First Chechen War

• 1. Introduction

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  The First Chechen War began on the 11th of December 1994, when approximately 40,000 Russian troops crossed the border into Chechnya. Russian Defense Minister Pavel Grachev had promised it would be a bloodless blitzkrieg, over before the 20th of December. What followed instead was nearly two years of urban warfare, aerial bombardment, guerrilla raids, and mass civilian death on a scale Europe had not seen since World War II. By the time a ceasefire was signed in August 1996, somewhere between 30,000 and 100,000 Chechen civilians were dead, more than half a million people had been displaced, and Grozny had been reduced to rubble. Russia's military had suffered thousands of its own dead. And the war ended not with a Russian victory, but with a Chechen one. How did a modern military superpower invade its own territory, promise a quick resolution, and then lose? What drove the Chechen people to resist so fiercely? And what did the destruction leave behind? Those are the questions this documentary will follow.

• 2. Centuries of Resistance

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  Chechen resistance to Russian expansion reaches back to 1785, when Sheikh Mansur, recognized as the first imam of the Caucasian peoples, united various North Caucasian nations in an attempt to repel Russian invasion. His effort ultimately failed. The 1817-1864 Caucasian War ended with Imperial Russian forces defeating the Chechens, annexing their lands, and deporting thousands to the Middle East.

  After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Chechen bids for independence again came to nothing. By 1922, Chechnya had been absorbed into the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, the largest constituent state of the newly formed Soviet Union. In 1936, Joseph Stalin formally established the Checheno-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic within that structure.

  Then came 1944. On the orders of NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria, more than 500,000 Chechens, Ingush, and several other North Caucasian peoples were deported to Siberia and Central Asia. The official Soviet justification was collective punishment for alleged collaboration with German forces during the 1940-1944 insurgency. The reality was more complex: many Chechens and Ingush had fought loyally for the Soviet Union against the Nazis, and some had received the highest military awards the country offered, among them Khanpasha Nuradilov and Movlid Visaitov. In March 1944, the Soviet authorities abolished the Checheno-Ingush Republic outright. It was only under Nikita Khrushchev that the Vainakh peoples were permitted to return to their homeland, and their republic was restored in 1957.

• 3. Dudayev and the Declaration

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  On the 6th of September 1991, militants of the All-National Congress of the Chechen People stormed a session of the Supreme Soviet of the Checheno-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. The Congress had been created by a former Soviet Air Force general named Dzhokhar Dudayev. During the storming, the head of Grozny's branch of the Communist Party, Vitaliy Kutsenko, died after being defenestrated or falling while attempting to escape. The session dissolved. The government of the republic effectively ceased to exist.

  Elections were held on the 27th of October 1991. The day before, the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union published a notice in the local Chechen press declaring the elections illegal. Dudayev won 90.1% of the vote on a turnout of 72%. He became president and declared independence from the Soviet Union. In November 1991, Boris Yeltsin dispatched Internal Troops to Grozny; Dudayev's forces surrounded them at the airport and they withdrew. By June 1992 the Checheno-Ingush Republic had split, with Ingushetia joining the Russian Federation. Chechnya declared full independence in 1993 as the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria.

  Dudayev's government was not without enemies at home. In March 1993 an opposition coup attempt was crushed by force. A month later Dudayev introduced direct presidential rule. By June 1993 he had dissolved the Chechen parliament to prevent a vote of no confidence. The economy collapsed as Dudayev severed economic ties with Russia; black market trading, arms trafficking, and counterfeiting filled the vacuum. From 1991 to 1994, tens of thousands of non-Chechen residents left the republic. Moscow, meanwhile, began covertly supplying opposition factions with finances, military equipment, and mercenaries, and eventually unmarked Russian aircraft started flying combat operations over Chechnya.

  The Federation Treaty signed on the 31st of March 1992 offered a path toward negotiated autonomy. Yeltsin and Ruslan Khasbulatov, then chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet and himself an ethnic Chechen, signed it with 86 of 88 federal subjects. Chechnya and Tatarstan were the only holdouts. Tatarstan eventually reached a special accord with Yeltsin in early 1994. That left Chechnya alone, and with neither side making serious efforts at negotiation, the situation drifted toward war.

• 4. The Blitzkrieg That Was Not

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  When Russian troops crossed into Chechnya on the 11th of December 1994, the invasion was supposed to be over in days. Pavel Grachev had boasted he could topple Dudayev in a couple of hours with a single airborne regiment. The offensive had been planned so hastily that Deputy Nationalities Minister Vyacheslav Mikhailov learned of it only while boarding his plane in Moscow, on his way to begin peace talks.

  The three-pronged advance stalled almost immediately. In Dagestan, civilians blocked tanks and pleaded with soldiers not to go. In Ingushetia, protesters opposed to the use of force against their Chechen neighbors stopped a column advancing from Vladikavkaz; the protest turned violent, and five Ingush civilians and one soldier died. The only column that came close to Grozny was halted three days after the invasion began, at Dolinsky, just 15 miles from the capital, by unexpected Chechen resistance.

  The main attack was temporarily halted by the deputy commander of the Russian Ground Forces, who then resigned in protest, calling it a crime to send the army against its own people. Yeltsin's adviser on nationality affairs resigned as well. So did General Boris Gromov, who had commanded Soviet forces in Afghanistan and warned on television it would be a bloodbath and another Afghanistan. General Boris Poliakov also resigned. More than 800 professional soldiers and officers refused to participate; 83 were convicted by military courts, and the rest were discharged. Later, General Lev Rokhlin refused to be decorated as a Hero of the Russian Federation for his role in the war.

  A group of 50 Russian paratroopers deployed by helicopter to capture a Chechen weapons cache was captured by local Chechen militia. Chechen separatists also managed to capture around 20 Russian Ground Forces regulars and about 50 other Russian citizens who had been covertly hired by the Russian FSK state security organization to fight for the opposition forces. On the 29th of December, Russian airborne forces did seize the military airfield next to Grozny in a rare clear victory at the Battle of Khankala. The next objective was the capital itself.

• 5. Grozny in Ruins

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  The assault on Grozny began on New Year's Eve 1994. International monitors from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe described the scenes as an unimaginable catastrophe; former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev called the war a disgraceful, bloody adventure, and German chancellor Helmut Kohl called it sheer madness. The city endured a week-long series of air raids and artillery bombardments that observers compared to the destruction of Dresden, making it the heaviest bombing campaign in Europe since World War II.

  The initial New Year's assault ended in a major Russian defeat. Estimates put Russian soldiers killed in the battle at between 1,000 and 2,000, most of them barely trained conscripts. The worst losses fell on the 131st Maikop Motor Rifle Brigade, which was destroyed in fighting near the central railway station. On the 7th of January 1995, Major-General Viktor Vorobyov was killed by mortar fire, becoming the first in a long series of Russian generals to die in Chechnya. On the 19th of January, Russian forces seized the ruins of the Chechen presidential palace after more than three weeks of continuous fighting over it.

  By the estimate of Yeltsin's human rights adviser Sergei Kovalev, about 27,000 civilians died in the first five weeks of fighting. Russian historian and general Dmitri Volkogonov estimated that the bombardment killed around 35,000 civilians, including 5,000 children, and that the vast majority of those killed were ethnic Russians who had been unable to find escape routes. The battle for the southern part of the city did not officially end until the 6th of March 1995. In February of that year, a group of Wahhabi fighters, primarily Saudi and North African Arabs, entered Chechnya under the leadership of Ibn al-Khattab; while they participated in ambushes, the source notes their value lay more in Khattab's financial resources than his military effectiveness.

• 6. Guerrilla War and Atrocity

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  After Grozny fell in March 1995, Russian forces methodically expanded their control over lowland areas and then pushed into the mountains. On the 7th of April, OMON and other federal forces seized the border village of Samashki, killing up to 300 civilians in what was described as the worst massacre of the war. Hundreds more were detained and subjected to beatings or torture.

  Chechen surgeon Khassan Baiev arrived in Samashki immediately after and documented what he found. In his book, he described dozens of charred corpses of women and children lying in a mosque courtyard, a wild-eyed woman emerging from a burned-out house holding a dead baby, and trucks with bodies piled in the back rolling toward the cemetery. He wrote of young men gagged and dragged by chains behind personnel carriers, and of a human skull mounted on the front of a Russian armored personnel carrier with the word SAMASHKI written on its side. Human Rights Watch later documented that Russian cluster bombs had killed at least 55 civilians in the 3rd of January 1995 Shali attack alone, and that Russian artillery and rocket attacks killed at least 267 civilians during a single December 1995 raid on Gudermes.

  The Chechens responded with large-scale hostage-taking. In June 1995, field commander Shamil Basayev led a group that seized more than 1,500 people in the Budyonnovsk hospital hostage crisis in southern Russia. About 120 Russian civilians died before a ceasefire was negotiated between Basayev and Russian prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin. The raid forced a temporary halt in Russian military operations and gave Chechen forces time to regroup. By late 1995, local self-defence militia units officially numbered 5,000 to 6,000 armed men. According to a United Nations report, Chechen armed forces also included a large number of child soldiers, some as young as 11 years old.

  On the 6th of October 1995, General Anatoliy Romanov, the federal commander in Chechnya, was critically injured and paralyzed in a bomb blast in Grozny. The attack was suspected to have been carried out by rogue elements within the Russian military itself, as it destroyed a developing channel of trust between Romanov and ChRI Chief of Staff Aslan Maskhadov. The two had traveled together to southern Chechnya in August to convince local commanders to release Russian prisoners. Photographer and documenter Zainap Gashaeva recorded war crimes throughout the conflict; her work was later used in a 2011 online archive created by the Society for Threatened Peoples to support investigations into unpunished crimes.

• 7. Operation Jihad and Defeat

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  By early 1996, the war was becoming a serious political liability for Yeltsin as Russia approached a presidential election. On the 21st of April 1996, Chechen president Dzhokhar Dudayev was assassinated by a Russian guided missile. Chechen resistance continued under acting president Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev.

  On the 6th of August 1996, while Russian troops were moving south for a planned final offensive against mountain strongholds, Chechen forces launched what they called Operation Jihad. Led by Aslan Maskhadov and Shamil Basayev, 1,500 Chechen fighters infiltrated Grozny and within hours surrounded Russian garrisons and the government compound. Russian attempts to relieve the trapped units were repulsed with heavy losses; the 276th Motorized Regiment alone suffered 50% losses in a two-day attempt to reach the city center. Chechen forces simultaneously seized control of Argun and Gudermes, reversing Russian gains across the territory.

  On the 19th of August, Russian commander Konstantin Pulikovsky issued an ultimatum demanding Chechen fighters leave Grozny within 48 hours or face destruction by strategic bombers. Yeltsin's national security adviser Alexander Lebed called it a bad joke, given that federal forces were plainly incapable of retaking the city. Lebed began direct negotiations with Maskhadov, and on the 31st of August 1996, they signed the Khasavyurt Accord. The agreement required the withdrawal of all federal forces from Chechnya by the 31st of December 1996 and deferred any decision on Chechnya's final political status until 2001.

  Military analysts and historians have characterized the outcome as a Chechen victory and a Russian defeat. The Foreign Military Studies Office case study concluded that the conflict resulted in Russian defeat. Russian analysts including Alexander Khramchikhin agreed. Some international studies described it as a Pyrrhic victory for Chechnya. Maskhadov was elected president of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria in January 1997. On the 12th of May 1997, he traveled to Moscow and he and Yeltsin signed a formal treaty on peace and the principles of Russian-Chechen relations. Maskhadov said it would demolish any basis for ill-feelings between Moscow and Grozny. His optimism did not last long. In the summer of 1999, former comrades of his led by Basayev and Khattab invaded Dagestan, and Russian forces entered Chechnya again.