2. Speaking and Reading.

a. How do you think people get involved in terrorism?

b. What makes them do that?

c. Terrorism in Russia is a major threat to the security of the nation with most terrorist activity taking place in Chechnya and Dagestan. Why do you think exactly these regions are hotbeds of tension in our country?

d. Read the text below and fill in the gaps with the suitable words or word combinations given: average, bloodthirsty, bombings, breakaway, charge, chief, deported, elected, hassle, heel, invaded, lucrative, masterminded, mercenary, militants, out, plains, prejudice, pretext, protest, rebel, refugees, rescue, resisted, rife, scrutiny, tamed, tolerance, tyrants, withdrawa.

Text 2. Russia and chechnya

The Economist, November 2, 2002

Peace in the (1)_____________republic of Chechnya has never looked easy, but the recent hostage crisis in Moscow has rendered it well-nigh impossible.

“NEGOTIATE?” retorts Zakir, a Muscovite of mixed Russian and Azeri descent, with an angry look. “Look here: you can negotiate with the Dagestanis, with the Circassians, with the Ossetians, but you can’t negotiate with the Chechens!”

That is pretty much what the (2)______________ Russian thinks about Chechens now; and it is pretty much what he thought about them long before last week’s hostage crisis, in which Chechen (3)______________ held more than 700 people in a Moscow theatre for two-and-a-half days. The (4)_______________ operation, in which the gas that knocked (5)_______________ the attackers also killed at least 117 hostages, sparked local and international (6)________________ and left many questions unanswered. But as the anger dies down and the questions start to be swept under the rug, trouble is only beginning for those who will be the attack's (7)_____________ victims: the Chechen people themselves.

The police who idle away the hours on Moscow's streets checking identity papers and residence permits have always given more (8)_______________ to people with the dark hair and swarthy skin of the North Caucasus — people like Zakir. But now the (9)_______________ has intensified. This week police swooped to search the homes of even well-off Chechens and Dagestanis who have lived in Moscow for years. A call for (10)________________ from President Vladimir Putin made little difference. Old (11) _______________ has hardened.

Since Chechnya tried to break away in 1991, Russia has fought two wars to try to bring it to (12)_______________. The results are a destroyed land, tens of thousands dead and hundreds of thousands made (13)_________________; but above all, war has so permeated the fabric of Chechnya that it has become self-perpetuating. While optimists hope that the hostage crisis will shock Mr Putin into negotiating and the majority fear that it will only make him more implacable, the most awful thing is that it hardly matters. No solution - all-out assault, full military (14)____________________ or careful peace talks - will be easier than any other.

Born Enemies

The Russians think the Chechens are (15) ____________________ barbarians. The Chechens think the Russians are imperialist (16)__________________. History shows why. Slapped against the north face of the Caucasus mountains like a huge pancake, Chechnya is just one of the mini-nations that Russia began to swallow up in the 18th century as it expanded towards the borders of the Ottoman Empire. The people of the mountains (17)_______________ invasion even more fiercely than their plains brethren: their greatest leader, Imam Shamil, waged guerrilla war for a quarter of a century. The Chechens always remained the least (18)___________________ of Russia's new subjects — perhaps because they had no traditional hierarchy, but rather a network of communities and teips, land-based clans. Strong teip loyalty still exists, and is one reason why no truly all-Chechen leader has emerged — in itself, one of the biggest obstacles to peace.

Joseph Stalin made the Chechen-Ingush region an autonomous republic within Russia in 1936. But at the height of the second world war he (19)____________________the entire population, half a million people, to Central Asia, ostensibly as a punishment for mass collaboration with the Nazis. Most probably, as Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal argue in "Chechnya: A small victorious war" (Pan Books, 1997), it was because they had resisted Stalinist collectivisation, and would be the natural leaders of the mountain peoples in any future insurgency. Within five years, a quarter of them had died. Not until 1957 was the republic reinstated.

It declared independence from Russia in 1991, after the Soviet Union broke up. Russia, itself a new state, tolerated the rebellion at first. But under the Chechen president, Jokhar Dudaev, the economy collapsed and organised crime became (20)______________________. In 1994, Moscow supported an opposition coup against Dudaev; when that failed, Russian forces (21)____________________.

They left 18 months later, humiliatingly defeated. The Chechen chief of staff, Aslan Maskhadov, had united rag-tag bands of (22) __________________ troops into a victorious army, like Shamil before him. And yet he was the most moderate and pragmatic Chechen leader around: he signed the eventual peace agreement with Moscow and those Chechens who had not fled during the war (23) _________________ him president in 1997.

But trying to rebuild a shattered republic — only one building in Grozny, the capital, was deemed safe enough to hold his inauguration — and unite competing interest groups proved too much for him. Chechnya became a bandit state, with the rebel commanders and teip leaders fighting for control of (24) ___________________ shady businesses.

Moreover, the peace deal left one question open: Chechnya's independence. Talks about it were repeatedly called off, often on the (25) __________________of fresh terrorist attacks. Charles Blandy of the Conflict Studies Research Centre, part of the British defence ministry, argues that Moscow may have deliberately prevaricated. "Whilst Maskhadov was a person with whom the Russian authorities could work", Mr Blandy writes, "they perhaps recognised, too, that he was possibly the greatest threat to Russian ambitions of keeping Chechnya within the Russian Federation."

If that was the tactic, it worked. Disillusioned with a fruitless peace, Mr Maskhadov's field commanders joined the opposition. One of them, Shamil Basaev, together with a Saudi Arabian (26) ___________________ known as Khattab, led a rebel force into neighbouring Dagestan in August 1999. A month later there was a series of (27) __________________ in Moscow and elsewhere — blamed on Chechens, though there was never any proof. Those events gave Russia the support it needed for a second invasion.

The campaign was (28) __________________ by the new prime minister, Mr Putin. Its initial success helped him win the March 2000 presidential election. But once again, the mountain region proved much harder to capture than the (29)____________________, and soon the army got bogged down. Although Mr Putin declared 90 the military operation over earlier this year, rebels still control much of the southern part, and kill 20 to 30 Russian soldiers each week. Often, they also attack the pro-Moscow Chechen officials who are nominally in (30)________________ of most of Chechnya.