Among this profusion of ancient peoples, amid the labyrinth of ethnic and religious traditions, one group always seemed to stand apart: the Chechens. Few have yearned more fervently, or more militantly, for freedom. Since their first skirmish with Peter the Great's cavalry in 1722, Chechens have struggled to escape Russian domination. During a journey across the Caucasus in 1858—a time when the Muslim mountaineers were waging holy war against tsarist rule—the writer Alexandre Dumas noted their martial spirit: "All these mountain fighters are fanatically brave, and whatever money they acquire is spent on weapons. A Chechen . . . may be literally in rags, but his sword, dagger, and gun are of the finest quality."

Even in the gulag, the Soviet Union's prison labor camps, the Chechens stood out. Dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in Gulag Archipelago, wrote of them with envy: "There was one nation which would not give in, would not acquire the mental habits of submission—and not just individual rebels among them, but the whole nation to a man. These were the Chechens."

The roots of the present trouble, like so much of the tension across the Caucasus, began with Joseph Stalin. When the Bolshevik army finally wrested control over the region in the 1920s, Stalin, then nationalities commissar, hatched a scheme to subjugate the restive population: Embed enough ethnic, linguistic, and religious contradictions into the political geography so as to preoccupy the locals and ensure that Moscow's firm hand would be required to maintain order. In the case of the hyphenated republics Karachayevo-Cherkesiya and Kabardino-Balkariya, natural enemies were forced to live side by side. "It wasn't just divide and conquer," Ali Kazikhanov, editor of the newspaper Severny Kavkaz, told me in Nalchik, the capital of Kabardino-Balkariya. "It was divide, conquer, and tie up in trouble."

On February 23, 1944, Red Army Day, the entire Chechen and Ingush populations were forced into exile. Stalin had wrongly accused them of collaborating with the Nazi invaders, and they were rounded up and packed off in freight cars to Central Asia and Siberia. The true toll may never be known, but historians believe hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children perished en route or in exile.

In 1957 Stalin’s successor, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, allowed the Chechens and Ingush to return home. Slowly they reclaimed their towns and villages from Russian settlers, and for nearly half a century there followed muted acquiescence to Moscow. Yet in the final years of the Soviet Union, the Chechens were among the first to test their bonds. As independence movements sprang up from the Baltics to the Russian Far East, cries for freedom in Chechnya ignited a rebellion. On the final day of 1994 Yeltsin responded to Dudayev’s declaration of an independent Chechnya by launching what is now referred to as the first Chechen war.

It would be a long, dismal campaign that pitted blundering Russian generals and teen-age conscripts against a few thousand resolute Chechen guerrillas. For Moscow, the war soon devolved into a costly and deeply unpopular quagmire. For the Chechens, however, it was a war of infinite passion and pride. "Those who fought in the first war were driven by one goal," says Timur Aliev, a Chechen journalist. "The rebels pursued a dream inherited from our ancestors: freedom."