At the end of November 1994 – just two weeks before the Russian military invasion of Chechnya – two colonels from the Russian General Staff visited the State Military Historical Archive in Moscow with an official request from the Ministry of Defense to learn more about the historical context of armed conflict in the North Caucasus. The archival staff were eager to help, but it turned out that the two colonels were interested only in “general information which they could have found in any pre-Soviet encyclopedia.”

As this episode demonstrates, the Russian Ministry of Defense had little notion of the historical experience of the people whose lands they were about to invade. The Russian military – and, evidently, the Russian government as well – had contracted a case of historical amnesia, and this amnesia, in turn, constituted an intelligence failure of immense proportions.

In his short book on the Chechen crisis, Sergei Yushenkov, chairman of the State Duma Defense Committee and a retired military officer, recalls how he exerted himself in vain to forestall the invasion of Chechnya in the period following the military debacle of 26 November 1994.