Fareed Zakaria wrote this OpEd for Newsweek/MSNBC on the Chechnya crisis facing Russia.   Not being very well versed on the details in Chechnya, I found Zakaria's brief historical summary very helpful:

To review the history briefly: The Chechens were forced into the Russian Empire in 1862, after 45 years of bloody resistance. They were granted independence in 1918, but in 1920 the Soviet Union invaded the country again and brutally suppressed periodic revolts. In 1944 Joseph Stalin applied a Stalinist solution to the Chechnya problem. He deported most of its inhabitants to Siberia—more than half a million—and burned their villages to the ground. (Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, allowed the survivors to return to their lands in the late 1950s.)
        In 1990, as the Soviet Union was breaking up, a national conference of all Chechen political groups declared independence. Russia refused to recognize it and in 1994 launched the first Chechen war. After two bloody years Moscow was unable to win and signed a peace treaty with the Chechens. In 1999 Russia reinvaded Chechnya, and since then has had 100,000 troops in this republic, the size of Vermont.

The remainder of the article describes the evolution of events in the past 2 years and scolds the Bush administration's oscillating stance towards Russian treatment of the Chechens.