Oh yes, Russia may have "civilized" Chechnya, but at what cost? Sorry to bring up this inconvenient fact, but the entire population of Chechnya; men, women and children, were packed off to the Siberian Gulags. A third of the population died in those Gulags. Would you like Russia if it had done that to the American people?
Don't get me wrong, I don't support the tactics of Shamil Basayev and the late Khattab. However, the Chechens have good reason to hate the Russians. The fact that senior figures in the pro-Moscow Chechen puppet government resigned last July because of the severity of the Russian army's mistreatment of Chechen civilians, proves that Russia is still happy to employ heavy-handed methods.
What did we Russians ever bring them? Well besides the alphebat, education, roads, running water and flushing toilets, a lot.
Stavka, don't forget mass torture and genocide!
Russians, Ukrainians, and other former Soviet bloc countries, even those that are ashamed of their government's past record, agree near unanimously that the way to be rid of the Islamic fanatics is to exterminate every last one of them.
They have history as their teacher. We have some notion of idealistic morality translated into geospeak as human rights.
When Americans think of Russian human rights abuses, they should remember that they have had the benefit of being isolated by two oceans. During the war between the states, one need only recall Vicksberg, Sherman's march to the sea and so forth, to realize that Americans are just as capable of such brutality.