The Chechnyan war that empowered Putin
An hour before midnight on Dec 31 1999, Vladimir Putin, acting president of Russia, was flown into Chechnya to make his first visit to troops at the front. That night, he sent a message: he was a strongman leader, unafraid to take on his enemies. As Mr Putin marks 20 years in power, it has become clear how the war set the stage for empowering the security services, muzzling the media, and centralising his authority, and in the process killing the dream of a liberal Russia.
About an hour before midnight on Dec 31 1999, Akhmat looked up into the sky and tried to pinpoint the sound of a helicopter flying low and fast over the shattered city of Grozny. But it was an overcast night, and he knew that engaging a helicopter with anything less than a rocket launcher was a waste of ammunition.
He shrugged, adjusted the heavy machine-gun on his shoulder, and trudged to the front line trenches surrounding the Chechen capital.
Days later, he could have kicked himself. The helicopter, he realised, had been carrying Vladimir Putin, the newly installed acting president of Russia, en route to his first visit to troops at the front. A lucky shot could have changed Chechen – and Russian – history forever. Or would it?
Strictly speaking, the Second Chechen War was not of Putin’s making. When it began in September 1999, Boris Yeltsin was still president and Mr Putin simply the latest in a succession of rapidly hired-and-fired prime ministers. By the time Yeltsin gave his slurred, meandering resignation speech at midnight on Dec 31, handing power to Mr Putin as acting president, Russian troops already were deep inside Chechnya.
But Mr Putin’s visit to the troops that night sent a powerful message: this would be his war. In prosecuting it he would establish credentials that he continues to trade on as he completes his 20th anniversary in power: as a strongman leader, unafraid to deal roughly with his enemies, and the man to deliver Russia from the unresolved crises of the Yeltsin era.
But the war would also set the stage for empowering the security services, muzzling the media and centralising authority, all of which have killed the dream of a liberal Russia.
The murder in Berlin this year of Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a former Chechen rebel, by a Russian agent is a vivid illustration of how the ruthless logic of that conflict continues to guide the Kremlin today.
“The war inflicted not only tens of thousands of deaths. It also dealt a death blow to hopes of democracy,” said one Chechen businessman who spoke on condition of anonymity. “The war in Chechnya was the lever for the rise of authoritarianism in Russia and so-called ‘sovereign democracy’. If it hadn’t happened, we would be living in a completely democratic country.”
The tragedy of Chechnya began 1994, when Boris Yeltsin sent an ill-prepared army to crush a separatist nationalist movement that had declared independence, but after two years Russian forces withdrew.
The 1996 ceasefire was seen as a humiliation. Three years of uneasy peace ended in August 1999 when Shamil Basayev, a radical Islamist Chechen militia leader, led 2,000 fighters to invade the neighbouring Russian republic of Dagestan. That, together with a string of apartmentblock bombings in Russia the following month, provided the pretext for a renewed Russian assault against what Mr Putin called “terrorists”.
When he addressed the troops at Gudermes on Jan 1 2000, Mr Putin told them their mission was to prevent the break-up of the Russian Federation.
But the character of this war was summed up in a cruder remark made four months earlier, when he was still prime minister. “We will hunt terrorists everywhere,” he told a journalist who challenged him over the bombardment of Grozny. “If we find them in the toilet, we will kill them on the toilet ... Problem solved.”
Coming from this diminutive and relatively unknown bureaucrat, such language sounded absurd. But they were not empty words.
“The promotional literature for the first war was ‘restore constitutional order’,” said Andrei Terentyev, an officer in the Russian combat engineers who fought in both wars. “But the slogan for the second war was ‘counterterrorism’, and that was quite a different thing. The commander in chief said ‘kill them in the s---house,’ and that’s basically how it went.”
Brutal Russian tactics, including artillery bombardments dflattening villages, bought victory, but the cost was immense. The Russian human rights group Memorial estimates more than 200,000 civilians were killed in the course of both Chechen wars. The number of fighters killed is unknown.
By the time combat operations were declared over in 2009, Russian military fatalities in Chechnya were somewhere between 20,000 and 40,000. Chechnya today is probably the strangest place in Russia, not just because it is unrecognisable from the
‘The war inflicted not only tens of thousands of deaths. It also dealt a death blow to hopes of democracy’
hellscape of the war. Neighbourhoods have been rebuilt and smart shops do a brisk trade on the central street – named, in case anyone was unsure who won, Vladimir Putin Avenue.
On the hilltop where Russian and Chechen forces fought bloody battles for a vantage point over the city, there is now a gleaming viewing platform and family-friendly recreation facilities. On every available surface, there are portraits of Akhmad Kadyrov, the former rebel whom Mr Putin appointed as a pro-russian ruler, and his son Ramzan, who continues to rule the republic for the Kremlin.
In exchange for keeping Chechnya quiet and professing undying loyalty to Mr Putin, Mr Kadyrov has been granted perks that no other regional leader in Russia could dream of, including a sumptuous reconstruction budget and a high degree of autonomy.
The regime he runs is centred on a personality cult, conservative Islam and the loyalty of several thousand well-armed police and interior ministry personnel, whose job it is to root out insurgents and political rivals.
The upshot, says Tanya Lokshina, a Human Rights Watch researcher, is an “independent fiefdom where Russian law has no writ, and the only law is ‘Ramzan skazal’ – Ramzan said.”
If the authorities hoped the erasure of the scars of war would exorcise memories of conflict, it has only been partially successful. Every street corner in Grozny has a horrific story attached to it, and it seems impossible that the stupefying violence can have had no lasting impact on Russia.
“Fear isn’t the right word,” said Mr Terentyev, the Russian combat engineer. “The word is terror, and terror is a physical thing. It has a taste – put a metal thing in your mouth, that is the taste of terror. We dealt with it with alcohol.”
But nothing sums up the cruelty of the Chechen war, or the corrosiveness of its legacy, like the phenomenon of the disappeared. Human Rights Watch estimates that over 3,000 people were “disappeared” – in other words, arrested and never seen again – in the Second Chechen War.
Russia has never admitted it, but there is strong evidence that
‘Terror is a physical thing. It has a taste – put a metal thing in your mouth, that is the taste of terror. We dealt with it with alcohol’
disappearing prisoners was a matter of policy. One former soldier, who said he had witnessed the interrogation, torture and killing of at least five suspected insurgents by Russian special forces, described it as “a principle of anti-partisan warfare.”
If you wish to demoralise a hostile population, the theory goes, you deny families the closure of a dead body or a funeral. The bodies were disposed of in unmarked graves or vaporised with high explosive. The goal was that “nothing, absolutely nothing, should be left”, said the veteran, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
But while the war may be over, the dream of Chechen independence is not – and it is not just unrepentant rebels who keep it alive. “Kadyrov cherishes this dream,” said the Grozny businessman, who has met the Chechen president several times. One day that question may have to be revisited. In the meantime, many of those who went through the wars are left wondering what it was all for.
Akhmat, the former Chechen rebel, says a lucky shot at Mr Putin’s helicopter as it swept over Grozny 20 years ago probably wouldn’t have made that much difference. “The system is more than one man,” he shrugged. “And the system had already decided what it wanted to do.”
Some names have been changed to protect the identity of sources.
On this day 20 years ago, a somewhat reserved and undemonstrative technocrat became acting president of Russia, succeeding Boris Yeltsin, the very opposite in temperament. Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer chosen by Yeltsin to be his prime minister, stepped into the role that he has held ever since in one guise or another. On that New Year’s Eve 1999, few in the West, probably not even Mr Putin himself, could have imagined he would still be at the helm two decades later. Post-soviet Russia was undergoing a massive transformation and faced severe economic difficulties. The chances of an inexperienced politician clinging to power for even a year or two seemed fanciful.
Yet he won the election to confirm his presidency, carried to victory on a tide of popular support partly achieved through his ruthless suppression of the Chechen uprising. To begin with he delivered two things the Russians wanted most after the chaos following the collapse of the Soviet Union: stability and prosperity. He clipped the wings of the powerful regional governors while high oil prices helped boost growth.
For as long as the economy was booming (albeit with assets in the hands of a few favoured oligarchs), Mr Putin was well disposed towards the West, even at one stage contemplating joining Nato. As Sir Malcom Rifkind, the former defence secretary, confirms today, he proposed as much in the mid-1990s. This was a missed opportunity. But when the oil price collapsed and the economy tanked, Mr Putin adopted the characteristics of a traditional Kremlin leader, stoking resentment towards the West for allegedly looking down on Russia and encroaching on its sphere of influence.
Russia has subsequently interfered in European and American politics, sided with anti-western forces in the Middle East, invaded Georgia, annexed Crimea, destabilised Ukraine and murdered its enemies wherever they were, regardless of who got in the way, as in Salisbury. As a consequence, Putin has retained his hard-man popularity in his own country while suppressing opposition at home and fomenting fear and loathing abroad.
Mr Putin came to power apparently eager to act like a Western democratic leader but has turned into an old-style Russian autocrat. He is supposed to give up his office in 2024 but is showing no sign of wanting to do so. Yet the economy remains fragile and millions of Russians are still in poverty as wealth stays in the hands of the favoured few. Protest movements are growing. Sooner or later, even Mr Putin’s luck will run out.