A Small Victorious War

"The first two. A Small Victorious War is a very thorough, practical guide to the first of two post-Soviet wars in Chechnya. The authors interviewed everyone connected with the war, except maybe Boris Yeltsin. Their book tells the story of how and why newly independent Russia, in 1991, first gave its various ethnic minorities what the president called “as much independence as you can swallow” and then, a couple of years later, reined them back in – and how Chechnya, alone, refused to give in, leading to war. Chechnya had been run since independence by Dzhokhar Dudayev, whose enthusiasm for independence was probably genuine but whose claims that it could be easily financed, because Chechnya had enough oil to make it as rich as Kuwait, didn’t measure up against reality when Russia imposed an economic blockade. With President Yeltsin surrounded by an increasingly unpleasant bunch of hardliners, led by his bodyguard Alexander Korzhakov, Russia’s generals came to feel they could follow the lead of America in Haiti, and boost their administration’s popularity with a quick war to depose what they regarded as an unpleasant little regime on their southern border. They counted without the two centuries of accumulated resentment of Chechens for their Russian invaders; and then they bungled it, and found themselves mired in a long-running, bloody, chaotic and unpopular repeat of the 19th century."