Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [39]
In the summer of 1994 he authorized a covert operation supporting anti-Dudayev forces, comprised mostly of Moscow-based Chechen expatriates. Dudayev crushed the insurgency and captured a number of Russian soldiers posing as dissident Chechens. He paraded them on TV and publicly denounced Yeltsin as a liar. Yeltsin was enraged. In December 1994 he unleashed the full force of the Russian army, on the strength of assurances by Defense Minister Pavel Grachev, who bragged that “a paratroop regiment would take Grozny in two hours.” Sasha Litvinenko and a group of his FSB friends saw a broadcast of Russian columns advancing on Grozny and were awash in patriotic fervor. They applauded and toasted to a quick victory.
“What are you happy about, silly?” Marina asked him at the time. “People will get killed. And it is a war in our own country, isn’t it?”
But back then he would not even call it a war. He repeated the defense minister’s boasts about a two-hour job for a paratroop platoon. And he dismissed the Chechens, those primitive shepherds, who could not possibly fight the Russian army.
Some weeks into the war, when NTV showed horrific pictures of the destruction of Grozny, Sasha’s comments became less flippant but no more sympathetic to the Chechens. The bandits were putting up resistance, fighting for every house, he said. Bombardment was the cheapest way to smoke them out; it cost fewer Russian lives than hand-to-hand combat. The Chechens were the enemy. He was an officer. War is ugly, but it was necessary to preserve the integrity of Russia.
His moment of truth came in January 1996, during the siege of Pervomaiskoye. He called Marina unexpectedly from work to say that he was leaving for Dagestan and asked her to turn on the TV. For two weeks Marina was glued to the screen, hoping to see his face among the Russian troops that surrounded the unfortunate village where a band of insurgents held some 120 hostages. It was clear to Marina that something very wrong was happening, and the fact that Sasha did not call home—very unusual for him—added to her anxiety.
As the hostage drama unfolded, she saw the absolute helplessness of federal commanders, who could not explain how fewer than three hundred pinned-down rebels held out against thousands of federal troops, who could not take the village after artillery and aircraft had pulverized it for four days. Nor could they explain why the bombardment was allowed in the first place, while most of the hostages were still alive. Nor how the insurgent commander, Salman Raduyev, and his “Lone Wolf” band of fighters were able to break out of the village through three lines of encirclement.
Two days after everything was over, the doorbell rang. It was Sasha.
“At first, I did not recognize him,” Marina recalled. “He was a different man, exhausted, with an empty stare. He could barely walk, he had frostbite on his feet.”
It took him some days to recover, and then he did something that he had never done before. He told her what had happened.
Marina was horrified by Sasha’s story. His group, a bunch of big city opers from the FSB, was thrown into the middle of a military operation without any equipment, protective gear, or even an adequate supply of food and water. They were ordered to storm the village on foot across an open field, but had to retreat when they were exposed to friendly rocket fire. They slept in an unheated bus in the freezing cold. They had some canned food, but no spoons or forks or even knives to open the cans. They were abandoned for two days in the bus without any orders or communications from anyone. Finally Sasha managed to navigate through the frozen fog to a heated command tent, where he found a group of generals, dead drunk.
On the third day of the siege a commando unit suddenly appeared out of the fog, and Sasha recognized its commander, an old friend from officers school. The new