• Military Menu                       

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Industry
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• WMD
• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

War In Chechnya:
Implications for Russian Security Policy

Introduction and Acknowledgements

Mikhail Tsypkin

Associate Professor
Department of National Security Affairs, Naval Postgraduate School

Over a century ago, in 1891, the great Russian historian Vassily Kliuchevsky compared Russia to

" a heavily armed medieval knight. We shall be beaten not by those who would attack us, in a proper knightly fashion, from the front, but by him who would grab our leg from under the horse and turn us upside down: like a cockroach lying on its back, we would, without losing any of our inherent strength, powerlessly move our feet in search of firm ground. Power is action, not a potential; when not connected with discipline, it kills itself. We are the lower organisms in the international zoology: we keep on moving even after losing our head." [1]

The war in Chechnya, a tiny (in comparison to the Russian Federation's population and human and material resources) ethnic homeland in the North Caucasus, has put into question Russia's military power and the cohesion of Russia's political system itself, and dramatically slowed Russia's momentum towards reform. The five chapters of this collection are based on papers by prominent Russian specialists on the implications of the Chechen war on Russia's security policy, presented at a conference held at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California on November 7 and 8, 1995.

The Russian participants (in alphabetical order) were:

• Dr. Vladimir Averchev, a member of the State Duma (lower house of parliament) from the YABLOKO party;
• Dr. Sergei Arutyunov, Senior Fellow, Institute of Ethnic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences;
• Major Aleksandr Belkin (Ret.), Deputy Executive Secretary of the Council for Defense and Foreign Policy, a leading non-governmental organization;
• Dr. Pavel Felgenhauer, Defense and Security Editor, Segodnya daily newspaper (Moscow);
• Dr. Col. Vitaly Shlykov (Ret.), formerly with the General Staff, currently a private consultant.

Russia's military involvement in Chechnya has lasted since the fall of 1994, and the public, both in Russia and the West, is still ignorant of the policy-making process that resulted in the decision to use military force in December 1994, ostensibly to bring the rebellious Chechen Republic back under the sovereignty of the Russian Federation. Vladimir Averchev argues in his paper that the war in Chechnya has resulted from a virtual breakdown of the national security decision-making mechanisms of the Russian Federation. While the public and the elites are in general agreement over the Kremlin's ultimate goal in Chechnya -- to preserve the territorial integrity of the Russian federation -- Yeltsin's administration made no effort, prior to the initiation of hostilities, to ensure a broad public or even elite support for use of force.

The war in Chechnya has also demonstrated that the legislative branch has very little practical control over the actions of the executive branch in the area of national security. The parliament, although generally opposed to the war, has failed to find a legal foundation for stopping the hostilities. According to Averchev, "[T]he Council of Federation [the upper chamber of the parliament] was unable to exercise its authority to approve or disapprove the introduction of the emergency rule in Chechnya and hence the use of force inside the country because the President simply did not ask for it." The lower chamber, the State Duma, has failed to exercise the only practical power it has over the executive -- the budgetary one in the case of Chechnya -- because of various loopholes in Russia's laws on financing government operations.

The executive branch has concentrated immense national security decision-making power in its hands, in a manner reminiscent of its predecessor, the communist regime. The crucial difference, however, is that the Russian presidency, unlike the Soviet Politburo, largely lacks the political "transmission belts" essential for mobilizing societal resources for national security needs. Yeltsin's administration failed to mobilize not only the public to support the war in Chechnya, but even the military. As Alexander Belkin notes in his chapter, the war in Chechnya has aggravated the crisis in civil-military relations that has been brewing throughout Boris Yeltsin's term in office. This crisis involved:

"[the] latent struggle for the right to control the military and law-enforcement policies between the president himself (counseled and directed by his security entourage) and other branches of power - the prime minister, Security Council, and parliament. On the level of the military itself, the crisis of civil-military relations was manifested in the desperate desire of the military to establish their own lobby in the parliament in an attempt to affect the national government."

This attempt resulted in a nearly complete failure during the parliamentary elections in December 1995. And finally, the war in Chechnya aggravated the relationship between the mass media and the military, because of the latter's attempts to deceive and censor the former.

Initiated to cover up, as suggested by Pavel Felgenhauer, the blunder of the security forces' highly visible "covert" operations to overthrow Dudaev, the military attack on Chechnya stumbled into a blunder itself, reminiscent of Russian and Soviet defeats in 1914 and 1941, albeit on a much smaller scale. Poorly trained and hastily organized troops, led by incompetent commanders, walked into the trap in Grozny: according to Felgenhauer, by New Year's Day of 1996, the General Staff practically lost control of its forces in the Chechen capital. The "perfect" plan in the style of the General Staff Academy -- four armored columns meeting simultaneously in downtown Grozny -- reminds one of Leo Tolstoy's sarcastic analysis in War and Peace of the Russians' "perfect" plans for the battle of Austerlitz: both ended in disaster because the enemy refused to act in accordance with the plan!
The experience of combat in Chechnya reveals three salient points. First, the new Russian state has not developed a mechanism for learning from its past mistakes: just like the Soviets in Afghanistan, the Russian forces marched into a guerrilla war hoping that the mere sight of the mass of modern weapons would suffice to intimidate the "natives." Second, the tenacity of Russian soldiers has not disappeared altogether: if properly led (e.g. the troops of Lt. Gen. Rokhlin, nearly encircled in Grozny), they can put up a good fight even for a dubious cause. Third, military reform is desperately needed, but the war in Chechnya has cast a doubt on its direction: in their reconquest of Chechnya, the Russian military had to rely on the massive application of heavy weapons, not on highly mobile, and relatively lightly armed, forces, which are viewed as the wave of the future by many reformers and observers of reform in Russia.

Many in the military establishment, including those not directly responsible for the failures in Chechnya, refuse to see any linkage between that war and military reform, writes Vitaly Shlykov. Further, he writes:

"The Russian military leadership rejects the experiences of the Chechen war to the extent that it prohibited their inclusion in the study programs of the Russian military academies and schools. In the MoD's opinion, this conflict is atypical because it's being waged on Russian territory. Instead, the studies of the war in Afghanistan are being strengthened."

Anti-reform political forces ascendant from 1995 to early 1996 in President Yeltsin's entourage were also skeptical of military reform, so the term itself disappeared for a time from Yeltsin's speeches. In democratic Russia, however, the issue of military reform could not be buried just because those in power were not inclined to discuss it. In October 1995, a movement for military reform, Honor and Motherland, was established under the leadership of Lt. Gen. Aleksandr Lebed, who had just retired. His main idea regarding military reform is that military strength is essential for political and economic reform in Russia: in his view, Russia can peacefully conduct reforms only if it is strong enough to deter aggression.

But what about Chechnya itself, and the powder keg of the Caucasus? Before the end of the Cold War and disintegration of the Soviet empire, which had put a lid on ethnic friction, American analysts tended to ignore the ethnic dimension of international conflict. Now, with ethnic conflicts seeming to roar out of control throughout Eurasia, American observers frequently view them as inevitable. Sergei Arutyunov argues against such fatalism: "The real causes of the war lay in the desires of the powers in conflict to dominate larger territories, markets, natural resources and so on." Thus, it is the policies pursued by Russian and Caucasian elites that have resulted in the war. A different set of policies can result in cessation of hostilities and economic development of the region.


Acknowledgements

The conference War In Chechnya: Implications for Russian Security Policy, was sponsored by the U.S. Department of the Navy and the Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College.

The Editor would like to express his appreciation to Ms. Diana Peternell for her flawless work in organizing the conference, and for her editorial assistance.


Participants

Dr. Roy Allison, Director, Russian and Eurasian Program, the Royal Institute of International Affairs.
Dr. Rob Arnett, Office of the US Army Chief of Staff.
Dr. Sergei Arutyunov, Senior Fellow, Institute of Ethnic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences.
Dr. Vladimir Averchev, Member of the Committee on International Affairs, State Duma of the Russian Federation.
Dr. Debbie Yarsike Ball, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Mr. Alexander Belkin, Council for Defense and Foreign Policies
Professor Stephen Blank, Strategic Studies Institute, Army War College.
Dr. John Dziak, Office of the Secretary of Defense.
Mr. George Fedoroff, Dept. of the Navy.
Dr. Pavel Felgenhauer, Defense and National Security Editor, Segodnya newspaper.
Mr. Graham Fuller, Senior Social Scientist, Rand Corp.
Dr. Gail Lapidus, Center for International Security and Arms Control, Stanford University.
Dr. Jacob Kipp, Senior Analyst, Foreign Military Studies Office, Combined Arms Center, Command and General Staff College, US Army.
Mr. George Kolt, National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia, CIA.
Professor Roman Laba, Naval Postgraduate School.
Dr. Ben Lambeth, Senior Social Scientist, Rand Corp.
Prof. John W. R. Lepingwell, University of Illinois at Urbana.
Prof. Jacques Sapir, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales
Dr. Vitaliy Shlykov, Col., General Staff (Ret.)
Prof. Ronald Grigor Suny, University of Chicago.
Ambassador Richard Staar, Hoover Institution.
Mr. Timothy Thomas (LTC, US Army, Ret.), Senior Analyst, Foreign Military Studies Office, Combined Arms Center, Command and General Staff College, US Army.
Professor Mikhail Tsypkin, Naval Postgraduate School.