Following three weeks of fierce fighting, the army was closing in on the capital. The city had long been under bombardment; the Russian Air Force pilots had total dominance in the air, and they had tried every possible method of bombing Grozny. On the night of 31 December 1994, the majority of the fighters defending the capital had been discharged for New Year’s Eve. The city had been left with a small but battle-worthy group, which included two of the Chechen Army’s most effective units: Hamzat Gelayev’s[5] special-forces regiment and Shamil Basayev’s[6] Abkhaz Battalion, a volunteer force formed in 1992 to assist Abkhazia. I’d been working tirelessly for a good many days: I’d been at a rally that had disbanded just before New Year’s Eve; I’d been at the front line; and, alongside journalists from a number of Russian and foreign news agencies, I’d been meeting various ranks of military and political functionaries. There had been little time for relaxing and thinking about mundane matters. And so on the evening of New Year’s Eve I’d decided to give myself a well-earned rest and was sitting at home in front of the television (thankfully our power station had not been blown up). But there was to be no rest for me that night.
Countless words have been written about the New Year assault on Grozny. And each side has advanced its own version of events. The Chechen command, of necessity – as this was a war not just for freedom, but for the right to live on their own land – milked the most graphic aspects of the assault for propaganda purposes; in the process, they were able to spin their mistakes into a deliberate strategy. The truth is that Grozny had been left poorly defended on New Year’s Eve. Even though in the first days of the assault the Chechens smashed the Russians with minimal losses, nevertheless the Russian forces gained a foothold at various points on the city fringes, and this accelerated Grozny’s fall. The Russian generals – those who participated in the storm and those who didn’t – later came out with ever more absurd explanations for their failure to take Grozny. The best excuse that Gennady Troshev[7] could come up with was to announce to the whole country, ‘We hadn’t expected such resistance on the part of the Chechens. After all, they were up against a proper army!’ – though the events of 26 November had clearly hinted at what was to come. Yet the truth was the Russian generals sent their troops to storm the capital without even equipping them with detailed maps or proper intelligence. They’d hurried the operation because Grachev had wanted to celebrate the New Year with Grozny’s capture. And the generals had wanted to hand Grachev the city as a present on his birthday, 1 January. The Russian press wrote so at the time. The Chechen command had known that sooner or later an attack was coming, but they hadn’t expected it on the night of 31 December, and they had no multi-layered defence system, as the bungling Russian generals said and as my account of that night’s events will bear out. On these pages you won’t find the parroting of either side’s views; you’ll find the account of an eyewitness, with what may seem, at times, like too many fine details. But because this is an eyewitness account and not an analysis, such detail is inevitable, for when someone is caught in the thick of things, it is the details he relies on to build his picture of what is happening.
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It was around noon when I heard the Chechen television presenter’s voice through the crackle: ‘Everyone out there! Everyone out there! Whoever is listening! Russian troops are storming Grozny! The Presidential Palace is surrounded! Everyone out there! Everyone out there! Russian troops are storming Grozny! The Presidential Palace is surrounded!’ The Presidential Palace was indeed surrounded: clearly the Chechens had been taken by surprise, though they did later manage to break the encirclement. As the Russian special forces closed in on the palace, they were met by a surprise barrage of Chechen fire from just fifteen metres away. Up until then the Russians had been moving under a smoke screen, but at the last minute a gust of wind had blown in from the Sunzha (the river that cuts through central Grozny, with the Presidential Palace on one bank), sweeping away the smoke and sealing the battle’s outcome. Yet even if the Russian special forces had stormed the palace successfully, who knows how the assault might have ended. Later, their special forces stormed many Chechen-held buildings, only to retreat from them with heavy losses.
I was walking towards the railway station with some journalists and a group of Chechen fighters we’d run into when we stumbled into a horrific firefight. Two of the fighters were killed on the spot. The Chechen Army units were engaged in the first serious clash with the Russian armada of tanks. We were witnessing the beginning of the famed demise of the Russian Army’s tragic 131st Maikop Brigade, who were trapped at the station. Later, when the brigade was fully encircled, a battle erupted in which both sides fought impeccably, shining examples of valour. We could clearly hear the voices of Chechen fighters calling on the Russians to surrender and of Russian soldiers trying to keep their spirits up.
‘Don’t send your lads to their deaths, Commander! Surrender, we have you surrounded! If you give yourselves up, we guarantee you’ll live. And we’ll help you return home!’
‘I have orders!’
‘I don’t have the authority to make decisions like that!’
‘Vasily! Let’s fight to the death! The Chechens will only kill us anyway!’
These shouts reached us from the area of the depot held by the Russians. All these exchanges, the groans of the wounded, the smell of gunpowder – they evoked in me a feeling of… Perhaps it was impending doom?
By now groups of resistance fighters were fast making their way from every corner of the republic to help defend the capital. Each came armed as best he could: some had an entire arsenal of state-of-the-art small arms, some were armed with a hunting rifle, or a single hand grenade, or a petrol bomb, while others had no weapon at all. On the roads into Grozny, signs announcing ‘Welcome to Hell!’ proved prophetic. The militiamen armed themselves to the teeth with trophy weapons taken from the Russians and, without the least training in the theory of warfare, they became a genuine nightmare for the Russians.[8] According to the official figures,[9] in the space of twenty-four hours on 1 January 1995 in Grozny 1,426 Russian military servicemen were killed and 4,630 wounded. But you have to remember that armies traditionally hugely under-report their losses. As well as the 131st Brigade, almost the entire contingents of the 81st and 74th Motor Rifle Regiments and the 276th Brigade were taken out. The units were virtually annihilated. The Chechen fighters knew every last alley of their capital like the back of their hand, which is critical in urban combat. But their adversary was by no means weak. The Russian Army may have already been a piteous shadow of its former self – once one of the world’s mightiest militaries – but it remained one of Europe’s finest armed forces. And its officers, particularly the mid-ranking ones, fighting on the front line alongside their soldiers, were imbued with the spirit of the Soviet Army. You won’t hear stories of mass cowardice on the part of the Russians except from people whose knowledge of the war comes merely from hearsay. I myself witnessed them on several occasions during the assault showing true martial prowess and bravery. The very fact that they secured several sites within the city bounds attests to their strength and courage as opponents. Later, on the television, I saw shots of Grozny filmed by journalists: all was white snow and the Chechen fighters in their white camouflage suits. It really was like that. But that came later. On that first and most horrific night there was no snow. Just black earth – as if soaked with grief and horror at the nightmare to come – and above it, a black sky hung low. It was strange and terrible to see a southern city at one o’clock in the afternoon almost entirely cloaked in darkness, as if the city were trying to hide its defenders. Daylight could not penetrate the vast storm cloud of black smoke that covered the burning city. And in this gloom the only way to see anything at all was to crouch down below the hanging smoke.
5
Hamzat Gelayev was a prominent Chechen field commander. From 1995 he was Brigadier General in the Chechen Armed Forces. In February 2004 he was killed in action.
6
Shamil Basayev was a Chechen field commander. From 1995 he was Brigadier General in the Armed Forces of Chechnya. He was appointed Vice President of Chechnya. He died in July 2006.
7
Gennady Troshev was a Russian general. A native of Grozny, he fought in both the First and Second Chechen Wars. He is the author of
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