What makes Chechens such vicious fighters?
ASCRIBE their fighting prowess to the cause of independence they made their own for nearly two centuries. They were crushed brutally by Russian general Alexei Yermolov, who governed Chechnya with an iron hand between 1816 and 1826. The Chechens rose again under Imam Shamil who wanted to establish an Islamic state. Defeated in 1858, Chechnya was incorporated into Tsarist Russia. They sniffed freedom in the confusion following the Bolshevik revolution; in 1922, the Chechnya autonomous region was established, subsequently renamed in 1934 as the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Ten years later, Stalin deported the entire Chechen population to Siberia and Central Asia, citing their collaboration with the Nazis as the reason. Khrushchev allowed them to return to their land in 1957. It’s a truism of Russian history: a weak Moscow enables Chechens to breathe freer. With the Soviet Union collapsing in 1991, Dzhokhar Dudayev, hero of the Afghanistan war, declared independence
