“The danger of Russia falling apart has passed,” Yeltsin stated boisterously the same month as the lovefest with Nemtsov. “This does not mean,” he said in qualification of his good cheer, “that all difficulties are behind us.”101 Little did he know that he was about to get into a fratricidal war that bore out this admonitory note.
Chechnya, a swatch of North Caucasus uplands fringed on the north by plain, had as many grievances against the Russian state as any region. Its people, incorporated into the empire against their will in the nineteenth century, raised revolts against tsars and commissars. From 1944 to 1956, they lived in exile in Central Asia and Siberia, having been deported by Stalin on the charge of sympathizing with the German invaders. Although their troubles were not unique,102 their sense of deprivation and an ingrained willingness to take up arms were a flammable combination. The Chechens follow Sunni Islam and are organized into clans that drive off higher authority, be it Russian or Chechen.
The Brezhnev-era leadership of the republic was not changed until June 1989, when Moscow replaced an ethnic Russian first secretary with Doku Zavgayev, a Chechen partocrat. Nationalist and reformist ferment flared in 1990, and that November republic sovereignty was duly declared. The next month Djokhar Dudayev was chosen to chair a national congress, an alternative legislature working in collaboration with street-level activists. In August–September 1991 his congress and paramilitary overthrew Zavgayev, with some loss of life, and on October 27 Dudayev was elected president in a procedurally flawed contest. On November 1 he declared Chechnya fully independent of the Soviet Union and the RSFSR. The Moscow authorities fled the territory and left behind thousands of heavy weapons—the only province of Russia where they did so.
The proximate cause of the Chechen horror show was leadership failure. An air-force officer by profession, Dudayev was the first ethnic Chechen to make general in the Soviet military and had commanded six thousand men in a strategic bomber wing in Estonia—a force that in the event of war with NATO would have rained nuclear bombs on Western Europe. Except for a few weeks in babyhood, he had never lived in Chechnya until 1991. Between him and Yeltsin there were certain parallels: The two were model servants of the former regime, broke with it, and succeeded politically as populists. But there the similarities ended. Where Yeltsin was a risk-taker who knew his limits, Dudayev was a narcissist influenced by the Chechen mountaineers’ cult of the jiggit, the madcap or knight who proves himself in armed forays and lives on in heroic songs if he falls on the battlefield.103 And Dudayev was more beguiled by the trappings of power than by its utilization—“much more interested in the idea of calling Chechnya independent than in the practicality of making that idea work.”104 He had a weakness for cinematic costumes and pageantry. Of a commemoration in Grozny where Dudayev took the platform in a leather trench coat, epaulets, and jackboots, one observer writes that “he looked like nothing so much as a bad copy of Charlie Chaplin’s Little Dictator, toothbrush mustache included.”105 Unlike Mintimer Shaimiyev, who flirted with separatism and then did a workable deal for his republic under the Russian tent, Dudayev scorned the via media and a Tatarstan-type accommodation. As was once said of Yasser Arafat, he rarely lost an opportunity to lose an opportunity. Dudayev’s Chechnya was an economic basket case, at the mercy of political cliques, smugglers, counterfeiters, local mobsters, and Russian businessmen and officials who valued it as a haven and transit point. Between 1992 and 1994, nearly 200,000 people, or one-fifth of the population, left the republic as refugees; most were ethnic Russians.
Yeltsin was not at the top of his game, either. It was he who had said the minorities should take all the sovereignty they could swallow, and here was a minority that said it wanted every last crumb. As Aleksandr Tsipko had pointed out, it was no walkover to explain to the Chechens or anyone in their position that they had no title to the independence that the fifteen union republics of the USSR—one of them Russia—asserted in 1991. In 1995, when the war was in full swing, Yeltsin was to imply that there was a limit the Chechens should have known not to cross: “I have said, ‘Take as much sovereignty as you can.’ But a very profound meaning sits within this word ‘can.’ As much as you can—meaning, Don’t take more than you can. And if you do, you will crack up, like Chechnya did.”106 After the fact, the Chechens’ crackup was instructive to the others, but at the time it was not foreseen.
Racked by indecision, Yeltsin entrusted policy on Chechnya to a revolving carousel of advisory groups. The attitude stiffened after Vladimir Zhirinovskii led the polls in the December 1993 parliamentary election. The sole Chechen with authority in the Russia-wide political arena was Ruslan Khasbulatov. Released from prison under the amnesty, he set up shop in the Chechen village of Tolstoy-Yurt in March of 1994 and offered his good offices as a broker. Yeltsin, however, warned his former adversary off, thus ruling out of court one potentially nonviolent outcome.107
A flag-waving group headed by Nikolai Yegorov, the former governor of Krasnodar province, led in defining Kremlin policy once he was appointed minister of nationality and regional affairs in May 1994. Attempts to arrange a meeting between Dudayev and Yeltsin were to no avail. “Beside the powerful historical and sociopolitical currents, the Chechen conflict… was decisively rooted in personal and emotional influences that cannot be explained in the usual categories of positivist causality.”108 Yeltsin informed Shaimiyev in the early summer that he was thinking about a meeting; he hardened his position when, apparently in reaction to an assassination attempt, Dudayev contemned him on Russian television as an unfit leader and a dipsomaniac. Yeltsin as a result “crossed Dudayev off the list of… politicians with whom it was permissible in any way to communicate and raised him to the rank of a primary enemy. ”109 The patience of Job would have been required to work things out with Dudayev, and that was a quality Boris Yeltsin lacked. Dudayev gave journalists a glimpse of the patience needed at press conferences called to publicize the Chechens’ policy. The pattern was that he would lead off with a rational statement. “Then, however, he would rapidly degenerate into hysterical insults and… philosophical, racial, and historical speculations, almost as if possessed by some evil demon.” Anatol Lieven, the Briton who made this observation, also recalls Dudayev in interviews before the war ranting at Yeltsin and the Russians as Nazis, totalitarian, satanic.110