3
Deciding that the operation to overthrow Dudayev had now ended, I turned back and headed for the city centre. As I was passing the Presidential Palace, I saw the same tank crew sitting on their tank. Their commander was saying into his radio, ‘Four! Four! What’s the situation?’
Through the hiss and crackle, I could hear a voice replying: ‘We’ve got two of their tanks surrounded. We’re telling them to surrender. They won’t surrender.’
‘Are you out of ammunition?’
‘No, we’ve got ammunition. But we’re hoping to avoid bloodshed.’
‘Look, if they won’t surrender, then take out their tanks and complete the operation!’
I enquired about the situation in the city.
‘The enemy are retreating in all directions, we’ve taken lots of them prisoner. Luckily we’ve had far fewer losses than we might have expected,’ he told me.
This news was reassuring, and I headed home with the blissful nonchalance common to newcomers to war. Filled with exhilaration from my bloodless adventure, and secretly rather pleased with myself for my interview scoop, I was walking along the platform at the station whistling the tune of a popular song when a girl called out to me. She was peering out of the window of a three-storey building overlooking the platform.
‘Hey! Don’t go that way! There are tanks!’ she warned me.
‘Tanks? But they’re already leaving the city,’ I told her confidently – but I was wrong. I had barely taken a couple more steps when two tanks came speeding around the corner, and one of them fired a round. The shell landed twenty paces from me (I went back and measured the paces later), but I was strangely lucky: it didn’t explode, merely kicked up dust and chunks of tarmac. I don’t know whether the tank gunner had decided to be merciful with the first round or it was just sheer good luck, but the shell turned out to be a dud. Almost at the very moment the tank fired, a hail of small-arms fire broke out. From nowhere some men from the Department for State Security sprang up behind me and they opened fire at the tanks. The tanks in turn began pelting all around with their heavy-calibre machine guns. And in the middle of this mayhem, numb with fear, I stood rooted to the spot.
To say I was frightened would be a lie: I wasn’t just frightened, I was terrified out of my skin! I’d stumbled – for the first time in my life – straight into crossfire. Crushing fear paralysed me to the point where I could not move, let alone run. It felt as if everyone was aiming directly at me, and this was only made worse by the eerie whistling of bullets. All this was happening with unreal speed, but how strange is the human brain, nature’s finest computer, for my mind captured every detail with amazing precision. ‘Run over to us! If you don’t move fast, you’ll be killed!’ the Department for State Security soldiers shouted to me. And to my utter surprise, I suddenly became calm. I couldn’t understand why, but I had a wave of certainty: these tank gunners and soldiers were not going to kill me. It was as if I’d made telepathic contact with everybody firing and I’d understood no one would harm me. Of course in reality there was no telepathic contact. I’d simply found myself in a situation (as I realized later) where I was faced with the choice: conquer your fear and stay alive, or surrender to it and die. Rather than fleeing for dear life, as most people in my place would have done, I spun round and quickly climbed down the railway embankment, taking cover behind the three-storey building. I chose to stay put not from any desire to act bravely – that was the last thing on my mind. No, I’d simply remembered that if you run during combat you’ll be taken for a target. No sooner had I got behind the building than half the top floor was blown out by a round from the tank. Almost simultaneously a grenade launcher fired, knocking out the first tank, which was left to burn on the railway crossing, while the second tank made straight for the Department for State Security building. In an instant I transformed from frightened civilian to daredevil journalist. I climbed over the fence and ran down a parallel street in pursuit of the tank, although I could not explain to myself why I was chasing after it. I must have thought that was what I had to do, being a journalist and all…
It must have been the speed of the tank, which was too fast for me, that once again saved me from death. I’d run out into a square by the station where a market used to be held when I was stopped by the taut, drawn-out sound of an explosion. Instinctively dropping to the ground, I saw the massive gun turret of a tank rotating above me in slow motion. This turret gave me an incredible fright. It seemed as if it was about to fall straight on to my head. The daredevil journalist reverted to a terrified young man. Whirring shrapnel was sinking into the ground with heavy sighs, like weary travellers. Then deathly silence broke out. Some time elapsed before I heard voices and came out into the square. I was stunned by the scene that met me. The tank that a few minutes ago had failed to kill me had been transformed into something that defied imagination. The warhead from the RPG-7 had detonated the tank’s own ammunition supply, which in turn had ripped its way through the hull, twisting the tank inside out. That had been the long, drawn-out explosion. And the turret had been torn clean off – that’s what I had seen falling towards me. But it was not the mangled tank that threw me into a cold sweat – I’d already seen two that day. It was the sight of the corpses. Or rather of what remained of them. Seeing people who had died in war up close shook me so deeply that I lost all sense of reality. On a nearby tree hung naked human hips, unnaturally deformed, with pinkish-white bones jutting out of them. Around ten metres away lay a head that had been ripped off together with a piece of meat running down the spine, and from another tree innards were hanging. A bit further off lay an entire severed shoulder with lots of little chunks of flesh. The scene looked like a giant cannibal had decided to make lunch and had been chopping up plenty of meat. And the intolerable salty smell of blood fused with the smell of molten metal. Here was all that remained of people who’d been alive a few moments ago. I could not make sense of the nakedness of the corpses at the time; only later did I find out that the force of the blast completely strips people of clothing.
So all those Soviet war films had been nothing but lies. The hero had always died beautifully with a smile on his face and with time to bid farewell to his comrades. And the enemy had died ugly deaths, falling face down, arms and legs sprawled out like spiders. The soldiers here on both sides had been raised on the same films as I had. They too had believed in these beautiful wartime deaths. Some time later in the war, one such child of the school of Soviet patriotic cinema, a Chechen fighter, was wounded in combat. His injury was not life-threatening, but there was a lot of blood. Believing himself to be fatally wounded, the fighter decided to ‘die beautifully’! To this end, he assumed a pose befitting the occasion, bade us farewell, smiled and lay motionless, waiting to meet death with a smile on his lips, just like in the movies. His plans were dashed by the doctor who suggested he ‘get up and quieten yourself down, and save your pose for a more serious occasion.’ The war would later make cynical combat professionals out of all these men, but at that time there was more romance and adventure than hatred or malice.