Eight Pieces of Empire (22 page)

GRENADE, LIGHTLY TOSSED

I
t was a sultry
summer day in 1993. Two old men in a Moskvich sedan picked us up at the side of the road after we crossed the “frontier.” This was my first foray into Chechnya, a tiny (the size of Connecticut) place it took the czars’ armies longer than any other to “pacify” in the nineteenth century. As the empire reeled, Chechen activists wasted no time in declaring independence from the Russian Federation.

Despite the searing heat, our two driving hosts wore Chicago 1930s–style black fedora hats, popular in Chechnya at the time, but totally incongruous with the surrounding countryside, dotted with flocks of sheep and newly constructed mosques. I sat in the back along with my traveling companion, Liam McDowall of the Associated Press, studying the fedoras. I couldn’t escape the feeling that we were being driven to Grozny by members of the rap group RUN-DMC or some Prohibition-era gangsters. In the ex–Soviet Union, the fedora was a strictly Chechen accoutrement, the favored headgear of the renegade former Soviet nuclear bomber squadron commander General Dzhokhar Dudayev, president of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, a state recognized at the time by no other country on earth.

We entered Grozny and asked the two fedora-topped gentlemen to drop us at the best hotel in town.

“There’s only one hotel—the Kavkaz,” they laughed, and brought us to a menacingly rundown shack across from Dudayev’s presidential
palace on Grozny’s massive central square, which would later assume a legendary role as the heart of the resistance during the war.

The hotel lobby was teeming with armed men milling around. One was lightly tossing a live hand grenade, detonation ring intact, into the air repeatedly, as if it were a lemon or a small ball. “Hey, which room are you guys in here?” he asked. We answered that we hadn’t checked in yet. We inquired about rooms. A rail-thin man at the front desk said that he had only two left, and that the door lock on one was broken. After no deliberation we deposited our things in the room with the lock and left the grenade-tossing young man and his companions behind.

The city was tense, but in the then-jovial, chaotic Chechen way. The Russian-backed opposition had tried to stage a referendum on Dudayev’s rule, but not through diplomatic negotiations. An armed clash erupted down the street at the state drama theater. Several people were killed in a melee a couple of hours before our arrival. Dudayev’s forces celebrated their “victory” by discharging every type of weapon they had into the cloudless sky and performing a
zikr
, a Sufi dance of remembrance for the dead.

So loud was the volley of fire that my editor in Moscow couldn’t make out what I was dictating when I tried to file a dispatch from the press center of the presidential palace. I finally got off a few stock quotes and told him not to worry—the gunfire was only a celebration. He laughed, hanging up the phone, evidently getting more “color” than he bargained for from the nonstop gunfire than I could give him in a million words.

The next day, tens of thousands began assembling on the square in front of the presidential palace. Dudayev was coming to address the masses. Bravado-happy bodyguards pointed AKs at different angles into the crowd below, but any real sense of security was mythological; there were so many in the crowd openly armed with everything from Kalashnikovs to old hunting rifles. Then Dzhokhar emerged and mounted an old pickup truck with a loudspeaker.

It was the first of dozens of times I would see him. Short, dressed in a black suit and tie and the obligatory fedora of the time, he exuded a powerful, even mesmerizing presence, despite his rusty Chechen-language
skills after so many years of speaking solely Russian in the Soviet military. His message was clear: The Chechen opposition to his rule was being financed and directed by Moscow, and war with Russia was just a matter of time. Moscow, Dudayev argued, was going to “invade” this tiny republic of 1 million people, which represented only about a half percent of the entire territory of the Russian Federation, of which the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria had never really been a voluntary part.

Dudayev then reiterated the grim litany of Chechen history seared into every Chechen soul, from fifty years of resistance to Russian conquest in the nineteenth century under Imam Shamil to the
vysyl
, or deportation, of February 23, 1944.

“Never again!” shouted Dudayev at the end of his speech.

When the mass demonstration was over, a man from the presidential administration named Kazbek led me down to a memorial that the separatist government had constructed to explain the national psychosis.

It was an eerie, chilling monument, dedicated to the hundreds of thousands of Chechens deported en masse by dictator Joseph Stalin nearly fifty years before. There were no graves; rather, only
reclaimed
grave markers belonging to Chechen elders. After the forced send-off of the Chechens, the markers had been summarily ripped from graveyards and blithely used as building materials for paving sidewalks or roads in the now totally Sovietized Grozny, devoid of anything Chechen.

February 23, 1944, is the day of the Chechen deportations. Ironically and perhaps sadistically, February 23 was and is to this day “Red Army Day.”

The previous night, every Chechen had been told to show up in central village squares early the next morning to celebrate another victorious battle against the Nazi foe. Instead Stalin’s People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD, the precursor to the KGB) quickly bundled more than 400,000 people into cattle cars and sent them—with almost no provisions—into exile thousands of miles away into the arid steppe of Central Asia on charges of collaborating with the Germans. (The Germans never made it to Chechnya, and only a tiny minority of Chechens actually had sympathized with them in other areas under Nazi control,
but Stalin obviously feared that the Chechens were a security risk, given their long, poisoned history under Russian colonial rule.) A third of the deportees are estimated to have perished along the way of disease, dysentery, and dehydration; those who died were thrown out along the tracks.

“This is what the Russians have in store for us again,” said Kazbek. Here was the key to understanding the upcoming dynamic. Dudayev was far from universally popular; he had many detractors in Chechnya, perhaps well over half the population. Thus the war to come would be one of
resistance
, not formal
independence
. The memory of the deportation distilled this into a potion.

Regardless of what they thought about Dudayev, his often erratic behavior, and evidence that after a life in the Soviet military he had little knowledge of the Sufi-type Islam practiced in Chechnya, the overwhelming majority of Chechens would fight for their homes and land, the deportations still fresh as yesterday in their minds.

There were repeated flare-ups throughout 1993 and 1994 between Dudayev and his detractors. Each attempt by the Chechen opposition to topple Dudayev ended in failure, his supporters far more motivated than his Moscow-financed and more Russified foes.

Finally, in August of 1994, I attended a sizable Dudayev press conference in his presidential palace. He had called the gathering to announce, asserting complete certainty, that Russia was planning a “large-scale aggression” against Chechnya, an intervention. Although it was widely reported in the press, the claim was generally scoffed at as another one of Dudayev’s incoherent ravings. And, anyway, what kind of a war could a few thousand lightly armed Dudayev-loyal Chechens expect to wage against the mighty, thousands of times larger and better-equipped (as was thought at the time) Russian military machine?

The answer turned out to be a mind-bending war to make one’s hair stand on end, unequal as the two forces were.

It was about to begin.

GROZNY

I
t was evening on
November 26, 1994, in the Azerbaijani capital, Baku, when the phone rang. It was the desk in Moscow.

“Grozny has fallen,” the editor told me. Battles had raged all day, the Moscow-backed Chechen opposition had taken the presidential palace, and Dzhokhar Dudayev had fled. At least that is what the Russian government information agency TASS was telling the world.

There was no independent confirmation, and cell phones did not exist at that time. So I phoned Eldar, our Azerbaijani driver. Together with Adil Bunyatov, the Azeri cameraman killed a year later filming an army mutiny in his homeland, we sped away from Baku, up the Caspian Sea coast toward Grozny, an eight-hour drive.

We arrived in the city well after dark, but it was clear something bad had indeed taken place, and we drove right into the middle of it. Flames spewed from broken overhead gas mains. There were no civilians silly enough to be on the streets—only men with weapons, some injured, delirious, or aggressive. We slowed at an intersection on the main avenue, heading toward the presidential palace. Two fighters forcefully stopped our car, ripped opened the rear door, and lifted in a wounded pro-Dudayev comrade, whose leg was bleeding profusely. They shouted, steering us toward a hospital, where we delivered the moaning man to the front door, his comrades dragging him inside.

A destroyed Soviet-vintage T-55 tank adorned the yard of the
presidential palace, its turret blown off and lying upside down on a lawn. The palace windows were missing, but the lights inside were glowing.

I entered, not sure what to expect. On the first floor I found Aslan Maskhadov, Dudayev’s chief military commander, calmly giving a live televised update from an improvised studio. He was denying the reports that the “rebels” were in control: That was clear by his mere presence.

Clearly, the TASS report cited by my Moscow editors was wrong, and no doubt willfully so. Next I ascended the stairs to find Movladi Udugov, Dudayev’s information minister (sometimes dubbed the Chechen Goebbels), gun in holster, casually stepping over smashed glass, and followed him into his office. “TASS says that the city has fallen to the opposition,” I told him.

“What are you, some sort of idiot?” Udugov barked. “Does it look like to you that the opposition is in control?”

He then offered to let me call my desk in Moscow on the single phone line that still functioned.

“Where the hell are you?” shrieked desk man David Lundgren upon hearing my voice.

“Grozny, inside the presidential palace,” I replied.

“But that’s impossible!” he shouted. “TASS just ran a bulletin saying the presidential palace is on fire and the city has fallen to the opposition.”

“I’m telling you I’m standing inside the information minister’s office as we speak,” I said. “Nothing is on fire. There aren’t any opposition guys around.”

The information minister, Udugov, then grabbed the phone and spat out random figures, telling Lundgren that one hundred opposition fighters had been killed and two hundred captured during the day’s fighting. (Just minutes later, he rehashed those numbers, telling me that two hundred had been killed and one hundred injured. Udugov, a rabble-rousing opportunistic propagandist with a known penchant for beer and bacchanalia, despite a later “conversion” to strict Islamist piety, was never much for exact numbers.) He finished with an admonition: “CANCEL YOUR SUBSCRIPTION TO TASS!” he shouted to the desk man in Moscow, slamming down the phone.

“But what about Dudayev?” I asked. “They reported he fled.”

Udugov sighed, picked up the phone again, and dialed a number, handing me the receiver.

“Ask him yourself,” he said.

The phone rang twice, and then a male voice answered with a simple
da
(yes).

“Hello,” I replied in Russian, introducing myself and explaining the reason for my late-night call to the supposedly ousted president of the outlaw Chechen Republic. “Where are you and what are you doing?”

Dudayev calmly said he was at home, about a mile away, and eating a bowl of soup.

“My wife, Alla, makes very good borscht,” he said. “Do you have any more questions? If not, I’m a bit busy, as you can probably imagine.”

I might have asked when the real war was to begin, but that was days away, when Russian planes began bombarding the city. As Chechen elders in the square performed the
zikr
, furiously prancing in a circle chanting the word “Allah,” Dudayev held an impromptu press conference on the top floor of the presidential palace, his facial expression unchanging as the bombs began to fall in midafternoon, hitting the main airport, among other targets. Press counselor Udugov seemed almost amused as we terrified journalists hit the floor or crawled into the corners of the room. “All right, journalists into the basement,” said Dudayev matter-of-factly as he closed the press conference.

Despite the Chechens’ confidence, not many believed they would stand and fight, given the incredibly long odds. The Russians could blow the city to smithereens. A few days before the Russians formally intervened, I found Udugov speaking on an open telephone line in his office, cracking jokes and cheerily ordering money paid for some unspecified weapons and military-type radios.

I asked him in my pragmatic Western train of thought: Is it not farfetched to believe the Chechens could win, with just a few thousand lightly armed fighters against the mighty Russian military machine?

“If you fight and lose, you still have won,” he smilingly told me, showing absolutely no signs of worry, let alone irritation with my question.

The response from many Chechens was similar. Among them was their bizarre “foreign minister,” a Jordanian Chechen diaspora reémigré by the name of Shamsuddin Yusuf. On his office wall, a poster proclaimed:
CHECHENISTAN: VACATION PARADISE
. Outside the presidential palace, there was a handwritten note next to the main entrance, immeasurably telling in its against-all-odds spirit of defiance:

All volunteers arriving from other regions of the CIS: Please go to the General Staff of the ChRI [Chechen Republic of Ichkeria]. Volunteers are needed for the following specializations: 1/ Tank operators of all types 2/Artillerymen a. Mortar-firers b. Experience with BM-21s, GRAD-RC30 of all types.