Roots of the Conflict
According to Matthew Evangelista, author of The Chechen Wars, Chechnya's political mobilization in 1990 was rooted in an anticommunist reaction to the centralization and inefficiency of Russia's political and economic system.

In November 1990, the Chechens convened a nationalist movement, the Chechen National Congress, and invited Gen. Dzokhar Dudayev to head it. Dudayev — who had never lived in Chechnya before — and his fellow nationalists wanted to secede from the Soviet Union and form a North Caucasus federation with neighboring Muslim republics. Leaders were inspired by events in Georgia, where a nationalist movement had gathered steam in 1989 and resulted in autonomy from Russian rule in 1991.

During the first half of 1991, the differences within the province became more pronounced as the Chechen nationalist movement gathered support and moved toward secession and the local communist powers became more adamant that the province remain under Soviet control.

The failed August 1991 Russian coup, which sought to undo reforms and unseat Mikhail Gorbachev, gave nationalists a chance to assert their power. Dozu Zavgaev, Russia's representative in Chechnya, did not denounce those who had planned the coup and was discredited in the eyes of the Chechen nationalists. Moscow sent a new representative, Ruslan Khasbulatov, to Grozny; he convinced Zavgaev and his fellow leaders to resign and to establish a temporary council until elections could be held.

Dudayev, however, immediately attempted a revolt against temporary council. Evangelista writes, "They stormed the republic's KGB headquarters and seized its cache of weapons, reportedly with the acquiescence of Moscow authorities."

In September 1991, nationalist groups met to demand Dudayev stop his attempts to seize power, but in October he declared his National Congress of the Chechen People the sole power in the region and claimed 90 percent of the votes in Chechnya's presidential elections. Five days later, Boris Yeltsin declared a state of emergency and dispatched troops to the region. A series of Russian military incursions followed, which Chechen separatists repeatedly stymied.

As Dudayev's power grew in Chechnya, he encountered resistance from the breakaway parliament, from the public and from rival warlords. He responded by abolishing the parliament, the Grozny Municipal Assembly and the Constitutional Court, and establishing presidential rule in April 1993. He announced martial law in September 1994, and in December Russian troops invaded Chechnya, seeking to oust Dudayev.

Dudayev's internal conflicts stemmed in part from an attempt to accommodate the viewpoints of hard-line Islamic militants, many of whom had entered the region after the first Chechen war. They came to the area from the Middle East hoping to help fight Russia, as had happened in the Afghanistan-Russia war. While Dudayev had planned on fighting a war to promote a secular republic, he increasingly felt the need to rely on Islamic forces. By 1997, Chechnya's third-largest city, Urus-Martan, had become a stronghold for Islamic radicals.

"With uncompromising economic prospects and an astronomical rate of unemployment, Chechnya seemed fertile ground for recruiting fighters to march under the banner of Islam," Evangelista wrote.

At Islamic training camps, young recruits met up with Khattab, a warlord who had come to Chechnya from Saudi Arabia. He led a force of radicals known as the Wahhabis, who would later link up with the warlord Shamil Basayev and invade the neighboring republic of Dagestan in 1999. This invasion would in turn bring Russian troops back to the region and tip off the second Chechen war.

Several attempts were made on Dudayev's life throughout his time as leader, without clear evidence of who was responsible. When a shell fragment killed him in April 1996; conflicting reports about his death circulated. According to the American Foreign Policy Council's Russia Reform Monitor, Russia's NTV network reported that Russian federal forces were responsible for the attack, and had made four prior attempts to kill Dudayev with missiles guided by the transmission from his satellite telephone.

Also in 1996, Boris Yeltsin ordered a unilateral cease-fire to end the war, expressing willingness to grant Chechnya special autonomous status within the Russian Federation. He called for parliamentary elections, saying he would ask Russia's parliament to grant an amnesty for most Chechen fighters. He stopped short of meeting the separatists' main demands: Chechen independence and a withdrawal of all Russian forces.

Russian leaders and Chechen rebels signed the cease-fire agreement in May 1996; Yeltsin greeted the signing with the words, "We have resolved the key problem of peace in Chechnya. This is a historic day, a historic moment."

The cease-fire agreement, however, still left the question of Chechnya's independence unresolved.