Abstract
Chechnya, a tiny republic of around 17,000 square kilometers located on thenorthern edges of the Greater Caucasus mountain range, has become a symbol of post-Soviet turmoil and war. Civil unrest, religiously-inspired extremism andterrorism, economic decline and criminality, and incessant insurgency andcounterinsurgency has plagued this North Caucasian republic since the early1990s.
Most of Chechnya's destruction is caused by two subsequent invasions byRussian armies and the ruthless violence deployed by them since the mid-1990sto the mid-2000s. Yet the roots of the conflict date back to the gradual dissolutionof the Soviet Union at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s.
Back then, what has cometo shape Chechnya's political landscape - and its relations with Moscow - crystallised as Chechnya along with the rest of the Soviet successor territoriesslipped into deep economic and political crisis. Indeed, the dissolution of theSoviet Union paved the ground for separatism as newly established Chechenelites sought to fill the power gap left after the withdrawal of Soviet authorities.The crisis of political legitimacy was coupled with an unprecedented economiccrisis, an outcome of the decline of Soviet centralised economy and Chechnya'sefforts to secede from the rest of Russia.
Against this background, as the followinglines show, the outbreak of hostilities between the Russian center and its Chechen periphery became inevitable, which ultimately resulted in what came to be knownas the First Russian-Chechen War (1994-1996).