Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 2, No. 2 | New Book on the Chechen Wars (low bandwidth)

In 1992, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, only two of Russia’s 89 regions refused to join the new Russian Federation: Chechnya and Tartarstan, which shared many similarities, including strategically important locations, large Muslim populations and significant natural resources. Yet Tartarstan was allowed to negotiate greater autonomy while Chechnya was treated as a breakaway republic—one that had to be brutally forced into submission with two wars that destroyed cities, towns and villages and cost tens of thousands of lives, nearly all Russian citizens. In his newly published book, The Chechen Wars: Will Russia Go the Way of the Soviet Union? (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2002) Matthew Evangelista explores this tragedy and challenges Moscow’s justifications for it—that Chechnya’s rebellion had to be crushed to dissuade other republics from seceding from the Federation. As President Vladimir Putin, quoted by Evangelista, once expressed it: “I have never for a second believed that Chechnya would limit itself to its own independence. It would become a beachhead for further attacks on Russia.”

Evangelista, a professor of government at Cornell University, wrote the book with support from Carnegie Corporation as a Carnegie Scholar, one of 12 comprising the first class of Carnegie Scholars, which was named in 2000. At that time, the Corporation revived its support for individual scholarship to promote innovative and policy-focused research in areas of special relevance to the foundation’s programs. Two subsequent classes of Carnegie Scholars have since been named as part of this annual program, and a total of 39 fellowships have been awarded to date.

Evangelista earned his A.B. in Russian history and literature from Harvard University in 1981, a certificate in Russian language from the Pushkin Institute, Moscow, in 1979, and his Ph.D. in government from Cornell University in 1986. His publications include Unarmed Forces: The Transnational Movement to End the Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), Innovation and the Arms Race: How the United States and the Soviet Union Develop New Military Technologies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988; paperback, 1989), and numerous articles.

In answer to the question raised in his new book’s title, Evangelista writes: “Could Russia go the way of the Soviet Union in the sense that Yeltsin and Putin had in mind in their fear-mongering about the consequences of Chechen separatism? The evidence presented in this book suggests that the Russian Federation is highly unlikely to break up into its constituent parts, as the USSR did, or even to see any of the other ethnic republics follow the Chechen example.”