Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits (45 page)

Radujev and his men made their way southwest to another town, Pervomaiskoye, still in Dagestan but on the border with Chechnya. The Russians had them trapped, however, and the best Radujev could do was to order large numbers of hostages to be taken. As happened in Budennovsk, the Chechens seized a hospital and, as before, Russian forces massed for an assault. This time there were to be no negotiations; the Russians decided to flatten the town and kill all the terrorists, even if doing so meant the inevitable loss of many innocents.

Before the Russians could act decisively, however, yet another terrorist act unfolded on the Black Sea, where pro-Chechen gunmen seized the Russian ferry
EURASIA
. They took some two hundred passengers hostage in the hope of using them to guarantee the safe passage of Radujev’s raiders out of Pervomaiskoye. Oddly, when the Russians refused to accede to their demands, the gunmen released those they were holding and went into custody themselves. And so the fighting in Pervomaiskoye continued.

After beating off a number of armor-and-infantry assaults, the Chechens made their break for home—joined, it seems, by quite a few of their hostages, who feared that the Russians were about to level the town and kill everyone. To help with the breakout, Maskhadov mustered several attack teams operating from inside Chechnya to strike at the Russians standing between Radujev and home. It was an important diversion, allowing the raiders to make a circuitous escape, heading northeast out of Pervomaiskoye. To create even more confusion, Maskhadov ordered simultaneous small-scale attacks at several locations throughout Chechnya.

While Radujev’s raid failed, about two-thirds of his strike force returned safely. It was thought that Radujev had been killed, but he resurfaced several months later. The real consequence of this incident, however, was to confirm the resumption of the war. In the following months the fighting grew in intensity. New Russian offensives were mounted against other built-up areas in Chechnya, most notably at the small city of Sernodovsk in February 1996. Another terrorist incident occurred in March with the hijacking of a Turkish Cypriot airliner—ending, as events did on the Black Sea ferry, with the surrender of the hijackers. Their goal, it seems, was to draw attention to their cause, not to appall the world with wanton violence.

But such nuanced measures had little effect on Moscow, and the fighting escalated. In April the Russians caught a lucky break, killing General Dudayev with a rocket that homed in on his satellite phone while he was talking on it.
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Now the Chechens had lost their president. But their fighting spirit remained high; soon Maskhadov launched a campaign that looked much like Vo Nguyen Giap’s Tet 1968 Tet offensive, in that he ordered attacks throughout the country, from the mountains to the plains, from rural to urban areas. It was a strategic swarm, rocking the large, conventional Russian field army of well over fifty thousand men back on its heels.

The centerpiece of Maskhadov’s offensive was his direct assault on Grozny in August 1996. With an attacking force about one-tenth the size of the occupier’s garrison of some twelve thousand, Maskhadov split his men yet again into well over a hundred small teams. They advanced from every point of the compass, some crawling through the sewers and others climbing to the roofs of the high-rise buildings located in the city’s center. Maskhadov’s men attacked both from below and above, creating a truly vertical battlespace that gave the Russians fits. Even their aircraft suffered as the Chechens shot down four helicopters on the first day of the fighting.
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Shamil Basayev was Maskhadov’s key subordinate in these days of brutal dawn-to-dusk struggle.

After more than two weeks of fighting that turned Grozny into a smaller-scale Stalingrad, newly reelected Russian president Boris Yeltsin sent his adviser on security affairs—and chief political rival—former general Alexander Lebed, to negotiate with Maskhadov. Lebed was a veteran of tough counterinsurgent battles against the
MUJAHIDEEN
in Afghanistan during the 1980s and brought a field soldier’s practical views to his discussions with Maskhadov. The two developed a rapport—there is a wonderful photograph of them playing chess during a break in their talks—and arrived at an agreement to withdraw Russian troops from Grozny, and soon after from Chechnya. In return the Chechens would not declare independence, and a final determination of their relationship with Russia would be postponed for five years.

Thus the agreement reached at Khasavyurt brought an end to the fighting that had seen both sides suffer grievously. Soldiers in each army had been killed in the thousands; but it was the Chechen people who had taken the heaviest casualties. Official Chechen figures developed after the war put the number at 87,500.
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In the Chechen elections that followed, the two leading presidential candidates were Aslan Maskhadov and Shamil Basayev, the former campaigning on a conciliatory policy toward the Russians, the latter on continued confrontation. Maskhadov won with 59 percent of the vote, a result that Basayev seemed to accept with good grace. The loser was invited into the new president’s cabinet, and he accepted. As Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal noted of these two men’s willingness to continue working together, “there seemed to be little possibility of an ‘Afghan option,’ as some Russian observers fondly predicted, in which the commanders on the victorious side started fighting each other.”
10

Still, tensions continued between the two men over relations with Russia as time ran out on the five-year truce. Maskhadov hoped for peace; Basayev planned for war. Lebed, the calmest, clearest voice on the Russian side against renewing the war, had been used cynically by Yeltsin and was now being blamed for “losing Chechnya.” The hawks were thus on the rise in Moscow, just waiting on a
CASUS BELLI
. With his invasion of Dagestan in August 1999, Shamil Basayev gave the Russians all the reasons they could ask for to renew the war against the Chechens.

*

For most Americans, awareness of the deadly seriousness of rising Muslim militancy came only in the wake of 9/11. For Russians, the alarm was sounded two years earlier, in the summer of 1999, when Shamil Basayev decided on his own to launch an offensive
JIHAD
(the 1994–1996 fighting in Chechnya is more accurately described as defending against a Russian invasion) in Dagestan. Earlier in 1999 Basayev and his followers succeeded in pressuring Maskhadov into imposing
SHARIA
Islamic law in Chechnya; now they sought to expand the realm that was to be governed in this way. But Basayev’s raiders were countered by a determined Russian defense. In hard fighting, the Chechens were driven back.

In the wake of this repulse, several terrorist bombings occurred in a number of locales around Russia, killing hundreds and wounding thousands. As a leading scholar of this conflict, Mark Kramer, observed of these events, “the circumstances of the attacks were never adequately explained, but the Russian government promptly blamed the Chechens.”
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Thus the hawks in Moscow now had their justification for action
,
a war on terror. In September, Prime Minister (and soon to be president when Yeltsin resigned at the close of 1999) Vladimir Putin ordered military action against the Chechens. What has followed since has been nothing short of a bloodbath.

Tens of thousands of Russian troops soon poured into Chechnya, supported by massive aerial bombing. By November they were crossing the Terek River on their way to Grozny, which they captured in February 2000. This time they did not simply roll their tanks into town, to be ambushed by small Chechen fire teams. Rather, the Russians themselves had learned how to work in smaller teams. Their special forces (
SPETSNAZ
) and naval infantry in particular showed considerable aptitude for this kind of fighting. Indeed, their improved performance in this campaign recalled their eventual victory over the Finns in the Winter War of 1939–1940. In that conflict the Finns had also relied on small, mobile fire teams to befuddle the much balkier Russian formations, but after stinging early reverses the Russians had begun to operate in a similarly skillful way.
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None of this is to suggest that things went smoothly for the Russians. Maskhadov, Basayev, and their minions put up a stern fight, defending Grozny for months and thereafter mounting countless raids and ambushes throughout the country. Russian casualties were high, in the tens of thousands. Their losses and the elusiveness of the enemy enraged them so greatly that they were spurred to commit terrible atrocities against the Chechen people. A woman described the horror of the Russian advance to the French journalist Anne Nivat: “We hid for four days under a pile of manure. . . . That’s how we were able to escape. But almost all our neighbors disappeared. When we came out, there were bodies everywhere.”
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As Mark Kramer has noted, the suffering was such that between 1999 and 2004, the population of Chechnya was reduced from just over one million to about seven hundred thousand. Many tens of thousands were killed, and hundreds of thousands of others have left the country.
14
The population has continued to decline in recent years, though less precipitously.

Maskhadov, forced into a defensive crouch that left him only the ability to mount jabbing raids and ambushes, nonetheless pursued his campaign. He skillfully dodged Russian attempts to kill him with the same kind of homing missiles that had taken out Dudayev, and kept some semblance of order in Chechen insurgent operations. All the while he hoped that his forces’ ability to continue fighting would induce the Russians to return to the bargaining table. But two factors were now working against him: improved Russian military performance had induced significant Chechen factions to side with the invaders; and Shamil Basayev, not content with a defensive war of attrition, was agitating for a renewed terrorist campaign in Russia proper.

More effective Russian military action was a thorny problem, but it was one that Maskhadov was trained to cope with. After the fall of Grozny he made sure to husband his resources carefully, avoiding direct combat in favor of a shift to the use of improvised explosive devices, the same tactics used in Iraq and Afghanistan against American forces. Maskhadov also employed a small number of elite snipers to create disruption among the Russians, both at the front and in rear areas. He set traps for helicopters—a principal means of Russian tactical mobility—and knocked out eighteen of them in the first six months of the war.
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Maskhadov also continued the practice of using his small combat teams to infiltrate Russian positions and set ambushes.

In short, Maskhadov found a way to maintain a protracted resistance to the Russians, even against their improved tactics and growing ability to turn some Chechens to their side. But he could not restrain Basayev from launching his terrorist invasion of Russia, which prompted outrage and redoubled Moscow’s resolve to crush the Chechens. The first major move in the new terrorist campaign was the seizure of hundreds of hostages at a Moscow opera house in October 2002 by some fifty Chechen men and women
SMERTNIKI
(kamikazes). Putin refused to negotiate with them and employed both anesthetic gas and
SPETSNAZ
troopers to kill almost all the terrorists. More than a hundred hostages died too, but Russian resolve was demonstrated.

Undaunted, the Chechen terror campaign continued with suicide bombings in Russian subways and elsewhere, often perpetrated by women operatives known as Black Widows, wives of men who had been killed in Chechnya and who now sought revenge. The Widows’ most spectacular attacks came in August 2004 when two of them boarded Russian airliners wearing bomb vests and blew themselves up. Both planes went down with all passengers and crew killed.

The airline bombings were followed a month later with a terrorist assault on a North Ossetian middle school by a team of about thirty fighters. They took more than a thousand hostages; Putin once again took a hard line, refusing to negotiate. Instead he mustered a significant military force, including a team of Russia’s elite Alpha commandos. Fighting soon erupted, with more than four hundred of the hostages killed along with almost all the terrorists. While this catastrophe caused a firestorm of criticism of Putin’s methods, Basayev’s goal of weakening Russian resolve was not achieved. The average Russian was angrier with the terrorists than at the usual ham-handedness of the military.

Maskhadov understood this, and continued to try to rein in Basayev and other extremists, but he could not change their minds. So he continued his campaign of ambushes and raids, hoping to wear down the Russians through attrition. To this strategy in the field he added a renewed effort to negotiate peace. But here too he failed. Alexander Lebed, with whom he had crafted a peace agreement a decade earlier, had died in a helicopter crash in April 2002. It seemed that Maskhadov could talk with no one about prospects for peace.

In January 2005 he struck out on his own, declaring a unilateral, conditional cease fire. Chechen fighters would act only in self-defense; they would mount no new attacks. Violence levels began to drop in the wake of Maskhadov’s announcement, and it appeared that the Russians put out peace feelers, indicating their willingness to open talks. Encouraged, the Chechen leader made his way to the village of Tolstoy-Yurt in March. But instead of diplomacy he found death.