A complicating factor was that the so-called Chechen question would soon become instrumentalized
by the Russian power-elite for internal, political reasons. In the Duma elections
of December 1993 Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party had won 22.9 percent of the
vote—which was much more than the 15 percent of Russia’s Choice, the pro-Kremlin party
at that time. The writing was clearly on the wall for Yeltsin, whose popularity at
that time was at a historical low and reached not even 10 percent. A victory for him
at the presidential elections of 1996 was far from sure, and some even feared that
the communist leader Zyuganov had a chance of being elected. Yeltsin’s advisers considered
a quick victory in Chechnya would increase the ailing popularity of the incumbent
president. The war plans, however, met with opposition in the army that had not yet
digested its defeat in Afghanistan. Deputy Defence Minister General Boris Gromov openly
declared himself against an intervention, and General Eduard Vorobyev, deputy head
of the ground forces, refused to lead the invasion.[25]
Nevertheless Yeltsin issued on November 30, 1994, presidential decree No. 2137c, authorizing
the invasion. This was a secret decree—which means that it was unconstitutional. On December 11, 1994, the day of
the invasion, this decree was supplanted by another secret, and therefore equally
unconstitutional, decree No. 2169c.[26] From the beginning, therefore, this war was unconstitutional. When the war did
not turn out to be the easy walkover that was expected, opposition to the war escalated.
Grozny was only captured at the end of February 1995, after three months of heavy
fighting. When the Russians were confronted with many casualties during their first
attacks on Grozny (it cost the lives of two thousand Russian soldiers), they started
a carpet bombing of the city which led to an unprecedented massacre of the civilian
population. According to eyewitness reports, “they continued to pound the rebel-held
quarter [of Grozny] with thousands of guns, rockets, and bombs day and night . . .
. To put the intensity of firing in perspective, the highest level of firing recorded
in Sarajevo was 3,500 heavy detonations per day. In Grozny in early February, a colleague
of mine counted 4,000 detonations per hour.”[27] The Russian army could have saved civilian lives by using precision-guided weapons,
which they had in their arsenal. According to Gregory J. Celestan, “‘the word in the
[Russian] higher command is that these highly advanced armaments were too expensive
to be wasted’ in Chechnya and needed to be kept for more serious contingencies.”[28] One may doubt, however, that financial calculations alone were the reason for this
indiscriminate bombing of a densely populated city. It seems to have been a deliberate
choice with the goal to “bomb the Chechen population into submission.” The bombardments
caused a hecatomb that took the lives of an estimated twenty-five thousand to twenty-nine
thousand inhabitants—mostly civilians, especially older and disabled people and children,
who had been unable to flee the city. As a point of comparison: the Allied bombardment
of the German city of Dresden in February 1945 involved a civilian death toll of about
twenty-five thousand people. This means that the bombardments of Grozny in the first
months of 1995 were probably the most lethal attack on an open city in Europe since
the end of World War II. This war was not even called a war. The Russian government
pretended it was a “police action” (militseyskaya operatsiya) against a group of its own citizens. Bombarding an open city for months, causing
a civilian death toll that equals that of Dresden at the end of World War II, and
calling it a police action was not only extremely cynical, it was an outright criminal
violation of human rights, and above all of the most basic human right: the right
to life.
