Paul Goble
Staunton, Aug. 31 – Thirty years ago, on Aug. 31, 1996, Russian general Aleksandr Lebed and Chechen general Aslan Maskhadov concluded an agreement ending the first post-Soviet Chechen war and laid out the principles on which the independence of Chechnya could have been finally achieved.
That was “a unique event in post-Soviet Russian history,” Vadim Shtepa, editor of the Tallinn-based regionalist portal, Region.Expert, for three reasons: how it was achieved, why it failed to live up to its promise, and how it could be a model for the end of Putin’s war in Ukraine but probably won’t (region.expert/khasavyurt30/).
The agreement happened not because Russian President Boris Yeltsin negotiated an end to the Chechen war but because Aleksandr Lebed, a Russian general who had become a politician, was able to find common language with a Chechen general and for a time at least stopped the war and gave hope of peace.
The Yeltsin regime had many weaknesses but one of its often unrecognized strengths was that it provided space for people like Lebed, a kind of Russian de Gaulle, to operate, something few regimes would have allowed but that meant peace could be achieved without Yeltsin personally having to take public actions that could have sparked a negative reaction.
The 1996 agreement could have succeeded save for two things. On the one hand, it was not supported by the Western powers, something that forced the Chechens to seek cooperation with Islamist groups even though that meant there was no chance of support from that sector. And on the other, Putin launched the second Chechen war and drowned that republic in blood.
There are lessons to be learned from all this, Shtepa says; but the most important question now is “can there be found in the Russian army any new generals capable of stopping” Putin’s war in Ukraine? The answer is likely no; but the possibility shouldn’t be excluded as Russian moves deeper into a succession crisis.
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