Sebastian Smith is a prize winning author and journalist. He has been a correspondent in Washington, Moscow and London for the English-language service of Agence France-Presse and is currently living and working in Georgia.

‘Fluent and persuasive prose ... admirably clear,’ New Statesman

‘A moving example of how history can be written. Smith’s account of the historical background to the conflict reads like a novel, but better, because it also has the intimacy and immediacy of an eyewitness account. He has given us a memorable, well-researched account of a peculiarly horrible war’ Literary Review

‘This is a riveting book, written with almost seamless elegance. But Allah’s Mountains is not simply a reportage. In a commendable effort to go beyond the present facts, Smith has delved deeply into the broader Caucasian context, steeping himself in the knowledge of its myriad peoples, cultures and languages’ International Affairs

‘Sebastian Smith’s Allah’s Mountains is a riveting battle by battle account’ The Tablet

‘Excellent, readable, insightful’ Jane’s Intelligence Review

‘Smith’s book is exceptionally well written, alternating between hard reporting and more personal vignettes that give the flavour and emotional colouring of the area’ The Moscow Times

‘Heads of state and their foreign ministers should be forced to read and ponder this book’ Professor George Hewitt

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Copyright © 1998, 2001, 2006 Sebastian Smith

Cover image: Female Chechen rebel fighter © Heidi Bradner/Panos

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For my Father

Contents

List of Maps

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Prologue

Part 1 The Jigsaw

Part 2 Fires of Liberty

Part 3 The Jigsaw in Pieces

Part 4 The Chechen Wolf

Part 5 The Fury

Part 6 Chasing Paradise

Bibliography

Maps

1 Southern Russia and the Caucacus

2 Extent of Russian Conquest in Caucasus in 1800

3 Existing and Proposed Oil and Gas Pipelines

4 Ethnic Groups in the North Caucasus

5 Chechnya During 1994–96 War

6 Grozny

Acknowledgements

The first people I owe thanks are those in Chechnya who risked their lives to protect mine, or to help me get the story for my news agency, usually for no reward. In true Caucasus style, many others ignored considerable hardships to house and feed me.

Some are named in this book, but many are not. A special thanks to Mussa Damayev of Shali, Salamu Turlayev of Novy Tsenteroi, Khanzad Batayev and Movladi Yermolayev of Bamut, Ali Atuyev of Stary Achkhoi, Islam Gunayev of Hadji Yurt, Yussup of Serzhen Yurt.

I am grateful to all those in other parts of the North Caucasus who displayed such magnicifent hospitality and also to the many academics and officials who gave me their time. Especially: in Dagestan, Sayid Khabetov of Novoselskoye, Natasha Stoyanova of Makhachkala and Gussein Gazimagomedov of Gimry; in Ingushetia, Boris Khaniyev; in North Ossetia, Anatoly Isayenko at Vladikavkaz University and Vladimir Shakbazidi at the Greek Society; in Kabardino-Balkaria, Kazir Dzhammal and his family in the mountains; in Karachai-Cherkessia, Karachai leader Kazbek Chomayev and mullah Kazbek Shamatayev, Rasul and friends; in Adygea, Khamzet Kazanov, Aslan, museum director Almir Abregov and national dance troupe director Amerbi Kulov; also the staff of the Severny Kavkaz newspaper, especially Tatyana Mamkhyagova in Cherkessk.

For their great help in knocking sense into my manuscript, I am forever grateful to Andrew Harding, James Meek, Carey Scott and Antony Smith. I also thank Anna-Maria Boura, Laurence Peter, Andrei Piontkovsky and Dmitri Trenin for their comments on the text, and Agence France-Presse and the Moscow Times for their archives, and the Centre for Global Energy Studies and Philip Armstrong for maps.

Also thanks to my AFP boss Paola Messana for giving me time off to write and an unlimited chance to work in Chechnya; to Natasha Fairweather for helping me find a publisher; to Marina Lapenkova and Valentina Blinova for teaching me to enjoy the Russian winter; to the late Peter Braestrup and to Jack Kneece Åsne Seierstad for their early encouragement; to fellow journalists in Chechnya, some of whom, but not all, are mentioned in this book, for their company and support; and finally to Anna Enayat at my publishers I.B.Tauris for taking on the book and being so patient at my rewrites and delays.

This book could not have been written without help from previously published works. They are listed in the bibliography, but I am particularly indebted to the various works of Alexandre Bennigsen and S. Enders Wimbush on Islam under the Soviet Union; to Robert Conquest for his definitive account of the deportations The Nation Killers; to Marie Bennigsen Broxup et al for The North Caucasus Barrier – a classic reference on the region – and to Moshe Gammer for his detailed history of Imam Shamil’s reign in Muslim Resistance to the Tsar. For understanding the history of the 19th-century wars, there is still no better book than John F. Baddeley’s 1908 work The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus. And for understanding the nature of the opposing sides, there are no more accurate accounts than those by Tolstoy in Hadji Murat and The Cossacks, and by Lermontov in A Hero of Our Time; for help in entering the world of Lermontov, I am grateful to Laurence Kelly for his Lermontov. Tragedy in the Caucasus.

Map 1: Southern Russia and the Caucasus

Map 2: Extent of Russian Conquest in Caucasus in 1800

Map 3: Existing and Proposed Oil and Gas Pipelines

Map 4: Ethnic Groups in the North Caucasus

Map 5: Chechnya During 1994–96 War

Map 6: Grozny

Introduction

Just over 100 years ago, Leo Tolstoy described in the novella Hadji Murat a skirmish between Russian soldiers and Chechen guerrillas. The action begins when Russian troops stationed at the edge of a forest spot a handful of Chechen fighters on horseback. Shots are exchanged and the Chechens melt back into the trees. In the brief clash, which the officers treat as sport, a bullet fatally wounds one Russian conscript; the Chechens suffer no visible casualties. Militarily speaking, it is an insignificant engagement. Yet when the time comes to report to headquarters, wrote Tolstoy, the incident balloons into a heroic battle: an assault of ‘considerable’ Chechen forces, a Russian counterattack with bayonets and the routing of the enemy. ‘In the course of this action two privates were slightly wounded and one killed,’ reads the report. ‘The highlanders’ losses were about a hundred killed and wounded.’

Tolstoy, who’d served in the Caucasus, knew what he was writing about, and in Hadji Murat, set in the mid-nineteenth century, he portrayed the self-serving lies of an imperial army with memorable effect. So what would he have made of the gap between reality and the official version in the contemporary Chechen war?

More than a decade has passed since then president Boris Yeltsin ordered the Russian army to take control of Chechnya and ‘restore constitutional order’. More than five years have passed since Vladimir Putin sent the army back to Chechnya with the aim of securing Russia from terrorism.

The so-called ‘first’ war (1994–96) and ‘second’ war (1999–to date) both had lofty official aims. The results, however, have brought about precisely the opposite. Rather than a place of constitutional, or any other order, Chechnya has for years been a lawless ghetto. Here, soldiers and policemen have been able to loot, rape and murder – almost certain of escaping punishment. Chechen rebel factions have blown up civilians who happen to be around military targets; increasingly they have dispensed with military targets altogether and simply aimed at civilians. Chechens in irregular, pro-Kremlin units torture and kidnap fellow Chechens – often former rebel comrades in arms.

As for protecting Russia from terrorism, President Putin’s war has provoked an unprecedented wave of outrages: the downing of passenger planes, a mass hostage-taking at a Moscow theatre, an explosion in the Moscow metro and a bloodbath at a school in Beslan. If terrorism can be defined as violence against civilians in the name of politico-military goals, then much of what the Russian military has perpetrated in Chechnya should be added to this sinister list. A recent survey by the aid group Médecins Sans Frontières found that Chechens suffer some of the highest levels of psychological trauma in the world. 9 out of 10 people in the study had lost someone close to them in the war. 1 in 6 had witnessed the death of a close relative. 80 per cent had seen people wounded. Two thirds said they never felt safe and almost every single respondent had come under aerial bombardment or crossfire. Terror: the word is apt.

According to various reliable estimates, more than 100,000 Chechens have been killed in the last decade, and several hundred thousand others have at some point lost their homes or been forced to flee: that from a population of one million. Grozny, once a city of about 450,000 and one of the Soviet Union’s major oil refining centres, is a gruesome ruin. Oil spills, radiation, landmines, unexploded ordnance, and destroyed forests scar and poison Chechnya’s landscape. By sober unofficial estimates, more than 20,000 Russian soldiers have been killed.

Yet on Russian television screens, all now controlled by President Putin’s Kremlin, Chechnya is at peace. There is rarely any mention of resistance to Russian forces, only a flow of Tolstoyan success stories about ‘liquidated’ bandits and foiled terrorist plots. Believe the Russian media and Chechnya has enthusiastically embraced the Russian state and President Putin himself. Accept this version and one believes official reports that Chechens voted unreservedly for a constitution cementing them within Russia. One believes they flocked to elect as president Akhmad Kadyrov, a former rebel mufti who went over to the Russians at the start of Vladimir Putin’s war. (Kadyrov – who in fact was hated, feared or mistrusted by almost all sides in Chechnya – was assassinated in the summer of 2004.) Logically, one must also consider it normal that many of Kadyrov’s powers were transferred to his son Ramzan, a boxing enthusiast accused by human rights specialists of being one of the republic’s chief torturers.

As 2004 gave way to 2005, the official media portrayal of Chechen loyalty to – love for – the Russian Federation knew no bounds. The Russian-installed government in Chechnya was promising its sick, broken population not only peace, but a film industry, a football stadium and what the prime minister, Sergei Abramov, called ‘Disneyland’, apparently an aquatic fun park in the city of Gudermes. To mark the New Year, President Putin personally awarded Ramzan Kadyrov the Hero of Russia medal – the supreme decoration of the Russian state.

***

At about this time, 10 years after the first tanks rolled toward Grozny, I made a visit to Chechnya. I had been there many times before. Its capital was a place I knew well and over the last decade I had observed several stages of its slow-motion catastrophe. Yet I found myself in a place I had difficulty recognising. Certainly Grozny was not the impoverished, but still functioning ex-Soviet regional centre I’d seen in 1994. But neither did it resemble the devilish battlefield I’d come to know later. Grozny had become a twilight zone – a place where the definitions of war and peace were blurred, all loyalties suspect and the aims of the combatants themselves unclear.

The fact of having made previous visits also did little to lessen the shock of witnessing the city’s appalling condition. In the central square kilometre – an area once thick with institutional buildings, the university, large apartment blocks, major thoroughfares and parks – barely a stone is left. Flattened by bombs and shells, then bulldozed clean, the onetime heart of the city is a desert. And from this ground zero the destruction radiates for miles: through gutted factories and sprawling neighbourhoods of smashed houses, through disembowelled apartment complexes, through tangled, wild undergrowth that no one dares enter for fear of bombs and mines.

The only crowds you’ll find are those in the Stalingrad-like centre. War never prevented the Chechens from trading and in a place where there have long been no shops, the open-air bazaar is a lifeline. But at dusk, even those crowds leave for the villages and Grozny becomes dark, quiet and dangerous. In my estimate – reached by driving at night and counting lighted windows – no more than a third of the population, or 150,000 people, permanently reside in what was once one of the most important cities in the Caucasus.

Official Moscow and its subordinates in Chechnya talk up their reconstruction programmes. But in reality these projects have in ten years accomplished almost nothing other than enrich those controlling the funds. In Grozny the restored or reconstructed buildings are in such small numbers that they are startling – far more so than the ruins. I counted only dozens and, bar a few exceptions, they were security forces barracks and offices, institutions serving the oil industry, or the electricity and gas companies that keep Chechens, however miserable, alive. Grozny is a monument not only to the Russian army’s destructiveness, but the Russian state’s inability to rebuild the peace.

Walking through this wasteland, I discovered the former site of the presidential palace and its rose garden. Across the way, there would have been the Hotel Kavkaz, an exotic, semi-Soviet, semi-Oriental building in which I stayed once before the war. There would have been the national bank, parliament and internal security ministry. Today, only mud on each side of the asphalt indicates where the road, the pavements, squares and buildings used to lie. A young girl passed. Did she remember the presidential palace? This had been the headquarters of Dzhokhar Dudayev and the original separatist government, as well as the scene of an epic battle early in the first war. ‘No idea!’ the girl said. She was sixteen, so only six when the wars began.

Nearby, I found a woman, one of these typically expressive and incalculably tough Chechen housewives. She was collecting water. This meant towing a trolley-load of bottles and urns to a broken pipe, then towing the trolley home, where she would boil the lot. Few parts of Chechnya have running water anymore. Taps, sinks and baths, like phones and rubbish bins, are relics of a forgotten civilisation. (Not that the lack of water is hindering the plan for an aqua fun park in Gudermes.)

This woman, however, possessed something valuable: memory. ‘Over there,’ she said, ‘you had the jewellers. There was the music school. There was a college. There were apartment buildings...’ All this time she pointed into space. The broken pipe gushing water marked the site of the Okean (meaning ocean) restaurant and fish shop, she said. I remembered the spot well: it was there that one of the first bombs dropped in 1994, killing two bystanders and drawing a crowd of bemused, outraged Grozny residents. None of them could have imagined what was yet to come. ‘It’s like a dream,’ the woman said.

Think of the towns annihilated in the Boxing Day 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean and you have Grozny – the difference being that one disaster was delivered in minutes by nature, the other over 10 years, with great effort, planning and determination, by mankind.

***

Large-scale combat in the second war ended in 2000 after the capture of Grozny and the scattering of thousands of poorly supplied rebels to the mountain villages. Yet, as happened in Iraq after President George Bush’s famous declaration of an end to major operations, the war was only entering the first of numerous new phases. Each of these has been more opaque than the last, reaching the point today when few in Russia or even Chechnya can fully define what the conflict is about anymore.

There is still open fighting in the mountains. Long range artillery salvos directed into the forests are audible from Grozny in the early hours. But the combat takes place far from most witnesses. It is up in the Nozhai Yurt, Vedeno and Shatoi regions that a new generation of commanders almost unknown to the outside world, continue to operate. Until his killing in March of 2005, the veteran leader and Chechnya’s only freely elected president, Aslan Maskhadov, also remained active. He is survived by Shamil Basayev, another of the original commanders, and, for a long time now, the most extreme of them all. Their survival – in Maskhadov’s case lasting five and a half years continuously on the run since 1999 – testifies partly to the inefficiency and corruption of the Russian forces, partly to the rebels’ determination, robust intelligence gathering and a widespread network of civilian supporters. There is simply no other way that a guerrilla force could function so long in such a small place.

In the plains, insurgents wage a campaign of assassinations and small-scale ambushes. Russian forces and their Chechen irregular allies respond with equally ruthless counter-insurgency operations, ranging from raids on suspected hideouts to the kidnapping of rebels’ relatives. But this is a low-level conflict. Even in Grozny, that great vortex of urban warfare, extended combat has become the exception. Every week, or every other week, guerrillas will gun down a pro-Russian official, or perhaps blow apart a jeep-load of police. Just as often, if not more, Russian and pro-Russian Chechen forces will corner and kill a suspected rebel, or group of rebels. However, larger-scale actions – such as the rebel takeover of much of the city for a few hours in the summer of 2004 – are infrequent. On a random visit to Grozny, one will probably hear nothing more than isolated bursts of rifle fire. There are no longer aerial attacks on the city, no shelling, or rocketing and almost never any battle involving more than a few houses or a single street. Nights, which for years were rocked by incessant firefights and guerrilla rocket attacks, are now eerily silent. The rebels have gone into deep cover, hiding, as they now must, not only from regular forces, but many of their own countrymen who have turned, or have been turned against them. One fighter I met, his ‘disguise’ consisting of a smart overcoat and polished shoes, told me that even the long-favourite tactic of laying roadside bombs against military traffic in the city had become ineffective. The security forces reacted too quickly; the waves of arrests were too difficult to escape. Besides, as this man put it, Russia has more armoured personnel carriers and jeeps than the Chechen rebels have men. ‘They don’t really care about an APC or two. We can’t afford to keep losing a man for an operation like that.’

On their websites, the rebels have lost none of their old swagger and bellicosity. But evidence on the ground suggests that after all these years the assorted rebel forces are at least badly weakened. The Russian military’s incomparably greater resources have squeezed the guerrillas, hampered their ability to regroup and reduced the territory in which they feel at home. An undeclared state of martial law, torture, and the use of informants (themselves, often previously victims of torture) have undercut the rebels’ links to a society already bled by poverty and fatigue. Rebel access to funds has been slashed. And on a purely tactical level, years of practice have brought improvements to the performance of Russian units. Unlike their hapless predecessors in the early stages of the first war, they are often well-trained, experienced and know where they are going and what to expect when they get there.

However, to believe the rebels are broken would be simplistic and to say that the war is ending, or already has, would be wrong. The insurgents kill Russian soldiers on an almost daily basis and when cornered often fight to the death. The fact is that the resistance has fragmented to the point where it is almost impossible to defeat in the normal sense of the term. There is no Reichstag to capture in Chechnya and the death of Maskhadov – ultimately more a political, than military leader – means that many of his supporters will simply become more hardline.

The core resistance, which springs from the original nationalist rebellion of the first war, has adapted for a long game. For these fighters, resisting Russian troops is a calling: they have no interest in surrender. Another wing is composed of part-timers with grievances to avenge against the Russian authorities and soldiers. This potentially includes most Chechen men, although in practice only a small percentage take up arms. The other principal wing consists of Islamic ideologues, blinded by their revolutionary fervour into committing horrific terrorist acts. There is also a large pool of men who might be simultaneously bandits, guerrilla fighters and opportunists. Whether all these separate wings could ever again unite is questionable, but the fact is they have survived, and the result is stalemate: the rebels cannot drive out the Russian army, yet nor can the Russian army crush the rebels.

Bizarre as it appears, the impasse is one that suits powerful elements on each side. An unseasoned observer would naturally imagine that all the impressive Russian hardware, those helmeted soldiers, secret service operatives and loyal Chechen militiamen are moving irresistibly towards the day when they can clear the last cellar and forest of resistance. The goal, one would assume, is total victory. Yet closer inspection reveals something quite different: an army more interested in reaching accommodations than winning, and a war that is self-perpetuating, sustainable in the long term – a career. In the rebels’ extremist wing, war has also become a way of life. War means power and war means recruits, mostly young people barely able to imagine anything else. There are those in Chechnya, and in Russia generally, for whom peace and order would spell catastrophe.

Not surprising, then, that the federal army resembles the enemy it was sent to fight. Just like textbook bandits, regular troops roam in unmarked vehicles. They wear the same masks worn by terrorists. They raid and loot private homes at night. They execute people without trial. They hold hostages, even dead bodies for ransom. They organise and provide cover for smuggling operations and for black market deals between lawless Chechnya and the neighbouring regions. Picture this conflict not just as a war, but an extreme version of a mafia turf struggle in which armed gangs chase money and power while trying to stay alive.

Indeed, anything, anybody can be sold and bought in Chechnya. The ruins are scavenged for their bricks and scrap metal; oil is stolen and driven into southern Russia; compensation money is pilfered, extorted and diverted. Killing has a price: Russian citizens sell the Chechens weapons and ammunition. (For sceptics: note that every bullet and grenade fired by the rebels is Russian-made; there are no arms factories in Chechnya; Russian territory surrounds Chechnya on 3 sides and the fourth frontier, Georgia, is impassable to anything but light foot traffic.) Peace, too, has its price. A senior officer within the pro-Russian Chechen forces told me that the Russians cut deals with the rebels on ceasefire zones in the mountains. So there may be fighting in one valley, but calm in the next, despite the presence of guerrillas.

Such deal-making – and blurring of lines – has its apex in the complex relationship between Russia’s federal forces and their irregular Chechen allies. Many, perhaps a majority, of the local militia joining the Russians are themselves ex-guerrillas. Some enlist because they are sickened by rebel radicalisation, others because there is no other work. But for many, joining the Russians is a way to legalise what they were already doing: wielding a gun and ransacking what remains of Chechnya’s resources. In their black uniforms, unmarked cars and with their reputation for abduction and torture, the irregular units are as disconcerting a presence to most Chechens as are the Russian soldiers. Many Chechen militiamen are thought to be double agents and their military contribution in the fight against the guerrillas shows mixed results. Indeed, rather than help Russia to end to the war, the pitting of Chechens against Chechens has wreaked havoc in the clannish society, triggering innumerable blood feuds and a guarantee of many years more violence – something the profiteers on all sides must welcome.

Banditry has not been ‘cleaned up’ in Chechnya, as patriotic Russians might fancy. It has been expanded, diversified and nationalised.

***

Back in 1994, the idea of a serious war appeared absurd. It seemed impossible to outside observers that Russia, while lumbering towards democracy, could turn its vast army against what officials themselves described as a few hundred armed criminals. In a state stretching across eleven time zones, Chechnya was a pinprick, its entire population numbering less than the Russian armed forces alone. Some generals refused to take part in the so-called ‘disarming of bandit formations’. One famously halted his column when a group of unarmed Chechen women blocked the road. For a few tense days, it seemed there might be enough sense left in Moscow and Grozny somehow to pull from the brink. There was still a sense of certain taboos – a taboo, for example, against airforce pilots bombing elderly people and children and any other bystanders who were supposedly citizens of their own country.

However, such scruples are only hard to break once and as soon as the first aerial bombs hit Grozny’s crowded streets, anything became possible. Indeed, those first air raids seem almost innocent in retrospect – more like simple murder than the total abandonment of moral principles that soon came. Between the explosions, there remained time to experience shock. Then the bombs fell too fast and this luxury vanished. The impossible became normal and Chechnya slid into the abyss in which it has remained since.

So what was at the root of the Kremlin’s obsession with Chechnya in 1994 and again in 1999? What was it about this remote corner that motivated Russia’s leaders to stumble not once, but twice into a military and political quagmire? There are two answers in both cases – one related to broad national security and geo-strategic concerns, the other to narrow interests of internal Kremlin politics.

Chechnya and the Caucasus region around it have been strategically significant for centuries. Home to dozens of little-known ethnic groups, the Caucasus forms a crossroads between Asia and Europe that the regional rivals – Iran, Turkey and, especially, Russia – have always coveted. So although it is common to talk of the ‘first’ war in Chechnya in 1994–96 and the ‘second’ starting in 1999, the truth is that these are only the latest in a centuries-long string of conflicts throughout the region, including two centuries of Russian-Chechen bloodshed.

At the collapse of the USSR, these mostly dormant geo-strategic issues became newly relevant. With the independence of the south Caucasus states, the northern slopes of the mountains turned into Russia’s most troubled frontier. On the northern, Russian side there was inter-ethnic tension and Chechnya’s independence declaration. To the south, in Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Moscow faced growing diplomatic and economic competition from Western countries – particularly in relation to the Caspian Sea oil boom. For some, the intense diplomatic struggle to decide the pipeline routes from the Caspian was a key factor in starting the Chechen conflict. Originally, the principal export pipeline from Azerbaijan’s big offshore fields ran through the North Caucasus.

The oil argument is essentially that Russia had to secure Chechnya from the separatists in order to secure the oil export route. But that has always been something of a red herring. The Russian pipeline (now eclipsed by the new, US-backed pipe going through Georgia to Turkey) was antiquated and in any case simple to re-route around unstable Chechnya. As for oil in Chechnya itself, there is very little, while the infrastructure, including the once mammoth refinery in Grozny, has been heavily and deliberately bombed.

Another strategic factor that some believe to be instrumental in the decision to go to war was fear in Moscow that Chechnya’s separatist revolution would spread through the rest of the region, even to Tatarstan in the centre of Russia. However, although various degrees of unrest swept the seven tiny ethnic republics of the North Caucasus, only Chechnya sought independence, while Tatarstan was clearly content with autonomy.

So while there were valid areas for concern throughout the early 1990s, none presented overwhelming danger in late 1994, as Boris Yeltsin’s Kremlin Security Council decided to send troops into the region.

In 1999, the situation was rather different. From a Russian viewpoint, the southern Caucasus was stabilising. But to the north, Chechnya was out of control. In ruins, full of unemployed, traumatised and armed men, and abandoned by the outside world, the republic was the model of a failed state. The elected president Aslan Maskhadov, who had negotiated the withdrawal of Russian troops, was unable to impose his authority. The traditional, decentralised rule of clan elders lay in tatters from the wartime upheavals. And amid all the disorder, only newly arrived, radical Islamic groups – groups that had both money and at least the illusion of discipline – seemed to gain in strength. Chechnya made headlines as kidnapping capital of the world. Journalists, businessmen, aid workers – all who entered the republic were at great risk. A handful of hostages were killed, the most gruesome cases being four telecom engineers, (three British, one a New Zealander) who were beheaded two months after being kidnapped in 1998.

In the summer of 1999, things suddenly got worse. Warlord Shamil Basayev led hundreds of Chechens into the neighbouring region of Dagestan, ostensibly to support an uprising of radical Islamic groups – so-called Wahabbis. Russia’s people were in shock. For the first time in three years, their soldiers were being sent into pitched battles with the feared Chechens and there seemed to be no limit to how weak the country under Boris Yeltsin, by now in the last months of his presidency, could become. Then without warning in September a series of bombings ripped down blocks of apartments in Moscow and elsewhere, killing 294 people. No one claimed responsibility, no one was caught, no concrete evidence was produced, but the blame was decided at once: Chechen terrorism.

Of course, even at this stage, there were important arguments against sending in the army for another full-blown invasion. The experience of the first war, ended just three years earlier, did not recommend military solutions. The first war had failed militarily, weakened Russia’s image abroad, scuttled reforms of the armed services, alienated Chechens of all stripes and stoked the fires of Islamic revolution. Yet despite these recent lessons, the Kremlin did not hesitate. Another war – destined to be as ruinous and unsuccessful as the first – was the only option considered.

Why? The simple answer, of course, is that the Kremlin blundered in 1994 and failed to learn its lessons for 1999. But there is another, more complex and far more important reason, and for this one must delve into the politics of the Kremlin itself.

Consider the first war. In the winter of 1994, Yeltsin was at almost the lowest ebb of a turbulent career. Disillusioned Russians no longer believed in his economic and political reforms – and with good reason. Just a year earlier, Yeltsin had used tanks to resolve his breakdown in relations with the opposition in parliament. Millions were subject to crushing poverty. Diminished by ill health and drink, Yeltsin himself barely appeared to be in control. At the same time, a shift was taking place inside the Kremlin, with the last of Yeltsin’s politically liberal allies making way for a hawkish, unsavoury and unprofessional entourage including Yeltsin’s bodyguard.

It was this new team that insisted on force to resolve Chechnya’s nationalist revolt, which Moscow had largely ignored during the previous three years. There was little analysis of the situation, while the defence minister Pavel Grachev, who should have known better, was mired in corruption allegations and ready to go along with anything. All the evidence suggests that these men, headed by Yeltsin, believed they had hit on a good idea. Invading Chechnya would show the country that the Kremlin was still in charge and that Yeltsin, blamed by nostalgic patriots for losing the Soviet Union, would not ‘lose’ another centimetre of territory. Far from being a ludicrous concept, war in Chechnya – in the Yeltsin team’s eyes – was inevitable.

Of course, things did not turn out as hoped. The victorious little expedition turned into a twenty one month guerrilla conflict that took tens of thousands of lives and ended in 1996 with a humiliating Russian pullout and de facto Chechen independence. Yet the war had done little real harm to its political and military authors back in Moscow, an astonishing fact helping to explain the willingness with which a second invasion was embraced just three years later.

This time, Yeltsin’s Kremlin found itself in even more trouble than in 1994. Yeltsin in 1999 was ill (again) and barely in control of the presidency. His latest entourage was deeply unpopular. Only recently, the country had suffered the collapse of the rouble and the loss of millions of people’s bank savings – one of the darkest periods in ten painful years of Russia’s attempt to create a market economy. As if that were not enough, Russians had also endured the humiliation of watching NATO bomb their old ally Yugoslavia to eject Serb forces from Kosovo. In Moscow parliament was inching towards impeachment proceedings for, among other things, the first Chechen war. In New York and Geneva investigators were closing in on allegations of kickbacks, embezzlement, hidden bank accounts and the laundering of billions of dollars. Most seriously, legislative elections threatened the Kremlin and its allies in December 1999. In July 2000 there would be all-important presidential polls to replace Yeltsin.

With anger against Yeltsin mounting throughout the country, the entire Kremlin establishment that had dominated Russia and enriched itself from Russia over the last decade faced destruction. The most effective challenger, Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov, looked increasingly likely to win any election, and there was for the first time real speculation that Yeltsin’s people could end up in jail. The appointment in August of Vladimir Putin, a man with no political base, no economics experience, nor even charisma, as prime minister only seemed to confirm that Yeltsin had lost his grip. But then came the events in Dagestan and the apartment block bombings.

It was now that Vladimir Putin, the almost unknown ex-chief of the FSB, or secret services, suddenly came into his own. By taking personal responsibility for the military response in Dagestan, the decisive, strong-willed martial arts expert became man of the hour. By talking up Russia’s military prowess, using crude, violent language and simply by looking and acting sober, Putin caught the mood of the nation. ‘Wipe out the terrorists in the shithouse,’ Putin declared in his celebrated phrase.

Scared, enraged and frustrated, Russians took little persuading that another merciless campaign was needed in Chechnya. Among the military, too, there was hunger for revenge. Russia had a great many problems in the late Yeltsin years – poverty, unbridled corruption, awesome environmental ills, a shambolic armed forces, declining birth rate – but Chechnya was seen as the sorest part of the whole sick body. Cure Chechnya, the idea went, and the rest could be cured too – even the country’s chronic sense of impotence on the international stage. After all, what could those NATO countries that brushed aside Russian objections to bombing the sovereign state of Yugoslavia say when Moscow unleashed jets against Chechnya?

The risk posed by Chechnya in 1999 clearly required drastic action. Regardless of any political motives, the security argument for going to war was strong – infinitely more so than in 1994. Yet another total occupation was always going to be a disaster. Some cooler heads suggested attempting to seal off Chechnya. Others put forward the idea of partitioning the republic, with Russia occupying only the more easily controllable plains in the north. The beleaguered Aslan Maskhadov called desperately for negotiations, but was dismissed out of hand. Having been unable to control Shamil Basayev, Maskhadov was declared a spent force. However, many in Chechnya still supported him. At the very least they supported anyone who was not Basayev or one of the other radical warlords. The thought of more war was agony to the vast majority, who had not had time to recover morally and materially from the first. Yet no one in Moscow wanted to help Maskhadov or any moderate element. The war started with enthusiastic backing from the Russian public.

***

Questions over the extent of political ambitions in driving the start of the second Chechen war become more troubling on inspection of the outwardly solid casus belli: the Dagestan incursion, followed by the apartment block bombs.

Moscow’s line was that the Dagestan incursion and the bombs were directly linked and that the decision to invade Chechnya was merely a response. However, Moscow had begun plans to attack Chechnya long before either of these events. That was stated by Sergei Stepashin, prime minister before Putin’s surprise appointment in late summer of 1999. According to his account, the original plan for moving into Chechnya had been drawn up in March, long before Dagestan or the apartment block bombs, and was to be executed that summer. In other words, the Chechen assault on Dagestan had forced a delay in the Russian invasion of several months.

Maybe the Chechen raiders, as Basayev boasted, did want to establish a fundamentalist Islamic state stretching to the Caspian Sea, and in so doing triggered Russian reprisal. On the other hand, Basayev the military man would have known very well that the bare, rocky slopes of Dagestan (as opposed to the forests of Chechnya) would make a poor place to defend against Russian helicopters and jets. So it is also possible that the whole Dagestan affair was really just a diversionary attack by the Chechens in order to win time before the long-planned Russian assault on their own territory.

The truth could easily lie between theories. Maybe Basayev planned to draw Russian forces away from Chechnya, while at the same time making a speculative attempt at destabilising Dagestan. Maybe, as has been rumoured in Russia, Basayev was himself tricked, with some apparently friendly force in Moscow encouraging, even funding the adventure with the idea that a flare up in Dagestan would better prepare the ground for a new war in Chechnya. After all, until then the Russians had ignored, even tolerated the presence of the radical Islamic groups in Dagestan’s mountains and, although Basayev’s incursion was especially large in scale, it was far from the first. Skirmishes had been taking place along the Chechen-Dagestan border ever since the end of the first war.

One of the many strange elements in this episode, according to the speaker of the upper house of the Russian