On 31 December, the Russian forces in Chechnya, now united in one group of units north and north-west of Grozny, launched a full-scale ground assault on the city. The choice of that particular date has been alternatively explained by the fact that the Russian media were taking a holiday over the New ^ear, the expectation that the Chechens would be celebrating, or the fact that it was General Grachev's birthday.
The Russians attacked from only two sides, since their numbers did not permit them to surround and isolate the city. In consequence, throughout the 'siege', which lasted in all some seven weeks, the city was open to the south and east, and the Chechen fighters received continuous reinforcement and resupply, and were eventually able to withdraw from it in good order.
Grachev later claimed that the Chechens had 15,000 well-armed troops in Grozny (probably twice to three times the real number) and General Anatoly Kvashnin, the commander at the time of the attack, gave as an excuse for his failure the suggestion that, based on Second World War experience, he would have needed 50-60,000 troops to capture Grozny. These excuses however were mendacious in their exaggeration both of the numbers and the weapons of the defenders. In the Second World War, the German and Soviet armies had a rough equivalence in heavy weapons; in Grozny, the Russians had total superiority.5
The first day's battle was a thoroughly disastrous one for the Russians.
Sergei Stepashin later tried to excuse his intelligence department's failure to prepare the army for the resistance they encountered in Grozny by saying that a system of defence installations had been built after 1991, while the only maps the attackers had were made earlier. This excuse was ridiculous even in its own terms, because all those years Grozny was an open city, and it is diffi-cult to understand what the FSK agents were working on there if they were not even able to supply the army with information on the centres of resistance.
But more to the point, there were no such formally organised defences. In fact, the lack of obvious barricades and tank traps made me and other jour-nalists think that the Chechens would put up only a symbolic fight in the city.
But as will be seen, they were much better tacticians than that. Barricades would have been blasted to pieces by tank fire from a distance. A Chechen fighter described how the Chechens actually fought as follows:
The Russian soldiers stayed in their armour, so we just stood on the bal-conies and dropped grenades on to their vehicles as they drove by underneath. The Russians are cowards. They just can't bear to come out of shelter and fight us man-to-man. They know they are no match for us. That is why we beat them and will always beat them.
Lack of infantry cover was also the explanation for the Russian failure given privately by the Russian General Staff:
The Russian troops broke through the outer defence perimeter and occupied the left bank of the Sunja River in Grozny. The Chechens wisely retreated. But when our armour entered the city centre, a sur-prise awaited it. According to the explanations given in the General Staff, the Russian side had a shortage of infantry. The Chechens allowed the tank columns to pass and then surrounded them and attacked.6
In traditional American slang, the first stage of the resulting battle would have been called a turkey-shoot. Several hundred Russian soldiers died in the course of a few hours, and complete disaster was only narrowly averted. Ten days later, Valery Kukayev, a nineteen-year-old private from a collective farm in Samara Region, driver of an armoured personnel carrier (BMP, in its Rus-sian version), described from his hospital bed in Chechen captivity what happened to his company of the 65th Motorised Infantry on the night of the 31st and morning of the 1st:
The commanders gave us no map, no briefing, just told us to follow the BMP in front, but it got lost and ended up following us. By morning, we were completely lost and separated from the other units. I asked our officer where we were, he said he didn't know - somewhere near the railway station. No, he didn't have a map either. We were told to take up defensive positions, but it was hopeless - the Chechens were all around us and firing. There was nowhere to take cover, because they were everywhere.
I asked for orders from our company commander, Lt Chernychenko, and they told me he'd already run for it. Then we tried to escape. That was when I was wounded, by a sniper - I'd got out of the BMP to try to find a way out. My friends put me in another BMP, but it was soon dam-aged. I saw three BMPs destroyed in all, and I think only five or six of the crews survived. My friends had to leave me behind, they said they couldn't carry me. I don't blame them - two of them were wounded themselves, one in the arm and one in the ear. One of them was cap-tured with me. I don't know if the others made it. I lay there for three or four hours, and then the Chechens found me. They operated on me at a hospital in Grozny, then brought me here. They treated me well, though I was their enemy. I did not want to be their enemy, to come here to kill other farmers. I am a farmer myself. If Yeltsin and Grachev want this war, let them come and fight themselves, not send us to die.7
The northern column, advancing towards the centre of the city down Per-vomaiskoye Chaussee, was brought to a halt with heavy casualties around half a mile from the presidential headquarters on the main square. On 20 Febru-ary, by the secondary school on Pervomaiskoye I met a lieutenant-colonel from the 81st Motorised Infantry Regiment, who gave his name as Nikolai Mikhailovich, with half a dozen of his men. Two of them were carrying sacks.
Seven weeks after the start of the battle, they were looking for pieces of their comrades, still scattered among the ruins. Around them were shattered, twisted bits of tanks and armoured personnel carriers, obviously hit again and again. Nikolai Mikhailovich cursed the intelligence they had received before the battle: 'If those fools in the FSK had given us any idea of the kind of the kind of resistance we were going to meet, of course we wouldn't have driven into town like that.' He said that the commander of the 81st had been killed
and more than half its men killed or wounded. The commander of the 131st Motorised Rifle Brigade was also killed. That brigade, in the western column, reached the area of the railway station, south of the square, but was then surrounded, split up and almost obliterated. The whole attacking group risked being forced to withdraw from the city.
According to the Russian media and military sources, the situation was saved largely thanks to Major-General Lev Rokhlin, a paratroop officer (unusually for the senior ranks of the Soviet and Russian armies, of Jewish origin), who re-established control over the scattered forces, rallied them and broke through to the troops encircled at the station. On the strength of this success he went on to make a political career as a centrist, and after the December 1995 presidential elections became Chairman of the Duma Defence Committee and a leading figure in the contested field of military reform (see chapter 8).
The situation in Grozny then settled down into a grim slogging match, with the Russian forces edging towards the presidential headquarters under cover of one of the most intense bombardments of recent times. In consequence, the centre of Grozny was almost totally destroyed. In the end, rather than storming the Chechen positions, the Russian forces literally blasted the Chechen fighters out of them. The Russian government for its part issued bulletin after bulletin, reporting Victory', 'an end to the bombing' and 'nor-malisation', which in their mendacity recalled Soviet days and in their obvious distance from reality served to discredit the state and the official and semi-official media which carried them, and which were scorned by independent Russian newspapers, even those normally sympathetic to the government.8
On 19 January, however, after several false claims of capture by the Rus-sians, the presidential headquarters was finally abandoned by its defenders when a penetration bomb pierced the cellars where they had been holding out. Russian military losses were high, although, thanks to the fact that after the first few days they relied much more on artillery than on assault, not apparently as high as some reports at the time suggested. The late General Volkogonov, generally a reliable source, gave the number of deaths in the federal forces up to 24 February as 1,146 men killed, with another 374 missing - most of them also dead.9
The attack on Grozny was accompanied by a great deal of looting and attacks on civilians, which have already been sketched in chapter 1. I saw direct evidence of the looting on the morning of 12 January 1995, near the village of Alkhan Yurt on the main road out of Grozny to the west, after the car in which I was travelling towards Grozny was passed at high speed by a Russian armoured personnel carrier tearing wildly down the road in the oppo-site direction. Shortly before, we had heard a burst of automatic fire from up ahead. Fearing a battle was in process, we went carefully forward, until we came to two Russian trucks with their tyres shot out, one of them lying in the ditch, and surrounded by Chechen fighters.
They invited us to look in the truck. It was full of an assortment of goods
that would have done justice to a Russian Sergeant Bilko: an IBM computer;
an Epson printer; an air conditioner; a easeful of blank music cassettes;
another full of women's underwear. More women's clothes were scattered all over the back of the truck, as if thrown in at random. This was the loot of the captured northern suburbs of Grozny, driven off by Russian troops - includ-ing officers - who had left the firinclud-ing line (with or without the permission of their commanders) to sell it in the bazaars of southern Russia, and who had had the misfortune to take the wrong turning and drive into Chechen-controlled territory.
It is worth pointing out that the first weeks of the Chechen War saw failures by virtually every arm of the Russian armed forces, except for air transport -and as a Western military attache put it, 'no one was shooting at them.' For example, the contemporary state of the 'elite' Spetsnaz was graphically illus-trated for me by an eighteen-year-old junior sergeant of the 22nd Spetsnaz Brigade, Alexander Tupolsky, whose unit was dropped into the Chechen mountains at the end of December to operate as a raiding force behind Chechen lines, presumably in order to hinder the Chechens from regrouping in the mountains for a partisan war (the assumption being, of course, that the Chechen fighters would flee from Grozny as soon as the Russians launched a serious attack). I met Sergeant Tupolsky on January 11 in the hospital of Stary Atagi, after he had been wounded and captured. He told me that,
We were dropped in by helicopter, about fifty of us in my unit. We were supposed to make contact with other groups, but they were never dropped. When it became obvious that the whole operation was a shambles, after about two days, we should have been pulled out again, but headquarters told us they couldn't send in helicopters because of the cloud and fog. I reckon the pilots were just too scared to try. We called and called for air support, but it only came after we had surren-dered, and then they almost bombed us. They missed the Chechen fighters altogether. Maybe they meant to kill us, because we were embarrassing for them. We talked about that among ourselves. God knows -1 just don't know what to think any more.
They didn't send in any food or tents or sleeping bags with us, and it was freezing, so we were soon in a bad way... No, I've never had any training in mountain fighting or how to survive in those conditions...
For four days we had nothing to eat, and nowhere to sleep, and we were on the move the whole time because of course the Chechens were on to us at once. We were sniped at, and by the time we surrendered we had two killed and two wounded. We couldn't light fires for fear of being seen. In the end we just gave up. Some local Chechens arranged our surrender....
We were never told what we had been sent to do. Our commander wouldn't tell us - maybe he didn't know either - so there was nothing I could tell my lads. All we were told was that we were coming to free the
peaceful Chechen population from Afghan bandits and mercenaries, fighting for Dudayev. But now I think that they tricked us, that this was all some kind of Kremlin game. Every day we see peaceful, ordinary civilians being brought here killed and wounded by bombing. The Chechens have treated us decently - look, we are getting the same treat-ment as their own wounded. I will never fight them again. If I get out of here, I will go back to my mother and father.10
And this, I repeat, was a Spetsnaz group, supposedly the creme de la creme of the Russian army.
As for the Russian artillery, its fire was no more accurate than Russian bombing. Thus in late January 1995 I was staying with other correspondents at a house in south Grozny near which the Chechens had established a mortar, which went on firing day after day, apparently from exactly the same position. Once again, repeated Russian attempts to hit it failed. A veteran French war correspondent was utterly bewildered: 'But the Russians have equipment to track where mortars fire from, every modern army has it, that's why you have to keep moving mortars around. What are they playing at?' The old Russia hands present proposed a variety of explanations: that the equip-ment was defective (due to the lack of replaceequip-ment spare parts, the greater part of Russian military equipment can only survive by cannibalizing other equipment); that it had all been broken and never repaired; that it had been illegally sold (possibly to Chechen 'businessmen'); that the only men who knew how to use it had left the army and had never been replaced; or finally, that it contained some alcoholic or potentially alcoholic element—in which case no further explanation of its fate was necessary."
But as this last explanation suggests, even many of the military-technical failures come down in the end to a failure of morale, and not just to poor training (since performance did not improve as the war progressed). Russian pilots and gunners who really believed in the Chechen War would have made much more determined efforts to hit their targets, whatever the drawbacks of their equipment; and Russian pilots would have risked the weather and the ground fire and come in low enough to bomb accurately - like the Argentine pilots in the Falklands War, who faced much heavier odds and achieved much greater results.