CHAPTER ELEVEN, GROZNY, EARLY 1995: MALINOVSKY
Changing careers had not been hard for Rebecca Taylor. She’d let the Washington Post know that, yes, she was interested. They’d responded with an immediate offer. She’d accepted after indicating that she expected to spend the next three years in Russia, based out of Moscow but going wherever she chose and could. Her editors in DC, admiring her brio and probably figuring that the Moscow bureau chief would tend to her tethering, went along. Two months later, after some discreet assistance from a Russian colonel she’d met at a humanitarian aid conference and a let’s-have-the-showdown-now confrontation with her bureau chief, she and a few thousand armed Russians found another way into Grozny. It turned out to be the old, old way.
Seven days in combat, Rebecca Taylor learned quickly, is eternity times seven. Reporters, however, had the luxury of taking themselves out of the action in order to write and file their stories, sleep, and eat. Now she sat, filthy and exhausted and unable to remember ever feeling any other way, hoping that the electricity in the command track would remain steady enough to keep her laptop from crashing again. Tents and buildings were available. So were beds. And that was the problem. Anywhere she could lie down, she would. Soon enough, she would. But first, she had to understand enough to write enough to make some preliminary sense of it all. Rebecca Taylor believed that things ought to make sense, that if you just tried hard enough to understand, you would. Even when understanding requires that you empty your mind of all prejudices, all preconceptions, all beliefs, all knowledge and everything you once thought of as knowledge.
Even when understanding requires that you reach conclusions that you may not want to reach.
She stared at her screen, wondering what to tell America, how to find the right level of detail between the obvious and the intimate, between the truths that could no longer be evaded and the truths that had to be, at least for now. She decided to start with a simple matter that everyone understood and whose implications everyone chose to evade. This war was going to be long: long because of the dreadful condition of the Russian Army and the dreadful nature of the enemy. Long because it had been going on for centuries in one form or another, and this was only the latest iteration. Long because it was part of a much larger struggle that would also be long. And long because…
Your Majesty! Your Majesty! The Thirty Years War has begun!
Rebecca Taylor stared down in disbelief at the words she’d typed without realizing it. An idiotic little academic joke from one of her least funny history professors, the one who’d sneered off her protest about American agriculture so many worlds ago. Obviously, the general who approached his sovereign thus in 1618, could not have known that the war would last thirty years. The serious point, according to that professor: understanding the past requires you to suspend your knowledge of the present; demands that you refuse to know how things turned out. Except, of course, when the present is just like the past and the future will be more of the same. Rebecca Taylor deleted that little quip and began again.
Someday, Russians will know what we’re doing here as the start of the First Chechen War of the post-Soviet era. How many more there will be is, of course, impossible to tell. But one is a good enough number with which to start. What the rest of the world will call this war, how they will understand it, remain to be determined.
She then accessed the history section she’d written before deploying. Background for the Beltway crowd. Not that it would do much good, but such is formulaic journalism and she was too tired to get creative.
The Groznaya Fortress was founded in 1818 by Terek Cossacks and played a major role in the Caucasian War later that century. Grozny became the center of Russia’s, then the Soviet Union’s, petroleum industry. After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the Cossacks were considered a threat to the new Soviet state and the Soviet leadership encouraged Chechen immigration into Grozny. Later, during World War Two, Josef Stalin deported the Chechens and Ingush, with NKVD troops actively destroying all traces of them from the city, from bookstores to graveyards. What is not commonly known is that some Chechen and Ingush leaders were negotiating with the Germans. In 1957, the Chechens and Ingush were allowed to return home, while many Russians left, especially for the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. After the collapse of central Soviet authority, most of the remaining Russians were expelled by Chechen militants. A separatist government under Dzhokar Dudayev, a former Soviet Air Force general, took power. Russian Defense Minister Pavel Grachev recently predicted that he could topple Dudayev with a single Airborne regiment. The man is not simply greedy and corrupt. He is also stupid.
But stupidity comes in many forms. And now it was necessary to write something about the stupidity of the Russian Army. But this was not, Rebecca Taylor had learned, the simple stupidity of dumb soldiers. It was the criminal stupidity of an institution that abused and squandered its men even when it didn’t have to, even when such waste meant defeat.
Training has always been the weakness of the Soviet and now the Russian Army. You hear the horror stories of harassment and abuse of conscripts. You hear stories involving murder and rape. You hear of officers beating the troops, even beating each other. But hard, realistic training? The kind that will keep you alive and maybe even victorious? There’s little evidence of that here. This is an army whose soldiers smoke pungent cigarettes while lying in ambush positions. Those who don’t, simply snore. This is an army far more likely to rely upon on massive firepower than accuracy, so they carry enormous amounts of ammunition. That degrades their mobility. This is an army that resolutely refuses to practice even the most basic field sanitation, with predictable results. Worst of all, this is an army that appears systemically incapable of thinking.
Rebecca Taylor began to weep for the men who had been so kind and helpful to her, who were now dead. Then she composed herself sufficiently to continue.
The Chechens hold the buildings here. The Russians patrol the streets in their vehicles. Their armored personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles are routinely disabled by rocket propelled grenades, mines, and other items. The tactic is simple. Knock out the vehicles in the front and rear of the Russian patrols and convoys. The vehicles in the middle can’t escape. The Chechens then destroy them one by one, giving the soldiers within them a choice. They can stay inside and burn to death. Or they can get out and take their chances. Usually, they’ll be shot as they run. The Chechens are very good at setting up multiple, interlocking ambushes. Over the last week, I have witnessed this scene several times. I have experienced it myself. Twice.
Rebecca Taylor put her head down and continued weeping until she was wept out. Then she finished her article, made sure it got filed through the Russian communications package, and slept. Later, she would check with her bureau chief to see if anything had gotten through and whether the homies had been astute enough not to run the garbage that the censors would occasionally and ineptly insert. As she drifted off, she recalled a word from her early readings about the Soviet Army. Exactingness. The great Communist soldierly virtue of adhering to orders with the utmost literalism and scrupulousness. Perhaps the Russian Army, she concluded, would do well to be a little less exact in following orders and a bit more exact in determining just whom they were killing, and why.