Exactly thirty years ago, a single Russian missile strike, guided by his satellite phone, ended the life of former Soviet General turned rebel leader, Dzhokhar Dudayev.

For five years, he had been in charge of a tiny speck of land in Russia's deep south called Chechnya. His fellow Caucasian mountain rebels put up a fight against the once-mighty Red Army that humiliated Boris Yeltsin in the Kremlin. Moscow responded with aerial bombardments and ruthless urban warfare. Yet unexpectedly, and at least in the interim, the Caucasian David won against the Russian Goliath.

To unpack this chaos, Putschcast is joined by Thomas de Waal, a Caucasus expert who was there during the First Chechen War and met Dudayev face-to-face multiple times. He experienced the rebel leader's defiance and unpredictability firsthand, as well as the atrocities that gained only limited Western media interest at the time.

Eventually banned from doing journalistic work in Russia, Tom takes listeners back to the chaotic days of the early 90s in post-Soviet Russia, when rubble littered the streets of Grozny and fierce nationalism turned into radical Islamist insurgency.

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