ABSTRACT
In 1991, the small mountain territory of Chechnya was an almost unknown part of the Soviet Union, one of a myriad of hidden regions on its political and geographic fringes. Three years later, the territory was the target of the largest military campaign staged on Russian territory since the Second World War. The Chechen capital Grozny, established in the late eighteenth century as a frontier town for the expanding Russian empire, experienced a level of destruction not seen on the European landmass since the fall of Berlin in 1945. Tens of thousands of refugees fled south from Grozny and other cities into the mountains. Thousands more civilians, many of them elderly Russians, were killed by the Russian armed forces that had ostensibly come to save them from ethnic bloodshed. By the summer of 1996, and in circumstances of military humiliation unrivalled since the First World War, the Kremlin pulled out its 40,000-strong army. It had been defeated and demoralized by bands of armed guerrillas who numbered a fraction of the size of Russia's forces.
