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Chechnya: A Small Victorious War Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal London: Pan Original, 1997, xiv, 416 pp
The 1994-96 war in Chechenia was Russia's Vietnam, insofar as the intense coverage devoted to it by the world's media ensured instant reporting especially via vivid images flashed across TV screens (even in Russia itself), which immediately gave the lie time and again to the disinformation emanating from those responsible for the bloodshed in the Kremlin. Unlike in some other Caucasian conflicts, Western journalists had no difficulty distinguishing aggressor from victim. Consequently, their readers and viewers received largely accurate information. But once a conflict ends, attention rapidly switches elsewhere, and the international community easily forgets both the problems which initially led to hostilities and the miseries (death, maiming, loss of domicile and employment, destruction of infrastructure and economy, breakdown of civic order) that typically result. Thus, roughly one year after the agreement negotiated by Aslan Maskhadov, now President of Chechenia, and Gen. Aleksandr Lebed, soon to be sacked by the opportunist Yeltsin, is an appropriate time for the appearance of a book chronicling the war and placing it in its historical context. The authors have done an excellent job in achieving their goals.
The first chapter plunges the reader into the thick of the ferocious assault on Grozny, Chechenia's capital, unleashed as 1994 drew to its close. No one read the omens in the number of dead (between 1,500 and 2,000) suffered by the Red Army attackers that New Year's Eve. The next three chapters recount pertinent aspects of Chechen history, in particular the brutality of (a) the l9th century Caucasian War, as Tsarist Russia crushed North Caucasia's struggle to preserve ancestral liberties, and (b) the deportation of the entire Chechen (and closely related Ingush) people to Central Asia by...