Black Earth: A journey through Russia after the fall. Andrew Meier

The second round, as one of its architects, General Troshev, promised early, would be “a merciless battle, with Moscow refusing to abstain from any of our weapons, for every square foot of the Chechen republic.”

      Led by the new strongman in the Kremlin, Russian troops moved with purpose across the northern plains of Chechnya. On television Russians watched with pride, and muted amazement, as Chechen village after Chechen town fell without a shot. When Gudermes fell without a fight, Moscow imagined the war was won. “Only mop-up work remains to be done,” announced Putin’s unctuous spokesman for the war, Sergei Yastrzhembsky. A spin doctor who had served both Yeltsin and his rival Luzhkov, Yastrzhembsky held daily briefings to assure reporters the new campaign was an “antiterrorist operation” not a war. “It will be over within days,” he promised as New Year’s 1999 neared. In the first war Russia’s fledgling private media had tested their independence. This time, however, the state drew a new line: To report from the Chechen side was to support the enemy. The local media largely complied, glossing over reports of civilian massacres and Chechen resistance.

      In Moscow the politicians and generals now tried to downplay the fate of Grozny. In the first war the city had become known among the troops as a meat grinder. The rebels had mastered the art of urban guerrilla warfare, using underground passages and fortified buildings to entrap Russian tank columns and destroy them. “Grozny is not critical,” insisted General Valery Manilov, the logorrheic spokesman for the high command. “We will not storm Grozny” became his mantra at weekly briefings, as reporters wondered how the Russians could win the war without entering the capital.

      The answer was simple – and brutal. Early in Putin’s War, Aleksandr Zhilin, a former MiG pilot and one of the keenest military journalists in Moscow, mapped the new strategy for me. “You take up positions as far away from your target as possible,” Zhilin said, “and shell the hell out of them. You use jets, attack helicopters, artillery – whatever has lead and metal and flies. You hit them day and night without pause. You send in men only once you’ve leveled everything.” The onslaught was calculated to lose as few Russian soldiers as possible, while killing as many Chechens, armed or not, as possible. “Costly in terms of hardware,” Zhilin called the plan, “but effective.”

      Almost immediately the Chechens felt the difference from the first war. This time they fled. At one point more than three hundred thousand abandoned the republic. While most went to Ingushetia, some went south – on foot across the mountains to Georgia. In October 1999 in Duisi, a village at the mouth of the Pankisi Gorge across the border in Georgia, I found hundreds of Chechen refugees crowded in an abandoned hospital.³² For days they had walked in deep snow, beneath Russian bombers. At times the road was no more than a narrow path, much of it mined. They were the lucky ones, they said. Dozens more had died along the way. During World War II Leningrad residents trapped by the Nazi siege escaped on an ice road across Lake Ladoga to the north of the city. The Soviets later named it the Road of Life. The road from Grozny into the Pankisi Gorge, the Chechen refugees said, had been a Road of Death.

      The refugees had no trouble recognizing the Kremlin’s new tactics. “In the first war,” said Roza, a nine-year-old girl from Urus-Martan, “we’d sit in the cellar and count the bombs.” But in the new war, she said, “there are so many you can’t even count them.” The hospital, long abandoned, had no heat. Plastic sheets hung over the empty window-frames. Khassan, a village elder from Samashki, spoke of a new level of brutality. “I never imagined I’d feel nostalgia for Yeltsin,” he said. “I never imagined war could be worse than what we saw before. But this is not war. It is murder on a state level; it is mass murder.”

      Despite the generals’ assurances, few in Moscow doubted that the Russians would have to storm Grozny. This time, however, Kremlin officials were sure the city would fall easily. After all, little of its infrastructure remained, and given the mass flight of refugees, this time around there would be few civilians to shelter the rebels. By November 1999 Russian forces had invested the city, hoping to sever the supply lines to the last Chechen fighters within it. The siege had begun.

      By December 1999 the so-called chastniye sektora (private districts), the stretches of little single-story houses that had spread around Grozny in the years since Gorbachev, had been scorched. The tall apartment buildings along the long avenues were now shells, dark eye sockets in the city’s skull. The center, leveled once in the first war, had fallen silent. Civilians, both Chechen and Russian, still lived in Grozny. No one knew how many remained – some said as many as twenty thousand – but they were invisible. Day and night they crowded together in dank cellars beneath the ruins.

      The siege lasted 102 days. On January 31, after two weeks of the second war’s bloodiest fighting, Minutka Square, the intersection long considered the key to the city, fell. There was in the end no great battle for Grozny. Both sides exaggerated the numbers they had killed and wounded. However, the Chechen fighters, even the generals in Moscow had to admit, made a strong stand. Some had retreated earlier to their traditional refuge, the mountains south of Grozny. In the final days of January 2000, the last rebel contingent in the city, some three thousand men in all, started to decamp. They moved at night, in two columns through a corridor on the city’s southwestern side.

      By February 1 the fighters, now several hundred fewer in number, had reached the village of Alkhan-Kala, eleven miles southwest of Aldy. Fighters who survived the trek later told me how they crossed frozen pastures covered with mines. Knowing the fields were mined, they moved forward one after another, in a suicide walk. “We shall see each other in paradise,” they screamed as they stepped out into the field. “Allah akbar!” others cried. As they walked, explosions, feet triggering mines, lit the darkness. “The only way to cross the field,” said a young Chechen who was there that night, “was to walk across the bodies.” The exodus cost the fighters several top commanders. Basayev lost his right foot to a mine. Among the dead was Lecha Dudayev, the mayor of Grozny and nephew of the late former leader Dudayev.

      Every village the retreating fighters passed through became the object of fierce Russian bombing: Shaami-Yurt, Katyr-Yurt, Gekhi-Chu. Aldy had suffered surprisingly little damage – before February. Bombs and shells had fallen on the village, hitting scattered houses and the train station. But it had not figured in any clashes between the Russian forces and the rebels. Only later did I piece it together. On their bloody retreat from the besieged capital to Alkhan-Kala, one column of fighters had come straight through Aldy.

      GRIM AS IT WAS, Gudermes became home. In Moscow the town was considered under Russian control. In reality, the Russians’ hold here was as illusive as in any other corner of Chechnya. The officers kept to their barracks, a Soviet-style housing project laced with several cordons of fortifications. Even still, their sleep was routinely interrupted by grenades, remote-controlled bombs, and Kalashnikov fire. In the local bazaar stocked by Dagestani merchants, Russian soldiers shopped warily, moving only in packs. Moscow’s Chechen proxies, however, the natives recruited in the latest pacification effort, may have had the most to fear. Akhmed Kadirov, once the grand mufti of the republic, now Putin’s choice to rule it, lived in Gudermes, but no one ever saw him. They only heard him – each morning and evening, coming and going in a Russian helicopter. “The invisible mufti,” the Chechens called him mockingly.

      Issa’s apartment had all the warmth of an IRA safe house. He liked to keep the windows papered over, visitors at a minimum, and his Makarov pistol handy. The apartment was a gift from Nikolai Koshman, a feckless Russian apparatchik who had risen in the Railways Ministry and had served as a deputy in the brief puppet regime Moscow had tried to foist on Chechnya during the first war.³³ In the new campaign, before settling on the former mufti Kadirov, Putin had recalled Koshman to duty, naming him his viceroy in the republic.

      By his own estimation, Issa was equal parts Chechen and Soviet. Every morning he slapped on French cologne and prayed to Allah. Each night he prayed again. Yet when time and resources permitted, he drank. His usual drink, as beer and wine ran scarce in Chechnya, was spirt, denatured ethyl alcohol. As a reward for his taking on Dudayev, Moscow in 1995 had given him a sinecure, a position atop the Foreign Relations Department in Russia’s puppet