The War That Continues to Shape Russia, 25 Years Later

“...like the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the departure from Chechnya left a devastated land that quickly descended into lawless strife among rival factions….” As I see it, Islamic warlords in Afghanistan saw a chance to repay Russia for its horrors in Afghanistan. - - - - - "The war, he said, “sucked the whole country into a violent nightmare” as soldiers, mostly ill-trained conscripts, were thrown into the caldron.” Sounds like our initial venture in Korea, Task Force Smith, in July 1950, at the Battle of Osan where our small, hastily-assembled and poorly armed small force of 400 infantry who were battered badly by 5000 NoKo troops and retreated in disarray. - - - - “...the Russian Federation survived the Chechen debacle. … utterly humiliated … That made the ascent of a strongman like Mr. Putin, a former K.G.B. agent who vowed to restore order and avenge Russia’s defeat in Chechnya, not only possible but perhaps also inevitable.” So America elected a black man for president, our white racists were utterly humiliated. Thus we got the open racism of Trump to restore white pride, "unite the right," and MAGA MAGA MAGA. - - - - - - The lessons I take from experiences after WW-2 is that Vietnam, China, Korea, Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Chechna and other places is that people yearn to be free of foreign/outside domination so they can own their own destiny. Attempts to force control over others ends up with disasters as seen in these heart-breaking pictures.

“The hawks lost the war but won power.” This line from the article is haunting, because we see the same phenomena taking place in the United States, as the very people who advocated for and fought the wars in Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan - all on misleading grounds - are now being rehabilitated in the course of trying to impeach President Trump. I speak here of people like Mueller, Frum, Max Boot, Karl Rove, Bill Kristol, and the other intelligentsia who were responsible for a tremendous amount of bloodshed and human suffering. We must not exhume and rehabilitate these demons in order to defeat the man in the White House. "Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that."

These are the most potent photographs I have seen in a very long time. Any decision maker in our own government should contemplate these images before taking us into any conflict.

I wonder how the US government would behave if 350 thousand Arizona Indians declared independence, seized airfields, weapons, and began to kill and enslave US citizens? Of course he will offer independence to these honest rebels?

For people who criticize the American military, they should compare the behavior of American soldiers with the bloody savagery of Russia's military. And Trumpers should note, this is the country DJT admires so much.

The ignorance of the human animal prevails to this day and it looks like we will never learn and will eventually destroy ourselves.

I have been watching a history of World War II and now read this sad story. A common element in both is that of a ruler who is given sound advice and information by experts but who somehow believes himself to be better and smarter than they. The results are consistently disastrous. That was fortunate for us in the 1940's, disastrous for Russia in the 1990's. Can anyone think of an American leader who similarly believes, without any experience or training, that he is more knowledgeable and insightful than a dedicated staff with decades of experience?

Writing, documentation and reminders like this are one of the primary reasons why I subscribe to the Times. Outstanding journalism when most papers are being bought, scrapped for parts and then left to dangle.

The photo of the captured Russian prisoners tells the story war: practically children, conscripted, and thrown into a conflict that they had no part of creating, forced to suffer and die. Their fear is palpable and should serve as a sign of the humanity that is lost in all warfare. There's no honor. There's just fear and slaughter.

I feel really sorry for peoples who live in the shadow of Russia. Such a horrific bully. They’d make a lot more friends if they just tout the many positive aspects of Russian culture and way of life. War like this only makes more enemies.

I fear the same will happen to Ukraine if Putin’s aggression is not stopped.

What is a nation and when is violence acceptable or even necessary to keep it together? Mid-19th Century, the United States examined that question, and maybe 700,000 died and much of the country was devastated. Did not Russia have that same right to keep its national territory together as we did? As botched as the war was, following the breakup of the Soviet Union and its attendant humiliations and dislocations, if this question would not have arisen in Chechnya, it would have taken place somewhere else, as yet another republic sought to break away. Huge tragedy with no winners but lots of those who lost everything.

The referendum where the Chechen people voted for their independence in the early 1990s showed upwards of 90% pro-independence. A democratic Russia could have readily accommodated an "independent" Chechnya landlocked within Russia. Russia's central power structures, its "deep state" could not tolerate such a situation. In the late 1990s a series of apartment bombings blamed on the Chechens were revealed to be actions of the FSB to build public support to destroy Chechen independence.

This is a good piece. The first Chechen War was the breaking point for many of us who still hoped Russia would emerge healthy from the chaos that enveloped the country in the years after 1991.

This is a devastating collection of photographs. People who glorify war, or think that it solves things, should take a good hard look. That it enabled Putin only adds insult to injury.

Read A Constellation of Vital Phenomenon by Anthony Marra. An absolutely stunning and unforgettable novel on this subject.

Brutality of the war is true and reported powerfully. Political analysis is rather simplistic, and the war as a turning point is an exaggeration. It was tragic but just a sideshow. The defeat of nascent democracy ran deeper. Grachev backed down from braggadocio and wanted to avoid the war. Reed my memoir The Firebird.

What lesson of geopolitical history has Trump learned of this debacle? It's a rhetorical question, of course, but an important one since Trump is Putin's present stooge. The Republicans have no answer to this either, because in addition to believing there will never be another Democrat as President, there is no post-Trump doctrine in what's left of the Republican party. The Chechnya history lesson is a compelling counterpoint to our own Afghanistan debacle, sharply documented in the Afghanistan Papers, recently published. There will never be a Chechnya Papers counterpart to the Afghanistan Papers published from Russia, at least not while Mr. Putin continues to give orders to Trump and other authoritarian thugs in less hospitable parts of the world. And everyone understands why. But consider what will happen to our free press after Trump's re-election. Is there another Trump term with our own Chechnya waiting for us? Can we rule it out?

Considering the number of other former Soviet states that went independent around that time, I have always wondered why Russia fought so hard to try to keep that one from leaving.

The lies and connivance and absence of basic freedoms that accompany the brutality is the legacy of the current Russian leadership. The American and Russian people can be friends, and we’re for an all too brief time. Needs to be remembered as some of our current leadership appears adoring of Russian leadership.

And to what end? I fear that we will never learn anything as a species and that we are doomed to self destruct.

A good article but it abruptly stops after the end of the first Chechen war. It should have contained a discussion of the second Chechen war, Putin’s conduct of the war and how the war’s outcome might have met Putin’s objectives. The article would have also benefited from a discussion of today’s Chechnya.

A well-written story with haunting photographs. It does make me wonder why the Times and the rest of the media never, ever show combat images from our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — or even write about the reasons these photos are missing. I presume the government has restricted these images, but I see nothing explaining it, or how the Times is fighting it. Meanwhile we get a sanitized version of our wars.

If Chechnya didn’t have any oil then then their independence would have happened without war.

“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” ― James Joyce, Ulysses

All we really know is what is reported to us. There is little doubt that the atrocities incurred by those that seek separation from Russian dominance are far greater a horror than we know. All the more reason to be very alarmed at Trumps interests in Russia and Putin. Ukraine must be a line in the sand for the stoppage of madman Putin's lust for days of old.

This article is heartbreaking and shows the dark soul of the post-Soviet intelligence/military establishment and a grim reminder that Ukraine is not the first nation to have to deal with Russian hegemony. What is more perilous is leaderless America's craven response to all of it.

Never forget the role of piety and the goals of paradise. This was a religious war. Chechens warriors are pious, fearless, and merciless against non-believers. The rise of religious intolerance and hate, fostered by the West against its enemies since the end of the WWII to contain communism, has still ongoing effects. Grozny then looks like Syria now. The world will continue to pay for the destruction of war from piety. No wonder some countries like China and India are wary of this potential for catastrophe and are taking steps to foster secularism.

This is a fantastic article by Andrew Higgins. NY Times has enlightened us, an issue that many in America were unaware. Let us also consider that the the two Chechen Wars created fighters for DAISH/ISIS, and those who survived in Syria are back in the Caucasus. To add the conflict is continuing in Dagestan.

Trump's best friends. Whose side would he have supported?

The liberal dream was killed before the war, when it became painfully clear that the liberals could not govern. The lawless was everywhere in Russia, but in Chechnya it was especially deadly. The 'independent' Chechnya was really violent promoting exodus of thousand non-Chechens out of the republic, that brought economic collapse of the republic the result was the violence not only inside of the republic but outside as well. The liberal Government was not able to contain the violence, so they decide to use the Army. Unfortunately for them, their rule decimated the Army as well, as result they lost the war. Of course, the independent Chechnya was not sustainable. It lost the half of the population not so much to the war, but to exodus of non-Chechens as well as educated Chechens, leaving Chechnya with inability to create anything resemble a economy. Add to that warlords who were fighting with each other, and use kidnapping and slavery as ways to get some money. It creates danger to the southern borders of Russia, which was culminated by invasion of the Russian Republic of Dagestan by Chechen that started the second Chechen war.

My Russian freinds tell me that Grozny looks fantastic now. The Russian government is accomplishing with money where sheer force failed.

The article is OK but extremely lacking in context. From what’s written you would think the conflict had not been ongoing since the Russian empire. No mention of Stalin’s deportation campaign after WWII? I was waiting for the article to get to the preamble to the second Chechen war..but it didn’t come. Just sad to see complex situations in Georgia, Ukraine and Chechnya reduced to talking points about Russian interventionism. Also I would disagree that the Chechen war ended “liberal” ideas in Russia. Many Russian journalists and others used state abuses during Chechen war to unmask corruption if anything (ie Litvinenko, Politovskaya), leading the way for today’s generation of anti-corruption activists. Sad to see the level of public discussion get so low in this country. We need to do more to understand these places and events not by simplification but by a real effort to examine their history. These complex events deserve a better treatment by NYT.

The first photo that I saw in this article reminded me of the battle of Stalingrad during WW II. War is always the same: Many innocent people, soldiers and civilans, suffer and die while the political leadership on either side sits in a comfortable office dirrecting the slaugter for wtatever reason

The rest of the story is how Putin was engineered into a position of power, via the strong man image. To get a man who would protect the leadership's crimes, they selected a man who also had committed crimes - they could cover each others. Who made the plan remains a classified secret, but it amounted to bombing a number of apartment buildings and the death of 293, and injury of over 1,000. These bombings were blamed on the Chechens. Putin stood before the cameras and vowed to take revenge. He presented him self as the tough man who could become the country's leader and that is what happened. What a price to pay for power. In addition to the number of Russians killed in the apartment bombings, how many Russians and Chechens did in the 2d war. Read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_apartment_bombings I wonder if Trump has any idea of who he is dealing with.

The Chechen people were brutally conquered by the Czars, inhumanly deported en mass by Stalin, and slaughtered by Putin. The main pretext for the Second War against Chechnya was a series of apartment building bombings in southern Russia which were used to whip up nationalist fervor. The issue was that FSB agents were actually caught planting the second bomb in a false flag operation to blame the Chechens. The horror of what the Russians did still echoes in reactionary politics on both sides, Putinism and the Jihadis. While the US and Europeans tut-tuted the Russian brutality the fact was they were happy to see "stability" imposed over 'troublesome' Muslim peoples. The dangerous implications of this horror inflicted on the Chechen people are still unfolding.

I remember.. I am a History Major, following the war on the BBC and NYT which seemed like the only ones covering it ... such brutal stories and photographs.. and not being one bit surprise when I heard people walked on a Subway in Moscow and blew them selfs up ... violence most often leads to more violence.. and civilians hit the negative location lottery and just suffer relentlessly in vain.. what a heartbreak for all who are affected

The faceless bureaucrats, the ideologues, the hawks, and those at the top fight such wars from afar - as far as they can be from the battlefields. If only they could see what they wrought - like the photo of the child with her legs blown off . . .

The people of Grozny should flood the Kremlin with postcards for Putin showing this devastation reminding him it is why Russians are not invited in Chechnya. It should happen every year until eventually Putin apologies for the Russian atrocities. I now look at Putin's face with his smiles and realize what a killer he really is.

WAR, anywhere in the world.....Is just a reminder that flawed human beings with power are selfishly unsatisfied with peace, even when they have the upper hand. Greed & Arrogance motivated by the pursuit of even more power is celebrated at a cost that even death itself cannot stop, despite the inhumane levels of its cruelty on the world. God Help Us All!!!

The US should offer weapons and assistance to them to retake their country form the Russian mafia that now runs it. Putin is the most despised leader in the world since Stalin. The Russian people continue to prefer to ruled rather than governed, dictated to rather than inspired. Where is Kerensky when you need him?

Why are most of these photos in black and white?

This explains a lot about Putin's motivation to demonstrate Russian power around the world. Putin's macho image is his personal expression of the same power. Now he's got his tentacles woven into the U.S. through election meddling and pretending to be Trump's good buddy. He must be contained. Ruin Russia if you want, Vladmir, butt out of everywhere else.

And now Chechnya has become a land of public beatings of and concentration camps for gay men. Well, done indeed, Russia.

The Chechen war was one of the most under reported major conflicts by the western press post WWII. Thanks for tying it together with the rise of Comrade Putin.

Excellent piece. Thank you. Makes me realize it's not so much that we have to learn from history so as not to repeat it, it's that it fades, overtaken by more recent events. If we're not individually responsible for remembering these important historical events, who is? The Captain of the Horse Soldiers knew his history and it made a difference. The same cannot be said for subsequent leadership in Afghanistan and the squandering of $2 million in national treasure.

Well, you can't just have people willy-nilly deciding they want independence. After all, Alaska might just one day up and decide it would rather be an independent Nation. What then?

It'll be a cakewalk, they said. Clean, easy, and paying for itself. They'll throw rose petals - and where they don't, well, we'll flatten it, pave it, put on parking stripes, and be home by Christmas. After effects? You mean, besides all the awesomeness and friendly new territory? Something like this has surely been said since well before Thermopylae.