‘I’m not really fussed who’s president, so long as it’s someone chosen by the people, like Dzhokhar was. I don’t care what agreement he signs with Russia. Ultimately I’m fighting because I don’t want the Russians, or some soldiers or bureaucrats, to lord it over us on this God-given land of ours. We didn’t come sword in hand to their country, they came to us, and not for the first time in history. Russia’s been laying waste to our nation ever since the Russians first stepped foot in the Caucasus. And as a human being I have a right and as a man I have a duty to protect my people as best I can. I have a right to do everything in my power to see that this campaign will be Russia’s last.’
‘Do you think Chechnya has enough military might to punish Russia?’
‘It’s not about punishing Russia. And it would be ridiculous to compare Russia’s military might with ours. It’s about the fact that for every yard of earth they’ll pay an extortionate price; it’s about the fact that at this point in history the blood of the Chechens will cost the imperialists dear. The Russian leadership has got to understand once and for all that they’re better off being our allies than our enemies. And that’s exactly what our president Dzhokhar was offering Russia, but Yeltsin’s brains are permanently fuzzy with drink, and the majority of the Russian politicians are traitors to Russia. The Russian people, who are feeding, clothing and honouring an army that’s destroying our nation, they’ve got to understand: it’s not the generals’ sons who will die in this war, it is their sons. And when that happens, the people can stop this war, which brings nothing but sorrow to us ordinary folk, and all for the sake of some ambitious pack of traitors to Russia.’
‘Do you believe the Russian Army will leave our land?’
‘Why would we be fighting if we didn’t believe it? The ones who don’t believe it are busy serving the Russians.’
And this was how the vast majority saw it. During our stay in the area, enemy troops tried several times to storm Bamut, Yandi and Stary Achkhoy, but on each occasion they retreated with heavy losses. I managed to befriend many special-forces fighters, and over the course of the First and Second Chechen Wars, I lost nearly all of them.
In early May 1995, fighting flared up on the Shatoy and Vedensky axes, and the special-forces fighters were redeployed to the area near Shatoy. I arrived there two days before them. Along this axis the special forces were sustaining their heftiest losses, although the Russians too lost a good many men, at times entire units. And they were dumping large numbers of their own soldiers’ corpses from helicopters into remote gorges to cover up the number of fatalities. That area near Shatoy was where Hamzat Gelayev would again be severely wounded. But that came later. Whereas now… Now my journalistic dream came true.
12
With the help of Gelayev’s personal patronage, I managed to join a group leaving to buy arms and ammunition. Most of the party knew neither the route we were taking nor our final destination. We were a small group, with just enough manpower to defend the cargo, two UAZ jeeps and an all-terrain Ural motorcycle with a sidecar. Heading the group was a colourful old character, armed with a short assault rifle, a pistol and a long sabre, who was nicknamed ‘Daddy’. We set out in the evening. We passed the site where the fighters were digging their positions straight across from the federal forces, then we drove deep into the forest. In the dead of night we arrived at a village in the opposition-held Urus-Martan district. We stopped for the night with friends, planning on an early start in the morning. The next day we had our meeting with Russian Army officers on neutral ground, mediated by supporters of the Provisional Council. Due to the endless monetary reforms brought in by the Russian government, I no longer recall how much money changed hands, but I remember the transaction went smoothly. Both sides were pleased with the deaclass="underline" ‘Daddy’ purchased a large consignment of arms and ammunition at a good price, and the officers successfully offloaded their ‘wares’, mumbling in an attempt to ease their consciences, ‘Of course, we realize you’ve got to defend yourselves too. We didn’t want this war. It’s an unjust war which Yeltsin unleashed to distract people from the crimes of his own team. You Chechens are good guys! And you’re not just defending your own freedom; you’re defending ours, too.’
One of the fighters, who’d already taken part in these operations a few times, commented that the officers weren’t usually so talkative. ‘They must have decided you didn’t look like a militiaman and gave that speech for your benefit.’ ‘Daddy’ stayed on with some of the other fighters to buy another consignment of weapons. Meanwhile, we left in two vehicles, weighed down with arms and ammunition. Our return to Shatoy was uneventful, not counting the close call with enemy artillery, who fired rounds at our convoy. A few days later, I was summoned for a chat with one of the leaders of the resistance. They offered me a role in the counter psy-ops team they were putting together. I agreed without a second thought – acquiring this kind of experience was a dream come true for my career but I asked the team’s leader why it had taken us Chechens so long to think of it.
‘Up till now we’ve been running quite a successful psychological operation against the Russians. But there’s been no centralized control over the programme, like we have, say, in the information war run by Movladi Udugov.[24] So we decided to create a team to plan and coordinate the psychological warfare effort.’
As the leader of the team was a man of keen intellect (he was an academic) and dedicated to his nation, I accepted the offer and began work. But a few days later our campaign headquarters was bombed. All the files were burnt in the fire, and we did not get a chance to start afresh.
13
Life is easier for fatalists – because fatalists find it easier to die. And how else could you die ‘with a smile on your lips’, as General Grachev described the Russian soldiers dying in the meat-grinder of Grozny? If you are not a fatalist, then you’ll arrogantly assume that you are master of certain things in your life – of your fate, for example. You’ll assume that man shapes his own destiny, and so on, in the finest traditions of atheist ideology. But if you are a fatalist, then you know that whatever happens to you has been ordained by God, and the only choice open to you is which path – the righteous or the sinful – to take on your journey towards destiny. If you are a fatalist, war too will be easier.
You were sitting over a cup of tea with your wounded comrade, a cheery special-forces fighter. You noticed that today he is unusually sad and pensive; you joke with him about this, but, realizing that the joke has not elicited the usual chirpy response, you fall silent. He answers your puzzled question with a wave of the hand and indescribable grief in his eyes: ‘You know what? I’m tired. I can’t make sense of it all.’ There are planes in the sky, but you pay no attention to their tiresome whine; you’ve grown used to their continual presence, and you start fretting whenever they fail to appear at their usual time. Planes are a confirmation of life for you, like mosquitoes are a confirmation of summer. And as for the fact that they bomb you – well, that’s life, you may not like it, but you’re not bitter about it. Mosquitoes bite, after all, but you still love the summer. What’s more, over the past few months you’ve become a professional. You’re now an expert person-under-bombardment, and you know exactly when and where each particular plane will drop its bomb or fire its missile. So rather than panic, you continue to gaze at your comrade in surprise, and with an inexplicable ache in your soul. He draws your attention to the planes; you nod absent-mindedly, as though he were telling you about the good weather. Your wounded comrade again says, ‘They’re close,’ you dismiss him with a wave of your hand, someone shouts, ‘Drop!’ and at that instant you hear the blast of a missile, but you leap up, rushing towards him and… The silence is deathly, almost perfect, only somewhere far away there is the faint roar of water. No, you haven’t lost consciousness, you can see everything fine… well, no, you cannot see. But you can see that you cannot see in the dense billows of smoke and dust… You fumble about on the bed where your wounded comrade had been sitting. He’s not there. You call out. He does not answer. Or maybe he’s answered but you cannot hear. After taking some paces towards the door, you see the wall collapse, and something burns your outstretched hands. You find a window and jump through it into the street. For some reason a special-forces fighter is standing there moving his lips but no words come out. You ask, ‘Can you hear me?’ He nods. You shout, ‘I can’t hear you!’ repeating this over and over, wanting to satisfy yourself that he can hear, while you can’t. He makes some gestures, but you don’t understand, and you stand there bewildered in the middle of the street. He grabs you, presses you to a tree, pressing himself against you, covering you with his body, and almost instantly you see a missile explode right where you were just standing; you note this fact as unexciting but significant. The special-forces guy who saved you is pointing to your chest and your head, moving his lips. You look. Blood is pouring from somewhere near your ear, and the binoculars round your neck have been smashed to bits, with one eyepiece dangling from the strap. For some reason those smashed binoculars, a gift from a comrade who died a week earlier in hand-to-hand combat while trying to break out of an encirclement, bother you more than the blood issuing from your head. Well, you’ve already understood it’s nothing much. People collapse from serious wounds, but you’re still standing, it’s just you can’t hear anything. When will that water ever stop gushing! You’re grabbed by the arm and dragged into the air-raid shelter. You try to break free, without really knowing why, but they won’t let you go, and catching sight of your wounded comrade, who is also being led there, you call out to him joyously.
24
Movladi Udugov was Dudayev’s Information Minister and Deputy Prime Minister under Yandarbiyev and Maskhadov. He set up the website Kavkaz Center.