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Russia and Chechnia. The Permanent Crisis. Essays on Russo-Chechen Relations
Ben Fowkes (editor)
London: Macmillan, viii + 188 pp, 42.50
This puzzling book consists of five parts: 1. 'Introduction' (pp 1-24) by editor Ben Fowkes, Senior Lecturer (?in history) at the University of North London; 2. `The long[-]standing Russian and Soviet debate over Sheikh Shamil: antiimperialist hero or counter-revolutionary cleric?' (pp 25-64) by Bulent Gokay, Lecturer in International Relations at Keele University; 3. `The deportation of the Chechen and Ingush peoples: a critical examination' (pp 65-86) by William Flemming, researcher in Russian Studies at Oxford; 4. `The battle for Grozny: the Russian invasion of Chechnia, December 1994-December 1996' (pp 87169) by Pontus Siren, holder of two MAs (in Russian and East European Studies from Glasgow University and in International Relations from Cambridge); 5. `An outline chronology of the recent conflict in Chechnia' (pp 170-182) by Siren and Fowkes. There is also a five-page index.
The introduction is a fully adequate short survey of events in and around Chechenia (as I prefer to style it) over the last two centuries. We then jump straight into a discussion of how Russian/Soviet attitudes towards Shamil, who led the anti-Russian murid movement in northern Daghestan and Chechenia from 1834 to 1859, have altered according to which (re)assessment of history was required by the ruling regime at the time. There is nothing wrong with this survey as such, but, even though the bulwark of Shamil's fighting force may have been made up of Chechens, Shamil was, after all is said and done, an Avar, so that this chapter seems somewhat ill-placed in a volume devoted to the permanence of the Russo-Chechen crisis. Flemming's short contribution on the wartime deportations is the one detailed attempt to place the Chechens' deepseated anti-Russianism in some sort of historical context. The author has had access to materials not available to those (such as Robert Conquest in either `The Nation Killers' or `Stalin: Breaker of Nations', or Aleksandr Nekrich in `The Punished Peoples') who earlier dealt with this grim topic. The lion's share of the work is then taken by Siren's apparent description of the Chechen war from its start through to the withdrawal of the final Russian troops from the republic. The final chronology...