Today, just like the Chechen War itself,
I'm gonna do this video a second time, and do it right!
Almost. Sort of.
Привет и добро пожаловать Feature History.
Can't fault a man for repeating a gag.
But I think that's enough about referencing the original episode 6.
We oughta stop dwelling on the past.
Well, actually if we do that, I might not have a job, but you know what I mean.
Here, indulge me for a moment and rewind your mind back to the 1990s.
Well, unless you weren't alive then. You could hurt yourself.
It was the end of the Cold War,
and I've gotten the impression that people have the impression
that the Soviet Union ended and just turned into Russia, simple.
But of course it wasn't simple. In fact, it was complicated and violent.
But a lot of that violence was concentrated in one area, the Caucasus.
But what is the Caucasus?
Well, it's a geographical area located here.
Oh, you wanted me to elaborate. Well...
then strap in for some Feature Geography.
The Caucasus is a place with almost as many mountains
as it has ethnicities and languages.
Its iconically rugged and rough left it diverse, isolated,
and for the longest time, impossible.
It's typically split between northern Greater Caucasus
and the southern Lesser Caucasus.
The somewhat homogenized people of the south saw empires come and go.
Roman, Persian, and Ottoman, to name a few.
Whereas the many disparate people in the north enjoyed freedom,
with credit to the insulating mountains that encased them.
That environment birthed a culture that was decentralized and remote,
mountainsides littered with watchtower villages.
As a person of the Caucuses, you most likely only had three main priorites:
Your family, your faith, and your freedom.
This order was eventually threatened by Catherine the Great
as the Tsardom of Russia sought out a trade connection with the Middle East.
And so protection and pacification became the Russian army's agenda.
The better part of the 19th century was spent attempting just that.
Only to be met with constant and consistent resistance.
The religious leader, Imam Shamil,
would attempt to bring the many, many different people to Caucasus together
to throw out the Russians, using his Islamic faith and the concept of jihad.
He got close.
He, however, came to despise the Chechen people specifically,
considering them too resistant, too obsessed with banditry.
He really would've gotten along with my commenters.
Eventually, his inability to unite the Caucasus would be his and the land's downfall.
This, of couse, didn't cease disorder.
The Caucasus was to be the frontier of Russia.
Bandit country. A no man's land.
The wild, wild... not west.
As we all know, by 1917, Russia was having a bit of a phase.
Revolutions and civil war, and etcetera.
The whites, the reds, and the everyone else, duking it out.
And in all the confusion, a big whack of the Caucasus
would break away as the Mountain Republic.
It wasn't long before the Soviets would arrive
and enact the process of divide and conquer.
Their epic-sounding freedom to be replaced
by the mundane-sounding autonomy.
Of course, the Caucasians did what they do best: resist.
In fact, it is said that only a Caucasian can beat a Caucasian.
And so in 1922 swung around and the Georgian born,
Joseph Stalin took power.
There must have been a few "Ah, shit"s.
After the German invasion of the Soviet Union,
the Chechen people were accused of collaboration with the Wehrmacht
and as consequence, were deported to the desolate Kazakhstan in 1944.
Guilty or not, mass genocide often frowned upon.
Their homeland was to be converted, all symbols of their culture and history
put to the torch to give way for a Soviet paradise.
The regional capital, Grozny,
was established as a Russian city for Russian people.
It was only when Kurushchev succeeded Stalin,
he would go about "destalinization."
A return of the Chechens was permitted in 1957,
but the effects of Stalin's deed would not disappear overnight.
Ethnic tensions and clashes between Russians and Chechens became commonplace.
It wasn't until the 1980s that the Chechens once again
became the majority in the region.
But in the '80s, the affairs of little Chechnya mattered little to Soviet higher-ups.
There were far more pressing concerns.
Under the leadership of Brezhnev and his subsequent successors,
the Soviet Union had begun to stagnate and decay.
Soviet leadership had become old and decrepit.
And with each general secretary they buried, the Union's own death beckoned.
It was clear the Union would have to be reformed or die.
And Mikhail Gorbachev was very keen on reform.
With policies of glasnost and perestroika,
he had begun to open up the government and allow elements of the free market in.
Free elections were permitted, but this did not see reformists elected.
Instead, revolutionaries.
Soon, many of those in charge of the Soviet republics were looking to go their own way.
One such politician was Boris Yeltsin,
who had been elected in probably the most important Soviet republic, Russia.
He and his peers would have to resist one last attempt by communist hardliners
to throw out both reformists and revolutionaries in August of 1991.
When he had done just that, it was clear:
there was no communist control anymore.
Yeltsin, of course, wasn't the only one sticking it to the communists.
In September, the Chechen and former general, Dzhokhar Dudayev,
gathered militants and threw the communist government out of Chechnya.
He gathered popular support and declared the independent Chechen Republic of Itskeria,
making Chechnya one of the earliest republics to declare independence
from the Soviet Union.
It wasn't until Christmas day, 1991,
Gorbachev would formally dissolve the Union into 15 independent republics.
Chechnya was not actually recognized in this act,
and was officially part of the new Russian Federation.
You can see the issue here.
The not-independent independent republic continued to be practically independent,
as President Yeltsin had bigger fish to fry,
attempting to create his capitalist democratic Russia
and prevent a complete, total dissent into chaos, crime, and corruption.
That's not to say things were peachy for Dudayev in Chechnya.
There was a mass exodus of Russians as violence boiled over.
And with them left many of the educated and skilled workers,
leading to the collapse of Chechnya's industry.
Government services were also abysmal,
as Dudayev became obsessed with arming and organizing militias.
Chechnya was more gun than government.
Soon, there were elements inside Chechnya that looked to oust Dudayev.
And a failed coup in March '92 showed they were serious.
The president would respond by throwing out any kind of republican element from his republic,
ushering in direct rule, and later in '93, dissolving is parliament.
Not like Yeltsin was any better. Really, the two should have been best buds.
However, it was around the same time Yeltsin's administration began to prioritize Chechnya.
You see, Russia is one of the world's largest energy exporters,
trading metric shit tons of petrol and oil.
And the oil deposits of the Caucasus, and more specifically Chechnya,
were integral.
The counter-movements inside Chechnya began to receive Russian support.
1994 saw Chechnya blockaded, trade cut off,
and the only thing going in was Russian arms and money
to those against Dudayev.
The eventual coup would disastrously fail, though.
And Russian arms and mercenaries -- or what they really were, conscripted soldiers --
were exposed and paraded for all to see.
So it was decided: Screw subtlety, and an ultimatum of "pack it in" was given to Dudayev,
who responded -- now say it with me if you can --
No.
Then the order was given to restore constitutional order to Chechnya.
By force.
On the 11th of December, 1994, the war began.
And already it was severely unpopular.
And that wasn't the only bad sign. The other was the plan.
It was simple:
Three convoys and all the West and East to all blitz through to the heart of Chechnya.
After the capital had been softened up with some bombardment.
Yeltsin and his administration thought that was perfect.
It'd be a bloodless blitzkrieg, a quick strike and it's over.
The federal soldiers would be exemplary, showcasing restraint and their professionalism,
as overpowering military hardware carried them to victory.
Truth was, Chechnya is a mountainous, rugged place,
populated with a devoted and heavily-armed people with a long history of resistance
going up against poorly-trained conscripts backed by a nation suffering recession.
The recipe for success.
Dudayev had field commanders swiftly mobilize their militias.
The command was heavily decentralized and the Chechen fighters
would fight mostly as guerrillas,
never letting up on the convoys until the very moment they reached Grozny.
When the federal forces did arrive at Grozny, thousands of civilians were already dead
from a week-long series of aerial and artillery bombardments.
All the death in the air only further incited the Chechen fighters.
On New Years Day, 1994, Grozny was stormed.
Armored personnel carriers simply drove straight to the city.
But they were 𝘢𝘳𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦𝘥 carriers, not 𝘪𝘯𝘷𝘪𝘯𝘤𝘪𝘣𝘭𝘦 carriers,
and so quickly, vehicle after vehicle went down by ragtag groups of fighters.
With the vehicles went all the conscripts inside,
and soon Russian casualties were stacking as the enemy eluded them
inside the still-populated city.
The federal forces were made to withdraw from the slaughterhouse
and things were to be done the traditional Russian way:
Indiscriminately bombing the shit out of it.
It was only when there was nothing left to defend did Chechen general, Aslan Maskhadov,
finally give the order to retreat from the city on January 18th.
The Russians were now free to claim the carcass of Grozny.
Chechens, too, had traditional methods to resort to,
and retreated to the mountains to fight the Russians.
Ambushes became common, and the fighters offered Russians no mercy.
And so Russians would do likewise in their raids.
The war soon became not a battle for land, but for bodies.
The mountains were a blessing but also a curse,
as the fighters became increasingly cooped up as federal forces
continued their advance.
Chechnya's chief mufti, Akhmad Kadyrov,
would declare their struggle a jihad, and attempt to see foreign volunteers assist them.
Foreign offerings in numbers was, however, slim.
But they made up for it in their money.
The encirclement would not be broken by manpower, though,
nor any aid for that matter, but instead by the field commander,
Shamil Basayev.
He led a group of fighters in June to attack the Russian city of Budyonnovsk,
but not in any traditional sense of sieging or storming.
They instead entered a maternity hospital
and took around 1,800 of the occupants hostage.
His main demand was for a ceasefire.
The Russians answered with an attempted storming of the hospital.
It failed catastrophically and Basayev remained with both hospital and hostages.
And so the federation gave in.
A ceasefire was signed.
It's not like this would be the last, or even the worst, terrorist attack in the conflict, either.
But I digress.
The window offered was used by the Chechens and Russians to reorganize, regroup, and rearm.
Federal troops began to move more and more of their number from Grozny to the mountains.
And when that ceasefire ended, it was almost like nothing had changed.
Heavy fighting continued and the slaughter resumed.
By 1996, it was clear something had to change.
Yeltsin was absorbed by his reelection bid,
and so the army had to show results, claim a victory, anything.
That'd come in the form of Dzhokhar Dudayev's assassination in April, 1996.
Killed by two guided missiles.
When Basayev announced the death on a broadcast,
Yeltsin claimed it as a victory he so desperately needed.
But of course, it wasn't that simple. I wouldn't need two parts if any of this was simple.
As Yeltsin was sworn in for his second term,
the army in Chechnya was blatantly sidestepped,
and Grozny stormed by militants.
For the unlucky few troops still in the city, well,
use your imagination.
Grozny was captured, and the Russian army back at square one.
So either it was time to do it all again, or just call it quits.
The Yeltsin administration chose the latter
and the Khasav-Yurt accord was signed off on August 30th, 1996.
The Russian army would leave Chechnya.
They'd respect the boundary, but not recognize it.
It was also decided that any matter between Russia and Chechnya
could be left to 2001,
when all of this was no longer Yeltsin's problem.
Oh boy, wasn't that video worth the wait? In fact,
let's do some more for part two, it'll be great.
But before you leave -- hey, get away from the suggested videos, come back here --
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("Hell yeah I do!")
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or for getting those history chicks. Yes, they exist.
So why not head to LetterJoy.co,
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("Ten percent!")
Because of me, Feature.
It's FEATURE10. It gets you those letters cheaper,
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You can also choose not to give me a share, but, you know.
("Darn!")
I digress. To the five people who are still watching, bye-bye.
("Watch me whip it watch me go, watch me hit that soldier ball!")