By the evening of that first day, news had spread not only of the failure of the military operation, but of the wholesale collapse of Russia’s Chechen policy. For President Yeltsin and Defence Minister Grachev[2] had formally renounced their own soldiers and officers captured in Chechnya, branding them deserters. Public interviews and addresses made by the Russian captives via the media to their command, in which they confirmed their military-unit numbers, the locations of their bases, and the recruitment methods of their counter-intelligence officers, were dismissed by Russian officials as ‘lies and propaganda’. Defence Minister Grachev, meanwhile, got so carried away as to boast that he would never have made the mistake of sending tanks into Grozny: ‘A single parachute regiment would have got the job done in two hours.’ Just a few weeks later, of course, he himself would give the order to send tanks into the city, and we know how long it took for several army groups to capture Grozny. But for now Chechnya froze in uneasy suspense.
With the arrival of Sergey Yushenkov’s[3] team of deputies to negotiate the release of the captured soldiers and officers, people began to nurture the hope that the conflict could be resolved through peace talks. But sadly their hopes were soon dashed. The government representatives in Moscow refused even to entertain the idea of negotiations with the Chechen side. Amid almost daily statements from Dudayev conveying his willingness to negotiate, Russia’s preparations for the approaching conflict were steaming ahead. Russian politicians had pretensions to being Roman senators, seeing Russia as the Third Rome; their approach to Chechnya was that ‘Carthage must be destroyed’. Sergey Shakhray, the Russian deputy prime minister at the time and an ardent opponent of negotiating with the Chechen side, actually used this phrase of Cato the Elder during a television interview. The Chechens too were quietly preparing as far as their modest capabilities allowed. The inevitability of all-out war was palpable. The rounds of discussions, the march for peace organized by the residents of Chechnya and Ingushetia, the Duma deputies’ promises to ‘prevent bloodshed’ – all this was seen as the inevitable overture to the coming tragedy. And then the tragedy began.
5
On 11 December 1994, three Russian Army columns – 23,000 men according to the official Russian Ministry of Defence figures, although independent sources suggest 60,000 – crossed the border into Chechnya. They were subsequently redeployed into four columns: Group North, Group North-East, Group West and Group East.
Two days later, I set off with a party of Chechen, Russian and foreign journalists for the village of Pervomaysky,[4] which lay right on the front line. We left in a bus graciously provided by the President’s press centre. A small group of armed men in uniform also loaded into the bus – for our protection, we were told. We arrived at the site and, brushing off the warnings of the Chechen fighters, we naïvely walked almost to the first defence line. By that point I quite seriously considered myself a battle-scarred veteran war correspondent, and I was acting the part. My confident manner and my use of the odd military term impressed some of my colleagues, further bolstering my self-image as an old hand and encouraging the other journalists to stick close by me. We left the bus and walked on ahead until suddenly we found ourselves in the first line of Chechen trenches; the Russian troops were just over a kilometre away. Their main force was on the mountain ridge, but as soon as we got to the trenches, the forward infantry and tanks slowly began to move downhill. It was as if the whole scene had been specially set up for journalists wishing to photograph real combat. The Chechen fighters were sitting in trenches, slightly ahead of them were two crews with automatic grenade launchers, and behind the trenches stood a few Chechen tanks. A soldier stuck his head out of a tank and addressed us: ‘Anyone here a tank gunner?’
‘No, we’re journalists,’ I replied on our behalf. ‘Why, what’s wrong?’
‘We’ve got no gunner for this tank. I’ll have to stand in as one, but I’m not a gunner by training,’ he explained amiably.
‘Sorry we can’t help you,’ I said. After my experience on 26 November, neither love nor money could have persuaded me to climb into a tank. At that point firing broke out, and the soldier told us to run for it as he disappeared into the hatch. The bombardment rose to a horrific pitch. The advancing Russian tanks were firing, the Chechen tanks were returning fire, and in the spaces between was the thumping of the automatic grenade launchers, all accompanied by assault-rifle and machine-gun fire. I sat in the trench with the militiamen. Little remained of the ‘battle-hardened veteran’, but I tried desperately not to betray my fear. It is hard to believe that very soon this terrified young man would become almost indifferent to gunfire and shelling of far greater intensity. And a little later still, he would be living his life under conditions that would seem completely unfit for humans. Now the Russians were firing furiously. The air was thick with the whistle of bullets and the whirring of shrapnel. As if in mockery of my fear, I found myself right next to a deafening tank. I had, of course, ‘seen combat’, but I wanted like mad to jump up and flee for dear life. Such a rush of adrenalin came to my legs that it felt as if I could outrun even the bullets. It seemed impossible that anyone could withstand such intense fire. But these fighters had no thoughts of fleeing, whereas I could think of nothing else. Two things were holding me back from such an act of craziness: the fear of poking my head above the trench to make a dash for it and my self-respect. After all, I was a ‘veteran’, and it would be unseemly for me to panic. Although this second argument was clearly preposterous, I’d come up with it for my own consolation. To make matters worse, it seemed as if I was the only one struck by panic. This was nothing like our games of war, so beloved among us when we were little boys. If anyone tells you that in a moment of fear he thought of a loved one, don’t believe it. He didn’t. He thought of no one but himself. In fact, he wouldn’t have had any thoughts at all. Fear is your mind’s survival signal. This instinct is concerned with you alone. At such moments, it simply doesn’t enter your head to be frightened for some other person. All my fear was focused purely on me – on my beloved self.
The Chechen resistance were successful in repulsing the attack. On the slope of the ridge, two Russian tanks and an infantry combat vehicle were left burning – the work of the tank man who wasn’t a gunner by training. One of the automatic-grenade-launcher crew had died in combat, and the grenade launcher itself had been hit. Around half a dozen men were wounded to varying degrees. When the fighting was over, I looked around to find that the journalists, the bus, and our armed escorts had all fled. This helped to soothe my injured pride: so I hadn’t been the only one gripped with fear. Only one Russian journalist and a young Chechen had stayed. We started walking away from the front line. Soon some aeroplanes appeared, dropped their bombs and disappeared over the ridge. Moments later some Grad multiple-rocket launch vehicles drove out from somewhere, fired several volleys towards the ridge where the Russian units were dug in, and slunk back to their hiding places in the nearby garages and farms. No sooner had they hidden than several ground-attack planes emerged from behind the ridge. They circled the skies, searching in vain for their targets, then they bombed the outskirts of the village and left. Hot on their heels, the Grad vehicles re-emerged from their shelters for a new volley of fire. And this went on for almost the whole day: the Grad vehicles would fire at the ridge and vanish, the planes would search for them, fail to find them, then drop their bombs on some decoys and fly off again. In the evening, some men who’d noticed we were missing from the group and had set out in search of us finally tracked us down at the trenches near the village. Our runaway comrades were a little surprised to see us back at the press centre, but we did not give them a hard time for their very human response to such an unexpected and inhuman situation.
2
Pavel Grachev was Russian Defence Minister from May 1992 to June 1996. He was the architect and director of the unsuccessful assault on the Chechen capital Grozny on the night of 31 December 1994.
3
Sergey Yushenkov served as a deputy in Russia’s State Duma. In the first Duma, he was Defence Committee chairman. In 1995 he quit the army due to his objections to the war in Chechnya. He was shot dead in Moscow on 17 April 2003.