What happened was what always happens when a state possessing great military strength enters into relations with primitive, small peoples living their independent lives. Either on the pretext of self-defence, even though any attacks are always provoked by the offences of the strong neighbour, or on the pretext of bringing civilization to a wild people, even though this wild people lives incomparably better and more peacefully than its civilizers . . . the servants of large military states commit all sorts of villainy against small nations, insisting that it is impossible to deal with them in any other way.

Leo Tolstoy, 1902 draft of Hadji Murat

In the decade and a half since the end of the Cold War, the map of Eastern Europe has been comprehensively redrawn. More than a dozen new countries have appeared as a result of the break-up of the Soviet Union and the Yugoslav wars of succession, an arc of newly sovereign states stretching from Estonia to Azerbaijan. The majority of them have, at the prompting of the us, been incorporated into Euro-Atlantic defence structures, and several were ushered into the eu earlier this year; Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania now form the outer perimeter of the Single Market, while Georgia and Ukraine have advanced their cases for nato membership. The continent has been transformed.

Chechnya provides a stark contrast to these trajectories. Here, as in the Baltic states, a national independence movement emerged during perestroika, and a broad national consensus for secession was democratically ratified in late 1991. Earlier the same year the citizens of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania overwhelmingly voted for separation from the ussr; the results of the referenda were quickly approved by the ussr’s Supreme Soviet and the three new nations, with populations of 1.6 million, 2.7 million and 3.7 million respectively, were admitted to the un within a matter of weeks. But Chechnya—at 15,000 square kilometres, slightly smaller than Wales, and with a population of around a million—has, since 1991, suffered two full-scale assaults by the world’s fifth-largest military force, and is now entering the sixth year of a vicious occupation designed to reduce the populace to starvation and submission. While citizens of the Baltic states are now able to cross Europe’s borders freely, Chechens must endure Russian checkpoints and zachistki—‘clean-up’ operations, ostensibly for checking identity papers—which routinely result in the torture, ransom, disappearance or summary execution of those arrested, as well as the pillaging and further impoverishment of those who remain. The devastation is unthinkable, the brutality endless and unchecked, while the casualties remain largely uncounted.

Discussions of the Russo-Chechen conflict have rarely focused on this staggering divergence of fortunes, often preferring the state-sponsored obfuscations of the ‘war on terror’, or else characterizing it as the all but inevitable product of a long-running historical antagonism. The legacy of Chechen resistance to Russian colonization—from the first confrontations with Cossack settlers in the sixteenth century to the southward expansion of the Tsarist Empire in the nineteenth century, and well into the Soviet period—has undoubtedly played a role in galvanizing the movement for secession. A strong impetus would also have come from the experience of deportation and exile suffered by several North Caucasian peoples in 1944. The immediate roots of the present war, meanwhile, can be found in the Kremlin’s cynical plan to hoist Putin into power, and to reverse the defeats suffered in 1994–96.

But underpinning Chechen resistance, past and present, has been a consistent struggle for self-determination. The Chechens’ demands are comparatively modest—full sovereignty, retaining economic and social ties with Russia—and have a sound constitutional basis. The response, however, has been staggeringly disproportionate, with Russian forces unleashing attacks of a ferocity unmatched in these lands since the Second World War. In the West, on the rare occasions that attention is devoted to Chechnya there has been almost total unanimity that Chechen independence is not to be countenanced, for the good of Russian democracy and its nascent capitalism. What follows is an attempt to demonstrate the weakness in fact, and shamefulness in principle, of the arguments used to deny the fundamental right of the Chechen people to govern themselves.