Yeltsin was not at the top of his game, either. It was he who had said the minorities should take all the sovereignty they could swallow, and here was a minority that said it wanted every last crumb. As Aleksandr Tsipko had pointed out, it was no walkover to explain to the Chechens or anyone in their position that they had no title to the independence that the fifteen union republics of the USSR—one of them Russia—asserted in 1991. In 1995, when the war was in full swing, Yeltsin was to imply that there was a limit the Chechens should have known not to cross: “I have said, ‘Take as much sovereignty as you can.’ But a very profound meaning sits within this word ‘can.’ As much as you can—meaning, Don’t take more than you can. And if you do, you will crack up, like Chechnya did.”106 After the fact, the Chechens’ crackup was instructive to the others, but at the time it was not foreseen.
Racked by indecision, Yeltsin entrusted policy on Chechnya to a revolving carousel of advisory groups. The attitude stiffened after Vladimir Zhirinovskii led the polls in the December 1993 parliamentary election. The sole Chechen with authority in the Russia-wide political arena was Ruslan Khasbulatov. Released from prison under the amnesty, he set up shop in the Chechen village of Tolstoy-Yurt in March of 1994 and offered his good offices as a broker. Yeltsin, however, warned his former adversary off, thus ruling out of court one potentially nonviolent outcome.107
A flag-waving group headed by Nikolai Yegorov, the former governor of Krasnodar province, led in defining Kremlin policy once he was appointed minister of nationality and regional affairs in May 1994. Attempts to arrange a meeting between Dudayev and Yeltsin were to no avail. “Beside the powerful historical and sociopolitical currents, the Chechen conflict . . . was decisively rooted in personal and emotional influences that cannot be explained in the usual categories of positivist causality.”108 Yeltsin informed Shaimiyev in the early summer that he was thinking about a meeting; he hardened his position when, apparently in reaction to an assassination attempt, Dudayev contemned him on Russian television as an unfit leader and a dipsomaniac. Yeltsin as a result “crossed Dudayev off the list of . . . politicians with whom it was permissible in any way to communicate and raised him to the rank of a primary enemy. ”109 The patience of Job would have been required to work things out with Dudayev, and that was a quality Boris Yeltsin lacked. Dudayev gave journalists a glimpse of the patience needed at press conferences called to publicize the Chechens’ policy. The pattern was that he would lead off with a rational statement. “Then, however, he would rapidly degenerate into hysterical insults and . . . philosophical, racial, and historical speculations, almost as if possessed by some evil demon.” Anatol Lieven, the Briton who made this observation, also recalls Dudayev in interviews before the war ranting at Yeltsin and the Russians as Nazis, totalitarian, satanic.110
What made the case for a military response irresistible was the shared hubris of assuming that the army was capable of prevailing in a surgical strike. The Defense Ministry questioned only the feasibility of doing it rashly and in mid-winter. Pavel Grachëv believed the republic could be secured in ten days, and showed Yeltsin and Chernomyrdin on a map how the advance would go.111 Oleg Lobov, the Sverdlovsk apparatchik who by this time was secretary of the Security Council, the coordinating body for national security (rather like the National Security Council in Washington, D.C.), is reported to have boasted to a lawmaker in November 1994 that there would be “a small, victorious war” in Chechnya, which would “raise the president’s ratings” as, he said, the U.S. intervention in Haiti had helped Bill Clinton’s.112 Lobov in an interview with me in 2002 said he never made the statement, while confirming that he had thought the war would go more swimmingly than it did.113 As for Yeltsin, although there is no evidence that he linked Chechnya to his approval ratings, he had a pollyannaish view of Russian military capabilities and was now of the opinion that independence for a Chechen statelet would be “the beginning of the breakup of the country.”114
The Kremlin first attempted covert action to overthrow Dudayev in league with local anti-government militias. When this did not work, Yeltsin had his Security Council sanction a military operation. On November 30 he signed Decree No. 2137 authorizing the army and the MVD to “restore constitutional order” in Chechnya. Three columns of troops and armor tore across the provincial border on December 11. On December 31, without proper intelligence or infantry cover, tanks entered Grozny, which the tsar’s Terek Cossacks had founded as a fortress in 1818. Chechen squads mowed down many of the crews and hid in housing and office buildings. Russian guns and airstrikes within weeks made a moonscape out of the city and created a humanitarian catastrophe. The Russian contingent numbered 40,000 by January 1995 and 70,000 by February. By some estimates, 25,000 civilians and 1,500 Russian troops had died by April 1995. As early as January 4, Yeltsin was demanding to know at a Kremlin meeting why so many had been killed in the blitzkrieg. “Russia at this moment,” he was to write in his memoirs, “parted with one more exceptionally dubious but fond illusion—about the might of our army . . . about its indomitability.”115 He and the country had paid a prohibitive price for the illusion and for being drawn into what he confessed in 1996 had been “the most botched war in the history of Russia.”116
Chechnya has been called Yeltsin’s Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, or Iraq. It was a sorrier trial in one sense—its firsthand feedback into national life and politics. The butchery and squalor seen on the television news were not in some distant land but in a corner of Russia. The vox populi turned against the war in the spring of 1995, even as federal battalions chased the Chechen warriors out of the urban areas and into the hills. But on June 14, 1995, Shamil Basayev, a former firefighter, computer salesman, and airplane hijacker—who claimed he had been in the crowd defending Yeltsin at the Russian White House in August 1991—opened up a home front using the foreign weapon of terrorism. Basayev and his gunmen drove three trucks untouched into Budënnovsk, Stavropol province, and took 1,400 patients, medical personnel, and others hostage in a hospital, demanding a Russian pullout from Chechnya. Yeltsin ill-advisedly took off for a meeting of the G-7 in Halifax, Canada, leaving Viktor Chernomyrdin to negotiate with Basayev (and save lives) for two days of the crisis. By the time it was over on June 18, 126 townspeople had been executed or killed in the crossfire and the Chechens had escaped. On June 21 the Duma for the first and only time voted (by 241 votes to seventy-two) no-confidence in Yeltsin’s government, after which he fired the Stavropol governor and three cabinet members: Interior Minister Yerin, Minister of Nationality and Regional Affairs Yegorov, and the head of the security service, Sergei Stepashin.
The military thrust in Chechnya wound down after Budënnovsk. On July 30 Moscow signed a protocol with the guerrillas calling for a cease-fire, a disarming of the Chechen formations, and a drawdown of army units. In late 1995 it went through the motions of returning Doku Zavgayev as head of the republic and staging an election. But militants in the countryside continued to ambush the federal forces and their local clients, kidnapping and piracy went on unabated, and few weapons were turned in. Dudayev’s death in April 1996 had little effect on the Russians’ growing yearning for a way out. The presidential election of the summer of 1996 (see Chapter 14) was to force the issue.