Chechnya
Michael McFaul, “Eurasia Letter: Russian Politics after Chechnya”
Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, “Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the End of Revolution” pp. 15-37, 99-120, Why did the first Chechen War break out in the early to mid 1990s? What was happening in Russia and in Chechnya that precipitated this intervention?156-178.
- Why did the first Chechen War break out in the early to mid 1990s? What was happening in Russia and in Chechnya that precipitated this intervention? What was the response to it? What was Yeltsin really trying to achieve when he decided to get involved in this situation, according to Michael McFaul?
- Sketch out in 3 or 4 sentences what happened in Beslan in September 2004.
- Baker and Glasser assert that Russians see this event as their “9/11” and “an extension of the international war on terrorism” (20) but that, despite similarities to this, there are some fundamental differences at play. What factors make it similar to the “international war on terrorism”? What critical distinctions do Baker and Glasser point to that make this something very different from that?
- How did Putin respond to this crisis and why was this response such a problem? Pay attention here to his immediate response and then his attempts to address the country on TV in its aftermath.
- How and why was the war in Chechnya that Putin undertook at Prime Minister in 1999 becoming such a nightmare for him? Sketch out the argument about this that Glasser and Baker make (pp. 99-120) in 3-5 sentences.
- What happened in the Nord-Ost theater in Moscow in October 2002? What similarities did it bear to the Beslan hostage siege? What were some of the differences from it?
- What larger points do Baker and Glasser and Michael McFaul want us to take away from their assessments of the Russian government’s intervention into and treatment of the Chechen crises from 1993-2002 and beyond?
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