Tell about Chechnya ?

The secession attempts following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 are just a couple of many periods of disturbance Chechnya has witnessed.

The Terek River remained a defensive frontier until the 1860s. The constant skirmishes of Chechens and Russians along the Terek form the background to Leo Tolstoy’s novel The Cossacks.

The republic, whose population currently stands at around one million, has been in almost constant battle against foreign rule since at least the 15th century.

In fact, the area's original conversion to Sunni Islam may have been in large part so as to receive help from the Ottoman Empire against encroachment by the Russian Empire.

The Chechen autonomous oblast (region) was created by the Bolsheviks in November 1920.

The current resistance has its roots in the late 18th century when Russia expanded its territories into areas formerly under the control of the Ottoman Empire and Persia (Iran) including the Caucasus Mountains.

In 1934 it was merged with the Ingush autonomous oblast to form a joint Chechen-Ingush autonomous region, which two years later was designated a republic.

After a prolonged conflict of more than forty years, the area was formally annexed by the Russian Empire in 1859.

The conflict in Chechnya and Dagestan is relatively quiet right now, but has been ongoing in some form or another for almost 200 years

During World War II (1939–45) the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin accused the Chechens and Ingush of collaboration with the Germans; consequently, both groups were subjected to mass deportations to Central Asia, and the republic of Checheno-Ingushetia was dissolved.

Chechens and other peoples in the Caucasus region are struggling to retain an identity distinct from the larger Russian mass

The Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 and the Russian Civil War of 1917-1923.

The exiles later were allowed to return to their homeland, and the republic was reestablished under the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in 1957.

Moscow and the pro-Moscow government in Chechnya are working to tamp down extremism and violence rather than address the underlying grievances; extremism and jihadism are filling the void left by two awful wars in the 1990s

Under Soviet rule in the 1930s, the oil-rich region of Chechnya was combined with its even smaller neighbor Ingushetia to form the autonomous republic of Checheno-Ingushetia.

In 1944, in response to Chech uprisings during World War II, Stalin gave orders that the entire ethnic population of Chechnya and Inguishetia were to be forcibly relocated.

On December 11, 1994, Russian troops invaded Chechnya. Overcoming stiff resistance, the Russian forces took the capital city of Grozny (Dzhokhar) in March 1995.

the Chechen and Dagestan conflicts will define or "explain" what happened at the Boston Marathon, but as more biographical details emerge linking these two young suspects to a restive and little-understood part of the world, it can't hurt to better understand what's happening there and why it's been so troubled.

Chechen guerrilla resistance continued, however, and a series of cease-fires were negotiated and violated.

Checheno-Ingushetia was dissolved, mosques and graveyards were destroyed, place names changed and vast numbers of historical Chechen texts were burned.

the 2010 Moscow subway bombing was only three years ago. Neither the regional governments nor Moscow appear to be trying to solve the underlying issues so much as tamp down the extremism and violence

In 1996 Dudayev was killed during Russian shelling, and the following year former guerrilla leader Aslan Maskhadov was elected president. Russian Pres.

It is estimated that about half of ethnic Chechens died between 1944 and 1948.

Boris Yeltsin and Maskhadov signed a provisional peace treaty in May 1997 but left the question of Chechnya’s eventual status undetermined.

Checheno-Ingushetia was renamed Grozny Oblast and used to settle refugees from the Western Soviet Union.