EL PLINTO DE PIEDRA

The movement of Russian troops to the Chechen border during the Ingush-Ossete clashes was the only armed attempt by Moscow to put pressure on Dudayev between November 1991 and July 1994. Apart from occasional verbal salvoes, the Russian government contented itself with imposing an extremely ineffective trade blockade and cutting off central sub-sidies to Chechnya. The 'blockade' also received no help from the police of neighbouring Ingushetia and Daghestan.25

The financial cut-off was eventually much more effective. Up to June 1993, in an effort to woo Dudayev's regime back into the fold, and to help local Rus-sians (or rather to keep them from leaving Chechnya and consolidating still further the separatist position), the Russian state was still transferring some money for the payment of pensions - 2.5 billion roubles in all, though how much of this was ever seen by the pensioners in question is of course another matter. Professor Valery Tishkov, a leading Russian anthropologist and former advisor to the Yeltsin administration on nationality affairs, claims that 4 billion roubles in different state payments was transferred in 1992 alone. However, this still represented a great reduction on more normal times, and added to the chaos and corruption of Chechen officialdom, it meant that the Dudayev administration was soon unable to pay many salaries - to an even greater degree than was true in Russia in the same period.

By mid-1993, this had led to widespread disillusionment with Dudayev and growing support for the Chechen opposition. Chechen entrepreneurship, trade in untaxed goods, the financial power of Chechen businessmen (often organised criminal bosses) across much of Russia, coupled with Chechen family and clan solidarity, meant however that the Chechen population did not suffer as much as might have been expected. One bank fraud by Chechen criminals in Moscow in 1992 reportedly netted a staggering 700 million dollars, much of which was sent back to Chechnya. In general, Grozny's emergence as a centre of smuggling, money-laundering and fraud gained the Chechens many allies, as well as enemies, throughout the world of Russian business.26

Whether for corrupt reasons or as part of a quid pro quo in return for the maintenance of the oil pipeline from Baku, throughout this period the Russian authorities allowed Chechnya to go on importing Russian oil for processing at Chechen plants and re-exporting the refined product. Yegor Gaidar, Russian Prime Minister in 1992, gave the following excuse to a Duma investigative committee four years later:

The Grozny oil refinery is the largest oil-refining enterprise in Russia, and used to supply a considerable part of the North Caucasus, Stavropol Kray, Krasnodar Kray, etc. In this regard, turning off the petroleum faucet all at once meant, at least, leaving them without fuel

for sowing operations, and that would have punished not only Chech-nya, but also Russia.

In all, between 1991 and 1994 Chechnya exported some 20 million tonnes of oil to international markets. Given the corruption of the Russian bureaucracy and border guards, there can be little doubt that Chechens in fact exported very much more than this total (just as on the borders of the Baltic States in this period, Russian attempts to control the flow of oil and metals failed almost completely, allowing Estonia - which does not itself produce an ounce of metal - to become for a couple of years one of the biggest exporters of non-ferrous metals in the world).27

At least 300 million dollars in profits from oil went to the Chechen govern-ment in this period, but never showed up in the state budget (some Russian estimates put the figure as high as 1 billion dollars).²⁸ The question of whether General Dudayev himself was personally corrupt and criminal is in a sense irrel-evant. Those with a knowledge of his character suggest that this was not the case, and that many of these dollars were in fact going to buy arms for national defence. However, Dudayev certainly recruited large numbers of criminals into his national guard and tolerated their activities. He did little or nothing to prevent the siphoning off of Azeri oil from the pipeline running across Chechen territory into Russia, and repeated looting of Russian trains passing through Chechnya - though on the other hand, given the nature of Chechen society and the collapse of the old Soviet state institutions in Chechnya, it is very doubtful that he could have done anything about this even if he had wanted to.29

Meanwhile, state services of all kinds in Chechnya continued to collapse, far faster even than in Russia. The effects of this on individuals were modified by Chechen traditions of solidarity in the extended family, so that rich Chechen 'businessmen' often supported large numbers of relatives who would otherwise have been indigent. The Russian population, however, suf-fered especially badly. Because of this and growing physical insecurity, many left, and since they occupied jobs in many essential services, the decline of these accelerated still further.

By April 1993, discontent with Dudayev among Chechens had reached a point where a majority of parliamentary deputies appeared ready to support an impeachment motion against him, and the opposition launched a series of mass protests. By this stage, Dudayev had fallen out with most of the allies who had helped him to power, with the exception of Yandarbiyev. Of the others, Khasbulatov was fighting his own battle in Moscow with %ltsin, and had allied himself, bizarrely, with the Russian nationalist and Communist forces (I saw him declare on Russian television that 'what is good for the Rus-sian nation is good for all the peoples of Russia'); Gantemirov, Mamadayev, and Soslambekov had all joined the opposition to Dudayev.

One motive for this may have been Dudayev's rejection of a draft treaty on confederation with Russia which Mamadayev and Soslambekov had worked out with a Russian delegation led by Sergei Shakhrai and Ramazan

Abdullatipov in December 1993. The previous year they had also established working relations with Rutskoy, still part of the ^feltsin administration.

Although he was generally regarded as bitterly anti-Chechen, agreement was reached for Russian economic sanctions to be lifted and for respective mis-sions to be established in Grozny and Moscow.³⁰

Dudayev also persuaded the Chechen Congress to reject the treaty, and when Shakhrai and Abdullatipov arrived in Grozny to initial the treaty, Dudayev refused to meet them and had them turned away by his guards. Fury at this treatment may have been partly responsible for the hatred of Dudayev shown later by both Shakhrai (a Cossack) and Abdullatipov (a Daghestani Avar), and is an example of Dudayev's remarkable ability to insult people and unite them in hostility to him - something which was not the least among the causes of the Chechen War.

However, Dudayev's wild nationalist rhetoric was not, of course, simply a reflection of his own character. In a not unfamiliar historical pattern from around the world, Dudayev may have reckoned that the only way he could unite the country around his government, or at least attract the genuine loy-alty of parts of Chechen youth, was by keeping nationalist feeling and fears of the 'country in danger' at white-hot levels. His rhetoric may therefore not have been quite as 'irrational' as it seemed.

This fits in with my analysis of Chechen society in chapter 10 as an 'ordered anarchy' which could only take effective common action when presented with a very specific stimulus, and which could only accept one kind of leader, a war leader in the context of mobilisation against the ancient enemy. In this con-text, Maskhadov is luckier - he has already proved himself as a war leader, and presumably doesn't need to go on doing so.

In this connection, it is interesting to compare Chechnya under Dudayev with the other Russian autonomous republic which went furthest in its push for independence, and in the end achieved the greatest autonomy: Tataria, now Tatarstan. Tatarstan has been what Chechnya would have been if Zav-gayev had stayed in power, and if the Chechen nationalists had not been so numerous and well armed, and the Chechen people so anarchistic and reject-ing of authority. The difference between the behaviour of the two nations in the 1990s is partly due to the much greater changes that had occurred in Tatar society, both under Russian rule (since the sixteenth century, three hundred years longer than in Chechnya) and in Soviet times, which led to Tatars closely resembling Russians sociologically and culturally.31

The Tatars have, however, been tougher and more consistent in their push for sovereignty than many observers think. The Communist leadership of the Tatar ASSR twice asked for upgrading to the status of a union republic, con-stitutionally separate from Russia: during the discussions on the introduction of new Soviet constitutions under Stalin in 1936 - when several were exe-cuted as a result; and under Brezhnev in 1977, when in keeping with the late Soviet and Brezhnevite approach, they were bought off with more central investment for Tataria's industry.

The key difference between Tatarstan and Chechnya since 1990 has obvi-ously been that in 1991 Chechnya experienced a national revolution which overthrew the local institutions of the Soviet state, and Tatarstan did not. The Tatar Communist Party First Secretary, Mintimer Shaimiyev, stayed in power, defeated the radical nationalist opposition by a mixture of coercion and cooptation, and transformed the regional Communist Party into a moderate, statist national party under his absolute control. This was not easy, and at cer-tain moments it seemed that a wave of radical Tatar nationalism, leading to a declaration of independence, was a real possibility. If this had recurred, there is no reason to doubt that the \eltsin administration would have taken ruth-less measures against the Tatars.32

It is easy to dismiss Shaimiyev's strategy as a cynical and corrupt nomen-klatura manoeuvre; but it must also be admitted that as a result Tatarstan did achieve an impressive degree of real autonomy, and took control of important and effective state powers, including police control, revenue-raising capacity and control of the economy and especially oil production and exports -despite the lack of international status or an army. A visitor to Tatarstan in 1995 could not help but be struck by just how many signs of Tatar statehood really were present. The Chechens under Dudayev by contrast struck out for full independence, but in the process lost the state structures which could have underpinned that independence without war.

This picture of state collapse in Chechnya is by no means contradicted either by the mushrooming of Chechen ministries and bureaucrats or by the increase in the secret police. The first was simply a reflection of the privatisation of the state, as in Russia, and the buying off of individuals and groups by giving them non-working state jobs; the second was to defend Dudayev. This it may have done efficiently enough - assuming that the Russian intelligence service was try-ing to kill him - but it certainly did not increase his popularity with his people.

The resulting anarchy - unrule - contributed in three ways to the road to war: by encouraging Dudayev to fall back on radical nationalist rhetoric in an effort to compensate for his lack of real state authority; by allowing a growth of banditry which spilled over into Russia and infuriated the Russian govern-ment; and by encouraging the growth of a domestic violent opposition (that it was extraconstitutional goes without saying, given that there was no real constitution) which gave ample opportunity for Russia to interfere and play at divide and rule.

As for the desire of Soslambekov, Mamadayev and Gantemirov for compromise with Russia, this in my view reflected above all the groups they represented: Mamadayev the Chechen businessmen drawn from the Soviet managerial elite, Soslambekov and Gantemirov new businessmen and the mafia. Khasbulatov drew his support from the Soviet educated classes and from his own extensive lineage network. He came from one of those Muslim clerical families who under Soviet rule had switched to secular academia. He himself is an economist by training, and his elder brother, Aslanbek , a lead-ing historian.

However, Khasbulatov also had his own criminal contacts, and was report-edly encouraged to return to Chechnya in August 1994 by Suleiman Khosa, a leading Moscow gangster. These groups of course merged into each other, and all were well aware that their own commercial interests, and indeed commercial survival, depended on Chechnya remaining in some sense within Russia, so that Chechens could go on living and working throughout the Rus-sian Federation, and using the rouble freely as a currency. They may also genuinely have feared the terrible consequences of a war in Chechnya for the Chechen population.

They were also becoming alarmed, or so Chechen acquaintances in Moscow have told me, by the growing anti-Chechen chauvinism in Russia and in the Yeltsin administration, inspired partly by old hatreds, but also by resent-ment both at Dudayev and more importantly at Ruslan Khasbulatov and his orchestration of opposition to Yeltsin ('If only we could shoot that Chechen' was a sentiment often heard among Yeltsin supporters at that time). They feared the kind of expulsions of Chechens from Moscow which took place, albeit on a limited scale, after Yeltsin's overthrow of the Russian parliament in October. The Moscow-based business and mafia leaders had reason to be afraid; I have been told that in December 1994, at the start of the war, they were called in separately by the Moscow Mayor's office and the FSK and warned that if any major Chechen terrorist actions took place in Moscow, the entire Chechen community there would be deported, and its leading mem-bers would 'disappear' along the way.

As for the Chechen educated classes, and especially the handful of Chechen female professionals, their attitudes and fears were well expressed by a Chechen woman doctor called Natasha (her name of course indicating a certain degree of Russification) with whom I talked privately at the Grozny Military Hospital on 15 December 1994:

I was born in Kazakhstan, and lived most of my life in Alma Ata, but when the coup happened here in 1991 my family and I came back, because we wanted to live in a Chechen state ... but I have to say that Chechnya in the past three years has not been what I expected. The Chechens here are different from the Chechens living in other republics. They are less educated, and more nationalistic. They did not accept us very well... The educated people here, the doctors, teachers, engineers, have all suffered badly. I for example have not been paid for more than a year. I can only live because my family supports me, and so I can also help some of the other doctors as well. I also feel a growing Islamisation, it is creating a bad atmosphere for educated women...

The truth is, we Chechens should learn to restrain ourselves a bit more. There are too many of our young people who are ready to fly off the handle, and too many leaders who encourage them. That is why we need more educated leaders...

I am not politically active, but to tell you the truth I think that if we

had more educated leaders, it would have been possible to settle this problem with Russia much earlier and without war. I once met Ruslan Khasbulatov, and I think that if he had had more influence, he could have managed things better...

Of course I am proud of our people and their courage, but when I see young kids ready to attack tanks almost with their bare hands, it makes me cry. No one should want this.

Or in the blunter and more prejudiced words of Professor Khasbulatov, 'what we have seen in Chechnya under Dudayev is a peasants' revolt; and you as a historian will know that a peasants' revolt is the ugliest, the most stupid and the most dangerous political phenomenon.'

On top of the alienation of the professional classes, the arrogant and dicta-torial style both of Dudayev himself and of his various swaggering hangers on had also infuriated his former political allies, and to this, of course, was added furious resentment at not getting the share of the spoils of office to which they thought themselves entitled. The former Soviet establishment in Chechnya was solidly against Dudayev, and they were increasingly joined by the intelli-gentsia, angered by the collapse of their wages and worried by the General's increasing moves - in rhetoric at least - towards the establishment of an Islamic state.

Dudayev responded to the protests by dissolving the parliament and crush-ing the opposition by force. In the subsequent fightcrush-ing, several dozen people were killed and Grozny town hall, Gantemirov's headquarters, was destroyed.

For the parliament, Dudayev substituted hand-picked 'councils of elders' (Mekhel ) and 'councils of teip leaders', and in 1994 revived the Chechen National Congress in an effort to bolster his rule." From this time on, Dudayev frequently spoke of the Chechen people having made an 'irrevoc-able choice' of leader in 1991 - a pretty clear sign that he had no intention of ever facing real elections or surrendering power.

The opposition retreated to the countryside: Gantemirov to his home base of Urus Martan, south of Grozny; the rest of the opposition, based mainly on Doku Zavgayev's political clan and the former Soviet establishment, to Znamenskoye, in north-west Chechnya near the Russian border. This area had come under Russian rule earlier than the rest of Chechnya, and under the Tsars Chechen opponents of Shamil had been resettled there, giving it a certain pro-Russian tradition.

It should be noted that at this time there was no overt Russian military help for the opposition, or even major covert arms supplies, it would seem, since during the clashes in Grozny the opposition used no heavy weapons. It seems likely that the Russian failure to seize this opportunity to try to bring him down was simply due to the fact that with the struggle with the Supreme Soviet in Moscow building to its climax, and the Yeltsin administration's sur-vival at stake, senior officials simply had no attention to spare for what seemed a thoroughly peripheral issue.

However, there is also no reason to doubt that, from the first, the opposi-tion did receive some Russian encouragement. In Nadterechny they set up the Chechen Provisional Council in June 1994, under the chairmanship of former police officer and Zavgayev protege Umar Avturkhanov, and received Russian backing in arms and money. The latter enabled them to consolidate their hold on this region by paying wages and salaries to its inhabitants.

However, there is also no reason to doubt that, from the first, the opposi-tion did receive some Russian encouragement. In Nadterechny they set up the Chechen Provisional Council in June 1994, under the chairmanship of former police officer and Zavgayev protege Umar Avturkhanov, and received Russian backing in arms and money. The latter enabled them to consolidate their hold on this region by paying wages and salaries to its inhabitants.