referred to another, more recent, example, such as Slovakia’s secession from Czechoslovakia. In this case not only did the secession take place in a peaceful way, but also the relative size of the territory and the population was much more important. Chechnya, with its surface of 19,300 square kilometers, occupies a little bit more than 1 percent of the territory of the Russian Federation, and its population of about 1.2 million is even less than 1 percent of Russia’s total population. Inga Mikhaylovskaya of the Russian-American Project Group on Human Rights stated “that the treaty character of the Russian Federation was illusory, since there is no clear legislative statement on the presence or absence of the right of [the] federative subject to leave the federation.”^[36]

Sergey Kovalyov, a widely respected former dissident who was appointed by Yeltsin to chair the Presidential Human Rights Commission,^[37] remarked that “a negotiated resolution of the crisis was also obstructed by the fact that the federal authorities did not take account of the historical role which Russia had played in the fate of the Chechen people.”^[38] According to him, “the majority of Russians are not inclined to feel personal guilt [for what had earlier happened in Chechnya], and this, in my opinion, is a major obstacle on the path of our evolution toward a civilized civil society.”^[39] It might be going too far, as did Kovalyov, to demand from the Russians to feel a personal guilt for what happened to the Chechens during the Stalinist era. One can only experience a personal guilt for one’s own deeds. The Russian population should, however, assume a collective, Russian responsibility for what has happened in the small Caucasian republic.^[40] The reason why the Russian population was reluctant to assume a historical responsibility can be explained by two factors. The first reason would be its feeling of having been itself a victim of Stalin’s policies. The second reason would be its disenfranchised status: it never was a responsible subject of history, but rather a malleable object in the hands of authoritarian leaders. However, even taking these facts into consideration, the Russian citizens cannot deny that Stalin’s crimes were committed in their name.

On the eve of the second Chechen War, on September 8, 1999, Putin said: “Russia is defending itself. We have been attacked. And therefore we must throw off all syndromes, including the guilt syndrome.”^[41] The reason why the Russian leadership did not assume any guilt or historical responsibility is different. Their denial was clearly functional. It had to do with the fact that in post-Soviet Russia Chechnya began to play an increasingly important role in Russia’s internal policy. The political elite acted upon the maxim that if Chechnya did not exist, it should have been invented. For Russian politicians Chechnya was the ideal Prügelknabe, the ideal whipping boy who could be used to consolidate their own grip on power. Sergey Kovalyov already clearly saw this role of the war in Chechnya.

The real cause of the war in Chechnya is neither Grozny nor in the entire Caucasus region: it is in Moscow. The war pushed aside that corner of the curtain that obscured the real power struggle for control of Russia. Unfortunately, it is not liberal, but the most hard-line forces—those from the military-industrial complex and the former KGB—who are celebrating that victory in the power struggle now, . . . the true goal of the war in Chechnya was to send a clear-cut message to the entire Russian population: “The time for talking about democracy in Russia is up. It’s time to introduce some order in this country and we’ll do it whatever the cost.”^[42]