actions- raids, assaults and blockades.
The regime has been forced constantly to create democratic structures, and then, when they have fulfilled their immediate purpose, to abolish them.
If these structures were to survive and acquire strength, they would be dangerous and destructive for Russian nomenklatura capitalism. The Duma is less dangerous than was old Supreme Soviet, but it has begun to take on an independent significance as well.
Appearing now in the unaccustomed role of an opposition, the right-wing liberals are repeating all the errors of Yeltsin's earlier adversaries. By contrast, the leaders of the Communist Party, after suffering two defeats, appear a good deal. They appreciate that you cannot frighten the authorities with hysterical declarations and with little gatherings on Pushkin Square.
The crisis in Chechnya has confronted the Communists with a new political situation. They are now losing some of their allies in the "patriotic" camp. But in speaking out against the war, they are once again acquiring their own face as the leading party of the left. CHECHNYA is a state based on the Chechen people, who number somewhat less than a million.
They are one of many small nationalities in the Caucasus mountains who have a Muslim tradition and a history of resistance to Russian conquest.
Russia began to expand into this area at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but the Muslim mountaineers were not subdued until the middle of the century. Historically the Chechens have been the vanguard people of the Caucasus.
In the period of the Russian Revolution, the revolutionary Soviet government of Lenin and Trotsky won over the Chechens by offering them the right of national self-determination. The mountain people proved to be invaluable allies of the beleaguered revolutionists.
On his march towards Moscow, the counter-revolutionary General Denikin had to leave behind a third of his army to guard the area inhabited by the Chechens and the closely-related Inaush people.
The mountaineers, Denikin later wrote, had created a 'seething volcano'. In reprisal, the counter-revolutionaries burned down one out of every five Chechen and Ingush villages.
The Chechens were brutally repressed by Stalin. During World War Il the entire population, along with the Ingush people, were forcibly exiled to Central Asia.
About a quarter of them died on the road. After the war, they managed to force the Soviet authorities to allow them to resettle in their homeland. Subsequently the Chechen-Ingush autonomous republic was reconstituted.
So it is not surprising that the first battle fought by the Russian troops sent to Chechnya actually took place on the territory of the Ingush people.
In 1991, however, the Chechen regime, headed by Dzhokar Dudaev declared independence from Russia.
At the time, the far less numerous Ingush were not ready for such a radical step, and therefore formed an autonomous republic of their own.
The Russian republic in the old USSR was formally a federation. Some 17 percent of its people lived in national autonomous republics. In the Russian state that has emerged from the breakup of the USS, the autonomous republics remain, but their status and prerogatives are now in dispute.
The autonomous republics were set up in the period of the Russian Revolution to represent peoples that were granted the riaht of self-determination but were apparently too small or isolated for full independence to be an option.
These units were supposed to offer their titular peoples the opportunity to develop a national life. But the Soviet constitutions did not grant them the formal right to secede, as they did to the republics.
The Yeltsin government is now claiming that it therefore has the right to use military force to oust a Chechen regime that rejects Moscow rule.
Many of the small autonomous governments (some of them have even lesser status than autonomous republics) formally preside over territories with very important natural resources. Thus the Chechen capital of Grozny is now the most important centre of the petroleum industry in the oil-rich Caucasus area.
In fact the line between the full republics and the autonomous republics has never been a clear one.
The Volga Tatar people, for instance, who have an autonomous republic (although only about half the Tatar population were incorporated in it) are more numerous than the Estonians, Lithuanians and Latvians put together. But the latter three peoples, nevertheless, each had a full republic.
The Chechens, moreover, have a stronger tradition of resistance to Russian rule than many of the peoples of the republics that have gained independence.
When Dudaev proclaimed the independence of Chechnya in 1991, this was the most radical of the steps towards self-determination taken in a number of autonomous republics.
The Russian authorities feared he was starting a snowball rolling which could lead to the break-up of the Russian Federation, just as the USSR had disintegrated.
The current Russian intervention is Yeltsin's latest attempt to restore what Lenin called 'the great prison house of nations'.