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>...The Russian public's support for the conflict, however, remains ambiguous.
Russian sociologist Boris Kagarlitsky noted, in The Moscow Times (July 26,
2000), that opinion polls show that the same Russians who call for more force
to reconquer Chechnya also support withdrawing from Chechnya entirely, sealing
off its borders, and forgetting it for good. The reason for this ambivalence,
says Kagarlitsky, is the tendency of analysts and politicians to "confuse
everyday racism with support for the military operation. It's no news that a
substantial section of the population believes we must 'waste the blacks,'
'show the churki army [slang for Central Asians] their place,' and so on. With
these people, humanitarian arguments against the war, or references to the
Geneva Convention . . . carry no weight. But this does not mean that these
people can stomach the deaths of thousands of [Russian] lads in Chechnya."
Thus, despite the muted opposition to the war so far, an increasing number of
Russians are asking what the fighting is all about —"Are we there yet?"—because
there is no clear, overriding political goal or military objective driving the
Russian war effort.
There are worse things, of course, than a lack of purpose. Stalin had a clear objective in 1944 when he shipped the Chechen people en masse to Kazakhstan. They were, he thought, an untrustworthy ethnic group that jeopardized the Soviet war effort against Nazi Germany. Even after the war's end, the very idea of a unified and self- conscious Chechen nation posed a threat to Stalin's ambitions of total control, and so the Chechen refugees remained in their distant exile until 1957, four years after the despot's death.
Crumbling Megastates
Thanks to Stalin's mad policies of collective ethnic suspicion and guilt, however, the Chechens now have something the Russians no longer possess: a "grand narrative," a story that unites the people around a common goal and set of ideas. The Chechens are a proud and warlike people who have resisted Russian conquest for two centuries. Uprooted from their homes and driven thousands of kilometers away, they have overcome their clan- based squabbles to survive and return to their land as a unified nation more prepared than ever to assert its independence.
Over the past ten years, the West has hoped that constructing a tolerant, multiethnic democracy in Russia would provide Russians with a sense of purpose; the nation's history provides them with a deep awareness of what life is like without democracy and freedom. The Western vision was that ethnic Russians would work in peace with all groups in the Russian Federation to create a framework in which all could realize their aspirations, a structure providing such good foundations for peace and prosperity that almost all the constituent groups would desire to remain within it. And if reasons of religious identity or ethnic consciousness should prompt some groups—such as the Chechens—to choose not to join this enterprise, they should be allowed to depart. Such, at least, was the vision of liberal democrats both inside and outside Russia.
Although this vision now seems no more than a pipe dream of post-Cold War optimism, glimmers of such a consciousness did emerge during the first Chechen War. Protests were common in Russia, prompted in part by the evident senselessness of a struggle to keep within the Federation a people that most Russians, to be honest, were far from overjoyed to have in the country. Equally strong, however, was the revulsion many Russians felt about the unthinking savagery of Russian conscripts in Chechnya. Most Russians greeted the Chechen quasi-sovereignty agreement with a collective sigh of relief. Unfortunately, subsequent events have obliterated hopes for a peaceful, voluntary Russian Federation..