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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 182 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 182, January 1995.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
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The invasion of the republic of Chechnya by Russian troops has highlighted the splits at the very top of that society. A Russian socialist writes from Moscow to explain what is at stake |
At 1 a.m. Moscow time on Sunday 11 December three columns of Russian tanks rolled towards Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, a tiny republic in the North Caucasus. This is Russia’s biggest military operation since Afghanistan, involving some 600 tanks and armoured vehicles, 10,000 troops and massive air support.
Russian tanks met immediate resistance. On the Chechen border with Dagestan unarmed Chechens and other locals held up the column for two days, taking 59 prisoners and destroying several vehicles. In Ingushetia a second Russian column faced mass unarmed resistance from the local Ingushi population, but met it with fire: five Ingushis died, including an 80 year old woman. The Ingushi health minister was dragged from his car and beaten so badly that he later died in hospital. Houses and a mosque were destroyed. According to the Russian senate, all over Chechnya people came out in their thousands to stop the tanks.
Despite the colossal forces at Russia’s disposal, this was a big gamble. The troops were lacking in combat experience and easily demoralised. From the start there was a steady trickle of deserters and reports of grim moods among middle-ranking officers.
The Chechen resistance is small and badly armed, but determined. The conflict has a resonance throughout the Caucasus. Most importantly, the political leadership in Moscow did much to destroy ordinary Russians’ faith in the operation, which is the latest in a series of crises to hit Yeltsin and his high command. But while the decision to send in the tanks points to the difficulties facing Yeltsin and his fraction in Moscow, the invasion is also important to the Russian ruling class as a whole.
The Chechen leader, General Dudayev, came to power as a result of an uprising in September 1991 which overthrew the Chechen Communist boss Doku Zavgayev, a supporter of the August coup attempt in Moscow. Dudayev was elected on a massive turnout in free elections a month later.
His declaration of independence was a direct challenge to Yeltsin. Soviet tanks under Yeltsin’s command entered Chechnya in November 1991, but met such massive resistance that they turned tail and fled, the operation ending in fiasco. Since then Moscow has kept up the economic and military pressure on Grozny, looking for an opportunity to unseat Dudayev and put a more compliant figure in his place.
This tactic has been moderately successful in other parts of Russia and the former USSR. Under the flag of ‘peacekeeping’ forces Russian troops have been used to broker deals favourable to Moscow in Georgia, Moldova and Tadjikistan. In the disputed area of Nagorny Karabakh, Moscow has armed both the warring republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan, exhausting their economies and turning Armenia decisively towards Russia.
In North Ossetia, bordering on Chechnya, Russia has built up a colossal military outpost from which to act as policeman in the Caucasus, with military spending relative to population estimated to be the highest in the world.
By the summer of 1994 it was clear that the centrifugal tendencies threatening to pull Russia apart had begun to die down. Many former Soviet republics were making moves towards economic and political reintegration with Russia. It seemed to the government that pressure on stubbornly independent Chechnya could be safely increased. The Russian leadership has long been looking for an opportunity to bury its ‘Afghan syndrome’ – to overcome the population’s opposition to the use of troops since the Afghan war.
At the same time a direct threat to Russian hegemony in the Caucasus appeared in the shape of Azeri claims to the fabulously rich oil fields of the Caspian Sea and its moves to involve British, US and Turkish oil companies in developing the reserves. BP has invested $5 billion in Chechnya. Pipelines from Baku run through Georgia and Armenia, already within the Russian ambit, and through Grozny, which is also the site of major oil refineries. In September Azerbaijan dropped a bombshell by including Iran in a deal to re-route oil to the south, threatening Russia’s pipeline monopoly.
Bringing Chechnya to heel became an economic and a strategic necessity for Moscow, which stepped up its not so secret funding of the Chechen military opposition. Ruslan Khasbulatov, himself a Chechen and leader of the October 1993 attempt to storm the Kremlin, was given Russian cash and arms to increase Moscow’s influence and establish himself as a opposition leader. Doku Zavgayev, Chechnya’s former Communist boss, was brought into Yeltsin’s administration and is now a leading candidate to take Dudayev’s place.
On 26 November the Chechen opposition attempted to storm Grozny. It ended in military fiasco, with the capture of 70 Russian tank personnel. Now the truth was out. The Federal Counter-Intelligence Service, successor to the KGB, has been recruiting Russian officers to fight in Chechnya. This was a major setback for Moscow, facing it with the stark choice of shamefaced retreat or full scale invasion.
The political situation in Russia helped push Yeltsin and his generals towards war. The military leadership has come under mounting pressure. In October a popular journalist, Dmitri Kholodov, was killed by a bomb in his office. Kholodov had dug deep into corruption in the military and was due to testify to a parliamentary commission when he was murdered. There was strong circumstantial evidence that figures in the army or secret services had planned the killing.
But Pavel Grachev, the minister of defence and a target of Kholodov’s accusations, made sneering remarks about Kholodov and was backed by Yeltsin. The whole of Moscow was in shock with 10,000 people attending Kholodov’s funeral on a bitterly cold weekday morning. As the chess player Gary Kasparov said at the ceremony, ‘This is the funeral of Yeltsin’s union with the people.’
The incident also opened up the splits within the army, with popular generals such as Lebed and Gromov openly criticising Grachev. ‘the latter’s falling authority was a factor in opting for a show of strength in Chechnya. Add to this the crash of the rouble, the admission that fall in economic output will be even greater in 1995 than in 1994, plus elections looming in a year’s time, and you had a sore temptation from the leadership to play the nationalist card to boost its flagging popularity.
But the invasion has not won popular support. Despite the lies put out by government officials, accusing Chechens of throwing people out of windows, raping girls, taking children hostage and using woman and children as human shields, opinion polls put opposition to the invasion at 70 percent with only 12 percent in favour. Though there were threats of censorship, the main Moscow dailies kept up a consistent anti-war position.
The parliamentary opposition decided that the troops coming home in body bags could be another stick to beat Yeltsin, and lined up against him. The invasion’s only supporters were the Nazis Zhirinovsky and Barkashov, and Boris Fyodorov, leader of a tiny ultra-liberal fraction. The main grassroots democratic organisation, Democratic Russia, was firmly against the war, while Russia’s Choice, the electoral bloc led by Yegor Gaider, was split wide open – foreign minister Kozyrev left the bloc and Gaider was forced by its financial hackers to climb down from his initial call to impeach Yeltsin. None of the political forces opposing the war defended the Chechens’ right to independence, apart from the author Solzhenitsyn who seriously argues to deport all ‘blacks’ from Russia.
The war has also deepened the splits in the army. General Lebed, known for his advocacy of a ‘Pinochet solution’ in Russia, says he would have gladly joined Grachev in leading a battalion into Grozny – as long as it was made up of children. Other generals have stated that the invasion is a mess.
The Chechen crisis has wound up the political tension in Russia by several notches. Troops and armoured vehicles appeared in Moscow in mid-December, ostensibly to deal with the ‘terrorist threat’, but rumours are rife that Yeltsin could declare a state of emergency, disband parliament and give the military a crack of the whip.
Despite the overwhelming public opposition to the war, this did not translate itself into active protest: two demonstrations in Moscow when the troops first moved pulled no more than 3,000 people, a third of whom were extreme right wingers. In the event that the crisis spills over into neighbouring Caucasus republics leading to increased conscription and heavy Russian losses, the situation could change.
However, the crisis shows that despite the shift to the right in Russian politics, the ruling class still has great difficulty persuading workers to lay down their lives for the ‘national interest’. A defeat for Russia in Chechnya would be a setback not only for Yeltsin, but for the Russian Nazis as well. Victory could well bog Russia down in an expensive and unpopular Northern Ireland policing operation.
Either way there is now nothing left of Yeltsin’s democracy but bodies and rubble.
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