A Small Victorious War

The face of Moscow politics changed rapidly over the summer and autumn of 1994. [President Boris] Yeltsin himself had visibly degenerated from the vigorous politician of '91 and had become a remote, tired-looking figure, who rarely appeared in public. He was now in the grip of a hard-line group who were increasingly winning the battle for access to him and his thoughts.


The central figure in the group was [Alexander] Korzhakov, who had become Yeltsin's chief bodyguard and head of the Presidential Security Service. Korzhakov had been with Yeltsin since he became head of the Moscow Communist Party in 1985. He was a former KGB guard in both physical build and authoritarian outlook. He stayed at Yeltsin's side through his period of political exile and sat up with him during nights of depression and insomnia. In October 1993 it was he who helped coerce Defense Minister Pavel Grachev to storm the White House building. [Kremlin analyst Emil] Pain observed how "in the spring of 1994 not a single appointment, even the tiniest personnel change, could be made without Korzhakov ... And everyone knew it. And anyone who wanted to get something in the Kremlin first had to go and bow before him."


Korzhakov's cronies were Mikhail Barsukov, a fellow ex-KGB officer whom he had known for fifteen years and who became head of the Kremlin guard; the poker-faced First Deputy Prime Minister [Oleg] Soskovets, who was later described as the "spiritual father" of the group and who was a patron of the arms industry; the Sports Minister and presidential tennis partner Shamil Tarpishchev; and -- from May 1994 -- the Nationalities Minister [Nikolai] Yegorov. Their outlook was authoritarian and nationalist. They were a collection of Russian muzhiki. That meant that they swore heavily, drank heavily and went to the steam baths together. Increasingly Yeltsin joined them.


Korzhakov had a host of enemies: He was hostile to the Mayor of Moscow, Yury Luzhkov, despised Grachev and disliked the Prime Minister, [Viktor] Chernomyrdin, whom he dreamed of replacing with Soskovets. But his main foes were the surviving group of reformist advisers in the Kremlin who had been the core of Yeltsin's administration in 1992. This group included Pain, Yeltsin's Press Secretary Vyacheslav Kostikov, his chief political adviser Georgy Satarov and his foreign affairs adviser Dmitry Ryurikov. In many ways their intellectual mentor remained Yegor Gaidar, Yeltsin's acting prime minister in 1992, who had retained influence over the president after he was forced to relinquish him at the request of a hostile parliament. Gaidar, a Moscow intellectual who is tougher than his mild, cultivated manner suggests, felt that the Kremlin was turning into a Byzantine court with fawning courtiers and an ailing monarch: "[Yeltsin] is a man who communicates very well. For him live communication is a much more important source of information than any documents or papers. And if he is constantly talking to people who say, 'Yes, we have to do this,' even with his fairly subtle ability to analyze the situation it can have an effect."


In the late summer of 1994 Yeltsin's principle of "divide-and-rule" politics broke down and the hawks all but took over the Kremlin. The trigger for this was a ridiculous incident. On Aug. 31, when Yeltsin was attending the ceremony in Berlin to mark the withdrawal of the Russian armed forces from Germany, he appeared to be drunk. He stumbled down some steps after the champagne lunch, then seized the baton from the conductor of a police band and started to conduct it exuberantly. Then he grabbed a microphone and began loudly and tunelessly to sing the Russian folk song "Kalinka." This apparently drunken behavior by the Russian head of state mortified the liberal aides in the Kremlin and several of them wrote a letter remonstrating with Yeltsin about his behavior. The letter had the opposite effect to the one intended: The president took offense and stopped talking to them. Kostikov, Ryurikov and others were pointedly left behind when Yeltsin flew to the United States on Sept. 24.


While Yeltsin was away in America, Kostikov dared to make the Kremlin power struggle public, declaring that "A struggle is on for the president as a democrat and for Russia's foreseeable future." Two days later his point was underlined. Flying back from the United States, Yeltsin was due for a stopover at Shannon Airport and a meeting with the Irish prime minister, Albert Reynolds. Yeltsin did not get off the plane. The supposition was that he was again drunk. Just as interesting was the choice of man deputed to get off the plane to talk to Reynolds. It was Korzhakov's friend Soskovets.


October weakened the influence of the prime minister, Chernomyrdin, and correspondingly strengthened his opponents. On Oct. 11, or "Black Tuesday," the ruble suddenly crashed against the dollar and lost 27 percent of its value in a single day. There were calls for the resignation of Chernomyrdin, who unexpectedly did not return from holiday to meet Queen Elizabeth II at the airport as she arrived to make her historic trip to Russia: His place was taken by Soskovets. In November two more moderates, Kostikov, the presidential press secretary, and Alexander Shokhin, the economics minister, lost their jobs. On Nov. 15 the centrist [Sergei] Shakhrai was formally removed from Chechen policy-making, although he stayed a member of the Security Council. This was the political climate in which the decision to invade Chechnya was made.





In mid-November the Chechen opposition [which Moscow had armed since mid-1994] had proved so weak in its efforts to topple [President Dzhokhar] Dudayev that the decision was made to supply them with Russian manpower. The FSK under the direction of its Deputy Director Yevgeny Savostyanov signed secret contracts with forty-seven tank crews from the Kantemirov and Taman Divisions outside Moscow. It was an entirely secret operation and the head of the Kantemirov Division, General Boris Polyakov, later resigned, saying that his men had been recruited behind his back. The plan was for seventeen tanks to move on Grozny from Urus Martan in the south-west under the command of [opposition faction leader Beslan] Gantemirov, while another thirty would roll in from the north from Tolstoy-Yurt, escorted by [convicted murderer Ruslan] Labazanov, and from Znamenskoye with [opposition provisional council leader Umar] Avturkhanov.


On Nov. 22 the leading opposition figure, Salambek Khajiev, who had stayed on the sidelines for a long time, finally decided to get involved. He flew down to Znamenskoye to help organize the attack. The tank columns moved into Grozny at dawn on Nov. 26. It was a fiasco. The opposition commanders had been supplied with 100 walkie-talkies but the frequencies did not match and they were forced to relay instructions and news across the front line by car. Khajiev followed the Znamenskoye column by car: "I arrived in Grozny about twelve and what I saw there was of course a shock. I saw that there had been a real battle and moreover that the men on the opposition side were not real fighters. They were afraid to shoot. They had never shot in their lives."


The opposition fighters turned out not to be genuine fighters at all: As soon as they reached Grozny many of them broke ranks and started looting kiosks and shops. Dudayev's most hardened fighters soon surrounded the tanks in the streets and blitzed them with rocket-propelled grenades. Those of the tank crews who were not killed fled or were captured. A few days later one of the captured Russian soldiers told his story to reporters under the watchful eye of his Chechen captors in the basement of the State Security building. Andrei Chasov, twenty-one, a small, frightened, sandy-haired boy, said he was a conscript who had served seven months in the Kantemirov Tank Division outside Moscow. Two days before the attack he was sent down to Mozdok and told only that they were being sent to control a demonstration. "They told us nothing, they do everything in secret," he said. When they reached the edge of town his comrades fled and Chasov was captured, still having only a vague idea where he was.


Once the battle was lost, the opposition leaders retreated, distraught, to Tolstoy-Yurt. Their whole autumn campaign was now in ruins. The debacle was made worse by the official Russian news agency Itar-Tass and the First Channel of Russian television, which had been primed to release news of the attack. They flashed up the news that the fight had reached the Presidential Palace and Dudayev was fleeing, then they were forced to make a humiliating retraction.





The failure of the Nov. 26 attack on Grozny was a humiliation for the whole autumn strategy of arming the Chechen opposition. Twenty-one Russian servicemen were now in captivity in Grozny, although it took a week for Moscow to acknowledge that they were indeed its soldiers. Dudayev used the propaganda value of this to the full. He declared that if Moscow acknowledged that they were its own soldiers they would be treated as prisoners-of-war; if not, they would be shot as mercenaries.


A day after the debacle Pavel Grachev, the pug-faced defense minister, was questioned about Chechnya. He was extremely cheerful. First of all he said that he had for a long time taken "no interest" in Chechnya, underlining that he had nothing to do with the arming of the opposition. He washed his hands of the captured men, saying they were not his but were probably mercenaries. Then he mocked the incompetence of the attack on Grozny and said, "If the army had fought, we would have needed one parachute regiment to decide the whole affair in two hours." The remark about "one parachute regiment in two hours" became legendary and made Grachev a hostage to expectations.


The decision to send in the army to Chechnya was probably made on Monday, Nov. 28. On that day Yegorov drafted an "appeal" from the leaders of the North Caucasus to Yeltsin, asking him "swiftly to stop the bloody conflict in Chechnya and take all measures for the imposition of constitutional order." It was blatantly a device to legitimize a coming invasion. Ruslan Aushev, the president of Ingushetia, says he was summoned that evening by Chernomyrdin to his office in the government headquarters in the White House and asked to sign the appeal. Seven leaders of the regions of the North Caucasus had already signed. Aushev says he was appalled and refused to sign: "I said, 'Viktor Stepanovich! This is war!' He replied, 'Not at all. They will just impose constitutional order.'"


That same evening Chernomyrdin met the "power ministers" -- the Defense Minister Pavel Grachev, the Interior Minister Viktor Yerin, and the head of the FSK, Sergei Stepashin -- to discuss the use of force. According to Andrei Kozyrev, the then foreign minister, "I was invited a little bit later than the others. So when I arrived it was something like late evening and I found the prime minister presiding over a meeting mostly of the power ministers, the ministers of defense, the interior and security. And my understanding was that they had already made up their minds and after a very brief introduction I was asked what was my opinion: whether force should be used, (a), and (b) what the international reaction to that would be." Kozyrev said that in answer to the first question he backed the military option -- although he added that he thought it would be "quick, decisive and limited" -- and that he then answered, correctly as it turned out, that the international community would treat the use of force in Chechnya as a strictly domestic Russian affair.


Whenever the decision was made to invade, Boris Yeltsin was, according to two witnesses, already committed to sending in the army the following day. On the morning of Nov. 29 Aushev says he rang Yeltsin's office. "His aide Viktor Vasilyevich Ilyushin helped me to be put through to the president fairly quickly and I appealed to him with literally the following words: 'Boris Nikolayevich! Receive me. Give me just ten minutes. You have incorrect information. And if this decision is taken it will lead to bloodshed and deaths.' But he replied that his information was complete.'"


Then the Security Council gathered in the Kremlin. This was the gathering of fourteen men, including the president, the prime minister and all the power ministers, which met periodically to discuss issues of national security and defense. The council secretary was Oleg Lobov, an old party comrade of Yeltsin's from the Urals.


Yury Kalmykov, the justice minister, was a Cherkess from the North Caucasus. A distinguished lawyer in late middle age who was already suffering from heart illness, he was a professional in Yeltsin's team with no political ambitions. Kalmykov was a slow, cautious man with old-fashioned, gentlemanly manners and was something of a misfit in the Kremlin team. He arrived a little late at the Security Council meeting, which was held in a grand chamber on the fourth floor of the so-called "14th Corpus" in the Kremlin behind the Spassky Gates on Red Square. He was immediately told that all the members of the council were about to vote on the use of force in Chechnya. Yeltsin was at his most gruff and bearish. "From the president's tone of voice I understood that he had already decided on force to resolve the question and that it was useless to discuss it," Kalmykov recalled almost two years later.


Kalmykov said he tried to object but was told that he had to vote first: "It was done in the following way. They laid out papers. The president said, 'Let's vote.' I said, 'I want to speak.' 'No, we vote without discussion.' ... I was not allowed to speak and we voted. I had to vote. I said, 'If that's the main thing. If I have to vote, I'll vote.' It is a purely Soviet system. The Security Council almost always took decisions unanimously. And the president could not tolerate any discussion or any actions that looked as though they were directed directly against him. So I said, 'OK, let's vote.'" There was only one way to vote -- in favor of the use of force. They all, including Kalmykov, voted yes.


Then Yeltsin allowed the meeting to proceed. Grachev "hung up all these maps, with arrows showing how to take Grozny, which detachments should go into Grozny and into Chechnya. I little understood this and I was so agitated and upset, the more so because the president hadn't let me speak at first. I demanded that discussion could start and he said, 'No, wait, wait, wait.' Then he let me speak. Maybe I spoke sharply. Maybe I spoke too hotly. I said that by using military means in the Caucasus you only achieve the worst result. That's how it turned out."


The two most enthusiastic supporters of the invasion at the meeting, Kalmykov said, were Grachev and Kozyrev. Parallels were drawn with the Americans' lightening operation to overthrow the military junta in Haiti two months before, a comparison that horrified Kalmykov. The only person who supported him was Yevgeny Primakov, who was then head of the Foreign Intelligence Service and later became foreign minister. "I said that you can't solve things in the Caucasus that way, it's not Haiti," Kalmykov went on. "Someone said that in Haiti the Americans had come in and imposed order and left again. I said that kind of thing is more complicated in the Caucasus, there's a completely different mentality, different rules, different people, different nations. And I spoke out against the use of force. And Primakov said we should support Yury Khamzatovich and try peaceful means of resolving the conflict."


After the meeting Kalmykov handed in his resignation and flew to Grozny to talk to Dudayev. But their talks produced no result. The only minister who resigned over the Chechen invasion, he died of a heart attack in January 1997.


Even before the Security Council had met, Yeltsin had issued an ultimatum. It gave all the Chechens forty-eight hours to disarm. Otherwise, the ultimatum said, 'All the forces and means at the disposal of the state will be used to put a stop to the bloodshed.' Effectively, it was a call for unconditional surrender.


The ultimatum alarmed Russian liberal politicians, people like Sergei Yushenkov, a former colonel and dissident who was now chairman of the Parliamentary Defense Committee. Yushenkov was strongly opposed to the use of force in Chechnya. He had already started planning a trip to Grozny to try to free the prisoners from the Nov. 26 expedition after the Defense Ministry had renounced them.


The following day, Nov. 30, Yushenkov was making last-minute arrangements to fly to Chechnya. There was confusion about whether Yeltsin would impose a state of emergency in Chechnya, something that would heighten the tension. To clarify what was happening, Yushenkov called Oleg Lobov, the secretary of the Security Council. Lobov told him that there would be no state of emergency. But then he added that yes, there would be a war: "On the telephone Lobov used the phrase that 'It is not only a question of the integrity of Russia. We need a small victorious war to raise the president's ratings.' There was the comparison, the parallel that Clinton in Haiti could perform a successful operation and his ratings immediately jumped up. I was not able to convince Lobov that Chechnya was not Haiti."