ABSTRACT
The Russian province Chechnya came to sad prominence in 1994–6 when separatist parts of the population attempted to break loose from Boris Yeltsin’s Russia. Images of bloodshed and bombed sites were transported by the media into the homes of the Western world. The inhabitants of the Caucasus have ever been discontented with Russian dominion: the antagonism between Russia’s rulers and the Caucasus peoples forms a continuous thread through the history of the region, linking Boris Yeltsin to Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. Located on the unknown outskirts of that massive empire, little known and little noticed, the fate of the petty Caucasian fiefdoms has been determined by their distance from Russia’s political centre.
