Once settled in the Kremlin, Andropov surrounded himself with KGB officers, who immediately went on a propaganda offensive to introduce him to the West as a “moderate” Communist and a sensitive, warm, Western-oriented man who allegedly enjoyed an occasional drink of Scotch, liked to read English novels, and loved listening to American jazz and the music of Beethoven. In actual fact, Andropov did not drink, as he was already terminally ill from a kidney disorder, and the rest of the portrayal was equally false.[16]
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]
THE FIRST CHECHEN WAR: FOUR DIFFERENCES WITH FORMER WARS
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.
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]
16
Ion Mihai Pacepa, “No Peter the Great: Vladimir Putin is in the Andropov Mold,”
17
Cf. Vladimir Solovyov and Elena Klepikova,
18
Cf. Vladimir Fédorovski,
19
Borovik,
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,
22
Eric D. Weitz, “Racial Politics without the Concept: Reevaluating Soviet Ethnic and National Purges,”