Be that as it may, the Defence Committee’s plan to create hotspots of resistance in the major towns – Urus-Martan on the western front, Gudermes and Argun on the eastern front, and Grozny on the northern front – failed. Instead of several large hubs of resistance, with constant harassment by mobile units at the enemy’s rear, we ended up with only one. This failure was caused by two major developments. Firstly, in November 1999 a large, well-armed resistance group abandoned Urus-Martan when the threat of encirclement forced them to retreat to the mountains. Secondly, at the end of November 1999 the Yamadayev brothers[39] surrendered Gudermes to the Russians without a fight. To be fair, it should be noted that the majority of the town’s inhabitants had insisted on Gudermes being surrendered. On the other hand, you cannot defend your homeland from an aggressor without exposing the civilian population to harm. Ferocious fighting continued in many villages, especially in the foothills and mountains. By 2 December 1999 the Russian Army had fully encircled the Chechen capital.
4
The Russian soldiers in this new war were a different breed. The officer corps was more experienced; they had benefitted from the lessons learnt from their mistakes in 1994–6. In the first war the Russian soldiers and officers had retained a certain spirit of romance, a respect for the right of the Chechens to be masters of their own destiny. After all, both sides had emerged from the same school of patriotic rhetoric, believing the Soviet Army to be the ‘defender of peace and friend of liberty’. At that time the principles of democracy weren’t just an empty phrase. This time round, though, the Russians made no secret of their determination to wreak vengeance at any price. Neo-totalitarianism, which began in 1993, when Boris Yeltsin ordered the attack on the Russian parliament building,[40] had established a strong enough footing in Russia by the end of 1999 to parade nakedly, unashamed before everyone, even God Himself. The three interwar years had been spent kindling the soldiers’ and officers’ animosity towards the Chechen people, desensitizing and brutalizing them. All manner of methods were utilized for this, ranging from the falsification of history, whereby the Chechens were presented as savages who would only respect violence (an old trick used over the centuries by the Russian tsars in the Caucasian wars), to the video screenings of the executions of captured contract soldiers and Russian secret agents (the Chechens hadn’t executed conscripts in the first war) carried out by fighters bereaved of their loved ones. And, of course, there were the public executions of criminals who had been sentenced by a court, which so shocked the world. The Russian butchers could shoot innocent Chechens without trial by the thousands in their torture chambers scattered across Russia; they could wipe out tens of thousands with precision bombing and in their ‘cleansing operations’ in Chechnya itself; none of that, of course, shocked the world. All that was merely ‘human-rights violations’.
Here is a wonderful example of soldier training techniques. In February 2004, long after the declared end of the ‘military phase of the counter-terrorist operation’ and the start of the rebuilding of post-war life in the republic, the pro-Kremlin newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda ran an article on the instruction of new contract soldiers in the Russian Army’s 42nd Division, stationed in Chechnya. ‘The colonel explained to the contract soldiers in simple and accessible language that a long time ago the Chechens had descended from the mountains, and they’d adopted the custom of blood revenge from the Kumyks.’ The article also reported how the colonel emphasized that ‘the Chechens only respect power and violence’, and they live ‘on land that since time immemorial had been Russian’! The journalist penned this piece without a hint of reproach; quite the reverse, this was meant to be a worthy example of soldier education. It was plain that with training like this, the soldiers’ incentive to fight would rocket and they would consider all Chechens the enemy. Hatred, after all, is one of the strongest of human emotions.
So the new war followed new rules. But it was in Grozny that the Russians met their match. The vast majority of the defenders of the capital were veterans of the previous war and masters at urban combat. All the famous Chechen field commanders had remained in Grozny with their units.
5
And so there began a long, mutually exhausting siege, with frequent assaults against certain sectors, which the defenders would nevertheless repel fairly successfully. In the protracted battles of modern siege warfare, what counts is not which side has greater amounts of troops and equipment but which side has fighters who are stronger in spirit. It takes great strength to endure the nervous exhaustion of a stand-off. The chief preparations were tactical and psychological. Every fighter who chose to stay in the city knew what he was signing up to and went into it with his eyes open.
The defence of Grozny was planned in the finest traditions of military science and with an expectation of sustained fighting under siege. The command had neither the time nor the machinery to build fortifications. Instead, they swiftly turned the natural terrain and the city’s buildings into a line of defence. The initial jagged line was designed to gradually draw the attackers into the city, engage them in urban combat, then massacre them. Indeed, this tactic met with some success in the south-east, north and north-western outskirts of the city. It was in those areas that the enemy suffered their heaviest losses. But the Chechens never managed to provoke the Russians into a full-scale storming of the city. Either the enemy saw through our scheme or they learnt about our plans through their undercover agents, but around January 2000 the offensive suddenly slackened. Instead, equipped with an admirably accurate map of Grozny that broke the city down into grid squares, the Russian artillery and tank crews found it easy enough to pound the city relentlessly, one square at a time, from under cover. And the air force, enjoying total impunity, carpet bombed entire neighbourhoods into rubble, wantonly destroying the roads with bunker-busters, despite the fact that the militiamen weren’t using them, as they had no armoured vehicles. Yet, despite all the attempts to break their spirit of resistance, Grozny’s defenders, the finest of warriors, who had willingly united to do mortal combat with their age-old enemy, continued to hold the capital.
After capturing some of the commanding heights around the city, the enemy stepped up their bombardment. They fired on virtually every street and alley, especially in the south, south-west and south-east districts. They deployed chemical weapons, in particular hydrogen cyanide, whose bitter-almond smell is unmistakeable. The Russians had plenty of undercover agents among the defenders of Grozny, who provided them with information on the situation in the city. And yet they could not close down the channels through which the militiamen were getting their food and ammunition. And the militiamen were even acquiring weapons and ammunition from the Russian side: from Russian Army officers; from the Russians’ loyal allies, the Chechen special forces; and from the OMON paramilitaries. Only one hospital was functioning in the city, and its staff were performing daily acts of heroism, saving the lives of wounded fighters and of the few civilians whose misfortune it was to remain in the city. In brutal conditions, under the constant shelling and aerial bombardment, doctors performed the most complex neurosurgical operations; there were many whom they effectively brought back from the dead. The presence of these health professionals in the besieged city, heroes every one of them, from the nursing assistants to the Minister of Health, who had remained in the capital with his doctors, saved a great many lives.
39
The three Yamadayev brothers – Sulim, Ruslan, a former deputy in the State Duma of Russia, and Dzhabrail, all decorated Heroes of the Russian Federation – were former field commanders who in 1999 went over to the Russian side.
40
On 4 October 1993 Russian troops, with tanks and special forces, stormed the Russian parliament building. The Speaker of the Russian Supreme Soviet, Ruslan Khasbulatov, and the Vice President, Aleksandr Rutskoy, were arrested and later pardoned by Boris Yeltsin.