The decade of the 90s was a tricky one for Russia. The USSR fell in 1991 and then Russia inherited the crisis of the Soviet state. A moment like this feels like the perfect moment to declare your independence if you rule a region and that is your goal. So the Chechens did it. To understand why Chechenya wanted its independence we must aknowledge the many differences existing between this region and the Russian state. First of all the Chechens weren't Russians. It wasn't their ethnicity either it was their culture. They didn't even share a religion since most of the Chechens are Sunni muslims and Russians are mainly Christian Ortodox. Russia was basically seen as an invasor. Opposite to this view we have the Russian government who saw the region as an important asset to their geopolitics. It was possible that if other regions saw they could declare their independence as Chechenya did then they would declare it too and that was a threat the Russian government with Boris Yeltsin at the head wouldn't tolerate. On December 1994 the war started and around 20 months later the war finished with Russia as the loser of a war that they thought would only take days. The same story repeats over and over again huh?
Here you can see the build itself. It took me around 2 months. It has around 5 floors. The bottom ones belog to a grocery store and the upper ones are residential ones. This time there isn't a clear inspiration for the building since I couldn't find many info on the building desings of the 90s Chechenya. Anyway I hope it looks kinda similar to what the buildings looked like back then. The basement has a light I put inside the closed part (in the space behind the black bricks). This MOC isn't the one I enjoyed the most because as it grew tall I got more and more lost on how to finish the building. There was space to recreate more things (more rooms or a sewer tunnel) but I just couldn't figure out what I wanted for this build to look like when finished. Anyway I tested some new stuff that will be helpful in the future like the gap made of plates in the middle of the wall right over the car and the door of the store. It may look a bit off in this build but I will make it better in future builds. I saw people at Instagram doing it and I think it can look really good. Minifigs have also been a problem. I'm happy with how the Russian ones look even their body is from random soldiers bought at AliExpress and it looks similar to 90s Russian uniforms but it isn't accurate if you compare to their real counterparts. With the Chechen fighters I had more trouble. I couldn't get an accurate idea of how they really looked like in real life so I improvised inspired by some clips and pictures I found about the first and second of the wars happened in Chechenya in that era. The car was one of my main motivations for the build and it looks bad compared to the idea I had. It's supposed to be a Lada Niva. I need to work more on making cars.
I will give this topic another try in the future. This conflict happened 30 years ago so I hope if somehow someone related to the war and the consequences it had sees this post or the build somewhere I really hope they understand one of the reasons for me to build and share stuff like that is to pay tribute to the many people that sadly uses to die and get injured in the wars and that we must not forget them otherwise feels like they died for nothing. Now all the pictures I took and video I uploaded to YouTube.
Find the YouTube video here:
