Yeltsin tried to “pacify” Chechnya the old-fashioned hard way and it embarassed him for his whole term (well, so did almost everything that happened along his whole term). Putin, as befits an old-school KGB man, co-opted a faction of Chechens willing to be his clients and said to them: look, you do not *need *formal independence to opress your own people: side with me (…if you want to live…) and we’ll use our power to put you in charge and back you up as you do all the opressing you want, since you hate most of the same people I do anyway.
Any “moderates” would have been pretty much flushed out during the 1990s rebellions, and between that and a century plus of first Tsarist then Soviet subjugation, then a decade+ of rebellion, and now this, it’s hard to imagine a strong liberal political culture evolving.
I think they made a movie about this…
John Winger: C’mon, it’s Czechoslovakia. We zip in, we pick 'em up, we zip right out again. We’re not going to Moscow. It’s Czechoslovakia. It’s like going into Wisconsin.
Russell Ziskey: Well I got the shit kicked out of me in Wisconsin once. Forget it!
How do you spell the name of the country located in the North Caucasus, situated in the southernmost part of Eastern Europe, and within 62 miles)of the Caspian Sea. The capital of the republic is the city of Grozny.
It’s a trick question because the last internationally recognized country in the area was United Mountain Dwellers of North Caucasus and their capital wasn’t Grozny. There was defacto independence, without major power recognition, for a bit between the first and second Chechen wars. Since 1999 even that defacto but unrecognized independence is gone.
