Putin's Wars (30 page)

Andropov may be considered the secret “godfather” of Russia’s war in Afghanistan.
^[17]
The irony, however, was that this costly, protracted, and unwinnable guerrilla
war in a mountainous and hostile environment would soon exhibit the internal weaknesses
of Soviet society. This would convince Andropov—even before he became general secretary
of the CPSU in 1983—of the necessity of a fundamental and profound reform of the Soviet
system. And the man whom he had in mind to conduct these reforms was Mikhail Gorbachev.
^[18]

Artyom Borovik wrote: “As a general to whom I became quite close in Afghanistan put
it, ‘All of the wars that Russia lost led to social reforms, while all of the wars
it won led to the strengthening of totalitarianism.’”
^[19]
This seems, indeed, to be true in the cases of both the Cold War and the war in
Afghanistan. These two lost wars led, first, to Gorbachev’s perestroika, and, subsequently,
to the introduction of a market economy and a pluralistic democracy. But one may ask
if this reformist dynamic was still operative when the Soviet Union’s successor state,
the Russian Federation, lost the First Chechen War (1994–1996). There were, to begin
with, four important differences between the Cold War and the war in Afghanistan on
the one hand, and the war in Chechnya on the other. These differences concerned the

1. subject of the war,
   

2. its ideological interpretation,
   

3. its geopolitical meaning, and
   

4. the role of the army in the war.
   

In regard to the first point, the Cold War and the war in Afghanistan were conducted
by the Soviet Union. The war in Chechnya, however, was conducted by the Russian Federation.
In the latter case, the actor was no longer the world’s second superpower, but a (smaller)
country that had gone through a process of decolonization and was struggling to maintain
its great power status.

The second difference was that the two former wars were still interpreted in the ideological
framework of Marxism-Leninism. This meant that both wars were considered expansive
wars. Marxism offered an ideological certainty that the world was irrevocably moving
toward the socialist world revolution. Even the Cold War was considered only a temporary
stalemate between capitalism and socialism, which—in the end—would give way to a historic
victory of socialism over capitalism. Yury Andropov, like his mentor, the party ideologue
Mikhail Suslov, still saw the war in Afghanistan through this prism. It was a step
in the progressive evolution of the socialist camp. The First Chechen War, however,
was completely different. Russia had definitively lost its faith in the socialist
revolution. It had accepted the loss of the communist dream and recognized the superiority
of the capitalist system. There was, therefore, no longer an ideologically conditioned
certainty of a victory. The outcome of the Chechen war was considered unpredictable
and contingent.

A third difference was geopolitical. The war in Chechnya was not a war conducted by
a proud, expanding empire
outside its borders
, but a war conducted by a recently amputated empire
inside its borders.
Russia, which had shrunk to the size of sixteenth-century Muscovy, fought in Chechnya
not an offensive, expansive war, but a
defensive
war against the danger of dismemberment.

A fourth difference was the dire situation of the Russian army. Demoralized by the
demise of the Soviet Union, reduced in numbers, underfunded, undertrained, and deeply
corrupt, the Russian army was a shadow of its powerful and feared Soviet predecessor.
Additionally, the Russian leadership made important psychological and strategic miscalculations.
It was a psychological miscalculation to underestimate the strength of the Chechen
drive for national independence. This first miscalculation led to a second, strategic
miscalculation, which was to consider the capture of Grozny and the rest of Chechnya
as an easy walkover.

On October 27, 1991, the Chechens chose Djohar Dudayev, a former Soviet general, as
their president. Moscow immediately contested the legitimacy of the elections. Five
days later Dudayev declared the independence of Chechnya. President Yeltsin reacted
on November 8, 1991, by declaring a state of emergency in Chechnya and sending 2,500
troops of the Interior Ministry and the KGB to the rebellious republic. These troops
were blocked at Grozny airport by thousands of demonstrators. Fearing an escalation,
Moscow decided to withdraw its troops. The Soviet Union was at that time in complete
turmoil and would disintegrate some weeks later. The government was therefore more
concerned with other, seemingly more urgent problems. But when, in 1994, the situation
had calmed down, Moscow once again turned its attention to the rebellious republic
in the North Caucasus that for three years had been
de facto
independent. Hoping to resolve the problem by a simple coup d’état Moscow supported,
in November 1994, a rebellion by rival Chechen factions against the government of
Dudayev. The putsch, however, failed and the Russian government, which denied being
involved in the coup, was embarrassed by the fact that seven hundred regular Russian
soldiers were among the captured rebels. After this humiliation Yeltsin decided to
attack, and in the beginning of December 1994 Russian troops invaded Chechnya. Quite
unexpectedly, however, these troops met with a fierce resistance.

The Russian government had totally underestimated the power of Chechen nationalism.
This nationalism was the result of two factors. The first was the relatively late
incorporation of the Chechen (and ethnically related Ingushi)
^[20]
nation into the Russian empire. Chechnya was only incorporated in the 1860s, after
a long and protracted colonial war of conquest that took more than thirty years. A
second and even more important source of the Chechen drive for independence was the
persecution of the Chechen nation by Stalin’s regime. On February 23, 1944, Red Army
Day, Stalin deported the Chechen population for alleged treason. Four hundred thousand
Chechens—old and young, men, women, and children—were put in trains and trucks and
transported in the freezing cold of the barren winter to unknown destinations in Siberia,
Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. A quarter of them, up to 100,000–125,000 Chechens, died
in transit or after their arrival due to the harsh conditions.
^[21]
It was an example of ethnic cleansing with clear racist undertones. Officially,
however, racism was absent in the Soviet Union. Eric D. Weitz wrote:

The Soviets explicitly and loudly rejected the ideology of race. . . .
^[22]
Yet at the same time, traces of racial politics crept into Soviet nationalities
policies, especially between 1937 and 1953. The state not only repressed overly fervent
and potentially dangerous expressions of nationalism and deported entire national
groups. In the Stalin period especially, particular populations were endowed with
immutable traits that every member of the group possessed and that were passed from
one generation to the next. The particular traits . . . could lead to round-ups, forced
deportations, and resettlement in horrendous conditions. Under Iosif Stalin, the Soviets
practiced—intermittently, inconsistently, to be sure—racial politics without the overt
concept and ideology of race.
^[23]

Only in 1957, in the time of Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization, were the deported Chechens
allowed to return to their home country. This deportation is deeply engraved in the
Chechen national consciousness. Most of the Chechen leaders in the 1990s were born
in exile. The gruesome Chechen fate, suffered at the hands of Stalin and his executioners,
had fundamentally, and probably definitively, compromised any Chechen loyalty to the
Russian state. “There is perhaps a special emotional state,” wrote Georgi Derluguian,
“known only to the peoples that have been subjected to genocide in the past—the ‘never
again!’ sentiment that reduces the whole world to the dilemma of survival. It provided
the extraordinary determination and moral edge to the Chechen fighters in the first
war.”
^[24]
The Russians, however, never having come to terms with the crimes of their Stalinist
past, had no understanding of the grievances of the Chechen nation.

A complicating factor was that the so-called Chechen question would soon become instrumentalized
by the Russian power-elite for internal, political reasons. In the Duma elections
of December 1993 Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party had won 22.9 percent of the
vote—which was much more than the 15 percent of Russia’s Choice, the pro-Kremlin party
at that time. The writing was clearly on the wall for Yeltsin, whose popularity at
that time was at a historical low and reached not even 10 percent. A victory for him
at the presidential elections of 1996 was far from sure, and some even feared that
the communist leader Zyuganov had a chance of being elected. Yeltsin’s advisers considered
a quick victory in Chechnya would increase the ailing popularity of the incumbent
president. The war plans, however, met with opposition in the army that had not yet
digested its defeat in Afghanistan. Deputy Defence Minister General Boris Gromov openly
declared himself against an intervention, and General Eduard Vorobyev, deputy head
of the ground forces, refused to lead the invasion.
^[25]

Nevertheless Yeltsin issued on November 30, 1994, presidential decree No. 2137c, authorizing
the invasion. This was a
secret
decree—which means that it was unconstitutional. On December 11, 1994, the day of
the invasion, this decree was supplanted by another secret, and therefore equally
unconstitutional, decree No. 2169c.
^[26]
From the beginning, therefore, this war was unconstitutional. When the war did
not turn out to be the easy walkover that was expected, opposition to the war escalated.
Grozny was only captured at the end of February 1995, after three months of heavy
fighting. When the Russians were confronted with many casualties during their first
attacks on Grozny (it cost the lives of two thousand Russian soldiers), they started
a carpet bombing of the city which led to an unprecedented massacre of the civilian
population. According to eyewitness reports, “they continued to pound the rebel-held
quarter [of Grozny] with thousands of guns, rockets, and bombs day and night . . .
. To put the intensity of firing in perspective, the highest level of firing recorded
in Sarajevo was 3,500 heavy detonations per day. In Grozny in early February, a colleague
of mine counted 4,000 detonations per hour.”
^[27]
The Russian army could have saved civilian lives by using precision-guided weapons,
which they had in their arsenal. According to Gregory J. Celestan, “‘the word in the
[Russian] higher command is that these highly advanced armaments were too expensive
to be wasted’ in Chechnya and needed to be kept for more serious contingencies.”
^[28]
One may doubt, however, that financial calculations alone were the reason for this
indiscriminate bombing of a densely populated city. It seems to have been a deliberate
choice with the goal to “bomb the Chechen population into submission.” The bombardments
caused a hecatomb that took the lives of an estimated twenty-five thousand to twenty-nine
thousand inhabitants—mostly civilians, especially older and disabled people and children,
who had been unable to flee the city. As a point of comparison: the Allied bombardment
of the German city of Dresden in February 1945 involved a civilian death toll of about
twenty-five thousand people. This means that the bombardments of Grozny in the first
months of 1995 were probably the most lethal attack on an open city in Europe since
the end of World War II. This war was not even called a war. The Russian government
pretended it was a “police action” (
militseyskaya operatsiya
) against a group of its own citizens. Bombarding an open city for months, causing
a civilian death toll that equals that of Dresden at the end of World War II, and
calling it a police action was not only extremely cynical, it was an outright criminal
violation of human rights, and above all of the most basic human right: the right
to life.

Despite the fact that Grozny and the other cities were occupied, and despite their
heavy losses, the Chechens went on fighting. The war in Chechnya became more and more
unpopular in Russia. Instead of promoting Yeltsin’s reelection, the war began to endanger
it. On February 9, 1996, four months before the presidential election would be held,
the Moscow correspondent of
The Washington Post
wrote: “President Boris Yeltsin acknowledged today that he cannot be reelected if
Russia’s 14-month-old war against the separatist movement in Chechnya continues .
. . . Many Russians have recognized that the war is an enormous liability for Yeltsin.”
^[29]
On March 31, 1996, in a nationwide televised speech, Yeltsin presented a peace
plan, consisting of an immediate ceasefire, the withdrawal of some Russian troops,
and mediation with Dudayev. The peace plan received at that time much positive publicity
on Berezovsky’s pro-Yeltsin TV channel ORT, which may have salvaged Yeltsin’s reelection.
But in reality the fighting still went on, and, in August 1996, the Chechens even
succeeded in recapturing Grozny. Finally, on August 31, 1996, Yeltsin’s envoy, General
Aleksandr Lebed, signed a ceasefire with the Chechen commander, Aslan Mashkadov, in
the Daghestani town of Khasavyurt. The Russians promised to withdraw their troops
from Chechnya by the end of 1996 and to postpone a final decision on Chechnya’s status
until December 31, 2001.