At the same time, Sheikh Mansur, a Muslim cleric, unified the Chechen tribes and declared holy war on the czar and his army, delivering a shocking defeat to Russian forces in 1785. Mansur is still seen as a mystical figure and an inspiration to generations of Chechen separatists.

Following Mansur's victory, the czar dispatched more troops with an eye toward annexing the region. During renewed violence, Chechnya's second great military leader emerged — another Muslim holy man, Imam Shamil.

Shamil would lead decades of resistance using emerging guerilla techniques to thwart Russian efforts. As the Muslim fighters continued to resist, Russian forces poured into the region, eventually capturing Shamil in 1859.

The czar moved quickly to quell any other uprising, officially annexing the territory that same year and forcing thousands of Shamil's supporters to flee to other areas, including the Ottoman Empire.

During this fighting in the 1850s, Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy served with czarist troops in Chechnya. After witnessing the destruction of a Chechen village and the brutal repression of its citizens, Tolstoy described the residents' reaction.

"No one spoke of hatred for the Russians," he wrote. "The feeling which all Chechens felt, both young and old, was stronger than hatred. It was...such a revulsion, disgust and bewilderment at the senseless cruelty of these beings, that the desire to destroy them, like a desire to destroy rats, poisonous spiders and wolves, was as natural as the instinct for self-preservation."

Despite this historic anger and resentment, Chechnya remained fairly stable after it was granted a semi-autonomous status within Russia. The relative calm would last for another 50 years until the Bolshevik revolution.

When that uprising occurred in 1917, the Chechens again used the chaos within Russia to attempt to create an independent North Caucasian state. Its fighters took on both the rebellious Red Russians and the counter-revolutionary White Russians.

However, as the Soviets took full control in Moscow, they exerted more power in the Caucasus, forcibly subduing the resistance in the early 1930s. When the Russians again offered the Chechens a nominally autonomous republic in 1936 in a bid to end the violence, the Chechens joined with neighboring Ingushetia in 1934 to form a joint republic that was later named the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic.

Less than a decade later, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, who had ordered numerous purges of the communist party, the military and other ethnic groups, decided the Chechens could not be trusted in such a pivotal region.

Accusing the Chechens of being pro-Nazi, Stalin deported nearly all of them — more than 500,000 men, women and children — to Kazakhstan. He also deported the entire population of neighboring Ingushetia. Stalin's deportation orders were carried out on Feb. 23, 1944, a date that remains a touchstone in Chechen history.

The Chechens stayed in Kazakhstan for more than ten years, isolated from the local Kazakhs and resentful of the Soviets. Following Stalin's death in 1953, the Soviets eased their restrictions on the Chechens and Ingush and almost all had begun to return to their homeland by 1957. Although reports vary widely, experts estimate some 200,000 Chechens died during the exile.

Although the Chechens were allowed to return and their limited republic was restored, the Soviets continued to curtail their ability to practice Islam, and many of the region’s mosques were not rebuilt until well into the 1970s.

Ingushetia would later separate from Chechnya to form its own autonomous republic. When Chechnya declared itself independent of Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Ingush objected, preferring to keep their ties with Moscow.

Richard Clogg, professor of modern Balkan history at the University of London, wrote in a 1995 article for the Times of London that Russia's moves to limit Islam's religious influence in the region only strengthened the Chechens' beliefs.

"Far from crippling the influence of Islam, as the Soviet authorities hoped, such policies simply drove religion even further underground, and the influence of the Sufi tarikats, or religious brotherhoods, if anything, increased," he writes.

The region once again experienced an uneasy calm during the 1970s and 80s, but as the Soviet Union began to unravel, Chechnya once again made a move towards independence. Like prior attempts, the independence movement would soon devolve into a guerilla war between the Russian army and militant separatists aimed at ending more than 150 years of Russian rule.

-- By Lee Banville, Online NewsHour