Can you clarify what you mean by "quiet" since there have been many conflicts and attacks in an ongoing insurgency which has produced thousands of casualties?

Here we must digress to the first Chechen war. What enabled the Chechens to succeed in it. The first and most important thing is the chronic underfunding of the army since at least 1990. Most of the armed forces at that time were not engaged in military training, but was a huge organism lying in a coma. Roughly speaking a conscript came to the army and all he did there was to clean the snow on the garrison grounds or paint fences, maybe shoot up to 20 rounds at the firing range once every six months. The number of real combat-ready units at that time is a controversial question, but apparently from 15 to 40 thousand at most. Clearly not enough for such a large-scale operation.

The second is the attitude to the first war inside Russia itself. The vast majority viewed this war as Yeltsin's crime, a war on his own people and a variant of civil war. Especially liberal human rights activists could have been exhorted not to participate in the conflict, but to take the side of the rebels. (Later, this hit the human rights movement hard. They were often accused of 'during the first Chechen war you offered soldiers to surrender, and in captivity the guerrillas cut off the heads of soldiers who trusted you.) But the unpopularity of the war can also be seen from the fact that not only pro-Western opposition, which was still strong at that time, demanded to end conflict, but the Communists who had a majority in the parliament at that time also tried to impeach Yeltsin, which of course was more of a PR stunt, as everybody understood that if the parliament really tried to remove Yeltsin from power he would shoot out the parliament with tanks, as he did in 1993, but the fact of such attempts indicates that the war was unpopular almost on all sides of the political spectrum. (Although regional specifics of perception must be added here, but this will greatly increase the size of the text, which is already too long.)

) Third, Chechen society was able to act as a single monolith, seeing in the conflict not Yeltsin's performance on the side of one of the sides in the Chechen conflict, but another round of imperialist aggression. All the more so because the army, which ran into unexpected resistance, began to act more and more harshly, which provoked an even harsher response, and so on.

But after the first Chechen war the economy and the general political culture began to take its toll. First of all, the republic's economy was deeply subsidized, and it could not exist on its own. Society itself assumed a normal form of existence as military democracy. In reality, it looked like a constant war with each other local warlords. Naturally with the abandonment of all social guarantees. As Shamil Basayev supposedly said when asked about pensions, "What pensions? You wolf, go and take from the sheep!"

Actually the republic did not have many sources of income, the main and most profitable one was apparently hunting slaves and the slave trade, then, like in Afghanistan, drugs and finally guarding the pipes in the surviving pipeline, collecting a rent for the pumping. And all sources of income had to be fought for, trying to outdo their opponents in atrocities. An additional conflict was the conflict with the Islamists.

Radical Wahhabism was very much at odds with moderate traditional Chechen Islam. So the Wahhabi Mujahideen like Khattab came into conflict with local imams like Kadyrov. But a large part of the detachments received some of their funding from Arab structures that were only willing to support the pan-Islamic movements, for which they had to become increasingly radicalized.

Attempts to build relations with Western companies led nowhere; the engineers who came were kidnapped for ransom, tortured and killed.

In the end, by the second war, the situation was fundamentally different. The state had already been able to move away from a non-functioning state and begin to finance its institutions, the army was still inferior to the current one, but it was combat-ready. Russian society was unanimous in its view of Chechnya as a problem that needed to be solved; supporters of peaceful coexistence with the republic, where kidnapped people and stolen cars were sent to and drugs came instead, found it increasingly difficult to argue their point of view. The republic's neighbors were wary of it from the very beginning, Chechens were not very popular among the other peoples of the Caucasus, but initially they were ready to look at the Chechens' struggle with Russia with sympathy. But the years of free Ichkeria, with its raids by uncontrolled gangs, convinced almost all the neighbors that Russian control was the best option for almost all the neighbors. So when Basayev's units came to Dagestan from Chechnya expecting an all-Caucasus jihad against the infidels, instead they received fights with the local militia and requests for help from Russia. At the same time there was already a conflict between the various warlords within Chechnya, and within society there were apparently thoughts that there was something go wrong with free floating.