There were eight or nine of us, but I am still amazed at our achievement. Grunting and groaning, we pushed and shoved until finally we managed to prop the APC on its side, and then with another herculean effort, righted it back on its wheels. Rather than congratulate themselves on our success, however, the soldiers then began cursing one another over the damage, waving their fingers and assigning blame. When one seemed to take too much interest in a Kalashnikov propped on a bush, we knew it was time to go.
“Let’s get out of here,” Adil said.
It was a good idea, and I still had my legs.
Leaving our friends and the APC behind, we ascended a sandy ridge and kept walking in the general direction of the road, eventually finding it several miles away from where we had left our driver.
“You Americans don’t really understand. We’re not totally ready for democracy, as you call it,” Adil said, wiping APC soot and sweat from his brow. “I’m not saying we won’t have it eventually. But right now it’s too early. This is chaos, not democracy.”
What Adil really wanted was just a normal life for himself and his family.
Prophetically, Azerbaijan would in the coming years take on some of the elements of an “Eastern Democracy”: The former Communist strongman Heydar Aliyev conceded to some demands of the wool-merchant-cum-warlord Surat Huseinov, including making him prime minister. Within two years, however, Aliyev outmaneuvered Surat, who ended up in prison for several years on charges of coup plotting.
The Heydar Aliyev clan, helped by new oil money, then built an authoritarian system with all the whistles and bells—handing off power to Heydar’s son Ilham before Heydar’s death, holding sham elections, and engineering the total dominance of the state over most aspects of life.
We got back to the car and continued to the ancient town of Shemakhi, the former capital of Azerbaijan, probably crossing the front several times without knowing it because the sentries were asleep or something. There were a few gun-toting men hanging around the main administration building, and we met a city official inside, who said merely that he “was on the side of peace.” But we had no idea who was in control, and no one seemed to want to tell us.
“Let’s go back to Baku to see who is in power today,” Adil suggested, sarcastically.
“OK,” I said.
Aside from my near death by APC, it had been an enlightening day. A “civil war” that was barely one, the lone government casualty the wrecked piece of military hardware.
INDEED, THE REAL war was elsewhere, and receiving almost no news coverage because one had to cross the lines of the Shish Kebab War to get there. That real war, of course, was being fought over Karabakh, and during that white-hot summer, Azerbaijan’s battlefield losses to Armenia continued unabated. The most notable loss came in July, when Azerbaijani troops lost the frontline city of Agdam, once home to seventy thousand souls, but already largely abandoned by civilians. The Armenians then carted away doors, window frames, and even the white bricks used to build the houses as war booty.
I made it to within a few miles of Agdam the day after it fell, and saw it burning in the near distance—the fate of all fallen cities in all the Caucasus wars. There, I met the last Azerbaijani unit along the road, a platoon of twenty or so. The commander, distraught and on the edge of a nervous breakdown, insisted on digging up a dead comrade to show me. There was no corpse; only a perfectly flattened head remained, which the by now inconsolable commander pried up with a stick and displayed to me. He claimed it had been intentionally run over by an Armenian tank as his forces retreated.
I thought of my own narrow escape from getting crushed by the flip-flopping APC outside Shemakhi.
I listened to the commander wail and wave around the head of his friend with Agdam burning in the background, the requisite wave of refugees, cars loaded down with rescued refrigerators, blankets, and mattresses pulling away from the area.
AND I WOULD have to file again from the chaos of Azerbaijan a few years after the fall of Agdam and the Shish Kebab War, and this time the subject was Adil Bunyatov, my friend and cameraman.
Less than two years after Adil’s dreams of opening a ketchup factory and his soliloquy about “Eastern Democracy” and speculations about whether Azerbaijan might be better off with a little benign dictatorship instead of the chaos that came with gradual moves toward broader political freedoms, the autocratic government of Heydar Aliyev was faced with a new rebellion. Adil went forth to do his job of finding and filming the “front,” which this time took the form of a suburban military barracks in Baku. But unlike the Shish Kebab War of the summer of 1993, this was an all-too-real confrontation pitting Azerbaijani against Azerbaijani, and when the guys with guns on either side of the politic divide fired their weapons, it was in anger and with intent to kill.
When the smoke cleared, dozens of soldiers lay dead; the rogue officer behind the rebellion was allowed to bleed to death on his way to the hospital.
Adil was no longer there to report it. He was killed in the opening blast when a stray bullet struck his jugular. The doctors tried to reassure his family, which included a wife and a son, that his death had probably been very quick and almost painless.
He was the first of my close reporting friends and colleagues to be killed in action.
He would not be the last.
Dudayev addresses rally in Grozny, June 1993.
The most tragic thing about the first Chechen-Russian war was that it took place at all. Until just before it began, almost no journalists or political pundits believed there would be a war—those who had even heard of Chechnya assumed the embattled separatist leader Dzhokhar Dudayev would eventually be toppled by his own people, saving the Russians the trouble.
The reasons that it erupted were, at charitable best, human stupidity on a protozoan level; at worst, they were heinous and recklessly criminal. The decision by the Russian Federation to send in troops was made in a bathhouse by naked, drunken men during a birthday celebration for the country’s defense minister, Pavel Grachev. At first the Russians relentlessly bombed airports around the Chechen capital city, Grozny, to establish a no-fly zone.
Someone forgot to tell them that the Chechen separatists had no planes, except some old Czechoslovak training craft that were practically incapable of getting airborne, let alone dropping a bomb. Once the ground war began, thousands of fresh-faced Russian youth in armored columns without infantry were sent into Grozny without even city maps, getting lost in the maze of sixteen-story residential high-rises in the city center. This made them easy targets for the ragtag Chechen militias, who, armed with grenades and RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades), often laughingly ascended idling Russian tanks, flipped open the hatches, and dropped the explosives inside, turning the crews into shreds of human flesh. The Russian reaction was to carpet-bomb the city, using levels of tonnage that had not been seen since the Allied bombings of Dresden during World War II.
I first came to Chechnya during the summer of 1993, covered most of the war that broke out in 1994, and would return dozens of times over the next decade. Many of the central characters included in the following chapters were killed during the carnage. I often wonder why I am not among their number.
GRENADE, LIGHTLY TOSSED
It was a sultry summer day in 1993. Two old men in a Moskvich sedan picked us up at the side of the road after we crossed the “frontier.” This was my first foray into Chechnya, a tiny (the size of Connecticut) place it took the czars’ armies longer than any other to “pacify” in the nineteenth century. As the empire reeled, Chechen activists wasted no time in declaring independence from the Russian Federation.
Despite the searing heat, our two driving hosts wore Chicago 1930s–style black fedora hats, popular in Chechnya at the time, but totally incongruous with the surrounding countryside, dotted with flocks of sheep and newly constructed mosques. I sat in the back along with my traveling companion, Liam McDowall of the Associated Press, studying the fedoras. I couldn’t esca
pe the feeling that we were being driven to Grozny by members of the rap group RUN-DMC or some Prohibition-era gangsters. In the ex–Soviet Union, the fedora was a strictly Chechen accoutrement, the favored headgear of the renegade former Soviet nuclear bomber squadron commander General Dzhokhar Dudayev, president of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, a state recognized at the time by no other country on earth.
We entered Grozny and asked the two fedora-topped gentlemen to drop us at the best hotel in town.
“There’s only one hotel—the Kavkaz,” they laughed, and brought us to a menacingly rundown shack across from Dudayev’s presidential palace on Grozny’s massive central square, which would later assume a legendary role as the heart of the resistance during the war.
The hotel lobby was teeming with armed men milling around. One was lightly tossing a live hand grenade, detonation ring intact, into the air repeatedly, as if it were a lemon or a small ball. “Hey, which room are you guys in here?” he asked. We answered that we hadn’t checked in yet. We inquired about rooms. A rail-thin man at the front desk said that he had only two left, and that the door lock on one was broken. After no deliberation we deposited our things in the room with the lock and left the grenade-tossing young man and his companions behind.
The city was tense, but in the then-jovial, chaotic Chechen way. The Russian-backed opposition had tried to stage a referendum on Dudayev’s rule, but not through diplomatic negotiations. An armed clash erupted down the street at the state drama theater. Several people were killed in a melee a couple of hours before our arrival. Dudayev’s forces celebrated their “victory” by discharging every type of weapon they had into the cloudless sky and performing a zikr, a Sufi dance of remembrance for the dead.
So loud was the volley of fire that my editor in Moscow couldn’t make out what I was dictating when I tried to file a dispatch from the press center of the presidential palace. I finally got off a few stock quotes and told him not to worry—the gunfire was only a celebration. He laughed, hanging up the phone, evidently getting more “color” than he bargained for from the nonstop gunfire than I could give him in a million words.
The next day, tens of thousands began assembling on the square in front of the presidential palace. Dudayev was coming to address the masses. Bravado-happy bodyguards pointed AKs at different angles into the crowd below, but any real sense of security was mythological; there were so many in the crowd openly armed with everything from Kalashnikovs to old hunting rifles. Then Dzhokhar emerged and mounted an old pickup truck with a loudspeaker.
It was the first of dozens of times I would see him. Short, dressed in a black suit and tie and the obligatory fedora of the time, he exuded a powerful, even mesmerizing presence, despite his rusty Chechen-language skills after so many years of speaking solely Russian in the Soviet military. His message was clear: The Chechen opposition to his rule was being financed and directed by Moscow, and war with Russia was just a matter of time. Moscow, Dudayev argued, was going to “invade” this tiny republic of 1 million people, which represented only about a half percent of the entire territory of the Russian Federation, of which the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria had never really been a voluntary part.
Dudayev then reiterated the grim litany of Chechen history seared into every Chechen soul, from fifty years of resistance to Russian conquest in the nineteenth century under Imam Shamil to the vysyl, or deportation, of February 23, 1944.
“Never again!” shouted Dudayev at the end of his speech.
When the mass demonstration was over, a man from the presidential administration named Kazbek led me down to a memorial that the separatist government had constructed to explain the national psychosis.
It was an eerie, chilling monument, dedicated to the hundreds of thousands of Chechens deported en masse by dictator Joseph Stalin nearly fifty years before. There were no graves; rather, only reclaimed grave markers belonging to Chechen elders. After the forced send-off of the Chechens, the markers had been summarily ripped from graveyards and blithely used as building materials for paving sidewalks or roads in the now totally Sovietized Grozny, devoid of anything Chechen.
February 23, 1944, is the day of the Chechen deportations. Ironically and perhaps sadistically, February 23 was and is to this day “Red Army Day.”
The previous night, every Chechen had been told to show up in central village squares early the next morning to celebrate another victorious battle against the Nazi foe. Instead Stalin’s People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD, the precursor to the KGB) quickly bundled more than 400,000 people into cattle cars and sent them—with almost no provisions—into exile thousands of miles away into the arid steppe of Central Asia on charges of collaborating with the Germans. (The Germans never made it to Chechnya, and only a tiny minority of Chechens actually had sympathized with them in other areas under Nazi control, but Stalin obviously feared that the Chechens were a security risk, given their long, poisoned history under Russian colonial rule.) A third of the deportees are estimated to have perished along the way of disease, dysentery, and dehydration; those who died were thrown out along the tracks.
“This is what the Russians have in store for us again,” said Kazbek. Here was the key to understanding the upcoming dynamic. Dudayev was far from universally popular; he had many detractors in Chechnya, perhaps well over half the population. Thus the war to come would be one of resistance, not formal independence. The memory of the deportation distilled this into a potion.
Regardless of what they thought about Dudayev, his often erratic behavior, and evidence that after a life in the Soviet military he had little knowledge of the Sufi-type Islam practiced in Chechnya, the overwhelming majority of Chechens would fight for their homes and land, the deportations still fresh as yesterday in their minds.
There were repeated flare-ups throughout 1993 and 1994 between Dudayev and his detractors. Each attempt by the Chechen opposition to topple Dudayev ended in failure, his supporters far more motivated than his Moscow-financed and more Russified foes.
Finally, in August of 1994, I attended a sizable Dudayev press conference in his presidential palace. He had called the gathering to announce, asserting complete certainty, that Russia was planning a “large-scale aggression” against Chechnya, an intervention. Although it was widely reported in the press, the claim was generally scoffed at as another one of Dudayev’s incoherent ravings. And, anyway, what kind of a war could a few thousand lightly armed Dudayev-loyal Chechens expect to wage against the mighty, thousands of times larger and better-equipped (as was thought at the time) Russian military machine?
The answer turned out to be a mind-bending war to make one’s hair stand on end, unequal as the two forces were.
It was about to begin.
GROZNY
It was evening on November 26, 1994, in the Azerbaijani capital, Baku, when the phone rang. It was the desk in Moscow.
“Grozny has fallen,” the editor told me. Battles had raged all day, the Moscow-backed Chechen opposition had taken the presidential palace, and Dzhokhar Dudayev had fled. At least that is what the Russian government information agency TASS was telling the world.
There was no independent confirmation, and cell phones did not exist at that time. So I phoned Eldar, our Azerbaijani driver. Together with Adil Bunyatov, the Azeri cameraman killed a year later filming an army mutiny in his homeland, we sped away from Baku, up the Caspian Sea coast toward Grozny, an eight-hour drive.
We arrived in the city well after dark, but it was clear something bad had indeed taken place, and we drove right into the middle of it. Flames spewed from broken overhead gas mains. There were no civilians silly enough to be on the streets—only men with weapons, some injured, delirious, or aggressive. We slowed at an intersection on the main avenue, heading toward the presidential palace. Two fighters forcefully stopped our car, ripped opened the rear door, and lifted in a wounded pro-Dudayev comrade, whose leg was bleeding profusely. They shouted, steering us toward a hospital, where w
e delivered the moaning man to the front door, his comrades dragging him inside.
A destroyed Soviet-vintage T-55 tank adorned the yard of the presidential palace, its turret blown off and lying upside down on a lawn. The palace windows were missing, but the lights inside were glowing.
I entered, not sure what to expect. On the first floor I found Aslan Maskhadov, Dudayev’s chief military commander, calmly giving a live televised update from an improvised studio. He was denying the reports that the “rebels” were in control: That was clear by his mere presence.
Clearly, the TASS report cited by my Moscow editors was wrong, and no doubt willfully so. Next I ascended the stairs to find Movladi Udugov, Dudayev’s information minister (sometimes dubbed the Chechen Goebbels), gun in holster, casually stepping over smashed glass, and followed him into his office. “TASS says that the city has fallen to the opposition,” I told him.
“What are you, some sort of idiot?” Udugov barked. “Does it look like to you that the opposition is in control?”
He then offered to let me call my desk in Moscow on the single phone line that still functioned.
“Where the hell are you?” shrieked desk man David Lundgren upon hearing my voice.
“Grozny, inside the presidential palace,” I replied.
“But that’s impossible!” he shouted. “TASS just ran a bulletin saying the presidential palace is on fire and the city has fallen to the opposition.”
“I’m telling you I’m standing inside the information minister’s office as we speak,” I said. “Nothing is on fire. There aren’t any opposition guys around.”
The information minister, Udugov, then grabbed the phone and spat out random figures, telling Lundgren that one hundred opposition fighters had been killed and two hundred captured during the day’s fighting. (Just minutes later, he rehashed those numbers, telling me that two hundred had been killed and one hundred injured. Udugov, a rabble-rousing opportunistic propagandist with a known penchant for beer and bacchanalia, despite a later “conversion” to strict Islamist piety, was never much for exact numbers.) He finished with an admonition: “CANCEL YOUR SUBSCRIPTION TO TASS!” he shouted to the desk man in Moscow, slamming down the phone.
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