Here, however, I saw no beautiful deaths and no ugly ones. Just hunks of bodies that a moment ago had been living. Unlike the film heroes, these tank gunners hadn’t had time to think their last thoughts, let alone bid anyone farewell. It was as if they had never even existed. A keen foreboding came over me that it would not be the last time I witnessed a scene like this – and that I’d better learn to handle it. But I never did. Because, unless you are a maniac, you can never learn to handle the sight of mangled corpses. I was jolted from my stupor by the sad and weary voice of a soldier: ‘Hey, you’d better get out of here. There could be more tanks on the way.’ I silently nodded and turned away.
Before long I met a large group of young people who, like me, were trying to escape from the combat zone. Despite being total strangers, we joined together and formed a long, colourful convoy of civilians, unprotected by camouflage, heading out via the railway depot towards Grozny’s Oktyabr district. Soon – it was around lunchtime – a number of Russian ground-attack planes appeared in the sky. They must have wanted to survey the scene of combat, and spotting our brightly coloured convoy, mistook us for the enemy. Or maybe they knew perfectly well that we weren’t combatants, but all the same one of the planes turned around and unleashed a long burst from its rapid-fire gun. Luckily, nobody was hit. In our naïvety, it simply hadn’t occurred to us to disperse when the planes had appeared. After a while the planes departed, there was a lull in the shooting, and with a clean conscience I headed home. So now I had witnessed war: I had seen its blood and its corpses, I had heard small-arms fire and had even been fired at myself – or so it had seemed, at any rate. I was naïve, and didn’t have the vaguest notion of what lay in store for me. Yet of all the horrible deaths I was destined to witness in this interminable and brutal war, the image that is seared deepest in my memory is the death of the tank gunners who just minutes earlier had almost killed me. Maybe because they were the first real wartime deaths that I witnessed – the first living people to be snuffed out by war, or perhaps it was because they hadn’t killed me when I stood stock still in their tank’s field of fire. Many moments from that day are etched in my memory as isolated fragments: the opposition infantry going into attack. The calm absorption of the Chechen special forces and the Presidential Guard. The excitability of the commander of the ‘Tolstoy-Yurt Militia’. The three drunken men with Red Cross armbands sobbing, ‘I don’t want my people to die!’ For some reason those three stood out as the most openhearted of everyone I saw that day. The woman with her two twin boys in her arms, fleeing from a building that had been set alight by a tank round. And the crowning touch: the ghastly episode with the deaths of the tank crew.
Arriving home, I switched on the television and was completely stunned. On the main Russian channel, the presenter was announcing, ‘The Armed Opposition forces have taken control of Grozny with Ruslan Labazanov’s troops seizing the Presidential Palace. But Dudayev loyalists are not ready to accept the situation, and we can expect an intense night ahead in Grozny, for they’re sure to try to win back the city…’ Events which I had witnessed myself were being presented as if exactly the reverse had occurred, and it all sounded so convincing that I even began to doubt my own eyes. Since they knew I worked as a journalist, my neighbours soon came round for ‘the truth’, and I told them openly about everything I had witnessed. They began angrily cursing the Russian media: ‘Those lying parasites,’ and they immediately went off to tell the whole neighbourhood the ‘real truth, straight from our own Chechen journalist’. So the Russian government’s disinformation campaign was an instant flop with our neighbours. Over the coming days we would discover what rules the Russian Army played by. Tanks began opening fire on residential areas of the city and civilians were killed in large numbers. Some tank men surrendered to the Chechens without a fight when they received orders to fire on residential buildings from which no one had been shooting. Almost every building in central Grozny suffered some degree of damage, with the Presidential Palace getting off the lightest; untouched by a single round, its windows were merely shattered.
4
At that time, along with plenty of Chechens, I supported neither Dudayev’s government nor the opposition. I was an ordinary young guy, no different from thousands of others across the vast Soviet Union. I listened to Modern Talking and Abba, loved going to discos, where breakdancing was all the rage, and in my spare time I read books. Up until perestroika my life had been uneventful. I had gone to school, then college. Then came mandatory service in the Soviet Army, after which I got a job, studied at university and so on. It must have been my innate curiosity that led me into journalism, which I hadn’t considered initially. Yet even as a journalist, I had little time for politics. Soviet ideology had the most amazing ability to disappoint the moment you opened your textbook, because of the glaring discrepancy between the official picture and the reality. People who earnestly believed the stories printed by the government press were considered soft in the head. It was only when the USSR’s political processes were freed from Party control and things started moving in a new direction that I began to take an interest in politics. And then Chechnya declared independence, unleashing events that simply couldn’t be ignored. Yet I always remained impartial and apolitical, as a journalist should. Following independence, Chechnya faced huge economic problems. These were to be expected for such a young state but they were also artificially fuelled by Russian interference. The Chechen people had more than their share of woes, and so the Chechen government faced mounting discontent. The majority of Chechens didn’t regard Russia as an enemy state; they saw her at the time (as they still do now) as a country rich in culture, a country that would make a good neighbour. After all, they had imbibed not just their own cultural tradition, but Russia’s too. Ordinary Chechens saw the clash between the opposition and the government as nothing more than the resentment of those left out in the cold after the division of revenue and power. But this one day turned thousands of neutral Chechens into ardent supporters of Dudayev. No matter how noble their intentions, the opposition had arrived under the aegis of a military that for centuries had been deployed against the Chechen people. Accepting assistance from an army reviled for decimating the Chechen nation every fifty years or so over the past few centuries was not the cleverest move. In securing the help of the Russian Army, the opposition committed a fatal blunder. And it was this, along with the Russians’ indiscriminate targeting of civilians and the wanton cruelty of their soldiers, that turned many Chechens into supporters of Dudayev. The blatant lies of the Russian authorities, the killing of civilians, the bombing of homes – all this illustrated Russia’s true intentions and methods so graphically that within days I too had gone from being a genuinely impartial journalist to a partisan witness to yet another – history was littered with them – Chechen tragedy.
We should give credit where credit is due; among the opposition leaders were honest men who sincerely desired prosperity for their homeland. But the following story reveals that there were other types too. The Chechen elders had by this point entered the political fray. A delegation of these elders decided to visit the home of one of the Armed Opposition leaders. In Chechen tradition, they wanted to entreat this man’s father to talk some sense into his son before human blood was spilt in vain. The meeting took place and the father replied to the delegation that he’d be happy for his son to quit politics but the son had already invested too much money from his own pocket into this ‘project’ and he couldn’t just drop everything without at least recouping his investment. So while for some the ‘overthrow of the regime’ was a matter of blood and death, others simply saw it as a profitable and cynical business venture.