Crisis in the Caucasus: A New Look at Russia's Chechen Impasse

The human and material costs of the two Chechen wars are impossible to gauge with precision. Especially in the second war, the Russian government has restricted press access, and the profitable industry of kidnapping, a favored practice on all sides, has ensured that even the most intrepid observers have generally stayed away. But the broad outlines of the wars' devastating effects are clear. Tens of thousands of people have been killed -- many, perhaps most, of them civilians. The level of Russian military casualties is approaching that sustained by the Soviet Union during its ten-year quagmire in Afghanistan. Cities have been leveled by Russian bombs, and hundreds of thousands of citizens have been made refugees in neighboring republics and countries. The conflicts have had a negative effect on Russia's international standing and have helped push the country toward illiberal quasi-democracy, if not outright authoritarianism. They have brought terrorism to the heart of Moscow -- most recently in October 2002, when Chechen fighters seized an auditorium full of theater-goers, setting off a crisis that ended in the deaths of nearly 130 hostages during a gas attack by Russian security services. The war has thus had a doubly deleterious consequence for the Russian state: keeping it at arm's length from Western institutions while making it the West's partner in the minds of radical Islamists.

What might once have been a usable war now looks like an unwinnable one, and Evangelista's book is a detailed account of how things came to be this way. It is based on an exhaustive survey of the emerging memoir literature as well as on the work of prominent Russian analysts and journalists whose writings are not generally available to foreign readers. What the book lacks in the from-the-battlefield perspectives of Carlotta Gall, Thomas de Waal, and Anatol Lieven (all of whom covered the 1994-96 conflict), it more than makes up for with a compelling synthesis of new insights from Russian soldiers, scholars, and policymakers.

NOTHING PERSONAL

It is jarring, therefore, to read Evangelista's chapter on war crimes and international policy, a chapter that should have been the centerpiece of a broad indictment of U.S. and European responses to the war. It is instead a curiously emotional attack on Lieven, Jack Matlock, Robert Bruce Ware, and other leading Western experts. Evangelista's main charge is that these analysts have "sought to rationalize" -- by which he seems to mean "justify" -- Russian brutality, especially since 1999. He says that these writers' "poor understanding in general of international law" has led to their "ready acceptance" of indiscriminate bombing, civilian deaths, and numerous violations of basic human rights, all in the name of foiling separatism and fighting terrorists.

These are sweeping and serious accusations. They are also highly inaccurate, if not libelous, and Evangelista needs far more than a series of selective quotes to buttress them. It is simply ridiculous to imply that Ware, arguably America's leading authority on Dagestan and a writer intimately familiar with the suffering of civilians in the north Caucasus, or Lieven -- who, as a former war reporter, knows what it is like to be on the receiving end of Russian bombs -- have somehow given Moscow a pass on wartime atrocities. There is nothing in the work of these writers that even hints at a "rationalization" of the war. They have simply made the important observation that the United States and other countries often find themselves wagging a finger at Russia for acts that are uncomfortably close to ones that they themselves have committed -- and, in the murky environment of the war on terrorism, may commit again. The enforcers of international law are also often its violators, and to note this paradox is not to endorse the policies that might follow from it. It is odd that Evangelista is unable to tell the difference.

Evangelista means to offer a critical analysis of Western, especially American, policy on Chechnya, and the intention is laudable. The substance, however, is sometimes sophomoric. "How has Russia managed to avoid the status of international pariah," he asks, "that Slobodan Milosevic earned for Serbia by his prosecution of wars in the former Yugoslavia?" The answer is that Russia is not Serbia. Russia's prosecution of the war has obviously been reprehensible. Mop-up operations have regularly led to civilian "disappearances" and deaths, and Moscow has been generally unwilling to prosecute its own officers and soldiers for known atrocities. As a matter of ethics, there is little doubt that the level of human suffering produced by the Russian government is at least as great as in conflicts in which the international community has intervened with force. But merely pointing out the inconsistency here is a lame critique. America's stance on Russia's conduct in Chechnya is simply in a different category from its policies on other egregious human rights violations -- say, those in the Balkans or Iraq. Inconsistency, after all, is the indispensable prerogative of great powers.

FEDERAL FEUD

Evangelista is right to challenge the Yeltsin government's claim, now muted under Putin, that the war was necessary to preserve the union -- that a failure to stand tough in Chechnya would give a green light to other would-be separatists. Evangelista argues convincingly that the Russian government's reactions to the problems of state weakness, particularly its resort to extreme violence, have actually made the problem worse. But the "flexible, negotiated federalism" advocated by Evangelista, the kind of arrangement worked out with many other Russian republics and regions after 1991, has not come without a price. This new-fangled federalism is in reality as far from good governance as the centralism of the Soviet era.