First Chechen War: The moment when ‘Russia’s democratic post-Soviet dream ended’

WASHINGTON — Brutal tactics employed by Russia in its war on Ukraine have shocked much of the world but come as no surprise to older residents of Chechnya, who this week marked the 30th anniversary of an equally brutal war — one that many believe bore the seeds of the current conflict in Ukraine.

It was on December 11, 1994, that then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin launched an armed response to a bid by Chechnya, an autonomous republic in southern Russia’s North Caucasus region, to break away from the Russian Federation.

To thwart the self-styled Chechen Republic of Ichkeria’s independence bid, the Russian military threw poorly trained and equipped conscripts against highly motivated Chechen guerrillas.

Between December 1994 and August 1996, when the two sides signed the Khasavyurt Accords ending the First Chechen War, an estimated 8,000 Russian troops were killed or listed as missing in action, and more than 50,000 wounded.

The conflict also killed an estimated 50,000 to 100,000 Chechen civilians and fighters, and claimed the lives of as many as 35,000 ethnic Russian residents of Chechnya.

British journalist Thomas de Waal, who had worked in Chechnya before the war, returned to the Chechen capital of Grozny in January 1995 and found a horrific scene.

“Already the city had fallen to the Russian forces, but [only] after the most intense bombardment I think anyone had seen … certainly Russia had seen since the end of the Second World War,” De Waal, now a senior fellow at Carnegie Europe in Brussels, recently told Voice of America’s Russian Service.

“Most of the city lay in ruins,” he said. “Entire blocks had been destroyed, leaving gaping holes in their place. People were coming out of the basements where they had been hiding for weeks.”

Among those hiding from Russian bombing in Grozny’s basements was Abubakar Yangulbayev, now a lawyer and human rights activist, who was then 2 years old. The First Chechen War left a deep imprint on him.

“It was total devastation,” he told VOA. “There was nothing, everything was broken, everything was destroyed. And here is my first understanding: Is there any peace anywhere, where everything is not destroyed, where there are roads, where there is normal life without mud, without those constant annoying tanks, armored personnel carriers and all that?”

One general’s bid

Chechnya’s independence bid was launched by Dzhokhar Dudayev, a former Soviet general who had commanded strategic nuclear bomber aircraft divisions. He declared the region’s independence from the Russian Federation in October 1991, following a referendum that confirmed him as the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria’s president.

De Waal, who met Dudayev three times, called him “an extraordinary figure,” but also “pretty crazy.”

“He’d become a general in the Soviet army, but he also had become a Chechen nationalist,” De Waal said. “He was very Soviet in his mentality as well as Chechen. He would give these long, long speeches, denunciations of Russian imperialism, but he was really part of the problem.”

However, the Russian military’s indiscriminate mass bombardment of civilian areas in Chechnya, along with looting and human rights abuses committed by Russian troops deployed there, soon tipped the scales in the moral assessment of the conflict.

“It was complete devastation,” said De Waal. “It had gone from a situation where Russia had said that they wanted to remove, as they described it, the ‘anti-constitutional regime’ of Dzhokhar Dudayev, to a position of total war. And it certainly felt that way to the Chechens. They did not feel that they were being liberated from an unfriendly regime.”

De Waal, along with other observers, believes that the First Chechen War marked a watershed in Russia’s post-Soviet development.

“For me, Yeltsin’s invasion of — his intervention in — Chechnya, whatever you want to call it, in December 1994, was a Rubicon moment,” he said. “It was the moment when … Russia’s democratic post-Soviet dream ended, and it entered a much darker period from that moment on.”

Lost diplomatic opportunity?

That “Rubicon moment,” however, was not acknowledged by Western governments that supported Yeltsin.

Thomas Graham, a distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, was a U.S. Foreign Service officer working in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow when the First Chechen War started.

He noted that then-U.S. President Bill Clinton, who “had decided early on that Yeltsin was the best hope for democratic transition in Russia,” compared the Chechen conflict with the American Civil War.

“Now, that was a bit far-fetched even for some people inside the Clinton administration at that point, who saw, I think even in the early stages, that this was going to pose a threat to the democratic transition,” Graham told VOA.

“The question is, what could we have done differently at that point? You know, we certainly weren’t going to insert ourselves militarily into this and we weren’t going to support the Chechen rebels by any stretch of the imagination,” he added.

“We could have perhaps put more pressure on Yeltsin in the private conversations to bring this conflict to an end or to pursue the conflict with greater regard to what you would call the laws of armed conflict and so forth.”

Khasavyurt Accords

On April 21, 1996, Dudayev was assassinated by two laser-guided missiles fired by Russian warplanes. Several months later, his successor, Aslan Maskhadov — who would be killed by Russian forces in Chechnya nearly nine years later — negotiated the Khasavyurt Accords with the Yeltsin government, ending the fighting.

The cessation of hostilities, however, would prove to be relatively short-lived. Over the next several years, Chechen militants, increasingly influenced by radical Islamist ideology and operating jointly with allied fighters from neighboring North Caucasus republics and Middle Eastern jihadists, ratcheted up attacks.

Amid persistent rumors that President Boris Yeltsin’s health was deteriorating, the rising violence and unrest in the North Caucasus ultimately sparked the Second Chechen War in August 1999.

Yeltsin’s newly chosen prime minister, former spy chief Vladimir Putin, increasingly took the lead in the new North Caucasus military campaign, taking full charge of the Second Chechen War after Yeltsin stepped down and Putin became acting president on December 31, 1999.

The renewed conflict again saw systematic human rights violations against civilians committed by Russian forces.

For their part, the Chechen insurgents, sometimes operating together with allied regional and Middle Eastern militants, carried out high-profile terrorist attacks targeting Russian civilians.

According to human rights activist Abubakar Yangulbayev, Putin “built his career” on the “reoccupation or retaking of Chechnya.”

“He built his elections on this, he built his promises on this,” he said. “By creating a cult of impunity in Chechnya, he created the same foundation for all of Russia, which ultimately led to the war in Georgia, and the war in Syria, and the war in Ukraine.”

The First Chechen War, said de Waal, was not only “a huge tragedy for the Chechen people, who still live with the legacy of this war,” but “also a huge tragedy for Russia, not only in terms of the lives of Russian soldiers lost, but in a social sense, in terms of the violence that permeates society.” 
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