Biography
Aslan Maskhadov was born in 1951 in the Kazakh SSR, where the Soviet government had deported the Chechen people, and his family returned to Chechnya in 1957. He trained as an artillery officer at a school in Tbilisi, graduating in 1972, and at the Kalinin artillery academy in Leningrad, graduating in 1981. He served in Hungary and the Baltic states and was stationed in Vilnius during the January 1991 crackdown there, before retiring from the Soviet army as a colonel in 1992 and returning home.
In the separatist Chechen Republic of Ichkeria he became chief of staff of the armed forces in 1994 and directed the defence of Grozny during the First Chechen War. In August 1996 he signed the Khasavyurt Accord with the Russian general Alexander Lebed, which ended the war, and in October he became prime minister. He won the presidential election of January 1997 and in May 1997 signed a peace treaty with Boris Yeltsin in Moscow.
As president he was unable to control rival warlords; kidnappings flourished, and in 1999 he gave way to Islamist pressure by introducing Sharia law. He survived several assassination attempts. After Russia launched the Second Chechen War in 1999 he went underground and led the separatist resistance, while distancing himself from terrorist attacks such as the Beslan school siege. He was killed by Russian forces at Tolstoy-Yurt on 8 March 2005, weeks after declaring a unilateral ceasefire, and his body was not returned to his family.
