The portrayal of Chechnya as ideal guerrilla country is to a great
extent a false one. Only the southern third is mountainous. Most of
the rest, where most of the fighting has taken place, is rolling open
plain--ideal tank country, as demonstrated by the fact that the
Soviet army had a tank training school near the Chechen town of
Shelli. The Russian army's failure to use tanks and motorized
infantry to surround and destroy Chechen positions shows that it is
no longer even capable of the massive armored assaults that used to
be its tactical hallmark.

In many ways, the behavior--and the failure--of the Russian army in
Chechnya is reminiscent of that of Western armies in wars like those
in Algeria and Vietnam. The difference is that those were big
countries, with big populations, hundreds of thousands of square
miles of territory--much of it ideal guerrilla country--and with
bordering states that supported the guerrillas. At around six
thousand square miles, Chechnya is hardly bigger than Connecticut.
For guerrilla units (up to battalion or even regimental strength) in
an area this size to be able to run rings around what is supposed to
be the third largest army on earth is nothing less than bizarre. Only
an army in a truly advanced state of decadence would allow it to
happen.

Shortage of Men, Shortage of Spirit

Part of the reason for the failure of the Russian army is that even
numerically it is not nearly as strong as it looks. Indeed, recent
reports have suggested that the Russians are even incapable of
launching two local offensives in Chechnya simultaneously. This may
seem absurd for a force with a paper strength of 1.7 million men, but
the real disposable strength of the army is much lower, and the
number of effective combat units lower still. According to Western
estimates at the start of 1996, the Russian Defense Ministry (as
opposed to the Interior Ministry forces) had only seven divisions
that it even pretended were "battle-ready."

As Chechnya glaringly demonstrated, several of these "elite"
divisions were also greatly under-strength. Thus, according to their
official strength, the Russian forces that moved into Chechnya
(including formations from supposedly elite, "battle-ready" units
like the Kantemir Motorized Infantry Division and the Pskov Paratroop
Division) should have numbered some seventy thousand men. The real
figure, according to Russian and Western analysts, may have been as
low as twenty thousand--which was simply not enough to do the job.

The soldiers, including the officers, of the Pskov Division whom I
met on the road to Grozny in December 1994 were dressed like tramps.
Soldiers from the Kantemir Division whom I met later in Chechen
captivity were not "crack" troops by any serious international
standard--the privates, and even the NCOs, were simply conscripts,
several of them with less than six months' training. Some of the
"elite" Interior Ministry units like the paramilitary police, OMON,
and the police special reaction forces, SOBR, hurled into Grozny to
replace the shattered motorized infantry in January and February
1995, were thrown together on a few days' notice from individual
"volunteers" drawn from special police units all over the Russian
Federation. They had then been sent to fight without even a chance to
train together for so much as a day.

All that said, shortage of troops--even of crack troops--can only
very partially explain the Russian failure, which has occurred in
every field. In the analysis of Western military attachés in Moscow,
the only arm that has functioned at all competently has been air
transport. The rest--from intelligence through artillery, armor,
infantry, airborne troops, special forces, the air force--have all
failed miserably and repeatedly to do their job and achieve their
goals.

Failures of equipment and training also provide part of the
explanation, stemming above all from the savage cuts in the military
budget over the past seven years. For two years before the Chechen
War, the Russian air force commander, General Pyotr Deinekin, had
been warning that lack of money meant that his combat pilots were
getting only ten hours of flying time a year, and that this was
insufficient to maintain even basic combat efficiency--a warning
absolutely borne out by the event. In January of last year, I was
sitting with Chechen commander Shamil Basayev at a Chechen military
command post (a former Soviet military base) in the southern suburbs
of Grozny while Russian fighter bombers made repeated attempts to hit
the hill on which it was situated. Each time they missed or sheered
off without dropping their bombs, despite the fact that the only
weapon the Chechens had arrayed against them was a single heavy
machine-gun. So acute was the Russian shortage of competent and
determined pilots that early last year they were reportedly reduced
to creating combat squadrons for the war from test-pilots and
aerobatics teams.

In the same month, I was staying at a house in Grozny near which the
Chechens had established a mortar, which went on firing for day after
day, apparently from exactly the same position. Once again, repeated
Russian attempts to hit it failed. A veteran French war correspondent
was utterly bewildered: "But the Russians have equipment to track
where mortars fire from, every modern army has it, that's why you
have to keep moving mortars around. What are they playing at?" The
old Russia hands present proposed a variety of explanations: that the
equipment had all been defective (due to the lack of replacement
spare parts, the greater part of Russian military equipment can only
survive by cannibalizing other equipment); that it had all been
broken and never repaired; that it had been illegally sold (possibly
to Chechen "businessmen"); that the only men who knew how to use it
had left the army and had never been replaced; or finally, that it
contained some alcoholic or potentially alcoholic element--in which
case no further explanation of its fate was necessary.

But as this last explanation suggests, even many of the
military-technical failures come down in the end to a failure of
morale. Russian pilots who knew what they were fighting for, loved
what they knew, and were willing to risk death for it, would have hit
that hill, machine-gun or no machine-gun. The Russian soldier in
Chechnya--like the American soldier in the later years of the Vietnam
War--simply does not want to be there, let alone to fight and die
there. As with Western armies in similar circumstances, many of the
brutalities and atrocities committed by the Russians in
Chechnya--from the reliance on indiscriminate air-bombardment, to
random attacks on civilians--stem ultimately from this deep
demoralization.

The only explanation, too, of successful Chechen raids deep into
"Russian-controlled territory" is that (leaving aside the possibility
of bribery) Russian posts confronted with well-armed, determined
Chechens frequently just stand aside--something I've seen with my own
eyes. As one conscript admitted to me last February, "You know,
whatever they say in Moscow, I don't really think this is Russian
land, and so this war has nothing to do with me. I don't want to die
in a game by the leaders to cover their own mistakes and crimes." The
belief that "the real rulers of Russia today are the mafia" is as
widespread among Russian soldiers as in society at large.

This is a clear difference from the Russian armies that conquered the
Caucasus in the nineteenth century. No one ever accused the soldiers
of the Russian imperial army of a failure to stand still and be shot
at. One reason for this was obviously a mixture of blind serf
obedience and fear of their own officers; another was the obvious
willingness, shown by the casualty figures, of those officers to
stand and die with their men. Those officers were recruited from the
Russian elite, and whatever their other faults, were committed by
personal conviction and family tradition to the Russian empire and
Russian glory.

Today, as I heard again and again from Russian officers, with only
minor variations, it is a case of, "We serve in the army because
we're not trained for anything else. These days, who'd be an officer
if you could work in a bank?" One of the most personally impressive
and apparently highly-motivated Russian officers I met in
Chechnya--the commander of a SOBR special police unit--confided to me
that he was planning to leave the service to become a private
security operative, as were several of his subordinates.

The ordinary soldier's and officer's contempt and loathing for "that
brothel in the Kremlin" was extreme, open and, as far as I could
tell, virtually universal. If the dominant cliché to be heard on the
Chechen side is that "One Chechen is worth a hundred Russians", one
frequently heard on the Russian side is: "A fish rots from the head."
The "head" in this case means not just Yeltsin and his entourage, but
also Defense Minister Pavel Grachev and to an extent the entire
military hierarchy, riddled as it is with outrageous corruption and
outright theft. These military attitudes may be of critical
importance if in the weeks or years ahead the Yeltsin regime has to
call on the army for support in a power struggle.

Essay Types: Essay