Probably in consequence of the successful Chechen attack on Gudermes, the first day of January 1996 saw another change of Russian commander in Chechnya, one of eight that were to take place during the war, with all that this meant for efficiency and morale. An army general, Vyacheslav Tikhomirov, replaced Lt-General Anatoly Shkirko of the Interior Ministry troops. As usual, no attempt was made to bring Shkirko to book for the humil-iation in Gudermes, and he was in fact promoted, to Deputy Interior Minister and commander of internal troops. Tikhomirov displayed his own grasp of the situation in a TV interview on 7 January, in which he predicted that the war would soon end because the separatist forces were only 'small groups of fanatics'.
On 9 January, a Chechen raiding party calling themselves the 'Lone Wolves' and led by Salman Raduyev attacked a Russian military airfield near the town of Kizlyar in northern Daghestan. He was beaten off, and then entered the town and, imitating Basayev, took some 2,000 hostages and herded them into the local hospital. Some twenty-five Daghestanis were killed, along with two
Russian soldiers and (so the Russians claimed) seventeen Chechen fighters.
Raduyev initially declared that he and his men would fight to the death as 'kamikazes', and told Russian television that 'we can easily turn this city to hell and ashes.'42
The fact that the dead and the hostages included local Muslims and thirty-seven members of a Daghestani special police unit as well as local Russians did not increase the love of the Daghestanis for the Chechens. The following day, the presidents of all the North Caucasian autonomous republics with the exception of Ingushetia issued a statement calling on the Russian government to take strong action against 'Dudayevist bandits'. The Daghestani National-ities Minister declared that 'relations with Chechens will have to be reviewed.' One motive for Raduyev's action was said to be the desire to avenge his brother, killed in the fighting in Gudermes the previous month. However, Raduyev is also married to Dudayev's niece, and there is good reason to sup-pose that the idea for this raid was cooked up between them partly as a way of trying to restore Dudayev's prestige, cast into the shade by the achieve-ments of Maskhadov and Basayev. Maskhadov and Basayev are known to have disapproved of the raid on both military and political grounds, and resented the fact that they had to commit their men to extract Raduyev and his group from the trap they had entered. In March, it was reported in the Russian press that Raduyev had been ambushed and killed by other Chechen fighters. This was furiously denied by the Chechens, who said that he had only been wounded in a Russian air attack - and he did indeed turn up several months later.4'
On the same day, 9 January, Raduyev's group left Kizlyar for Chechnya with 160 hostages. On the tenth, despite promises of safe passage, Russian troops and helicopter gunships opened fire on them near the Daghestani village of Pervomaiskoye on the Chechen border. Extraordinarily, the Chechens were able to leave the convoy and take refuge in the village, adding some of its inhabitants to their hostages.
On 15 January, the Russian forces launched a full-scale attack on Pervo-maiskoye, including artillery and helicopter gunships, and without any regard for the safety of the hostages, between thirteen and eighteen of whom were killed in the fighting along with twenty-six Russian soldiers. Despite the fact that Pervomaiskoye is a small village with fewer than a hundred houses and was surrounded by thousands of Russian troops, Raduyev's force held out for three days; and then most of them, including Raduyev himself, succeeded in slipping away into Chechnya, crossing the Aksai, a medium-sized river in the process - though the Chechen casualties are said to have been unusually heavy, perhaps as many as half of the fighters involved.
According to Pavel Felgenhauer, a Russian journalist with, as noted, extremely good contacts in the Russian high command (though possibly as a result biased against the Interior Ministry), internal troops at Pervomaiskoye believed that the head of Russian counter-intelligence, General Mikhail Barsukov (formerly the chief of the presidential guard), who had taken
personal command of the operation, was 'deliberately sending Interior Min-istry officers to certain death'. An aide to Barsukov tried to justify his com-mander's performance by saying that the general personally led an assault in order to rally the troops, but as Felgenhauer comments, 'If a full general of the army was in fact desperate enough personally to lead an unsuccessful infantry attack, the morale of Russian troops at Pervomaiskoye must have been very near the breaking point'.44
The escape of Raduyev's men from such an exposed position - even with such high losses - is another testimony to the deep unwillingness of Russian troops in the war to risk their lives, even with the enemy at their mercy.45 It was also helped by attacks from forces led by Maskhadov and Basayev, based in the nearby town of Novogroznensky. These also took hostage twenty-nine Russian workers from a power station near Grozny.
More distant support during the Pervomaiskoye siege came from Chechen separatists in Turkey; with the help of Turkish sympathisers, they seized a Turkish ferry, theAvrasya, which operates between Trebizond and the Russian resort of Sochi, and threatened to destroy it unless the Russians allowed the Chechens in Pervomaiskoye to leave. The incident was eventually resolved without bloodshed, and the Turkish security forces succeeded in warding off any further such attacks.
On 6 March, the separatists, numbering by Russian estimates 1,800 men, launched the second of their major counter-attacks into urban areas, occupy-ing much of the centre of Grozny and surroundoccupy-ing Russian positions. They pulled out again after three days, leaving more than 150 Russian troops dead.
One of the Chechen commanders, Ruslan Believ, later explained to Obshchaya Gazeta why the Chechens had been able to escape from encirclement on this and other occasions: 'it was easy to escape from Grozny because they gave the Russian troops the chance to retreat. This caused around 50 per cent of Russian troops to refuse to obey orders and to reach agreements with the Chechens not to open fire on each other. This allowed the fighters free movement all over the city.'46
The end of March saw another peace initiative from the Russian side, with an announcement by ^Veltsin of another ceasefire and an offer of talks with Dudayev, together with a package of proposals based apparently on ones previously drawn up by Tatar President, Mintimer Shaimiyev.47 This time, the evidence suggests that the initiative was a complete sham, and that the Yeltsin administration had no intention of pursuing it for more than a few necessary weeks. Presidential elections were due in Russia on 16 June, and Yeltsin him-self made the surprising public admission at this time that his re-election depended on ending the war in Chechnya. Following the separatists' brief capture of central Grozny in March and the heavy casualties among the Rus-sian troops, an opinion poll in Russia for the first time showed a majority as in favour of an unconditional pull-out of Russian forces from Chechnya - an admission of defeat, in other words.48
The figure in this poll was 52 per cent in favour of withdrawal. Two weeks
later, a poll by the National Centre for Public Opinion showed 57 per cent of respondents in favour of direct talks between Yeltsin and Dudayev, and only 28 per cent against, even after eighteen months of government propaganda about 'terrorists' and 'bandits'.
Yeltsin's offer was completely ignored by the separatists: 31 March saw a major attack on Russian forces near Vedeno in which twenty-eight Russian soldiers were killed and seventy-five wounded. On 7 April, the Russian radio station Ekho Moskvy reported that Dudayev's response had been a counter-offer proposing the arrest of leading Russian generals and the dismissal of the Chernomyrdin government. On the 16th, a Russian convoy of the 245th Motorised Rifle Regiment was ambushed near Shatoy by Chechen fighters under a local commander, Ruslan Gelayev, and effectively destroyed. Accord-ing even to the Russian high command itself, twenty-three out of twenty-seven vehicles were destroyed, seventy-three men killed and fifty-two wounded - a severe defeat in which the Chechens employed their old nineteenth-century tactics of forest ambush.
But on the evening of 21-22 April, the Russians scored their only real and permanent success in the whole war: the death of President Dzhokhar Dudayev, killed by a Russian rocket from an aircraft which homed in on the satellite telephone that he was using in the village of Gekhi-Chu. He was replaced by Vice-President Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, to whom Maskhadov, Basayev and other commanders promptly vowed obedience.49
Hard-hearted though it may seem to say it, Dudayev's death did contribute to the later peace in Chechnya. On past form, it is very difficult to see him either being able to negotiate successfully with Lebed in August, or allowing Maskhadov to do so - let alone agreeing to stand in a free election after the peace. It is also difficult to see him maintaining the self-discipline shown by Yandarbiyev and Maskhadov (and indeed Basayev) during the period of the Russian withdrawal, studiously avoiding crowing over the defeated Russians and reining in their own forces. The elimination of Dudayev, who had been taunting them for so long, also made it psychologically easier for the Russian to admit defeat.
A new approach from the Chechen side was evident on 1 May, when Yandarbiyev offered new talks with Moscow. This was not, or so I was told at the time, because the separatist leaders were fooled by the Russian initiative;
they perfectly understood its motives. However, they probably reckoned they had nothing to lose (the previous ceasefire, as noted, had served their military purposes very well) and that, in any case, to help a Communist victory over Yeltsin in the presidential elections would certainly not be to their advantage.50
The OSCE now began once again to play a useful part, under the very able and committed Swiss diplomat Tim Guldimann. (The OSCE's mission to Chechnya, though obviously less important than the Chechen military to the final peace settlement, was none the less in many ways a model of patient, stubborn mediation. It played a very valuable 'enabling' role, and I am sorry that I cannot give more space to it). On 27 May, both sides announced a
three-day ceasefire, and Yandarbiyev travelled to Moscow with a delegation.
After a brief and irritable meeting with Yeltsin which was reportedly saved from breaking down by the intervention of Guldimann, Yandarbiyev and Chernomyrdin signed a new ceasefire agreement. In the words of Maria Eismont, 'not only observers, but even members of the Chechen delegation were surprised that the Russian side was willing to give up so much' - some-thing which can only be explained by the insincerity of the offers being made.
On 28 May, Yeltsin visited Chechnya for the first time during the war - now that it was relatively safe to do so, and as part of his election campaign, as was bitterly noted by Russian soldiers. His visit was restricted to the Russian military airfield north of Grozny, and lasted less than two hours. He told the soldiers that 'the war is over, and you have won.' They were not convinced.
This time, the ceasefire was relatively successful, with attacks on Russian troops and Russian bombardments kept to a minimum. At the same time, peace talks continued in the Ingush capital Nazran. The separatists, however, vowed to prevent the 16 June elections for the Russian presidency and for a Chechen parliament, and in Chechnya these barely took place.
The very day after the final results of the Russian presidential elections were announced, the Russian forces resumed large-scale attacks on separatist posi-tions all over Chechnya. The resulting fighting lasted until Russia's day of nemesis, 6 August. This was the day of Yeltsin's inauguration for his second term as President, and it was a day of humiliation for Russia. In Moscow a puffy, bloated, obviously very sick old man, unable to speak for more than one minute, who had been re-elected only as a result of a media conspiracy to disguise the real state of his health, shuffled up to the microphone to celebrate his victory. The whole affair was acutely reminiscent of old pictures of Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko in their last years.
In Chechnya - even though this was a day on which the Russian forces must surely have been expecting some form of attack - separatist forces simultane-ously entered Grozny, Argun and Gudermes in the largest Chechen offensive of the war. In Grozny, they rapidly occupied the centre of town, capturing the Zavgayev government headquarters, overrunning or surrounding Russian mil-itary posts and forcing others to be evacuated. They won this victory despite the fact that according to a later estimate by the Russian National Security Council, Russian troops in Grozny alone numbered 12,000 and outnumbered their attackers by around three to one. Two-thirds of these were the relatively badly equipped internal troops, but the rest were army, and thousands more army troops were stationed around Grozny, for example at the main Russian base and airfield of Khan Qala, seven miles to the north-west. The Russians also had 207 armoured vehicles, whereas at the beginning of their offensive the Chechens appear to have had none at all - the later ones seen in Chechen hands had all been captured.
One reason for the extraordinary Russian lack of preparedness appears to have been the division in command between the Interior Ministry and Defence Ministry troops. The Defence Ministry in Moscow was at that time
in turmoil as a result of the dismissal of Grachev and the swift action of Lebed in dismissing a number of senior generals belonging to Grachev's clique.
Shortly before the Chechen assault, the local command had been handed over from the army to the Interior Ministry, and the army later claimed that the internal troops had made no preparations to take over - though this may be just an attempt to evade responsibility. In any case, there can be no excuse for what happened, since the Chechens had after all carried out in March a smaller-scale dress rehearsal of the same operation - from which the Russians as usual appear to have learned nothing."
By the evening of the second day, most of the Russian forces around Grozny were back to the positions they had occupied before the first Russian assault in December 1994, twenty months before. The Chechens also occu-pied the centres of Gudermes and Argun. Some 494 Russian soldiers were killed in the August battle in Grozny alone, with 1,407 wounded and 182 missing or captured - figures which recall the worst days of the initial storm in January 1995. Eighteen tanks and 69 armoured personnel carriers were destroyed or captured.52 This very signal defeat presented Russians with the choice of either starting the whole war over again, beginning with a new and bloody storm of Grozny, or of effectively surrendering in return for peace.
As the next few weeks were to show, a large majority of Russians by now wanted peace at almost any price - and the man who was to give it to them, General Alexander Lebed, realised this. On 18 June, he had been appointed as head of the National Security Council and political supremo in the security field after the first round of elections, in which he came third, as part of a deal (almost certainly worked out several weeks previously) by which he agreed to support Yeltsin in the second round.
On 12 August, Lebed travelled to Daghestan and over the next two weeks, in a series of meetings at the border town of Khasavyurt, forged with Maskhadov the basis for Russian withdrawal from Chechnya. The question of Chechnya's constitutional status was to be shelved until the year 2001. This was an act of considerable moral as well as physical courage on Lebed's part.
Above all, he prevented some of the generals from launching a new counter-offensive in Grozny, something which could have prolonged the war for months or years. He did this with absolutely no support from Yeltsin, who according to his usual pattern tried to distance himself both from the blood-shed and from the moves to end it.53
However, although there can be no question of Lebed's genuine opposition to the Chechen War, which he had opposed from the beginning (after also strongly opposing the military intervention in Tajikistan), it is no doubt also true that he would not have embarked on his Chechen peace mission unless he had thought it would bring him political advantage - which it did, as the opinion polls I will quote in chapter 5 demonstrate.
This was also in line with Lebed's strategy during the Russian election cam-paign, which was to portray himself as a tough and patriotic soldier, but one who opposed military adventures and the loss of Russian lives. 'Others start
wars, he ends them' was the slogan, and it had great resonance with Russian voters. Also of considerable importance is the rapport that Lebed was able to establish with Maskhadov, another rather dour ex-Soviet officer. The two men seem to have recognised in each other a kindred spirit. It is very difficult to imagine that Lebed would have been able to establish such a relationship with the histrionic, capricious and arrogant Dudayev.
But with all due respect to Lebed, it is also vital to remember that this peace agreement came about only because the Chechens had won a great victory, and because the Russians realised that to reverse this would take more years of warfare and thousands of lives - and they simply did not have the stomach for it. Within the army, commanders realised that their men were simply not willing to fight any more. As with the French conscripts in Algeria or the Amer-icans in Vietnam - but to an even greater degree - Russians were just tired of war. This spirit was also amply reflected in Russian public opinion polls con-cerning the Khasavyurt agreements.M
This mood, and the recognition of it by Russia's rulers, is why the appar-ently intense criticism of Lebed's peace deal from many of the figures on the Russian political scene and in the Russian media in the end had no effects on the peace process - because it was not meant to. The infamous change to
This mood, and the recognition of it by Russia's rulers, is why the appar-ently intense criticism of Lebed's peace deal from many of the figures on the Russian political scene and in the Russian media in the end had no effects on the peace process - because it was not meant to. The infamous change to