In the previous chapter, we looked at events taking place during the tumultuous years of 1992–94 largely from the perspective of the separatist Chechen leadership. In the present chapter, our task will be once again to scrutinize this period, but this time chiefly through the eyes of the Yeltsin leadership. As we shall see, the Russian government appeared to lurch convulsively, and often unpredictably, from a conciliatory to a hard-line approach to the Chechen problem until the spring of 1994, when support for a coercive solution began to receive increasing backing at the top.

Russia arms Chechnya

It will be recalled that USSR deputy defense minister Pavel Grachev had traveled to Groznyi in early December 1991 for talks with General Dudaev. The Chechen president had agreed at the time to facilitate a withdrawal of Russian troops from the republic “if a part of their arms and military hardware were handed over to him.” Evgenii Shaposhnikov, at that time USSR defense minister, has claimed that Dudaev proposed to Grachev “a 50–50 split” of the armaments based in Chechnya but that he, Shaposhnikov, had firmly refused this offer.