And so it was that autumn. The autumn of 1999 was remarkably beautiful, warm and fertile. The colours were exuberant; Chechnya’s lakes were blue, her rivers clear, the sky was deep. And the cranes, those sad angels of the earth, when they left their homeland, did not fly in their usual clean, confident ‘V’ formation. That autumn they circled and circled the sky, honking plaintively, and only then did they spread out into a long ‘V’ as they left for the south. It was as if they were bidding farewell to the people who would not be there to meet them in the spring with excited cheers or quiet prayers of thanks. As though they were giving those people a last chance to hear their sad song. Their wailing lament. They knew. They could sense it. They are angels of the earth, after all. Calamity was closing in on Chechnya. A brutal calamity, terrifying in its barbarism. A huge dragon with many heads had departed from the snowy northern steppes for our warm, fertile land. It was heading south again, with its glittering scales of steel. And the whole world, which declared its highest values to be human life and liberty, was to watch the latest murder of a small nation and secretly rejoice. Rejoice that the dragon thirsting for human blood had gone to a small nation somewhere down south, and not to them. If the dragon had to be fed, then why not sacrifice the weakest – the people with nothing to lose but life itself. So the first victims appeared. The first brooklets of blood, which would soon turn into furious torrents.
That’s why the cranes are circling. Many of those now alive are seeing them for the last time. The whirling of the cranes is a gift to them, to the doomed, before their meeting with destiny. A reminder to them that they aren’t leaving because they are superfluous: they are the chosen ones. Their chosenness will bring them hell on earth and martyrdom, and through their suffering they’ll purify all of their nation’s generations of sin. To them befalls the cruel honour of burning in the flame of forgiveness. Farewell chosen ones. Goodbye motherland. And that is why autumn is raging. It will not be allowed to fade away quietly to the gentle whisper of the dying leaves and the sad song of the cranes. For this autumn is to be crucified and shot dead. And the snowy winter blizzards will grieve for the autumn with their horrible howl.
2
On 29 September 1999, Russian forces – up to 80,000 according to the official Russian Ministry of Defence records, although independent sources, which have traditionally been more trustworthy, claim it was 150,000, meaning two armies – crossed into Chechnya on three axes. In fact the first Russian troops crossed the Chechen border on 19 September, but the full-scale invasion began on 29 September. Just as they’d done five years earlier, the army entered the republic from Dagestan, Ossetia and the Stavropol territory. The Russian Empire, spread over an eighth of the earth, flung its entire military and economic might at tiny Chechnya, whose entire population barely amounted to the population of the average Russian city.
This time Chechnya was significantly weaker than in 1994. Bled dry by the previous war, which had claimed the lives of at least 10 per cent of the population; sapped by the devastation and the economic blockade that had followed the war; crippled by domestic turmoil; lacking a regular army – this time the Defence Ministry existed merely on paper, and the entire standing army did not even make up a regiment – Chechnya for the second time in just five years met in mortal combat with the Russian ogre. The Chechen field commanders were, with a few noble exceptions, drunk on victory, and they forgot they were dealing with Russia, for whom peace had been merely a preparation for war. Indeed a significant portion of these ‘war-hero commanders’ had emerged only after the first war ended. The Chechen people, who’d suffered such heavy losses, suddenly discovered a suspiciously large number of unknown heroes and generals, many of whom had their sights set on nothing less than stardom. Meanwhile the true hero of the conflict, the Chechen people, who had won that gruesome battle through the blood and lives of their finest children, found themselves in severe economic, political and legal crisis.
It may be fashionable to blame all of Chechnya’s woes on Russia, but what was to be expected from an enemy state, and one that had suffered so humiliating a defeat? Russia saw Chechnya as a hostile territory, with all that entailed. And so Russia’s intelligence agencies operated to further the interests of the state. But could her army and intelligence services have achieved even this hollow success if it weren’t for the many people in Chechnya willing to sell themselves, to be traitors, willing to be faithful servants of the enemy in exchange for a chimerical profit, willing to perpetrate the most barbaric crimes against innocent people and to mire their political opponents, yesterday’s brothers-in-arms, in slander? It was they, these ‘new generals’, the ‘politicians-cum-warriors’, along with the Mammon worshippers desperate to prove themselves and ambitious for power at any price, who wittingly or unwittingly became Russia’s most faithful allies, actively assisting her secret services. When they slung mud at their former comrades in the election campaign, they were trashing the ideals for which the people had laid down their lives in the war. The very fact that these field commanders were fighting for the presidential throne spoke of their ambition for personal gain, rather than for unity, when faced with a far more severe and complex challenge than the war itself had been: how to rebuild the country’s shattered economy and infrastructure. Instead of shedding sweat and tears, our new ‘brigadier generals’ were busy revelling in victory and flaunting their pact with Russia at every opportunity. The Chechens’ naïve belief that Russia would stick to the peace treaty served them poorly. For as Chechnya grappled with profound economic and political crisis and struggled for survival, Russia was preparing for war.
And the preparations were wide-ranging. First they carried out – very skilfully, too – an information blockade of Chechnya. After this they rolled out a sweeping programme to destabilize the country and stoke volatility in Chechnya. To this end they deployed their network of agents that had infiltrated all levels of Chechen society; they also mobilized their propaganda resources to create a negative image of Chechens in the eyes of the world. Fully aware that they’d lost the last war not because of any military weakness, but because they’d failed to shore up support for their operations at home and abroad, the Russian government concentrated their efforts on accomplishing this task. And as subsequent events clearly showed, they achieved a resounding success.
When the first war ended, the pro-Moscow opposition grew particularly active. A large number of undercover agents, left in Chechnya when the Russians withdrew and supplied with communications equipment, were regularly providing the Russian secret services with reliable intelligence on the situation in the republic. They acted with such confidence – or perhaps it was incompetence – that they were more or less openly recruiting among the unemployed Chechen youth and sending them to training camps near Moscow and Volgograd, where they created special-forces units made up entirely of Chechens. Over the last hundred years there has probably been no country in the world where enemy intelligence agencies have felt so free and confident as the Russians did in Chechnya at the time. For example, in a hundred-strong Chechen militia unit based in the town of Urus-Martan at the start of the second war, fifteen secret agents working for the Russian special services were uncovered! They were Russian Christians, most of whom had recently converted to Islam, claiming to be attracted by the idea of a ‘pure’ Islam. That is, before infiltrating the unit they had ‘embraced Islam’, which further illustrates how seriously the Russian secret services took their preparations. They were discovered by chance: one of them lost his nerve and confessed. And not only did he confess, but he also turned in the others. It is not normal practice for the secret services to use planted agents who know each other, but it seems this was a case of a special-forces unit (which usually operate as groups of thirteen to fifteen men) that went under cover for a specific goal – sabotage, say. This interpretation is supported by the fact that all of the agents had the same commander. Yet how many such agents went undiscovered? And there was no one to fight this rising tide of spies. Chechnya did, of course, have her own secret services. Indeed she had far too many for such a small country. But they were all busy fighting for influence over the President and for their own survival. And as part of their struggle for survival, they were fighting for control of the oil, the only source of real revenue.