Putin's Wars
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Notes
1. George F. Kennan, “Russia: Seven Years Later,” in Memoirs 1925–1950, ed. George F. Kennan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1967), 521.
2. Kennan, “Russia: Seven Years Later,” 521–522.
3. Mr. X (George F. Kennan), “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs 25, no. 4 (July 1947). This article was an elaboration of his “Long Telegram” of February 22, 1946, to the US Treasury Department. In this telegram he answered the question of the US Treasury to the US Embassy in Moscow why the Soviet Union did not support the recently founded World Bank and International Monetary Fund. In the telegram Kennan wrote that the Soviet Union was “impervious to the logic of reason,” but that it was “highly sensitive to the logic of force.”
4. Cf. Archie Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism (London: Vintage Books, 2010), 353.
5. Andreï Kozovoï, Les services secrets Russes: Des tsars à Poutine (Paris: Tallandier, 2010), 253.
6. J. Michael Waller, Secret Empire: The KGB in Russia Today (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994), 127.
7. Artyom Borovik, The Hidden War: A Russian Journalist’s Account of the Soviet War in Afghanistan (New York: Grove Press, 1990), 9.
8. Svetlana Savranskaya, ed., “The September 11th Sourcebooks, Volume II: Afghanistan: Lessons from the Last War: The Soviet Experience in Afghanistan: Russian Documents and Memoirs,” National Security Archive (October 9, 2001), 1. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB57/soviet.html.
9. “Personal Memorandum, Andropov to Brezhnev, n.d. [early December 1979],” Cold War International History Project Bulletin 8–9, (Winter 1996–97), 159–60. In this memorandum Andropov wrote that “alarming information started to arrive about Amin’s secret activities, forewarning of a possible political shift to the West.” Andropov said to have been “contacted by [a] group of Afghan communists abroad.” He mentioned the name of Babrak Karmal, “who had worked out a plan for opposing Amin and creating new party and state organs. But Amin, as a preventive measure, had begun mass arrests of ‘suspect persons’ (300 people have been shot).” His conclusion was that the situation was urgent. “We have two battalions stationed in Kabul,” wrote Andropov. “It appears that this is entirely sufficient for a successful operation.” He added that “it would be wise to have a military group close to the border. In case of the deployment of military forces we could at the same time decide various questions pertaining to the liquidation of gangs.” The implementation of the given operation “would allow us to decide the question of defending the gains of the April revolution.”
10. Savranskaya, ed., “The September 11th Source Books, Volume II,” 5.
11. Thierry Wolton, Le KGB au pouvoir: Le système Poutine (Paris: Gallimard, 2008), 24.
12. Alexander Lyakhovsky, The Tragedy and Valor of Afghan, translated by Svetlana Savranskaya (Moscow: GPI Iskon, 1995), 109–112. The author, Major General Lyakhovsky, served during the war in Afghanistan as assistant to General V. Varennikov, commander of the Operative Group of the Defense Ministry. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/.
13. Georgy M. Kornienko, The Cold War: Testimony of a Participant, translated by Svetlana Savranskaya (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnie otnosheniya, 1994), 193. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/.
14. Savranskaya, ed., “The September 11th Sourcebooks Volume II,” 2–3.
15. Cf. Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism, 389–390: “At the beginning of that month [July] a two-day Politburo meeting found Brezhnev and Kosygin still favouring intense pressure on Dubček—to remove the people in high office whom the Soviet leadership most objected to, and to crack down on the mass media—whereas several others already favoured the use of force. They included KGB chairman Yury Andropov and the Central Committee secretary (later to be minister of defense) who supervised the military and military industry, Dmitry Ustinov.”
16. Ion Mihai Pacepa, “No Peter the Great: Vladimir Putin is in the Andropov Mold,” National Review Online (September 20, 2004).
17. Cf. Vladimir Solovyov and Elena Klepikova, Inside the Kremlin (London: W.H. Allen & Co Plc., 1988), 246: “We know, then, where to assign responsibility for that occupation [of Afghanistan]. Although it took place in the last phase of the Brezhnev era, the authorship of that deed must be ascribed to the empire’s regent, Andropov (by that time all-powerful), his supporters, and others he could count on.”
18. Cf. Vladimir Fédorovski, Le Fantôme de Staline (Paris: Éditions du Rocher, 2007), 227. Before he died Andropov had informed his entourage that he wanted Gorbachev to succeed him as general secretary. The politburo, however, ignored Andropov’s wish and chose, after four days of deliberations, the seventy-three-year-old Chernenko. Andropov’s preference for Gorbachev, however, had nothing to do with Andropov’s supposed “liberal” or “democratic” leanings. Andropov wanted economic reforms (such as he had witnessed in Kadar’s Hungary), while maintaining a repressive political regime. Gorbachev would later remain rather evasive about his close relationship with the former KGB chief. In his conversations with the Czech dissident (and study friend) Zdenĕk Mlynář he called Andropov “a very interesting and complex personality. . . . Andropov definitely wanted to start making changes, . . . but there were certain bounds he could not go beyond; he was too deeply entrenched in his own past experience—it held him firmly in its grasp.” (Mikhail Gorbachev and Zdenĕk Mlynář, Conversations with Gorbachev on Perestroika, the Prague Spring, and the Crossroads of Socialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 50.)
19. Borovik, The Hidden War: A Russian Journalist’s Account of the Soviet War in Afghanistan, 14.
20. The related Chechens and Ingushes lived together in the Checheno-Ingush Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic. When the Ingush, who constituted a minority, did not want to follow the Chechens on the road toward independence, the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation founded, in June 1992, the Republic of Ingushetia.
21. John B. Dunlop quotes the testimony of one of the victims, a Chechen communist, as follows: “Packed in overcrowded cattle cars, without light or water, we spent almost a month heading to an unknown destination . . . . Typhus broke out. No treatment was available . . . . The dead were buried in snow.” According to Dunlop, “the local populace of settlements at which the special trains stopped were strictly forbidden to assist the dying by giving them water or medicine. In some cars, 50 percent of the imprisoned Chechens and Ingush were said to have perished.” (John B. Dunlop, Russia Confronts Chechnya: Roots of a Separatist Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 68.)
22. Eric D. Weitz, “Racial Politics without the Concept: Reevaluating Soviet Ethnic and National Purges,” Slavic Review 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002), 3.
23. Weitz, “Racial Politics Without the Concept,” 3.
24. Georgi Derluguian, “Introduction,” in Anna Politkovskaya, A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches of Chechnya (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 20.
25. Cf. Vicken Cheterian, War and Peace in the Caucasus: Russia’s Troubled Frontier (London: Hurst & Company, 2008), 258.
26. John B. Dunlop, “‘Storm in Moscow’: A Plan of the Yeltsin ‘Family’ to Destabilize Russia,” Project on Systemic Change and International Security in Russia and the New States of Eurasia, The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (October 8, 2004), 2.
27. Frederick C. Cuny, “Killing Chechnya,” New York Review of Books (April 6, 1995).
28. Maj. Gregory J. Celestan, “Wounded Bear: The Ongoing Russian Military Operation in Chechnya,” Foreign Military Studies Office Publications (August 1996). http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/documents/wounded/wounded.htm.
29. David Hoffman, “Yeltsin Says a 2nd Term Depends on Ending War; Chernomyrdin Named to Seek Chechnya Settlement,” The Washington Post (February 9, 1996).
30. Thomas de Waal, “Introduction,” in Anna Politkovskaya, A Dirty War, (London: The Harvill Press, 2007), xiii–xiv.
31. S. Kovalyov, “Neskolko replik po povodu chechenskogo konflikt
a,” in Pravovye aspekty Chechenskogo krizisa: Materialy seminara, eds. L. I. Bogoraz et al. (Moscow: Memorial, 1995), 82.
32. M. Polyakova, “Kriminalnye aspekty voennykh sobytiy v Chechne,” in Pravovye aspekty, eds. L. I. Bogoraz et al., 44.
33. Polyakova, “Kriminalnye aspekty voennykh sobytiy v Chechne,” 44–45.
34. Kovalyov, “Summary,” in Pravovye aspekty, eds. L. I. Bogoraz et al., 179.
35. Kovalyov, “Neskolko replik po povodu chechenskogo konflikta,” 83.
36. Kovalyov, “Summary,” in Pravovye aspekty, eds. L. I. Bogoraz et al., 176. Secession was not an option, neither in Imperial Russia nor in the Soviet Union. This fact was recognized by Yeltsin. “The Soviet empire,” he wrote, “spanning one-sixth of the earth’s surface, was built over the course of many years according, without the shadow of a doubt, to an ironclad plan. The internal contradictions were ignored. No one proposed a scenario that allowed the empire to abandon some of its territories or yield to the formation of new states. They didn’t even think of it.” (Boris Yeltsin, Midnight Diaries (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000), 53). The Chechen case was certainly not helped by the inappropriate comparison made by US President Bill Clinton during a press conference in Moscow in April 1996, when Clinton said: “I would remind you that we once had a civil war in our country, in which we lost on a per capita basis far more people than we lost in any of the wars of the twentieth century, over the proposition that Abraham Lincoln gave his life for, that no state had a right to withdrawal from our Union.” (Quoted in Thomas de Waal, “The Chechen Conflict and the Outside World,” Crimes of War Project (April 18, 2003).) http://www.crimesofwar.org/chechnya-mag/chech-waal.html.
37. Sergey Kovalyov stands out as a unique personality in post-Soviet politics. Born in 1930, he studied biology, was arrested as a dissident in 1974, and was sent for seven years to a labor camp in the Perm region. This was followed by an exile of three years. In 1990 he was elected to the Supreme Soviet (Parliament) of the Soviet Union, and from 1993 he was a member of the State Duma. As a founder and cochairman of the human rights organization Memorial he was appointed in 1994 by Yeltsin to become chairman of the Presidential Human Rights Commission. He resigned in 1996 because of the war in Chechnya.
38. Kovalyov, “Summary,” in Pravovye aspekty, eds. L. I. Bogoraz et al., 180.
39. Kovalyov, “Neskolko replik po povodu chechenskogo konflikta,” 78.
40. Interesting in this context are Elazar Barkan’s remarks on the important role apologies play in improving the relations between nations. Barkan wrote that “the new international emphasis on morality has been characterized not only by accusing other countries of human rights abuses but also by self-examination. The leaders of the policies of a new internationalism—Clinton, Blair, Chirac, and Schröder—all have previously apologized and repented for gross historical crimes in their own countries and for policies that ignored human rights. These actions did not wipe the slate clean, nor . . . were they a total novelty or unprecedented. Yet the dramatic shift produced a new scale: Moral issues came to dominate public attention and political issues and displayed the willingness of nations to embrace their own guilt. This national self-reflexivity is the new guilt of nations.” (Elazar Barkan, The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustice (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), xvii.) Although I would prefer to speak of “responsibility of nations” instead of “guilt of nations” (the latter term is too “psychological” and comes too close to collective guilt), I agree with Barkan when he writes that the “interaction between perpetrator and victim is a new form of political negotiation that enables the rewriting of memory and historical identity in ways that both can share” (viii).
41. Quoted in Yeltsin, Midnight Diaries, 335. Yeltsin added: “But the guilt syndrome persists. There is a great deal of misunderstanding about Chechnya, even in Russia itself. But more often it’s the West trying to instill this feeling of guilt in us” (ibid.). Yeltsin, tellingly, referred to a guilt syndrome, qualifying guilt feelings as some kind of a psychological disorder. Yeltsin apparently rejected any guilt and considered attempts at putting the crimes committed against the Chechen population on the agenda a deliberate policy of the West to weaken Russia.
42. Quoted in Emma Gilligan, Defending Human Rights in Russia: Sergei Kovalyov, Dissident and Human Rights Commissioner 1969–2003 (Abingdon: Routledge Curzon, 2004), 203.
43. Cheterian, War and Peace in the Caucasus: Russia’s Troubled Frontier, 259.
Chapter 11
The Mysterious Apartment Bombings
Detonator of the Second Chechen War
The Second Chechen War was “Putin’s War.” This fact was immediately recognized by Sergey Kovalyov, who chose it as the title of an article for the New York Review of Books in February 2000.[1] Putin’s war would surpass the First Chechen War in cruelty, lawlessness, cynicism, and murderous violence. It would, additionally, become the longest war that was fought in Europe after the Second World War. There were, however, five important differences with the First Chechen War.
Unlike the First Chechen War, the Second Chechen War consisted of two phases, the first of which was the detonator of the second. The first phase was a secret war against the Russian population; the second phase was an open war against the Chechen population. The first phase consisted of an incursion of Chechen rebels into Dagestan in Russia proper and a series of apartment bombings in the Russian Federation of which Chechen militias were accused. However, soon allegations hinted at a possible implication of the FSB, the Russian secret service.
The war was given another ideological justification. The First Chechen War was still presented as a war against Chechen “separatists” or “bandits.” The Second Chechen War was presented as a war against “international Islamist terrorism.”
In the First Chechen War the Russian soldiers were almost exclusively conscripts. In the Second Chechen War, alongside conscripts, contract soldiers (kontraktniki) also were engaged. This could explain the increased ferocity of the violence against the civilian population.
The First Chechen War was, on the Russian side, fought mainly by ethnic Russian soldiers. In the Second Chechen War, however, the Kremlin, after some time, went over to a Chechenization of the conflict, in which Chechens fought Chechens. This policy of divide and rule not only secured Russia a “victory”—albeit provisional and still fragile—but it was an additional factor that contributed to the growth in violence against the civilian population.
When the First Chechen War started, Russia was not a member of the Council of Europe. It became a member only on February 28, 1996—one month before Yeltsin presented his peace plan that ended the First Chechen War. During the Second Chechen War, however, Russia was a fully fledged member of the Council and there was a flagrant contradiction between the humanitarian obligations required by the membership of this organization and the situation on the ground in Chechnya.
The Detonator: A Secret War against
the Russian Population?
The official reason, given in September 1999 by the Russian government, which, at that time, was headed by prime minister Vladimir Putin, for starting the second war in Chechnya was a series of events. These events started with an incursion by the radical Chechen leader Shamil Basayev with two thousand armed men into the neighboring republic of Dagestan on August 8, 1999. This attack was followed by a series of terrorist explosions in apartment buildings in Buikansk, Moscow, and Volgodonsk in September. These explosions were immediately ascribed to Chechen terrorists. There remain, however, many unanswered questions concerning the Chechen incursion into Dagestan, as well as the apartment explosions, that cast doubt on the official version. From different sides, the Russian authorities have been accused of presenting an official version of the events that was, in effect, a smokescreen behind which another, darker and murkier reality was hidden. The Second Chechen War was presented by the Russian authorities as a spontaneous Russian r
esponse to an unexpected Chechen attack. However, the facts do not completely fit this narrative. Different authors suggest that, as in the case of the First Chechen War, the military attack was carefully planned within the Kremlin walls—only this time better.