The Chechen crisis is a complex phenomenon, and there are many aspects of it that cannot be understood to this day. The conflict does not have a simple explanation, and each side has its own truth. However, a scholarly analysis of events makes it possible to draw a number of general conclusions.

Major Factors of the Crisis

The August 1991 events in Moscow, when a conservative group led by the State Committee for the State of Emergency (SCSE) tried to seize power and force Mikhail Gorbachev to moderate his programme of reforms, was followed soon after by the dissolution of the USSR. This gave the multinational people of the Chechen-Ingush Republic a unique chance to replace the communist bureaucracy with a democratic system of power by peaceful constitutional means, and to define the status of the republic by means of a national referendum. It also made possible an acceptable form of relations with the Russian Federation, through which Chechnya might gradually acquire real economic and political independence in the framework of a renewed federal union of equal nations and republics of the new democratic Russia.

However, this way of resolving the aggravated problem of power and sovereignty proposed by the democratic community of Chechnya did not suit certain political structures in Moscow or in the republic itself. As a result, the Chechen-Ingush Republic and its political elites found themselves at the epicentre of the Russian leadership's struggle with the union centre (representing the Soviet Union) over the division of power and property.