The Russian military invasion of Chechnya, which was launched on 11 December 1994, triggered a harsh, 21-month-long war which constituted, at the least, a serious setback for nascent Russian democracy. How did this bloody war come about, and could it have been avoided? And how did Russia come to find itself facing such a motivated and implacable opponent? Finding answers to these questions will be a major aim of this book.

Russia Confronts Chechnya – the first of two projected volumes on the war – traces events from 4,000 BC, when the ancestors of present-day Chechens began to emerge in the North Caucasus region, to the end of November 1994, when the Russian Federation, in the person of its president and his top advisers, set an irrevocable course toward war. Our focus in this study will, rather narrowly, be upon Russian–Chechen relations; the larger geopolitical context of the encounter of these two peoples will be touched upon only briefly.

My intention in this study, which is an essay in contemporary history, has been to cast as wide a net as possible in order to bring together the available source material concerning the decisions and the events which led up to the war. I would have liked to have had greater access to prosecessionist Chechen sources, but they were not available; interviews with General Dudaev and other Chechen nationalist leaders appearing in the Russian press have been utilized, as have two detailed volumes of memoirs by Dudaev's acting vice president, Zelimkhan (Zelimkha) Yandarbiev.