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 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.
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]
24
Georgi Derluguian, “Introduction,” in Anna Politkovskaya,
25
Cf. Vicken Cheterian,
26
John B. Dunlop, “‘Storm in Moscow’: A Plan of the Yeltsin ‘Family’ to Destabilize Russia,”
28
Maj. Gregory J. Celestan, “Wounded Bear: The Ongoing Russian Military Operation in Chechnya,”
29
David Hoffman, “Yeltsin Says a 2nd Term Depends on Ending War; Chernomyrdin Named to Seek Chechnya Settlement,”
30
Thomas de Waal, “Introduction,” in Anna Politkovskaya,