Studies of a Yeltsin Folly

...The two works are complementary in their accounts of the major events and their appraisals of the leading players, which are based in large measure on eyewitness experience and scores of personal interviews with famous and anonymous participants alike...

...35.00...

...His insight into the idiosyncratic "Soviet" civilization—distinct from authentic Russian and Ukrainian traditions —in immigrant industrial towns like Donetsk is quite valuable...

...Lieven goes against present fashion in arguing, convincingly, that there is no such thing as "Russian nationalism" and never has been...

...Stalin's deportations of the Chechens and other Caucasian peoples to Central Asia in 1944...

...In the course of his narrative, he examines allegedly "comparable" situations in Transdniestria, the Crimea, the eastern Ukraine and elsewhere and (not surprisingly) finds each of them very different...

...The New Russian Tragedy" When Bill Clinton, threatened with a hunger strike by Randall Robinson of TransAfrica, sent thousands of American troops to "restore democracy" in Haiti, probably the last thing he or his advisers imagined was that the action would encourage Bons N. Yeltsin two months later to send the Russian Army into Chechnya to "restore constitutional order...

...One is with Henry Kissinger and others who portray Russia as an eternal military threat, the other with Western policymakers who identify Yeltsin's government with democracy and "reform" (the latter largely referring to its flawed "privatization...

...actions, including Clinton's subsequent comparison of Yeltsin's cause with that of the Union in the American Civil War, could be more than peripheral to a struggle in the Caucasus that had been going on, in one form or another, for 200 years...

...The most controversial aspect of Lieven's book compares Russia's current situation with the failure of classical liberalism in the 19th century in Italy, Spain, Mexico and other countries of Latin America...

...The data, of course, proved to be mistaken or irrelevant once the issue was plainly national independence and the sole Chechen who might have rivaled Dudayev for popular support, former Supreme Soviet Speaker Ruslan Khasbulatov, was excluded from the game by his rivalry with Yeltsin...

...Ethnically, Russians are almost as mixed by intermarriage as Americans, while their patriotism has had an imperial or (in the Soviet era) ideological character...

...It therefore seems appropriate to close this review on a forward-looking note by observing that both books give high marks to General Alexander I. Lebed for opposing the Chechen war from the beginning and for ending it when he had a chance to do so...

...436 pp...

...Between them, Gall and de Waal covered the war almost continuously for the Moscow Times, Lieven regularly for the Times of London...

...Lieven has written two books in one— the first parallels that of the Moscow Times authors, the second addresses larger policy concerns about contemporary Russia...

...On the initial count, Lieven demonstrates (as do the Moscow Times authors) the extreme unwillingness of Russian soldiers and officers to fight in Chechnya or similar colonial wars, and the unwillingness of the Russian public, led by the Committee of Soldiers' Mothers, to support these endeavors...

...Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power By Anatol Lieven Yale...

...When it did, the Administration's sages never thought the result would be a major Russian military defeat...

...For example, Gall and de Waal note, for the benefit of those inclined to blame the deportations on "the Russians," that the three highest officials involved— Stalin, security chief Lavrenti P. Beria and the operational commander Mikhail Gveshiani—were all Georgians...

...The Gall-de Waal book is sharply focused on the Chechen conflict as such...

...They demonstrate convincingly that the Chechnya conflict was sui generis, not "typical" of anything, even of neighboring Ingushetia, Ossetia or Dagestan...

...For instance, in the early phase of the conflict before the Army got involved, the security services' covert operations in Chechnya were based on an intricate calculation of the allegiances of the various teips whom they tried to manipulate against Dudayev...

...Its limitations are marked not only by the great defensive victories of 1815 and 1945, but by their more numerous defeats and failures in the same two centuries...

...Not that any U.S...

...In addition, Lieven conducts two running polemics...

...He sees Yeltsin as the equivalent of Mexico's Porfirio Diaz, thereby implying multiple crises yet to come...

...Reviewed by Anatole Shub Author, "An Empire Loses Hope...

...They also do justice to the major historic events that still shape current consciousness: the Caucasian wars of the 19th century (the revolt led by Imam Shamil...

...The authors' accents are almost always on the particular rather than on generalities...

...The first of them may already be under way...

...Both books are careful not to oversimplify the conflict, either as a "crisis of the Russian empire," or a "clash of civilizations" between Christianity and Islam (the Chechens were animists far longer than they have been Muslims), or a struggle between rival teips or clans...

...This, in turn, helps us understand why half a century later volunteer Chechen fighters joined in the Abkhazians' struggle against Georgian rule...

...Indeed, one of the great merits of these two fine books is that they demonstrate in copious detail how, like the Great War of 1914-18, the "small war" in Chechnya between 1994 and '96 had numerous personal, bureaucratic, political, economic, religious, and historical roots—and how these were constantly being intertwined in complex, changing combinations...

...the ups and downs of the relations between Yeltsin and Chechnya's General Dzhokar Dudayev from 1991 (when the two leaders came together in support of Estonian independence) to '94...

...He also shows the incompetence of the various Russian bureaucracies, including the much-feared security agencies, even when they imitate the "social science" of Western defense think tanks...