If The Neutral Observer remembers correctly, the short version goes something like this:
The Russians took over Chechnya sometime in the 1600s-1700s. Chechens have always been assholes, pulling this terrorism shit and killing Russian civilians and soldiers, since they were taken over (not that they did anything with the land but herd goats before that). Stalin rounded every last one of them up and sent them to Siberia, but after Stalin's death they were allowed to all come home, effectively erasing what Stalin had done to solve the problem (yeah...but, Stalin's solution did work).
So there was low-level terrorism there again until the breakup of the Soviet Union, but the Red Army and the Soviet internal security apparatus kept anything major from happening. On the breakup of the Soviet Union, the Chechens made their move. Being that there is a lot of oil and resources down there, the Russians wanted to hold on to the area, sparking the first nasty war. This was in the early 1990s.
The Russians have pulled out and invaded and pulled out again a couple of times since, tried to incorporate the place into Greater Russia, make it a semi-independent puppet state, and all of that. The Chechens are still being typical muslim assholes about it, refusing to accept any compromise and are busily killing innocent civilians. Now the Russians are going to invade again, after this unpleasantness with the school. Hopefully they'll do the job properly this time.