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What else do you expect them to do? But, of course, “being oppressed by the Russians” is actually an extraordinarily poor predictor of violent behavior. Any number of countries in Eastern Europe suffered terribly at the hands of the Russians. Hundreds of thousands of Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Poles were dispatched to the Gulag (most during the same timeframe as the Chechen deportation), and countries as varied as the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Bulgaria were crushed beneath the Soviet jackboot for decades. The Germans also had just a few small qualms against the Russians, what with the mass rapes that accompanied the post-war occupation of their country. The crimes Russians committed in these countries were almost identical to those that they perpetrated in Chechnya. The Russians installed pliant client regimes, they systematically used torture, and, when other methods failed, they often resorted to murder. The Russians ruled over an empire that stretched for thousands of miles and they ruled this empire in a thoroughly vicious maner. If you sat down and tried to list all of the ethnic groups they repressed, you would cover virtually every group in Europe except the English, the French, the Dutch, the Italians, and the Spanish. With such a long list of grievances and such deplorable conduct on the part of the Russians, it would have been perfectly understandable if any one of a dozen countries in Central and Eastern Europe waged a violent armed struggle for independence. And yet, in great contrast to Chechnya, all of these other countries struggled for independence non violently. They didn’t abduct Russian soldiers and slit their throats, they didn’t incinerate schoolchildren, and they didn’t take hostages at gunpoint. Instead, they made a lot of speeches, wrote editorials, and demonstrated. The near-total non violence of the anti-communist revolutions of 1989 was one of their most recognizable and laudable features, and showed that, with patience and persistence, even the most unbending of regimes could change.

The non-violence of the anti-Soviet movement in Eastern Europe does not reflect a deep, unchanging, or eternal truth about any of the ethnic groups involved. Back in the day Lithuanians, known today for being somewhat dour and unassuming, were famous for being violent pagans, and the stereotypes associated with ethnicities always change. Yesterday’s war-loving German becomes today’s “Euroweenie.” The non-violence reflected not the inherent “goodness” of people involved, but a number of deliberate and calculated decisions. There was nothing fated about the non-violence of the movements for Baltic independence and there was no unseen force which mandated a peaceful outcome. But the political leaders of the time (accurately!) understood that non-violence was the only way to achieve a decent outcome, and they studiously eschewed violent means of political persuasion. Political leaders across Eastern Europe made similar determinations. The Chechen leadership made a very different choice, opting for a war of independence against the Russians that almost immediately descended into criminality, nihilism, and depraved violence, with both sides in the conflict seemingly waging a competition to see who could be

The Caucasus doesn’t offer any simple answers or easy truths. But for this brief moment that people are paying attention to Chechnya, it’s worth remembering that the violence there doesn’t simply “happen,” it always reflects a deliberate choice from people possessed of agency. I fully sympathize with the Chechens’ evident desire to be free of Russian domination and can easily grasp the many reasons why fighting seems justified. But while such a choice is understandable, it should be understood as a choice, and not as the inevitable outcome of Russian imperialism.