The brutality of the war and the terrible destruction of the Chechen capital of Grozny helped enrage and radicalize a generation of Chechens, who already had no love lost for Russia. Chechnya and its neighbors, Ingushetia to the west and Dagestan to the east, had declared independence from Russia as a united mountain republic in 1917 only to be yoked into the Soviet Union by force four years later. Despite the honorable participation by the region’s inhabitants against the Nazis in World War II, Stalin had nearly all of them, close to half a million people, rounded up and deported to Kazakhstan in 1944. They were allowed to return in 1957 as part of the de-Stalinization process, but a huge number had starved or been killed.
It’s no coincidence that most of these disputed and conflicted regions are located in the Caucasus. (Not Moldova, which is on the west side of the Black Sea between Ukraine and Romania.) There are patches upon the patchwork quilt of the region and innumerable bloody rivalries both ancient and new. This contentious region reaches from my birthplace of Azerbaijan in the south on the Iranian border and the Caspian Sea over to Georgia on the Black Sea with Armenia in between and Turkey to the south. In the north, on the Russian side of the border, it includes Dagestan, Chechnya, and Ingushetia as well as Kabardino-Balkaria (home of Mount Elbrus, the highest mountain in Europe) and north to the Kalmyk Steppe. It is home to over fifty ethnic groups, dozens of languages, and nearly every kind of religion.
Letting Chechnya and its ultraviolent neighbors become independent was never going to appeal to Russian leaders. It wasn’t just that they were convenient punching bags to rally the domestic base. Nor did they have much in the way of resources. The problem was, if they became independent nations they would instantly gain the rights and protections of independent nations, free to make allies, sign treaties, and complain to the United Nations—all with no way these broken states could control the flow of violence. Dealing with a failed Russian state was bad. Dealing with a failed neighboring country was much worse, a lesson the Soviets had learned in Afghanistan.
Not to defend Yeltsin on the matter, but another factor made a split nearly impossible: the lack of clear borders. The USSR was made up of republics and the borders between them were quite clear. When the USSR broke up there were very few conflicts between the new nations over geography. But inside of Russia the borders had never been drawn so clearly since they had no sacred meaning inside the vast republic. So when the Chechnya-Ingushetia region declared for independence in 1991 nobody was sure exactly what that would mean. The breakaway’s leaders insisted their new nation might extend all the way to Stavropol, two hundred kilometers west of Grozny, and it was difficult to deny their claim or make an alternative one based on anything concrete. Where did Chechnya begin and end? And what of neighboring Dagestan? It was a Pandora’s box. Chechnya was also unique because there were no external influences on its rebellion. All the rest had neighbors pushing for or against rebellion in one way or another. But Chechnya’s revolt was entirely internal.
It is tempting to jump ahead to the second Chechen war that brought an unknown prime minister named Vladimir Putin to the presidency. This first war not only set the stage for the second, but it is also an important illustration of the light-handed way the West treated Russia during the 1990s. Thanks to the magic of e-books I can tell you that Bill Clinton’s memoir, My Life, mentions Chechnya exactly four times in its thousand-plus pages. Even if you discount the first half of the book that takes place before he became president, this is astonishing. It is also an accurate representation of where Chechnya and other global hot spots ranked on Clinton’s radar while he was in office, especially during his first term. (The 1994 Rwandan genocide earns a few more mentions, mostly in the form of his regret at not having done anything to intervene.)
It’s not as if the first Chechen war was widely ignored at the time. Human rights groups and the Western media covered the atrocities as closely as they could. The Russian military’s failure to pacify the region as quickly as promised became an embarrassing issue for Boris Yeltsin as the 1996 election approached, forcing him to talk about it at public appearances. Remember, this was back when Russia still had a free media. The word “Chechnya” itself would practically be banned from the Russian press soon after Putin took power. Yeltsin even spent some awkward moments standing next to Clinton at press conferences in 1995 and 1996 answering questions about Chechnya, mostly denying that violence was taking place despite the overwhelming reports of war crimes.
It’s a remarkable feeling to read those news conference transcripts today. A Russian president, pressed to answer tough questions from the Russian press! You could be forgiven for forgetting that such a moment had ever existed in Russian history. At their conference in Moscow on May 10, 1995, one reporter got straight to the point after hearing Yeltsin’s usual dismissive remarks.
REPORTER: “President Clinton, you’ve just heard President Yeltsin describe the situation in Chechnya in a way that may be at odds with news dispatches coming from the part of the country describing a massacre. And I wondered if—what your reaction is to his description, whether you accept it, if not why not, and what impact these reports of terrible things there may be having on the countries eager to join NATO, and what you would have to say to him about that?”
Clinton’s response referred to how the civilian casualties and the prolonged fighting in Chechnya had “troubled the rest of the world greatly and have had an impact in Europe on the attitudes of many countries about what is going on here and about future relationships.” He said he had urged Yeltsin to make a cease-fire and “bring this to a speedy resolution,” concluding that “it’s been a difficult thing for them [Russia] as well.”
So then, what could the American president or the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) do about a bloody civil war in Russia where tens of thousands of civilians were being displaced, tortured, and murdered? One clue comes from earlier in the same press conference, when President Clinton was asked what he would do about Russia’s continued support for Iran’s nuclear program.
REPORTER: “Will you resist Republican threats to cut off foreign aid to Russia?”
What!? Yes, this was the situation in 1995! Today, exactly twenty years later, the Iranian nuclear program Russia built is back on the front pages for mostly the same reason: fear over Iran making a nuclear bomb. It all started while American aid was helping keep Russia afloat (and helping Yeltsin get reelected in 1996). Surely making such aid conditional on dropping support for the Iranian nuclear program or on ending the massacre in Chechnya should have been discussed. In fact, such conditionality was discussed quite a bit in the US Congress, in both houses, in 1995 and 1996.
The Russian nuclear agency, MinAtom (succeeded by RosAtom in 2007), brought in desperately needed hard currency and was run with an alarming degree of autonomy. Its chief, Viktor Mikhaylov, had made a secret deal with Iran to deliver a gas centrifuge that would enable them to produce weapons-grade uranium, and he had done so without even telling Yeltsin. The rogue agency also had the support of Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov, who promoted close political and economic ties with Iran.