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.
If any consolation is to be taken from the Chechen fiasco, it is that Yeltsin did not put it to use to asphyxiate debate or political liberties. He pats himself on the back in Presidential Marathon: “If during those… critical days we had gone for extraordinary measures and had limited freedom of speech, a split would have been unavoidable” between state and society.117 It is no idle boast. At one of the low points of his administration, struggling to keep the state together with the bluntest of instruments, he could have attacked democratic freedoms in the name of protecting the state, but elected not to.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Boris Agonistes
If there is an enduring truism about Boris Yeltsin, it is that he had a colorful personality—a juicy or succulent personality (sochnaya lichnost’) is another idiom one hears Russians use. It was the stuff of countless news stories in his years in power and suffuses the Yeltsin legend.
Human personalities are elusive. The out-of-the-ordinary individual may outdo the ordinary in erecting “identity shields” to mask what is beneath the skin.1 Yeltsin’s carapace as national leader was unusually impenetrable. It differed in degree if not in kind from the reserve he maintained in Sverdlovsk, where he had found himself on familiar and stable terrain. Yeltsin seemed to bring to the metropole a fear of giving himself away, as Sergei Filatov, his chief of staff for three years, says—an unease “that someone would half-open a nook of his personal, secret life or read his inmost thoughts.” Vyacheslav Kostikov, his spokesman from 1992 to 1995, gives up in his memoir on jamming him into a master formula or sobriquet: “In reality, no one knows Yeltsin, and he does nothing to bring clarity to his selfportrait.” A member of the Kremlin press pool remembers Yeltsin as “the substantiation of power on two legs”; what went on inside his head flummoxed her to the end.2
The swashbuckler Man on the Tank from 1991 remains the culminating image of Yeltsin for the ages. Going from maverick to master, he began to project other, competing images. And some of them—lashing out at former parliamentary colleagues in 1992 and 1993, brandishing the notorious conductor’s baton in Berlin in 1994, looking wan after heart attacks in 1995—spoke of disquiet and even anguish. But these were not the only juices that flowed, which makes it important to eschew clichés and pop psychology and establish, as best one can, the actual balance among them. If the private man had not been predictive of the public man, one might not care. Here we can rest easy. As milestone events of Yeltsin’s first presidential term go to show, his interior landscape, inscrutable as it was, was highly relevant to his choices and to the fingerprints he left as leader.
Events were overtaking two of Yeltsin’s life scripts as the curtain lifted on the post-communist era. He had long since sloughed off his sense of political duty to the Soviet Union. His residual sense of filial duty ended on March 21, 1993, with the death of his mother from heart failure. Klavdiya Vasil’evna was eighty-five and had been staying with the Moscow Yeltsins for some months. The evening before, as the raucous conflict with the Supreme Soviet heated up, she took in the television news with them, bussed her son, and said to him, “That’s my boy, Borya,” as she went back to her bedroom. This was the last he heard from her. She was given an Orthodox burial at Kuntsevo Cemetery, with several priests and a choir. Yeltsin held a clod of frozen earth in his hand for some minutes before tossing it on the casket.3