ABSTRACT
The most obvious cause of the war was the reluctance of Russia's political leadership to allow a lawless part of the federation to secede. However, numerous other theories exist, most of them tied to alleged political, military and criminal links between Russia and Dudayev's regime, to explain the supposed 'real' motives both for the war and for its timing. This chapter looks at the growth of crime in the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation and examines the various theories which purport to explain the use of force by Russia to oust the Dudayev regime. Some Moscow-based experts and Western academics, such as Sergei Khrushchev at Brown University, argue that the Chechen war was a straightforward struggle between political factions in Grozny and Moscow over the lucrative oil, drugs and arms trades, a point of view supported by some who took an active political role in events in both Moscow and Chechnya during the early 1990s.
