PARIS - — Moscow's invasion of the breakaway republic of Chechnya reflects the twin obsessions that have dominated Russian history since czarist times - an unbending belief in Russia's imperial destiny and an abiding fear over the security of the nation's distant borders.
Historians point out that the first Russian ruler to wage war on the Chechens was Czar Peter the Great 280 years ago.
Since then, as even many Russian experts concede, the unequal struggle has never really ceased.
President Boris Yeltsin's decision to order the army to attack Chechnya "is merely the latest chapter in Moscow's centuries-old determination to subjugate the people of the North Caucasus," Russian emigre historian Peter Kalanovski said.
"The conflict has assumed many different forms, from the military campaigns of the early 19th century to [Josef) Stalin's brutal deportation and murder of hundreds of thousands of North Caucasians, including Chechens, before and during World War II."
The Chechens are a confederation of fierce, mainly Muslim, mountain clans who have lived in the region since prehistoric times.
Their antipathy to their Russian conquerors was deepened by Stalin's reign of terror in the 1930s when an estimated 14,000 Chechens - 3 percent of the population - were executed as "enemies of the people" or died in labor camps.
Kalanovski said that Russia's southward expansion into the Caucasus, a region inhabited by non-Slavs with no ethnic, cultural or religious links to Moscow, was launched by the czars to form a bulwark against the Turkish and Persian empires.
"The same fears influence Yeltsin and his military advisers today," the historian said. "The Russians are badly frightened by Turkey's reviving influence in the region, as well as by that of Iran. Little has changed."
No portion of the former Soviet Union has been worse hit by disorder and political destabilization than the Caucasus, a region where blood feuds and religious enmities reach far back into history.