Perhaps the most influential tragedy occurred during the second world war. A teacher in Zilgi, a predominantly Muslim village outside Beslan, says that, after the school siege, when her pupils ask her the eternal Russian question””?who is to blame?””?she gives a one-word answer: Stalin.

Well, Stalin forcefully resettled much of the Chechnyan population to Siberia and treated them horrible, and this is what led directly to the current situation. But while modern problems can be traced directly to Stalin, they don’t stop there. Why did Stalin treat the Chechnyans so badly? Simple, payback. Many Chechnyans sided with the Nazis during their failed invasion of Russia during WW2, and everything Stalin did to them was basically retribution for being collaborators. But it doesn’t stop there either. The reason they sided with the Nazis was because they had a history of being treated poorly by their Russian overlords and believed Hitler’s promises of increased freedom (which I imagine they would have regretted had the Reich broken Russia). And of course one of the reasons that they were treated badly is because they were a Muslim minority inside a strongly Christian country (before the Bolsheviks took over that is).

With such a tangled history, I think this will be a lot like the Israeli/Palestine conflict. Two sides with blood on their hands each blaming each other for everyone’s sins, but with no way to really track down the source of the blame to any single cause; everyone more interested in blame than solutions, and eternal low intensity conflict between one side that could easily crush the other in direct military conflict, but can never totally defend against innocent looking civilians completely willing to die.

Russia and Georgia are, as one would expect, making absolutely zero progress on removing Russia’s military bases from Georgian territory (excluding the peacekeeping forces in South Ossetia and Abkhazia).

Eurasia Daily Monitor’s Vladimir Socor sa…