The Second Russo-Chechen War Two Years On
By John B. Dunlop
Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution
Presentation at U.S. and World Affairs Seminar, Hoover Institution
October 17, 2001

The month of September 2001 marked the second anniversary of the second Russo-Chechen war of the past decade. As of the moment, there seems little likelihood of a negotiated settlement. The previous war of 1994-1996 was, it should be noted, ended only through the Herculean efforts of three men: General Aleksandr Lebed, the then secretary of the Russian Security Council; Aslan Maskhadov, the then chief of staff of the separatist forces (and now the elected Chechen president); and Ambassador Tim Guldimann of Switzerland, the then head of the OSCE's Assistance Group in Chechnya.

On the last day of August 1996, Generals Lebed and Maskhadov, in the presence of Ambassador Guldimann, signed the so-called Khasavyurt Accords in Dagestan, which put an end to the fighting. In January of 1997, Maskhadov, a political moderate and a former decorated colonel in the Soviet army, was elected to a five-year term as the Chechen president, in the presence of international election monitors who judged the voting to have been free and fair. In May of 1997, Maskhadov and President Boris Yeltsin met in Moscow and vowed to put an end to 400 years of hostility between the Russian and Chechen peoples. A large number of economic agreements were signed by Maskhadov and then Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin.

Unfortunately, the Khasavyurt Accords of August 1996 are now deemed by Russian elites, and especially by those in the so-called power ministries, to have been an act of betrayal. "No more Khasavyurts!" is a slogan which one frequently encounters in statements by top Russian government and military officials. Several Russian military leaders have suggested that General Lebed should be put on trial for having committed treason.

From August of 1996 until August-September of 1999, Russia and Chechnya benefited from three years of uneasy peace. Hostilities resumed following a bold incursion from Chechnya into neighboring Dagestan by an "international" force of Wahhabis, whose titular leaders were the legendary Chechen field commander Shamil Basaev and the shadowy Arab commander Khattab. In September of 1999, there occurred the notorious terror bombings of large apartment complexes in Moscow, Volgodonsk and Buinaksk which served to infuriate the Russian populace in a way similar to the American public's reaction to the American public's reaction to the events of 11 September in this country. On 23 September, Moscow once again commenced the bombing of Chechnya, and the second Russo-Chechen war of the past decade was on.

As a contemporary historian, I believe that the events of 1996-1999, and especially of August-September 1999, should be scrutinized closely before one accepts the received view of either the Putin or Maskhadov leaderships. I would be appropriate, I think, for a contemporary historian to write an 800-page book devoted to the tangled and sanguinary events of the autumn of 1999. I should note that Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski have devoted some valuable pages to these events in their 745-page magnum opus, The Tragedy of Russia's Reforms, published in January of this year.

Obviously I do not have time in a brief presentation to address this charged period in any detail. So I will limit myself to touching lightly on several key questions.

In an interview published in the April 26, 2001 issue of the pro-democracy weekly Obshchaya Gazeta, President (and retired Soviet general) Ruslan Aushev of Ingushetiya, which is a small autonomous republic adjacent to Chechnya, stated: "I know [President] Maskhadov personally. In those three 'peace' years-from 1996 to 1999-we would meet very often... He is a man who has a concept of conscience, of honor, and of decency." In addition, he "was one of the very best commanders in our [Soviet] army. I underline: in our not-yet-corrupted army. That says a lot."

When Maskhadov took office in early 1997, President Aushev noted, he "received a destroyed republic with a collapsed economy. Plus thousands of [Chechen] men armed to the teeth. To whom was he to have turned for help? To the federal center [in Moscow]? No. The federal center was playing a waiting game until all this 'Chechen epopee' should end and Chechnya should be forced to its knees." The May 1997 signed economic agreements were simply not put into effect by Russia.

If President Aushev is correct — and I believe that he is — then Russia, and not Chechnya, bears the lion's share of the responsibility for the failure not to make productive use of three years of peace during 1996-1999.

As for the resumption of hostilities in August-September 1999, there is much grist there for the contemporary historian's mill. On 6 June 1999 — a full three months before the terror bombings in Moscow-a Swedish journalist, Jan Blomgren, reported in the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet that one option being considered by the Kremlin leadership and its associates was a series of "terror bombings" in Moscow which could be blamed on the Chechens. (See The Independent [London], 29 January 2000)

In similar fashion, the well-known Russian journalist Aleksandr Zhilin reported in the 22 July 1999 issue of Moskovskaya Pravda, more than a month before the bombings, that the administration of President Yeltsin had worked out and confirmed a broad plan for discrediting the candidacy of Mayor Yurii Luzhkov-a major candidate for Russian president in the upcoming year 2000 elections-involving a series of provocations designed to destabilize the socio-psychological situation in Moscow. President Yeltsin was said to have approved individual points of the program, and in circles close to Yeltsin's influential daughter, Tatyana Dyachanko, the plan was being called "Storm in Moscow." Loud terrorist acts or attempts at such acts were to be part of the plan, according to Zhilin.

Concerning the early August 1999 incursion of Wahhabi forces from Chechnya into Dagestan, there also remain a great many questions. Pro-democracy Russian publications have reported, relying on inrormation obtained from French intelligence, that Yeltsin's chief of staff (and now Putin's chief of staff as well) Aleksandr Voloshin met with Shamil Basaev and Anton Surikov, a former GRU officer who had helped to direct Basaev's activities in Abkhaziya in the early 1990's, at the estate of the well-known arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi in the south of France. "Voloshin," the newspaper Novaya Gazeta wrote, "was concerned about the situation in Russia and the succession problem. Luzhkov seemed to be a threat and his alliance with Primakov was already a decided matter. They had to be stopped... The political situation and the rules of the game needed to be completely changed." (Novaya Gazeta, 24 January 2000)

I recently came across a useful volume, entitled Spetsnaz GRU, written by former officers of Russian and Soviet military intelligence and published in Moscow in the year 2000, which provides roughly the same information concerning this key meeting between Voloshin and Shamil Basaev, during which Voloshin is said to have handed Basaev $10 million "a sum fully compatible with the costs of a small war."

The authors of this volume, who, unlike the contributors to the aforementioned Novaya Gazeta are not political "democrats," also note that when Russian military intelligence observed the Basaev and Khattab forces coming across the border from Chechnya into Dagestan, they were "commanded not to enter into battle with them and not to hinder the movement of the rebels." (pp. 554-555)

President Maskahdov has stated in several interviews that he directly warned the Russian side of the impending incursion, and independent Russian journalists have confirmed that he did in fact do so. (See, for example, Versiya, 1-7 February 2000)

One leading Russian journalist, Sanobar Shermatova, who regularly writes for Moscow News, has written that the original plan "worked out by several employees of the [Russian] presidential administration" was for the Basaev-Khattab forces to complete a triumphant march to the capital of Dagestan, Makhachkala, and to proclaim there the creation of an Islamic government. In Russia, they would then impose Emergency Rule and officially postpone the scheduled December 1999 parliamentary elections. The realization of this "ambitious scenario," she notes, was unexpectedly thwarted by rank-and-file Avar Dagestani policemen who put up a terrific fight against the invaders (in Dmitrii Furman ed., Chechnya i Rossiya [Moscow: 1999], p. 420).

Concerning the subject of the bloody Moscow bombings of September 1999, which provided the emotional push for a renewal of hostilities in Chechnya, there is much that could be said. Suffice it to note that a secret trial is currently taking place in a penal colony near the city of Stavropol in southern Russia of five residents of Karachaevo-Cherkesiya — none of them ethnic Chechens-charged with having participated in the bombing of the apartment complexes in Moscow. Journalists have not been admitted to the trial, in violation of the Russian Constitution, the Russian Criminal Code and the Russian Law on the Mass Media.

A leading pro-democracy journalist, Valerii Yakov, wrote in the July 20, 2001 issue of Novye Izvestiya: "The trial that the country has been awaiting for two years is closed, both for the press and for society." It would be similar, Yakov underlined, to what would have occurred if the U.S. had held a secret trial of Timothy McVeigh for the bomb blast in Oklahoma City which killed 160 Americans. The U.S. special services, Yakov wrote, "were able to demonstrate the guilt of McVeigh and to offer convincing proof not only to the court but also to society... In our case, everything is the opposite."

I have begun my talk with a historical digression because, as you are aware, a number of Russian spokesmen have drawn a direct parallel between the events of 11 September and the events of August-September 1999 in Russia.

Another tack which Russian government spokesmen have been taking of late is to compare the "low intensity conflict" said to be presently taking place in Chchnya with the troubles in Northern Ireland or with the separatist movement in Spain's Basque region. "The historical parallel is Northern Ireland," President Putin's spokesman Sergei Yastrzhembsky recently underscored. (Quoted in the Washington Post, 27 July 2001)

A reporter for the Washington Post, Susan Glasser, recently looked into these alleged historical parallels and found them to be misleading. "About 800 people have died in Spain's Basque region in more than thirty years," she noted, "and about 3,000 in Northern Ireland since 1972." (Washington Post, 27 July 2001)

How many have died during the two wars in Chechnya. During the year 2000, I published an article with the cumbersome title: "How Many Soldiers and Civilians Died during the Russo-Chechen War of 1994-1996?" (Central Asia Survey, nos. 3-4, 2000) My conclusion: 7,500 troops of the Russian military and Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD); 4,000 Chechen separatist fighters; and approximately 35,000 civilians, yielding a combined total of 46,500 deaths for the first war.

For the current second war of 1999-2001, my highly tentative figures — actually little more than a stab in the dark — would be: 8,000 troops of the Russian military and MVD; 8,000 Chechen separatist fighters; and 20,000-25,000 civilians, yielding a total of 36,000-41,000 to date. So some 90,000 persons may have perished so far over the course of the two conflicts. Obviously, comparisons with Northern Ireland and the Basque secession are misleading.

A more accurate comparison would be with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the ensuing war of 1979-1989, in which the USSR lost 14,500 men (an official figure). It is at least possible that Russia has already lost as many men in less than four years of fighting during the two wars in Chechnya. An organization of Russian soldiers' mothers recently announced a figure of 10,500 Russian military and police deaths for the present second conflict alone.

In following events in Chechnya closely over the past year, I have been repeatedly struck by the extent of the deep corruption characterizing both Russian civilian and military bureaucracies who deal with Chechnya and of the military and police forces stationed in that small republic, which is approximately the same size as Wales in Great Britain.

In addition to the issue of corruption, which I will discuss shortly, there is the related issue of the total cost of the war. A Russian economics specialist, Boris Vishnevsky, calculated recently that, during 1999 and 2000, the Russian government spent approximately $8.8 billion on military actions in Chechnya, a figure which, he pointed out, exceeded the annual budget for the capital cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg. (In Novaya Gazeta, no. 29, 23-25 April, 2001)

Money allocated for the restoration of Chechnya has, it emerges, largely been embezzled. To be sure, this represents nothing new. In February of 1996, toward the end of the first war, the newspaper Izvestiya reported that the Budget Committee of the Russian State Duma was sharply questioning expenditures for Chechnya contained in Yeltsin's unpublished (and therefore unconstitutional) Decree No. 86 of January 1996. The then chairman of the Duma's Budget Committee, Mikhail Zadornov was appalled at the extraordinary size of the allocation for the restoration of Chechnya foreseen in Yeltsin's secret decree: a total of 16.2 trillion rubles, plus $1 billion in foreign loans. That sum, Zadornov noted, "was more than for any socially significant program contained in the 1996 [Russian] budget." Only 12.6 trillion rubles had been allocated in the 1996 budget for "the entire social policy" of the country. "Against the background of these figures," Zadornov complained, "the Chechen expenditures look simply monstrous." (Izvestiya, 10 February 1996)

Of course, these vast sums were not actually spent on restoration work in Chechnya. Rather they were directly pocketed by high-ranking Russian officials. Today, in 2001, little has changed. In July of this year, the elected Duma deputy from Chechnya, retired MVD general Aslambek Aslakhanov, an ethnic Chechen, maintained: "About 40% of the funds [earmarked for Chechen restoration] are stolen in Moscow; another 20%-30% are robbed in Chechnya. So there remains virtually nothing for the restoration of the republic." (Izvestiya, 17 July 2001)

Writing in the newspaper Moskovskii Komsomolets, a leading Russian journalist, Yuliya Kalinina, summed up an investigation which she had been conducting thus: "The budget money which reaches Chechnya is for the most part stolen." (Moskovskii Komsomolets, 25 May 2001) One key problem, Kalinina underlined, was the lack of any auditing of how the allocated funds are spent. The Russian Audit Chamber, for example, was conducting only sporadic reviews of the accounts and, moreover, "they only check to see if the numbers add up."

To take one of several examples provided by Kalinina, 800,000 rubles were paid out during the year 2000 for seeds which were to have been sent to Chechnya. The Control Administration of the Russian Ministry of Finance checked thirteen state farms in Chechnya, and in all thirteen, they had to open criminal investigations. Nothing, it turned out, had been planted, and indeed the seeds had never reached Chechnya. Instead, they had been sold for a second time in Stavropol Krai.

Kalinina also pointed out that Russian wages and pensions sent to Chechnya for distribution to the populace were being audited by no-one. The money was not being sent to pro-Moscow civilian administrators in the republic or to accountants but to the Russian military. "A representative of the district military commandant's office," she wrote, "receives the money in Mozdok [North Osetiya] and then transports it by car into Chechnya. Only the district commandant's office knows how this money is actually spent." When the pro-Moscow chief controller of Chechnya wanted to take a look, he was brusquely cold-shouldered by the military. It emerged that a number of Chechens for whom pension funds were being received by the Russian military were in fact "dead souls," persons deceased or not currently living at their previous address.

This report by Kalinina allows us to segue into the general theme of military and police corruption in Chechnya — the real reason, many Russians believe, why Russia may never negotiate peace with the separatists and why the present conflict could last for a decade or longer.

In May of this year, the pro-democracy weekly Moscow News carried an investigative article by journalist Aleksandr Tolmachev into the ongoing massive theft of oil from Chechnya. (Moskovskie Novosti, 15-21 May 2001) Every night, he wrote, during what was supposedly a curfew, army and other vehicles would form up in convoys of twenty or so and transport up to 2,000 tons of oil, as well as other valuable items looted from destroyed plants, such as non-ferrous metals and electric wiring, out of Chechnya into Stavropol Krai and other adjacent regions. They would pass by the military checkpoints without any difficulties. A joke going around the republic ran: "When the oil and gasoline are used up, then the war will end."

When retired general Viktor Kazantsev, who is President Putin's plenipotentiary representative in the Southern Federal District, was asked by Moscow News about these thefts, he replied with disarming candor: "I know about it [the thefts]. I get reports. Everyone is involved in thievery: the police, the armed forces, and the local populace." (Moskovskie Novosti, 15-21 May 2001)

Writing in the Boston Globe in June of this year, correspondent David Filipov reported that Russian soldiers based in Chechnya were engaged in a variety of inventive and sometimes grisly forms of bizness. (Boston Globe, 26 June 2001) For example, he wrote, Russian soldiers were selling the bodies of deceased Chechens to their close relatives, who wanted to give them a proper Muslim burial. One Chechen woman who worked at a street market was offered the corpse of her nephew by a Russian officer: the asking price — $1,000 in cash, plus a $200 gold necklace. Filipov also noted that: "Everyone must pay bribes to pass military checkpoints, some of which have 'cash register' signs pointing out where to pay."

"A new stage of the war," the weekly Obshchaya Gazeta wrote in July of this year, "is the disintegration of the [Russian] army. That never happened previously. The federal [forces] are killing each other for control over oil." (Obshchaya Gazeta, 26 July 2001)

Earlier this year, Moscow News reported that 132 Russian policemen from Bryansk Oblast who had been assigned to the Shatoi District Police Department of the Ministry of Interior in Chechnya were threatening to go on hunger strike and not return home (their period of service having ended) until they were paid their back wages in full. They claimed that they were actually being paid for work done on only sixteen days of a given month. The rest of their wages were being directly pocketed by their commanding officers. (Moskovskie Novosti, 27 February-5 March 2001)

The Los Angeles Times reported last year that Russian military forces based in Chechnya had transformed the kidnapping of civilians into big business. "In the lowlands... ransoms for kidnapped civilians can be as low as $20; in the highlands, however, ransoms can reach $1,000 or more." (Los Angeles Times, 25 October 2000)

The behavior of Russian contract soldiers (kontraktniki), who are reported to comprise 30% of the total Russian force in Chechnya, has been particularly scandalous. Colonel Vladimir Chirkin of the Forty-second Division told the army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda: "Basically these [contract soldiers] are chronic alcoholics, who are also not opposed to using narcotic substances, and who are simply parasites." (Krasnaya Zvezda, 17 October 2000) Not surprisingly, the kontraktniki have been especially unbridled in their behavior toward the Chechen civilian populace.

Of course, the massive corruption of the military and police forces based in Chechnya pales in the face of the atrocities and repeated acts of torture which these same forces have committed against the civilian populace of the republic. I don't intend to dwell on this grisly and repugnant aspect of the conflict, since it has been rather well documented by the Western media. In addition, leading Western human rights organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have issued a number of well documented reports on the subject, and you can access their web-sites.

The atrocities committed by the Russian forces continue today, and indeed a new mass grave was reportedly discovered this past week in Grozny. A word on one court case which has been dragging on since late February of this year. Colonel Yurii Budanov, a decorated Russian tank commander, was arrested in the spring of 2000 for having strangled a young Chechen woman, Elza Kungaeva, aged 18. (He may also have raped her.)

The trial of this decorated war hero has stirred deep emotions in Russia, and polls show that many Russians sympathize with him. On the first day of the trial, various extremist organizations like the neo-Nazi Russian National Unity organization and Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democrats, as well as some Cossack groups and some communists, held up signs and shouted slogans proclaiming: "Freedom for Budanov!" "Budanov-Hero of Russia!" and "Let's Cleanse [Chechnya] Using Beria's Methods!"

By now it seems likely that Budanov is probably too popular to punish. After undergoing a third psychiatric examination at the Serbsky Institute in Moscow, he has reportedly been diagnosed as having been temporarily insane at the time he strangled the young woman. It seems likely that Budanov will be given a three-year sentence and then immediately be released under the terms of an amnesty already adopted by the Russian State Duma.

In May of this year, the Russian defense minister, Sergei Ivanov, a former KGB general who is said to be close to President Putin, affirmed: "In human terms I sympathize with [Colonel Budanov]... Shortly before the killing [of Kungaeva], ten servicemen of his regiment were killed by a rebel sharpshooter. As the commanding officer, he could not take the deaths of his men calmly." (Russian agencies, 16 May)

A word concerning the Chechen separatists. During a recent interview with the English-language Moscow Times, the new U.S. ambassador to Russia, Alexander Vershbow, after expressing strong concerns about civilian losses and human rights abuses by the Russian forces in Chechnya, went on to state: "We have long recognized that Osama bin Laden and other international networks have been fueling the flames in Chechnya, including the involvement of foreign commanders like [the Arab] Khattab. So notwithstanding our [human rights] concerns, we're working with the Russians to cut off these external sources of support, and that includes intelligence-sharing, and working with Georgia to tighten up controls." (Moscow Times, 12 October)

The ambassador's comments invite an examination of the role of the so-called Wahhabis in the present conflict. My view, to put it up front, is that the role of these extremists in Chechnya is being exaggerated. I note that President Putin's official spokesman, Sergei Yastrzhembsky, claimed on 10 October during an interview with the newspaper Izvestiya that the number of foreign "mercenaries" (i.e., Wahhabis) fighting in Chechnya was "not more than 200 persons." That same number of 200 was recently cited by the elected Duma deputy from Chechnya, Aslambek Aslakhanov. On 15 October, the official ITAR-TASS Russian news agency reported that "the notorious warlord Khattab is planning to go to Afghanistan to fight against the U.S. troops there." Khattab allegedly said that he planned to return to Chechnya in two to three years' time.

It seems clear that, for the most part, what the Russian forces are fighting in Chechnya are dedicated separatists and not far-out extremists like the individuals who committed atrocities in our country on 11 September. As commentator Andreas Ruesch observed in the October 5 issue of the Neue Zurcher Zeitung, dozens of Russian soldiers continue to be killed each month through such methods as explosives and surprise attacks. "Looked at soberly, however," he observed, "these are not acts of terrorism but typical guerilla tactics are directed against military targets as a rule. The separatists have not engaged in the murder of civilians for the purpose of general intimidation."

In similar fashion, the well-known Russian military journalist Pavel Felgenhauer recently underscored: "The root sources of the Chechen resistance are located within Chechnya itself; the weapons and ammunition for the partisan war are basically purchased within Russia itself on the 'black market'... Other financial support for the separatists comes from the 'illegal oil business in Chechnya'." (Moscow News, no. 40, 3 October 2001)

A leitmotif of French journalist Anne Nivat's remarkable book Chienne de Guerre (that is also, oddly, the title of the English translation which was published earlier this year), which treats the current war, is the strong animosity felt by many ordinary Sufi Chechens (that is, adherents of he traditional Chechen Muslim tariqats or brotherhoods) toward the Wahhabis (who represent an extremist tendency first brought into Chechnya at the time of the 1994-1996 war). Many of the Sufis, Nivat reports, believe that the Wahhabis and the Russians together represent the cause of their afflictions. One female Chechen fighter, Raisa, tells Nivat that after the Russians have been driven out of the republic, a new conflict is inevitable with the Wahhabis, which the far more numerous Sufis will win.

A word on the current Chechen refugee crisis. A large number of Chechen refugees-officially numbering 148,000 but perhaps constituting twice that number-are presently hunkering down in the tiny autonomous republic of Ingushetiya to face their third winter in a row in tent camps and other places of refuge. The infrastructure of Ingushetiya has been overloaded to the point of breaking by this enormous refugee influx. To a person, the refugees maintain: "We would go back [to Chechnya] even on foot, if they could guarantee our safety." (Kommersasnt Vlast', 11 September 2001)

The Russian government has done little to assist this endangered populace, but organizations like the International Red Cross and the Danish Refugee Council among others have been remarkable in their dedication.

The two wars in Chechnya have also served massively to threaten the republic's natural environment. Writing in the 18 October issue of the weekly Argumenty i Fakty, journalist Lyudmila Averina noted that more than thirty percent of the republic's territory represents "a zone of ecological disaster," while an additional 40% is "a zone with a particularly unfavorable ecological situation." Ground water in the republic is heavily polluted with phenol, ammonia, pesticides and other poisons. According to health officials, eighty percent of the populace suffer from tuberculosis, heart and blood diseases, and various cancers. "The percentage of still-born children is twice the Russian average, while in Grozny it is five times the Russian average."

Is there a chance of a negotiated settlement to the conflict? Both President Putin and his chief spokesman Sergei Yastrzhembsky have warned that the present "low intensity" conflict could drag on for ten years or more. Recently there seemed to be indications that the two sides were getting ready to talk to one another. Unfortunately, over the past week it has become clear that the Russian side at least is not serious about negotiations. It has flatly ruled out third parties as intermediaries and has made insulting comments about their Chechen separatist interlocutors.

Over the past week there was, however, a new and perhaps significant development: "Chechenization" of the conflict. By the end of this month, a 10,000-strong pro-Moscow police force is to be created on the territory of the republic. A hand-over from ethnic Russian policemen brought in from other areas of Russia to Chechen policemen began on 9 October.

In addition, it has been reported that the head of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs in Chechnya, General Sergei Arenin, and the head of the republic's FSB, General Sergei Babkin (both of them ethnic Russians) are to be relieved of their duties. General Valerii Baranov, commander of the Combined Group of Russian Forces in Chechnya, has just been removed from his post and replaced by Lieutenant General Vladimir Moltenskoi, who has begun publicly paying attention to the complaints of Chechen civilians.

The new conflict in Afghanistan and the changed situation in former Soviet Central Asia appear to be providing an opportunity for the Russian leadership to reduce the enormous military and police presence in Chechnya (75,000-80,000 men). Battle-tested troops are now urgently needed elsewhere. In addition, Putin and his entourage may have come to understand that the massive corruption and criminalization of Russian military and police forces based in Chechnya constitute a serious political threat to themselves and not just to the populace of Chechnya. So a decision may have been taken to try something new: namely, Chechenization.

Will Chechenization work? It seems unlikely-just as the earlier Vietnamization did not work-given that the separatists have to date been at least as hostile toward the pro-Moscow Chechen leadership as they have toward Moscow itself. There is little evidence that the pro-Moscow Chechen leadership under Akhmad Kadyrov enjoys the trust of the Chechen leadership. On the other hand, there can also be little doubt that the pro-Moscow Chechen authorities will treat the republic's populace less brutally than have the Russian military and police. To sum up, Chechenization is unlikely to work but, nonetheless, in some ways it might represent an improvement over current Russian policies and practices.

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