Chechnya In Russia's Southern Periphery

Chechnya has been striving for its dependence for hundreds of years, and has been repeatedly denied it by the former Soviet Union, and the current Russia. The Chechens fiercely opposed the Russian conquest of Transcaucasia during the nineteenth century (Shah). Following the Russian Revolution in 1917, Chechnya’s first attempt at declaring its independence was met with Russian occupation (Shah). Upon the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Chechen interest in independence was renewed, and eventually erupted into bloodshed in 1994 with the Russian invasion of Chechnya. The Chechen people have been struggling for independence for centuries, and for a number of reasons, they deserve it. Similar to many of the republics in Russia’s Southern Periphery, Chechnya is vastly different ethnically and culturally from its Core neighbors to the north (de Blij 142). In addition, Moscow has shown little interest in Chechnya, with the exception of oil assets including the major pipeline Chechnya toward the Ukraine. Finally, Russia has shown a history of brutal domination of the area, causing perpetual dissent and instability within the entire region of Transcaucasia as a result. …show more content…
Russia seems more concerned with its strategic initiative than its treatment of the citizens in the Chechnya region. This is obvious by the massive numbers of Chechen civilians that lost their lives during the Russian invasion of 1994 (Shah). It is estimated that seventy to eighty thousand civilians lost their lives before Russia finally withdrew, defeated, in 1996 (Shah). The end result of this invasion was the creation of further chaos in the Chechen republic, along with further distrust for the Russia’s central government. The Russian disregard for the citizens in one of its own territories is another reason why today’s Chechnya deserves its