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In seven decades as part of the Soviet Union, Georgia maintained some cultural independence, and Georgian nationalism remained a significant--though at times muted--issue in relations with the Russians.

Stalin and Lavrenti Beria, his chief of secret police from 1938 to 1953, were both Georgians

Causes of Displacement Young people's vulnerability to abuses is the motivating factor for fleeing in many cases. The UNHCHR reports that threats by guerrillas and paramilitaries are the primary reasons for families to seek refuge elsewhere. According to CODHES, in 1998, 36 percent of families fled with their children because of direct threats; 25 percent because of fear; 22 percent because of massacres and killings; 8 percent because of battles; 4 percent because of "disappearances"; 3 percent because of armed attacks; and 2 percent because of torture. According to the ICG, armed conflict accounted for 66 percent of displacement cases in Putumayo in 2002. Families regularly cited fear of forced recruitment of children into armed forces as a reason for fleeing from their homes. For example, 60 families fled from their homes in the municipality of Cunday, in Tolima department in August 2002, following the announcement of a recruitment order by the FARC-EP for everyone over the age of 12, according to the UNHCHR (E/CN.4/2003/13, Annex). In 2002, fighting for territorial control between guerrillas and paramilitaries in western Urabá forced a group of 64 civilians, including 36 children, to flee to the Punusa area of the Darién jungle in Panama, near the Colombian border (UNHCR). World Vision Colombia reports in Victimas Civiles en Medio del Conflicto Armado, 2002, that paramilitary forces committed six massacres during the last quarter of 2002 that provoked displacements of at least 170 people each in Antioquia, Chocó and Córdoba departments. The report also cites 11 massacres by unidentified forces committed during the same period that also forced residents to flee. No specific locations or dates of these events are provided.

October 1986: Reagan signs the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which appropriates $1.7 billion to fight the drug war. The bill also creates mandatory minimum penalties for drug offenses, which are increasingly criticized for promoting significant racial disparities in the prison population because of the differences in sentencing for crack and powder cocaine. Possession of crack, which is cheaper, results in a harsher sentence; the majority of crack users are lower income.

Mid-1980s: Because of the South Florida Drug Task Force's work, cocaine trafficking slowly changes transport routes. The Mexican border becomes the major point of entry for cocaine headed into the United States. Crack, a cheap, addictive and potent form of cocaine, is first developed in the early '80s; it becomes popular in the New York region, devastating inner-city neighborhoods.

Nixon creates the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to coordinate the efforts of all other agencies.

the Russian Federation. For that purpose it was even willing to fight a full- scale war, the first round of which (1994-96) it won, at least militarily.

All this has called for both a radical re-moulding of Chechen national identi- ty and a thorough revision of its collective past. The Chechen authorities, the national movement, and in fact all the Chechen intelligentsia – that is, both professional historians and (even more so) many other persons with higher edu- cation – have been involved in this revision of their national past and rewriting of their history on both the academic and popular levels. It all began in 1989, when Gorbachev’s glasnost reached the periphery, and has been steadily growing in momentum ever since. The main milestones in its development have been 1) in 1990, the appointment of a Chechen as republican secretary of the party for the first time since the second world war;5 2) what man

e new Chechen historical narrative is still strongly linked to Soviet narratives, ways of arguing and moulds of thinking. It tries to prove, for example, that its national heroes were ‘progressive’ and ‘popular’, not ‘reactionary’. It tends, like its progenitor, to be openly political, to make value judgements and moralize and to overlook facts inconsistent with its thesis. Moreover, even emo- tionally it is still very much connected to the ex-USSR, and tries, for example, to prove the Chechens’ loyalty and heroism in the ‘Great Patriotic War’, as the Sec- ond World War is still called in the ex-USSR

the powers, struggling for the independence, finally divided into two camps. The most popular in the public was the political block "The Round Table". The famous leader of this block was the former dissident, philologist, Zviad Gamsakhurdia (1938-1993). Exactly his personal popularity conditioned the victory (62% votes) of "The Round Table" after October 28, 1990 elections (the first many-partied elections in Georgia since 1921). Thus, it was a peaceful end of the Communist governance in Georgia. Z. Gamsakhurdia soon became the president of the country, and during the period of his reign, the inner political situation in the Republic aggravated. Because of the inflexible, ambitious policy of Gamsakhurdia, the relations between the governing "The Round Table" and the rest opposite part, became bitter. The condition in Autonomies was strained too, especially in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Gamsakhurdia's nationalistic phraseology disturbed the ethnic minorities. If in 1981 the partial compromise with Abkhazia was managed, the conflict with Ossetia became the armed opposition. The reason of this was the abolishment of Autonomous Region of Ossetia by the Parliament of Georgia. This solution was provoked by Ossetians, declaring the Autonomous Region as the Sovereign Republic. It must also be notified that in Georgia of this period, one of the reasons of existing ethnical conflicts (and also the split in Georgian national movement), except the local radical actions, was, as it seemed, the hidden activity of SSC of the Union, which used the tried imperial methods - "separate and dominate".

The collapse of Communism in Eurasia has led to many events that few analysts in the West could have predicted during the Cold War. One of the most improbable of these events was the stunning military victory of the tiny autonomous republic of Chechnya in the 1994-1996 war for independence against the Russian Federation.

While the Chechens can officially claim to be victors in the first Russo-Chechen war of the 1990s, there was in actuality no winner in this bloody conflict. Scores of Chechen villages were destroyed, the Chechen capital of Grozny was bombed to rubble in the heaviest bombardment in Europe since the bombing of Dresden, tens of thousands of Chechens and Russians living in Chechnya lost their lives, hundreds of thousands more were made refugees, and the economy of the independent statelet of Ichkeria, as Chechnya is now known, lies in utter ruin.

Rather than accepting autonomy within the Russian Federation, as the Republic of Tatarstan has, for example, the Chechen people rallied behind such leaders as Dzhokhar Dudaev, Aslan Maskhadov and Shamil Basaev, and chose to fight the might of transcontinental Russia in a bitter struggle for total freedom. The heavy cost of this independence for the Chechen people has been incalculable in socioeconomic terms.

Chechens are predominantly Sunni Muslim.

As well as different cultural and religious beliefs, as for any group of people throughout history subdued by external rule or empire,

With the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, a number of regions managed to break away and gain independence.

At the time of writing of this review of Matthew Evangelista's clearly written book on the wars between Russia and Chechnya, there are reports of several people being killed in an explosion on a commuter train in south Russia, close to Chechnya.

The Russian authorities immediately blamed "Chechen terrorists.

The Judgment then turns to Bosnia and deals with the rise of ethnically-constituted parties in 1990 and the efforts of the Serb Democratic Party (SDS) to achieve a Greater Serbia by annexing parts of Bosnia and Croatia where there were Serb populations.97 There is a thorough discussion of how the Yugoslav National Army (JNA), which up to that point had been multi-ethnic, became 90 percent Serb. In 1991 it had become an army without a state to defend, and thus turned into an instrument of a militaristic Serb nationalism.98 War raged between the newly independent Croatia and Serb forces in late 1991, and this greatly increased tensions in Bosnia. The JNA withdrew from Croatia in early 1992 and brought 100,000 troops, airplanes, helicopters, and heavy weapons into Bosnia which further exacerbated anxiety and hostility among the population.99