Putin's Wars (31 page)
Thomas de Waal, an analyst who visited Grozny after the war, described the city in
the following words:
The destruction wrought on Grozny makes even the damage to a battle-scarred town like
Sarajevo seem light. Wandering through the streets after its ruination during the
first Chechen war in 1994–1996, it was hard to conceive how conventional weaponry
had done so much harm. The centre of the city was reduced to rubble, with many of
the inhabitants of these streets lying in mass graves. Ruins had been swept into tottering
piles. Streets had become empty thoroughfares that ran between large areas of sky.
If an occasional building had escaped the bombing, it was only a large windowless
façade facing nowhere. It would have seemed more plausible to be told that the place
had suffered a nuclear attack or some giant natural catastrophe.
[30]
Why this virulent, brutal overreaction by the Kremlin against a small mountain people?
In a seminar organized by the Russian human rights organization Memorial that took
place in Moscow in March 1995, shortly after the bombardment campaign on Grozny had
started, one of the speakers, Nikolay Kandyba, already spoke of a genocide.
[31]
Another speaker, Mara Polyakova, attacked the criminal character of the war. She
criticized the formulation of the presidential decree in which President Yeltsin had
announced that the war would be conducted “with all the means that the government
has at its disposal.”
A President who acts according to the laws and the Constitution, should say: “with
all lawful and constitutional means. . . .
[32]
He knows very well that not only are such means being used that are allowed by
the law and the Constitution, but also those that are not allowed by them. The possibility
of the use of such means against the population of one‘s own country is not allowed
by any legal norms. Thereby, instead of repressing these acts, the President through
[his declarations in] the mass media condones them and takes the responsibility for
everything that happens there.
[33]
Another participant, Vil Kikot from Moscow State Law Academy, referred to the historical
relations between Chechnya and Russia, “in the light of which Russia must seem to
be a cruel enemy to Chechens.”
[34]
He asked for what reason it was impossible for Chechnya to secede from Russia,
and he referred to the peaceful secession of Norway from Sweden in 1905.
[35]
He could also have referred to another, more recent, example, such as Slovakia’s
secession from Czechoslovakia. In this case not only did the secession take place
in a peaceful way, but also the relative size of the territory and the population
was much more important. Chechnya, with its surface of 19,300 square kilometers, occupies
a little bit more than 1
percent
of the territory of the Russian Federation, and its population of about 1.2 million
is even less than 1 percent of Russia’s total population. Inga Mikhaylovskaya of the
Russian-American Project Group on Human Rights stated “that the treaty character of
the Russian Federation was illusory, since there is no clear legislative statement
on the presence or absence of the right of [the] federative subject to leave the federation.”
[36]
Sergey Kovalyov, a widely respected former dissident who was appointed by Yeltsin
to chair the Presidential Human Rights Commission,
[37]
remarked that “a negotiated resolution of the crisis was also obstructed by the
fact that the federal authorities did not take account of the historical role which
Russia had played in the fate of the Chechen people.”
[38]
According to him, “the majority of Russians are not inclined to feel personal guilt
[for what had earlier happened in Chechnya], and this, in my opinion, is a major obstacle
on the path of our evolution toward a civilized civil society.”
[39]
It might be going too far, as did Kovalyov, to demand from the Russians to feel
a
personal
guilt for what happened to the Chechens during the Stalinist era. One can only experience
a personal guilt for one’s own deeds. The Russian population should, however, assume
a collective, Russian
responsibility
for what has happened in the small Caucasian republic.
[40]
The reason why the Russian population was reluctant to assume a historical responsibility
can be explained by two factors. The first reason would be its feeling of having been
itself a victim of Stalin’s policies. The second reason would be its disenfranchised
status: it never was a responsible subject of history, but rather a malleable object
in the hands of authoritarian leaders. However, even taking these facts into consideration,
the Russian citizens cannot deny that Stalin’s crimes were committed in
their
name.
On the eve of the second Chechen War, on September 8, 1999, Putin said: “Russia is
defending itself. We have been attacked. And therefore we must throw off all syndromes,
including the guilt syndrome.”
[41]
The reason why the Russian leadership did not assume any guilt or historical responsibility
is different. Their denial was clearly functional
.
It had to do with the fact that in post-Soviet Russia Chechnya began to play an increasingly
important role in Russia’s internal policy. The political elite acted upon the maxim
that if Chechnya did not exist, it should have been invented. For Russian politicians
Chechnya was the ideal
Prügelknabe
, the ideal whipping boy who could be used to consolidate their own grip on power.
Sergey Kovalyov already clearly saw this role of the war in Chechnya.
The real cause of the war in Chechnya is neither Grozny nor in the entire Caucasus
region: it is in Moscow. The war pushed aside that corner of the curtain that obscured
the real power struggle for control of Russia. Unfortunately, it is not liberal, but
the most hard-line forces—those from the military-industrial complex and the former
KGB—who are celebrating that victory in the power struggle now, . . . the true goal
of the war in Chechnya was to send a clear-cut message to the entire Russian population:
“The time for talking about democracy in Russia is up. It’s time to introduce some
order in this country and we’ll do it whatever the cost.”
[42]
Kovalyov also pointed to the central role of the FSB—the KGB’s successor organization—in
starting the First Chechen War. The FSB was not only in the forefront
before
the war, but equally
during
the war. “In the early months of the intervention, up to early February 1995,” wrote
Vicken Cheterian, “it was the generals of the FSB—the intelligence services—who were
obliged to lead the military operations, with catastrophic consequences.”
[43]
An invisible red line connects, therefore, the war in Afghanistan with the first
war in Chechnya, that is,
the leading role
of the KGB/FSB in instigating and conducting both wars. We will see in the next chapter
how the spooks of the Russian secret services equally played an important role in
the preparation of the Second Chechen War, which started as Yeltsin’s war, but was,
in fact, Putin’s war.
George F. Kennan, “Russia: Seven Years Later,” in
Memoirs 1925–1950
, ed. George F. Kennan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1967), 521.
Kennan, “Russia: Seven Years Later,” 521–522.
Mr. X (George F. Kennan), “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,”
Foreign Affairs
25, no. 4 (July 1947). This article was an elaboration of his “Long Telegram” of
February 22, 1946, to the US Treasury Department. In this telegram he answered the
question of the US Treasury to the US Embassy in Moscow why the Soviet Union did not
support the recently founded World Bank and International Monetary Fund. In the telegram
Kennan wrote that the Soviet Union was “impervious to the logic of reason,” but that
it was “highly sensitive to the logic of force.”
Cf. Archie Brown,
The Rise and Fall of Communism
(London: Vintage Books, 2010), 353.
Andreï Kozovoï,
Les services secrets Russes: Des tsars à Poutine
(Paris: Tallandier, 2010), 253.
J. Michael Waller,
Secret Empire: The KGB in Russia Today
(Boulder: Westview Press, 1994), 127.
Artyom Borovik,
The Hidden War: A Russian Journalist’s Account of the Soviet War in Afghanistan
(New York: Grove Press, 1990), 9.
Svetlana Savranskaya, ed., “The September 11th Sourcebooks, Volume II: Afghanistan:
Lessons from the Last War: The Soviet Experience in Afghanistan: Russian Documents
and Memoirs,”
National Security Archive
(October 9, 2001), 1.
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB57/soviet.html
.
“Personal Memorandum, Andropov to Brezhnev, n.d. [early December 1979],”
Cold War International History Project Bulletin
8–9, (Winter 1996–97), 159–60. In this memorandum Andropov wrote that “alarming information
started to arrive about Amin’s secret activities, forewarning of a possible political
shift to the West.” Andropov said to have been “contacted by [a] group of Afghan communists
abroad.” He mentioned the name of Babrak Karmal, “who had worked out a plan for opposing
Amin and creating new party and state organs. But Amin, as a preventive measure, had
begun mass arrests of ‘suspect persons’ (300 people have been shot).” His conclusion
was that the situation was urgent. “We have two battalions stationed in Kabul,” wrote
Andropov. “It appears that this is entirely sufficient for a successful operation.”
He added that “it would be wise to have a military group close to the border. In case
of the deployment of military forces we could at the same time decide various questions
pertaining to the liquidation of gangs.” The implementation of the given operation
“would allow us to decide the question of defending the gains of the April revolution.”
Savranskaya, ed., “The September 11th Source Books, Volume II,” 5.
Thierry Wolton,
Le KGB au pouvoir: Le système Poutine
(Paris: Gallimard, 2008), 24.
Alexander Lyakhovsky,
The Tragedy and Valor of Afghan
, translated by Svetlana Savranskaya (Moscow: GPI Iskon, 1995), 109–112. The author,
Major General Lyakhovsky, served during the war in Afghanistan as assistant to General
V. Varennikov, commander of the Operative Group of the Defense Ministry.
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/
.
Georgy M. Kornienko,
The Cold War: Testimony of a Participant
, translated by Svetlana Savranskaya (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnie otnosheniya, 1994), 193.
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/
.
Savranskaya, ed., “The September 11th Sourcebooks Volume II,” 2–3.
Cf. Brown,
The Rise and Fall of Communism
, 389–390: “At the beginning of that month [July] a two-day Politburo meeting found
Brezhnev and Kosygin still favouring intense pressure on Dubček—to remove the people
in high office whom the Soviet leadership most objected to, and to crack down on the
mass media—whereas several others already favoured the use of force. They included
KGB chairman Yury Andropov and the Central Committee secretary (later to be minister
of defense) who supervised the military and military industry, Dmitry Ustinov.”
Ion Mihai Pacepa, “No Peter the Great: Vladimir Putin is in the Andropov Mold,”
National Review Online
(September 20, 2004).
Cf. Vladimir Solovyov and Elena Klepikova,
Inside the Kremlin
(London: W.H. Allen & Co Plc., 1988), 246: “We know, then, where to assign responsibility
for that occupation [of Afghanistan]. Although it took place in the last phase of
the Brezhnev era, the authorship of that deed must be ascribed to the empire’s regent,
Andropov (by that time all-powerful), his supporters, and others he could count on.”
Cf. Vladimir Fédorovski,
Le Fantôme de Staline
(Paris: Éditions du Rocher, 2007), 227. Before he died Andropov had informed his
entourage that he wanted Gorbachev to succeed him as general secretary. The politburo,
however, ignored Andropov’s wish and chose, after four days of deliberations, the
seventy-three-year-old Chernenko. Andropov’s preference for Gorbachev, however, had
nothing to do with Andropov’s supposed “liberal” or “democratic” leanings. Andropov
wanted economic reforms (such as he had witnessed in Kadar’s Hungary), while maintaining
a repressive political regime. Gorbachev would later remain rather evasive about his
close relationship with the former KGB chief. In his conversations with the Czech
dissident (and study friend) Zdenĕk Mlynář he called Andropov “a very interesting
and complex personality. . . . Andropov definitely wanted to start making changes,
. . . but there were certain bounds he could not go beyond; he was too deeply entrenched
in his own past experience—it held him firmly in its grasp.” (Mikhail Gorbachev and
Zdenĕk Mlynář,
Conversations with Gorbachev on Perestroika, the Prague Spring, and the Crossroads
of Socialism
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 50.)
Borovik,
The Hidden War: A Russian Journalist’s Account of the Soviet War in Afghanistan
, 14.
The related Chechens and Ingushes lived together in the Checheno-Ingush Autonomous
Socialist Soviet Republic. When the Ingush, who constituted a minority, did not want
to follow the Chechens on the road toward independence, the Supreme Soviet of the
Russian Federation founded, in June 1992, the Republic of Ingushetia.
John B. Dunlop quotes the testimony of one of the victims, a Chechen communist, as
follows: “Packed in overcrowded cattle cars, without light or water, we spent almost
a month heading to an unknown destination . . . . Typhus broke out. No treatment was
available . . . . The dead were buried in snow.” According to Dunlop, “the local populace
of settlements at which the special trains stopped were strictly forbidden to assist
the dying by giving them water or medicine. In some cars, 50 percent of the imprisoned
Chechens and Ingush were said to have perished.” (John B. Dunlop,
Russia Confronts Chechnya: Roots of a Separatist Conflict
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 68.)
Eric D. Weitz, “Racial Politics without the Concept: Reevaluating Soviet Ethnic and
National Purges,”
Slavic Review
61, no. 1 (Spring 2002), 3.
Weitz, “Racial Politics Without the Concept,” 3.
Georgi Derluguian, “Introduction,” in Anna Politkovskaya,
A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches of Chechnya
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 20.
Cf. Vicken Cheterian,
War and Peace in the Caucasus: Russia’s Troubled Frontier
(London: Hurst & Company, 2008), 258.
John B. Dunlop, “‘Storm in Moscow’: A Plan of the Yeltsin ‘Family’ to Destabilize
Russia,”
Project on Systemic Change and International Security in Russia and the New States
of Eurasia,
The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (October 8, 2004), 2.
Frederick C. Cuny, “Killing Chechnya,”
New York Review of Books
(April 6, 1995).
Maj. Gregory J. Celestan, “Wounded Bear: The Ongoing Russian Military Operation in
Chechnya,”
Foreign Military Studies Office Publications
(August 1996).
http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/documents/wounded/wounded.htm
.
David Hoffman, “Yeltsin Says a 2nd Term Depends on Ending War; Chernomyrdin Named
to Seek Chechnya Settlement,”
The Washington Post
(February 9, 1996).
Thomas de Waal, “Introduction,” in Anna Politkovskaya,
A Dirty War
, (London: The Harvill Press, 2007), xiii–xiv.
S. Kovalyov, “Neskolko replik po povodu chechenskogo konflikta,” in
Pravovye aspekty Chechenskogo krizisa: Materialy seminara
, eds. L. I. Bogoraz et al. (Moscow: Memorial, 1995), 82.
M. Polyakova, “Kriminalnye aspekty voennykh sobytiy v Chechne,” in
Pravovye aspekty
, eds. L. I. Bogoraz et al., 44.
Polyakova, “Kriminalnye aspekty voennykh sobytiy v Chechne,” 44–45.
Kovalyov, “Summary,” in
Pravovye aspekty
, eds. L. I. Bogoraz et al., 179.
Kovalyov, “Neskolko replik po povodu chechenskogo konflikta,” 83.
Kovalyov, “Summary,” in
Pravovye aspekty
, eds. L. I. Bogoraz et al., 176. Secession was not an option, neither in Imperial
Russia nor in the Soviet Union. This fact was recognized by Yeltsin. “The Soviet empire,”
he wrote, “spanning one-sixth of the earth’s surface, was built over the course of
many years according, without the shadow of a doubt, to an ironclad plan. The internal
contradictions were ignored. No one proposed a scenario that allowed the empire to
abandon some of its territories or yield to the formation of new states. They didn’t
even think of it.” (Boris Yeltsin,
Midnight Diaries
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000), 53). The Chechen case was certainly not helped
by the inappropriate comparison made by US President Bill Clinton during a press conference
in Moscow in April 1996, when Clinton said: “I would remind you that we once had a
civil war in our country, in which we lost on a per capita basis far more people than
we lost in any of the wars of the twentieth century, over the proposition that Abraham
Lincoln gave his life for, that no state had a right to withdrawal from our Union.”
(Quoted in Thomas de Waal, “The Chechen Conflict and the Outside World,”
Crimes of War Project
(April 18, 2003).)
http://www.crimesofwar.org/chechnya-mag/chech-waal.html
.
Sergey Kovalyov stands out as a unique personality in post-Soviet politics. Born in
1930, he studied biology, was arrested as a dissident in 1974, and was sent for seven
years to a labor camp in the Perm region. This was followed by an exile of three years.
In 1990 he was elected to the Supreme Soviet (Parliament) of the Soviet Union, and
from 1993 he was a member of the State Duma. As a founder and cochairman of the human
rights organization Memorial he was appointed in 1994 by Yeltsin to become chairman
of the Presidential Human Rights Commission. He resigned in 1996 because of the war
in Chechnya.
Kovalyov, “Summary,” in
Pravovye aspekty
, eds. L. I. Bogoraz et al., 180.
Kovalyov, “Neskolko replik po povodu chechenskogo konflikta,” 78.
Interesting in this context are Elazar Barkan’s remarks on the important role apologies
play in improving the relations between nations. Barkan wrote that “the new international
emphasis on morality has been characterized not only by accusing other countries of
human rights abuses but also by self-examination. The leaders of the policies of a
new internationalism—Clinton, Blair, Chirac, and Schröder—all have previously apologized
and repented for gross historical crimes in their own countries and for policies that
ignored human rights. These actions did not wipe the slate clean, nor . . . were they
a total novelty or unprecedented. Yet the dramatic shift produced a new scale: Moral
issues came to dominate public attention and political issues and displayed the willingness
of nations to embrace their own guilt. This national self-reflexivity is the new guilt
of nations.” (Elazar Barkan,
The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustice
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), xvii.) Although I would prefer
to speak of “responsibility of nations” instead of “guilt of nations” (the latter
term is too “psychological” and comes too close to
collective
guilt), I agree with Barkan when he writes that the “interaction between perpetrator
and victim is a new form of political negotiation that enables the rewriting of memory
and historical identity in ways that both can share” (viii).
Quoted in Yeltsin,
Midnight Diaries
, 335. Yeltsin added: “But the guilt syndrome persists. There is a great deal of misunderstanding
about Chechnya, even in Russia itself. But more often it’s the West trying to instill
this feeling of guilt in us” (ibid.). Yeltsin, tellingly, referred to a guilt
syndrome
, qualifying guilt feelings as some kind of a psychological disorder
.
Yeltsin apparently rejected any guilt and considered attempts at putting the crimes
committed against the Chechen population on the agenda a deliberate policy of the
West to weaken Russia.
