Chechnya: politics of the New Barbarism.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Markwick, Roger D.
• Date: 22 December 1999

The KGB ushered in perestroika. The dying CPSU General Secretary and former KGB head Yury Andropov, anxious to reinvigorate the Soviet military-industrial state, endorsed Mikhail Gorbachev, who went on to become party General Secretary in March 1985. Fifteen years on, the Yeltsin era has ended with the appointment, as acting-president of Russia, of the head of the Russian successor to the KGB, the FSB (Federal Security Service), Vladimir Putin. The wheel of the Russian apparatus of state has turned full-circle. Notwithstanding the demise of Soviet-style communism, its principal instrument of domestic repression has returned to centre stage, secured by Russia's genocidal war in Chechnya.

Yeltsin's resignation on New Year's eve was the anti-climax to eight torrid years of 'reform' in Russia, his personal debility a metaphor for the disastrous legacy he has bequeathed to the Russian people, to whom he abjectly apologized for failing to keep his promises. 'Democracy' and the 'market' were the watchwords of the Yeltsin presidency. Neither has really been achieved. Unenlightened despotism was installed on the burnt-out ruins of a parliament shelled into submission in October 1993, bolstered by a constitution imposed via a dubious referendum in December, that gave the president the whip hand over parliament. Far from a flourishing, modern market, Yeltsin's semi-Bonapartist regime (1) has overseen an 'unprecedented ... demodernization of a twentieth-century country'. (2) The savagery of the Chechen war is symptomatic of this. A weak Russian state, unable to retain the allegiances of its minority peoples either through material benefits or shared national aspirations, has resorted to barbarism to shore up its tottering multi-national federation, and in the face of external challenges to its traditional sphere of influence on its southern flank.

The second Chechen war has its roots in the forces unleashed by Yeltsin himself in his drive to establish an independent Russia. In order to further the cause of Russian sovereignty in August 1990 he had urged its constituent 'subjects' to 'take as much power as you can swallow'. When Chechnya, under a former Soviet air force general, Dzhokhar Dudaev, took him at his word and declared independence in late 1991, Yeltsin reacted by declaring a state of emergency, a decision overturned by the Russian Supreme Soviet (parliament). For three years Yeltsin was forced to tolerate Chechen separatism. But with the parliament out of the way after October 1993, there were no obstacles to the use of force to resolve the situation. In December 1994 Moscow sent in Ministry of Interior troops, having failed to topple Dudaev with Chechen forces in the pay of the Kremlin. The result was a military debacle and human tragedy. Unmotivated Russian conscripts were routed by numerically inferior Chechen rebels, but not before they had half destroyed the Chechen capital, Grozny, and killed or wounded 100,000 civilians, losing perhaps as many as 4,000 of their own troops in the process. Military defeat resulted in Yeltsin making peace overtures on the eve of the June 1996 presidential elections. Yeltsin could not afford to appear to have lost Chechnya at the expense of so many of Russia's sons. A peace agreement was brokered by General Lebed, then Secretary of Russia's Security Council (a reward for supporting Yeltsin in the second round of the elections) at Khasavyurt on 31 August 1996. Yeltsin subsequently signed a peace pact in May 1997 that left the finer details of the deal to be resolved in 2001 but in effect granted de facto independence to Chechnya. It was not to be. Chechnya fell foul of the necessity for Yeltsin and those around him to ensure an orderly succession to the presidency in the face of presidential elections scheduled for June 2000.

A Kremlin Under Siege

Between March 1998 and December 1999 Yeltsin dismissed and installed five successive prime ministers. In May 1999, at the height of the crisis over NATO's war in Kosova, with an impeachment process underway and investigations of corruption that reached to the heart of the Kremlin itself, he replaced the popular Yevgeny Primakov with Sergei Stepashin, both of whom had KGB connections. A long-standing Yeltsin loyalist, Stepashin was the Colonel-General in charge of Interior Ministry forces; an unambiguous warning to the Duma (the lower house) that with parliamentary elections scheduled in December, the president would brook no opposition. Accordingly the Duma relented. The communist party initiated an impeachment vote on 15 May, based on five 'criminal' charges, one of which concerned the launching of war against Chechnya, but failed to muster the required two-thirds majority. Three days later the Duma meekly confirmed Stepashin's appointment.

Stepashin looked the sort of figure who would defend Yeltsin's interests and those of the oligarchic 'family' around him at a time when they were...