Andropov may be considered the secret “godfather” of Russia’s war in Afghanistan.[17] The irony, however, was that this costly, protracted, and unwinnable guerrilla war in a mountainous and hostile environment would soon exhibit the internal weaknesses of Soviet society. This would convince Andropov—even before he became general secretary of the CPSU in 1983—of the necessity of a fundamental and profound reform of the Soviet system. And the man whom he had in mind to conduct these reforms was Mikhail Gorbachev.[18]
The First Chechen War:
Four Differences with Former Wars
Artyom Borovik wrote: “As a general to whom I became quite close in Afghanistan put it, ‘All of the wars that Russia lost led to social reforms, while all of the wars it won led to the strengthening of totalitarianism.’”[19] This seems, indeed, to be true in the cases of both the Cold War and the war in Afghanistan. These two lost wars led, first, to Gorbachev’s perestroika, and, subsequently, to the introduction of a market economy and a pluralistic democracy. But one may ask if this reformist dynamic was still operative when the Soviet Union’s successor state, the Russian Federation, lost the First Chechen War (1994–1996). There were, to begin with, four important differences between the Cold War and the war in Afghanistan on the one hand, and the war in Chechnya on the other. These differences concerned the
subject of the war,
its ideological interpretation,
its geopolitical meaning, and
the role of the army in the war.
In regard to the first point, the Cold War and the war in Afghanistan were conducted by the Soviet Union. The war in Chechnya, however, was conducted by the Russian Federation. In the latter case, the actor was no longer the world’s second superpower, but a (smaller) country that had gone through a process of decolonization and was struggling to maintain its great power status.
The second difference was that the two former wars were still interpreted in the ideological framework of Marxism-Leninism. This meant that both wars were considered expansive wars. Marxism offered an ideological certainty that the world was irrevocably moving toward the socialist world revolution. Even the Cold War was considered only a temporary stalemate between capitalism and socialism, which—in the end—would give way to a historic victory of socialism over capitalism. Yury Andropov, like his mentor, the party ideologue Mikhail Suslov, still saw the war in Afghanistan through this prism. It was a step in the progressive evolution of the socialist camp. The First Chechen War, however, was completely different. Russia had definitively lost its faith in the socialist revolution. It had accepted the loss of the communist dream and recognized the superiority of the capitalist system. There was, therefore, no longer an ideologically conditioned certainty of a victory. The outcome of the Chechen war was considered unpredictable and contingent.
A third difference was geopolitical. The war in Chechnya was not a war conducted by
a proud, expanding empire
A fourth difference was the dire situation of the Russian army. Demoralized by the demise of the Soviet Union, reduced in numbers, underfunded, undertrained, and deeply corrupt, the Russian army was a shadow of its powerful and feared Soviet predecessor. Additionally, the Russian leadership made important psychological and strategic miscalculations. It was a psychological miscalculation to underestimate the strength of the Chechen drive for national independence. This first miscalculation led to a second, strategic miscalculation, which was to consider the capture of Grozny and the rest of Chechnya as an easy walkover.
The First Chechen War: Yeltsin’s War
