Whatever the motive, it is clear that Russia's leaders and military commanders expected that the overthrow of Dudayev would be an easy task. In November 1994 the defence minister, Pavel Grachev, famously boasted that 'we would need one parachute regiment to decide the whole affair in two hours'.[292] But the invasion was a disaster. The ill-equipped and demoralised Russian army, for all its numerical superiority in manpower and weapons, found the stubbornness and guerrilla tactics of Chechen fighters far more of a handful than they had expected. After fierce fighting, Russian forces captured the Chechen capital, Groznyi, on 26 January 1995, but the Chechen rebels mounted effective resistance in the mountains despite Dudayev's death from a Russian missile in May 1996. On 6 August 1996, the day of Yeltsin's rein- auguration as Russian president, in a move of astonishing daring, Chechen forces attacked and retook Groznyi from a Russian force supposedly three times the size of their own. Yeltsin, faced with military humiliation, and condemned internationally for human rights abuses, sent his former presidential electoral rival General Aleksandr Lebed' to Khasavyurt in Dagestan to negotiate an effective ceasefire marking the end of the first Chechen war. In January 1997, Aslan Maskhadov was elected president of Chechnya in mostly fair elections.[293]
Underthe Khasavyurt agreement, the question ofthe future status of Chechnya was deferred for five years. For the next three years Chechnya enjoyed virtual self-rule beyond Moscow's reach, but was divided internally as competing 'warlords' squabbled over influence and territory, leaving Maskhadov an often helpless observer. In the summer of 1999, the bombing of apartment blocks in Moscow, widely blamed on Chechen terrorists, was followed by an incursion into Dagestan by a Chechen force under Shamil Basaev. These events provided the pretext for a second Russian invasion, although there is ample evidence that preparations had been under way since at least the spring of that year. This time the Russian army was much better prepared and benefited from the vigorous political leadership of Vladimir Putin, who was soon to become president of the Russian Federation. Although not without setbacks, the second invasion was more effective than the first, and within a few months the Russian army had established control of Groznyi and most of the Chechen lowlands. Chechen guerrillas continued to hold out in the mountains, however, and a final end to the fighting seemed a long way off.
Having apparently solved the Chechen question, Putin also moved to curtail the powers of the autonomous republics by dividing the Russian Federation into seven 'super-regions', each overseen by a personal appointee. The move was accepted without much protest by the republics, underlining their dependence on Moscow and the lack of will for further secession struggles. Putin benefited from a revival in the Russian economy, as well as the weak foundation of republican national identity. The policies of Khrushchev and Brezhnev had ensured that the national minorities ofthe Russian Federation, apart from the Chechens, would not be as vigorous in their pursuit of national demands as the larger nationalities ofthe union republics. But the failure ofthe Russian Federation to reach a consensus on a non-ethnic conception of Russian citi- zenship65 means the potential remains for the national question to continue to pose problems for Russia's leaders.
65 Tishkov, Ethnicity, Nationalism and Conflict, pp. 272-93.
The western republics: Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and the Baltics
SERHYYEKELCHYK
The Soviet west, an arch of non-Russian republics extending from the Gulf of Finland in the north to the Black Sea in the south and separating Russia proper from other European states, came to the attention of scholars during the late 1960s and early 1970s. While Western sovietologists have long studied each individual country in the region - Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belorussia/ Belarus, Ukraine and Moldavia/Moldova-before the 1960s, they didnotthink of the Soviet west as an entity. But the region's prominence in the dissident movement during the 1960s suggested that the western fringe of the USSR might become a catalyst of nationalist unrest and, possibly, a channel for the spillover of democratic ideas from Eastern Europe. The region was now seen as a place where the Soviet collapse might begin.
Yet, as North American scholars pioneered the use of the term 'Soviet west', they soon discovered the difficulties of defining this region in economic or social terms - which was at the time considered a clue for understanding nationality perseverance there. In his lead article in the 1975 collection The Soviet West: Interplay between Nationality and Social Organization, Ralph S. Clem proposed that the area was characterised by 'high to moderate levels of economic development with relation to other areas of the USSR', but had to qualify this generalisation by excluding the republic of Moldavia, as well as some areas of Ukraine, Belorussia and Lithuania. Of the usual social consequences of economic development, except perhaps for low fertility, neither high educational level nor high urbanisation qualified as defining characteristics of the region. In any case, European Russia displayed similar economic and social trends. In the final analysis, history was the only factor unquestionably uniting the western republics and setting them aside from the rest of the Soviet Union. All had historical ties to other European countries. In the recent past, some had experienced independence, while others were divided territorially, with some of their territories forming part of another European country.1
Another contemporary collection, The Influence of East Europe and the Soviet West on the USSR (1975), takes a more productive approach to the region as defined more by its past and present links to Eastern Europe than by any sociological criteria. Its editor, Roman Szporluk, suggests in his introduction that the USSR's post-1939 extension westward made the Soviet nationality question much more pressing and sensitive.2 In his subsequent work on Western Ukraine, which was incorporated into the Ukrainian republic during 1939-45, Professor Szporluk shows that, owing to the pre-existing high level of national consciousness, the Soviet authorities never managed to fully absorb this area. Western Ukraine remained the mainstay of popular nationalism, later contributing greatly to the disintegration of the USSR.3
Although this argument would not apply to all western republics, it underscores an important factor in their historical development. The vitality of nationalities on the Soviet Union's western fringe was to a considerable degree determined by the successes or difficulties of their pre-Soviet nation-building. The areas that were able to preserve a high level of national consciousness were those where Sovietisation had come late and where during the twentieth century nationalists had had a chance to mobilise the masses for their cause, as was the case especially in the Baltic states and Western Ukraine. In contrast, in countries where an early interruption of nationalist agitation or lack of infrastructure for such work had prevented nationalist mobilisation of the masses, the population's national identities remained frustratingly ambiguous. This was the case in Belorussia, Moldavia and eastern Ukraine.
293
Anatol Lieven,