RUSSIA'S TINDERBOX - Belfer Center for Science and International ...

Soviet weaponry, including tanks and armored personnel carriers which allowed Dudayev to build
up his military forces.
4. The Beginning of the Opposition Movement to Dudayev:
After November 1991, Dudayev set about creating the state structures of government—
including a new parliament. Authority was, however, concentrated in the hands of the President.
This resulted in the first of a series of political rifts within the former Executive Committee of the
ANCCP. The internal power struggle between President and Parliament in Moscow, that began in
1992, was mirrored in Grozny in the same period. In the initial phases of the struggle, Yaragi
Mamodaev, who became Chechen Prime Minister in May 1992, pushed for the executive branch to
be strengthened, and rejected parliamentary control over the activity of the government and its
ministers. The parliamentary majority, however, headed by Parliament Chairman, Khusein
Akhmadov, demanded that the government be formed only with the agreement of the parliament,
and that the executive branch be accountable to the legislature.
In the summer of 1992, contradictions within the Chechen government increased as a result
of a dispute over the distribution of proceeds from the sale of Chechen oil and petroleum products.
New political factions coalesced around Prime Minister Mamodaev and the Chairman of the Grozny
Municipal Assembly Beslan Gantamirov; and around the head of the President’s Council on
External Economic Relations, Ruslan Utsiev, and the Minster of the Interior, Sultan Albakov. The
Democratic opposition in Chechnya also reasserted itself to demand changes in the power structure
and new elections.
As far as relations with Moscow were concerned, in March 1992, Chechnya joined Tatarstan
in refusing to sign Yeltsin’s Federal Treaty for the Russian Federation. The Russian government
made considerable efforts to persuade Dudayev to sign on, holding negotiations in Dagomys in
Krasnodar Krai in May 1992, bringing Chechen parliamentary delegations to Moscow to discuss a
separate draft treaty, sending delegations from Moscow to Grozny, and continuing to subsidize the
Chechen economy from the Russian budget, to the tune of 7.5 billion rubles in 1992. 132 These efforts
were, however, complicated by the outbreak of conflict between North Ossetia and Ingushetia in
October 1992.
5. The Second Russian Military Intervention in Chechnya:
Following the imposition of a state of emergency in the contested Prigorodny district of
North Ossetia, Russian troops were deployed to separate the warring parties. They were also ordered
into Ingushetia to prevent Ingush from Chechnya from joining the fighting, and to block reported
arms shipments by the Chechens. In the absence of a clearly demarcated border between Chechnya
and Ingushetia, Dudayev perceived the arrival of the Russian troops in Ingushetia as “an act of
aggression.”
132 See EPIcenter (Center for Economic and Political Research), “The Political Situation in the North Caucasus,” in
the series The Political Situation in Russia, No.2 (3), (Moscow January 1993), p.16.
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