When perestroika came, this sense of rebellion only intensified. Dzhokar Dudayev, a Chechen general in the Soviet air force, with dashing looks and a pencil moustache, was posted in Estonia as the Soviet Union collapsed and saw the small nation push for freedom from Moscow. He may have been a Soviet officer, but he too remembered the injustices of the past. He had been an infant during the deportation,
when his entire family were branded traitors despite the fact that two older brothers had fought in the Red Army. In November 1991, under Dudayevs leadership, Chechens declared independence.
But Chechnya was not Estonia, and this was a red line for Yeltsin. The Baltic States, like Ukraine and the Central Asian republics, had all been full-fledged 'SSRs' (Soviet Socialist Republics), with at least theoretical rights of secession from the USSR. Chechnya, by contrast, had been a region of the Russian SSR. Moscow had voluntarily given up control of the other Soviet republics, but there were plenty of other regions with similar status to Chechnya inside the Russian SSR boundaries. Allowing Chechnya to slip away could set a precedent that would see more and more territory ebb from the new, post-Soviet rulers in Moscow, as inexorably as their tsarist predecessors had once acquired it.
In late 1994, Yeltsin ordered what was meant to be a speedy operation to take back control of Chechnya, but the rump of the old Soviet Army was in no shape to fight a war against a motivated, nimble opponent on its own mountainous terrain. After an attempt to seize Grozny by land ended in defeat, Yeltsin resorted to crude, criminal tactics, pounding the city from the air. Thousands of civilians died in the attacks on the capital. The mess in Chechnya came to symbolize the hopelessness of the Yeltsin era. Two years of gruesome fighting killed tens of thousands of civilians and probably fifteen thousand Russian soldiers. It ended in a humiliating defeat for Moscow, and a brief period of de facto Chechen independence in the late 1990s, during which the territory became a Hobbesian nightmare of violence, kidnapping, and extortion.
Putin, as prime minister and then acting president, cemented his rise to power by launching a new campaign that would be equally bloody, but would eventually bring the territory back under Moscow's control. He filled the airwaves with tough talk, promising to hunt down the Chechen bandits and waste them in the outhouse' if necessary. The Chechen battle was portrayed as a terrorist struggle against the legitimate Russian state. This was partly true—the Chechens did begin to use terror as a weapon. But the context of extreme violence against them, both during the two wars but also further back in history, was ignored.
II
In early 2000, Putin used one of his first interviews as president to tell the Chechens they were not under attack from Russia, but being brought under its protection. 'We don't want them to develop the syndrome of a defeated nation. The people should understand that they are not a defeated people. They are a liberated people.'4
Putin said this as his fighter jets were bombing Grozny, raining more misery down on a city that already seemed as though it had reached total devastation. The damage was on a scale not seen in Europe since the Second World War. There was not a building that had remained intact from the two wars—Yeltsin's, then Putin's.
A survey by Medecins Sans Frontieres in the aftermath of the second Chechen war found that nine out of ten Chechens had lost someone close to them during the two wars, while one in six had witnessed the death of a close relative with their own eyes, and 80 per cent of people had seen someone wounded. Two-thirds said they never felt safe, and almost every single respondent said they had come under shelling or aerial bombardment, or been caught in crossfire.5
After the ruthless military action came attempts at peace. Moscow knew it could not win over Chechnya without at least some portion of local support. Akhmad Kadyrov, the rebel mufti during the first war, changed sides and agreed to do Moscow's bidding. Kadyrov and his clan benefited personally from collaborating with the old enemy, but after years of misery he also believed that further resistance was a path to extinction. Many Chechens agreed, and were willing to give peace a chance at any price, even if that meant collaborating with the Russians. Kadyrov, with Russian backing, granted amnesty to thousands of Chechen men who had fought against the Russians. Fighters emerged from the mountains and forests, and joined new battalions loyal to Kadyrov. Although they were theoretically integrated into the Russian state, the battalions essentially became Kadyrov's private army, and were known as the Kadyrovtsy. Those who refused to lay down their arms were hunted down, first by the Russians in ruthless 'cleansing' operations and filtration camps, then by the Kadyrovtsy, who terrorized anyone suspected of having links to the insurgency, which took on an ever-more Islamist bent.
Akhmad Kadyrov was killed in a bomb blast in Grozny in 2004, and his son Ramzan, then a stocky twenty-seven-year-old with a cropped ginger beard, effectively took over. Ramzan travelled to Moscow and was received personally by Putin, who voiced condolences on the death of his father. In a pale-blue tracksuit, Ramzan looked absurdly out of place in the Kremlins ornate interiors, but he and Putin formed a personal bond. Over the next years, Moscow showered Chechnya with cash. Ramzan used it to rebuild the region, but also to cement his personal rule.
By the time I made my first trip to Grozny, in 2009, the city was unrecognizable from the eerie photographs of Stalingrad-level destruction from less than a decade previously. Neat tree-lined avenues, of new apartment blocks and pleasant cafes, were intersected by pedestrian crossings where digital counters flicked the seconds down until the green man appeared. If you didn't look too closely, it could have been Belgium.
Each time I returned to Grozny, there were newer and shinier additions paid for with Moscow's roubles: a whole street in which the charred husks of apartment blocks had been replaced with brand-new versions; empty squares newly filled with white marble-effect ministerial buildings; and to top it all off, Grozny City, a thirty-two-story skyscraper housing a five-star hotel with a rooftop restaurant, a gym, and plush bedrooms with luxury toiletries. Next door, an enormous Ottoman-style mosque appeared, its minarets stretching far into the sky. The cognitive dissonance with the state of the city a decade previously was loud enough to cause tinnitus.
The money from Moscow came as part of a deal, offered by Putin via the medium of Kadyrov. In exchange for a free hand inside Chechnya, Kadyrov paid obsequious lip service to Putin, an almost mediaeval pledge of feudal loyalty. Portraits of Putin found their way onto flags, posters, and billboards across Grozny. Together with Ramzan and his slain father, they made up a Holy Trinity for modern Chechnya.
In 2008, less than a decade after Putin had ordered the bombing of the city, Grozny's central avenue was renamed from Victory Avenue to Putin Avenue. Kadyrov spoke at a ceremony to mark the switch: 'Terrorists from sixty countries came to Chechnya, not to make it an independent country, but to transform it into a springboard for destroying Russia.
They didn't succeed, thanks to Putin's will and resolve,' said Kadyrov. 'This avenue is being renamed after Vladimir Putin because he is the saviour of the Chechen people. He saved us from genocide.'
For Putin, the deal with Kadyrov was primarily about Russia's sovereignty, not about his own ego. It was not important that Chechens should see him as a personal saviour, but vital that they recognize the Russian state and its power as legitimate, despite the two terrible wars. A peaceful, loyal Chechnya was a key part of his mission to create a unified, great Russia.