Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [40]
“In Pervomaiskoye, we did not see any command or control or coordination,” Sasha told me later. “We were on our own, fighting the elements as much as we fought the Chechens, perhaps even more. Which made me wonder, who the hell were our commanders?”
On the last day of the operation they captured a Chechen boy, perhaps seventeen years old. They had finally taken the village after most of the terrorists had filtered out. It was a terrible sight: craters from bombardment, burned-out houses, and everywhere the bodies of rebels, villagers, hostages, and Russian soldiers.
The boy had apparently strayed away from his comrades and walked right into their hands.
“He was very scared, expecting that we would beat him,” Sasha recalled, “but I took him aside to talk. He was an intelligent-looking boy from Grozny, spoke clear, educated Russian. I was interested to know how he ended up among the terrorists. Wouldn’t he rather be in school? And he told me a remarkable thing: ‘I hate the war, but it has to be done. When it started, our whole class went.’ I remembered my grandfather’s stories of his whole class volunteering to go to the front during the Great Patriotic War with the Germans. And I thought that these were not terrorists, even though they attacked civilians. Entire classes of schoolboys don’t join terrorist organizations. This was a people’s war.”
He also found a field journal on a dead Chechen commander. What a contrast from the typically messy methods of Russian commanders! At the end of each day, the Chechen took stock of his personnel, ammunition, and supplies in an organized and cool-headed manner.
“It was in Pervomaiskoye that I realized that it would not be an easy war to win, but I still thought it was necessary for Russia. It did not yet cross my mind that perhaps we should have left the Chechens alone,” he said.
In the Chechen notebook, Sasha found some Arab names among the fighters, his first indication of the presence of foreigners. This was a significant discovery. He handed over the notebook to his commanding officer. The next day, the FSB director displayed the list to reporters as evidence of “foreign mercenaries” involved in the raid. Even Yeltsin himself, in a broadcast from the Kremlin, mentioned the captured diary.
Sasha was in the audience for FSB Director Mikhail Barsukov’s press conference from Dagestan on January 20, 1996, which was broadcast nationally on ORT. He heard his boss say, “We used Grad [rocket] launchers mainly to exert psychological pressure … so that the local population, including the Chechens, could see…. There were three Grad launchers but only one was used. It was shelling an area 1.5 kilometers from the village, and on the other side of the Terek [River] on Chechen territory, where rebels who had come to help the bandits might concentrate.”
Sasha could only curse quietly. When he had run across the muddy field toward the town, those Grad missiles were exploding all around him, killing two of his friends. How could Barsukov lie like that to the whole world? Even Yeltsin repeated those lies in a later broadcast from the Kremlin. He described Pervomaiskoye as “a Dudayev stronghold with earthworks, pillboxes, underground passageways between the houses, lots of special constructions, and heavy combat equipment. When I said, here in the Kremlin, that the operation was planned to last just one day, we did not know that under the ground there was a vast Dudayev stronghold. It had been set up long ago and maintained.”
It was all lies. The experience shattered Sasha’s trust in the system, but he was still adamant that the war must be won. He did not hate the Chechens, but he was a patriot. He could not accept losing a war to them.
It took two years and forty thousand dead, but in the end Russia did indeed lose. Chechnya suffered enormously, and never more than on April 21, 1996. Zakayev