Putin's Wars

by Marcel H. Van Herpen

  subject of the war,

  its ideological interpretation,

  its geopolitical meaning, and

  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.

  The First Chechen War: Yeltsin’s War

  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.

  Chechnya: Russia’s Whipping Boy

  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 Russi
ans 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.

  A Genocide?

  Thomas de Waal, an analyst who visited Grozny after the war, described the city in the following words:

  The destruction wrought on Grozny makes even the damage to a battle-scarred town like Sarajevo seem light. Wandering through the streets after its ruination during the first Chechen war in 1994–1996, it was hard to conceive how conventional weaponry had done so much harm. The centre of the city was reduced to rubble, with many of the inhabitants of these streets lying in mass graves. Ruins had been swept into tottering piles. Streets had become empty thoroughfares that ran between large areas of sky. If an occasional building had escaped the bombing, it was only a large windowless façade facing nowhere. It would have seemed more plausible to be told that the place had suffered a nuclear attack or some giant natural catastrophe.[30]

  Why this virulent, brutal overreaction by the Kremlin against a small mountain people? In a seminar organized by the Russian human rights organization Memorial that took place in Moscow in March 1995, shortly after the bombardment campaign on Grozny had started, one of the speakers, Nikolay Kandyba, already spoke of a genocide.[31] Another speaker, Mara Polyakova, attacked the criminal character of the war. She criticized the formulation of the presidential decree in which President Yeltsin had announced that the war would be conducted “with all the means that the government has at its disposal.”

  A President who acts according to the laws and the Constitution, should say: “with all lawful and constitutional means. . . .[32] He knows very well that not only are such means being used that are allowed by the law and the Constitution, but also those that are not allowed by them. The possibility of the use of such means against the population of one‘s own country is not allowed by any legal norms. Thereby, instead of repressing these acts, the President through [his declarations in] the mass media condones them and takes the responsibility for everything that happens there.[33]

  Another participant, Vil Kikot from Moscow State Law Academy, referred to the historical relations between Chechnya and Russia, “in the light of which Russia must seem to be a cruel enemy to Chechens.”[34] He asked for what reason it was impossible for Chechnya to secede from Russia, and he referred to the peaceful secession of Norway from Sweden in 1905.[35] He could also have referred to another, more recent, example, such as Slovakia’s secession from Czechoslovakia. In this case not only did the secession take place in a peaceful way, but also the relative size of the territory and the population was much more important. Chechnya, with its surface of 19,300 square kilometers, occupies a little bit more than 1 percent of the territory of the Russian Federation, and its population of about 1.2 million is even less than 1 percent of Russia’s total population. Inga Mikhaylovskaya of the Russian-American Project Group on Human Rights stated “that the treaty character of the Russian Federation was illusory, since there is no clear legislative statement on the presence or absence of the right of [the] federative subject to leave the federation.”[36]

  Sergey Kovalyov, a widely respected former dissident who was appointed by Yeltsin to chair the Presidential Human Rights Commission,[37] remarked that “a negotiated resolution of the crisis was also obstructed by the fact that the federal authorities did not take account of the historical role which Russia had played in the fate of the Chechen people.”[38] According to him, “the majority of Russians are not inclined to feel personal guilt [for what had earlier happened in Chechnya], and this, in my opinion, is a major obstacle on the path of our evolution toward a civilized civil society.”[39] It might be going too far, as did Kovalyov, to demand from the Russians to feel a personal guilt for what happened to the Chechens during the Stalinist era. One can only experience a personal guilt for one’s own deeds. The Russian population should, however, assume a collective, Russian responsibility for what has happened in the small Caucasian republic.[40] The reason why the Russian population was reluctant to assume a historical responsibility can be explained by two factors. The first reason would be its feeling of having been itself a victim of Stalin’s policies. The second reason would be its disenfranchised status: it never was a responsible subject of history, but rather a malleable object in the hands of authoritarian leaders. However, even taking these facts into consideration, the Russian citizens cannot deny that Stalin’s crimes were committed in their name.

  On the eve of the second Chechen War, on September 8, 1999, Putin said: “Russia is defending itself. We have been attacked. And therefore we must throw off all syndromes, including the guilt syndrome.”[41] The reason why the Russian leadership did not assume any guilt or historical responsibility is different. Their denial was clearly functional. It had to do with the fact that in pos
t-Soviet Russia Chechnya began to play an increasingly important role in Russia’s internal policy. The political elite acted upon the maxim that if Chechnya did not exist, it should have been invented. For Russian politicians Chechnya was the ideal Prügelknabe, the ideal whipping boy who could be used to consolidate their own grip on power. Sergey Kovalyov already clearly saw this role of the war in Chechnya.

  The real cause of the war in Chechnya is neither Grozny nor in the entire Caucasus region: it is in Moscow. The war pushed aside that corner of the curtain that obscured the real power struggle for control of Russia. Unfortunately, it is not liberal, but the most hard-line forces—those from the military-industrial complex and the former KGB—who are celebrating that victory in the power struggle now, . . . the true goal of the war in Chechnya was to send a clear-cut message to the entire Russian population: “The time for talking about democracy in Russia is up. It’s time to introduce some order in this country and we’ll do it whatever the cost.”[42]

  Kovalyov also pointed to the central role of the FSB—the KGB’s successor organization—in starting the First Chechen War. The FSB was not only in the forefront before the war, but equally during the war. “In the early months of the intervention, up to early February 1995,” wrote Vicken Cheterian, “it was the generals of the FSB—the intelligence services—who were obliged to lead the military operations, with catastrophic consequences.”[43] An invisible red line connects, therefore, the war in Afghanistan with the first war in Chechnya, that is, the leading role of the KGB/FSB in instigating and conducting both wars. We will see in the next chapter how the spooks of the Russian secret services equally played an important role in the preparation of the Second Chechen War, which started as Yeltsin’s war, but was, in fact, Putin’s war.