Chechen Hell

By Paul Quinn-Judge/Gudermes

General Alexander Mikhailov clearly wishes he were somewhere else. "I had my fill of fighting these monkeys three years ago," he complains to us, as we wait in Mozdok, a military base three hours by plane from Moscow that is the nerve center of operations against Chechnya. There is no point in trying to make "whites" out of the Chechens, he says. What the republic needs is a "good old governor-general."

The choice of General Mikhailov to lead a group of journalists on a tour of Russian-controlled parts of Chechnya is an intriguing one. In 1996 he was chief spokesman for the Federal Security Service at Pervomayskoye, site of one of Russia's worst humiliations in the 1994-96 Chechen war. A Chechen leader named Salman Raduyev had seized the village, taken hostages and for days beaten back attacks by elite Russian units. Mikhailov was responsible for explaining this mortifying defeat to Russians and to the world. His performance was roundly denounced as inflammatory and wildly inaccurate, and he was fired. He is back as one of the chiefs of the Rosinformcenter, the official voice of the Russian government in its latest and so far more successful effort to regain control of the breakaway republic.

Mikhailov apparently regards journalists in much the same way he views Chechens. If anyone has visited the other side in this war, he says unsmilingly as we prepare to take off from Moscow, don't mention it to Russian soldiers. You could have "serious problems."

Our destination is Gudermes, Chechnya's second-largest city, which recently surrendered to Russian troops without a shot. Now, as Russian guns, warplanes and missiles reduce to rubble what was left of Gudermes after the 1994-96 war, Russian officials talk increasingly of turning this grim railway town with a peacetime population of 38,000 into Chechnya's new capital. No problem, says a Russian airborne general, as we stand in a forward base just outside Gudermes listening to the steady rumble of heavy artillery and long salvos of Grad missiles. "We could establish the capital on this hill if we were told to." We are informed confidentially that a high-level delegation from Moscow will be flying in. But a brief, chaotic visit to the town underscores the difficulties that the Russian armed forces are having administering even an ostensibly friendly town.

The officer commanding the base, Colonel Yuri Em, invites us to lunch. No one was expecting us, we are told as we sit down to a light but tasty lunch of borscht followed by meat and buckwheat and served by young women in dazzling white mess jackets. Somehow this does not seem like daily fare. The soldiers on perimeter duty are not very talkative, in part because there are officers present. Morale is definitely higher than during the last war; casualties for many units have so far been low.

This is a war fought with bombers and artillery, though the dirty, killing work of real combat will probably increase as the Russian troops approach Grozny, the Chechen capital. Reports filtering out of the front lines are filled with talk of shortages of warm clothes, sleeping bags, gloves and socks for the troops, who will have to spend a bitterly cold winter in the open air.

Gudermes is muddy and miserable and seems half-empty. As in Grozny, some residents are holed up in apartment blocks that look to Western eyes as if they have been rendered uninhabitable by artillery fire. The city has no lights, no gas, no work. As our convoy drives up to the Gudermes administrative office with its fake Greek columns, we are met by a crowd of local citizens. We assume they have been bused in to voice their support and enthusiasm for the Russian presence. In fact, they have come to complain. Russian troops--in particular the special assignment police unit, a heavily militarized unit with a reputation for excessive muscle--have been looting the place. "They stole my car yesterday," yells one man in the crowd. "The soldiers steal cattle, spare parts. They get drunk at night and shoot up the town. They harass you at checkpoints," says an engineer called Khasam, who now runs a photocopying service.Clean-shaven-- Chechen-Islamic political correctness demands full beards--and defiantly secular in his views, Khasam makes it clear that he is no supporter of the city's former rulers. The gunmen who ran the town before the Russians were no good, he says, but the troops are even worse. His view is moderate in comparison with the feelings of some in the crowd. "Gudermes invited the Russians in because we knew they would flatten the city," says a 19-year-old named Salman. "The fighters will be back. Sooner or later, snipers will start killing Russians," he adds approvingly.

But the Russians seem intent on winning--for now--at any cost. In Moscow, top army commanders announced at week's end that Russian troops had entered the third and final phase of the offensive, the destruction of guerrillas in their mountain bases. On Thursday Grozny was hammered with the heaviest rocket and artillery fire of the current war. Thousands of rockets and shells rained down on the city, according to the Russian media. The few journalists in the city say hospitals are overflowing. The breakaway government claims more than 4,000 have died, though this cannot be independently confirmed. But Chechen doctors who worked through the last war are grimly confident that once again civilians will be the main target. "Last time one [Chechen] fighter was killed for every 170 civilians," Ayub Baudin, head doctor of a hospital in Shali, about 16 miles southeast of Grozny, said during a visit to Chechnya last month. This time the fighters are better trained, he added, so more civilians will die for each dead guerrilla.

With curfew and darkness rapidly approaching, we are about to board a military convoy heading out of town when the main event, much delayed, finally happens. Accompanied by multiple levels of security, Anatoli Chubais, former Deputy Prime Minister and Kremlin chief of staff and now head of the energy monopoly RAOEES, drives up to the administrative building. With him are the Russian government's point man for the breakaway republic, Nikolai Koshman, and the mufti of Chechnya, who has recently withdrawn his support from the government of Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov.

The official delegation heads for a battered and half-destroyed memorial to the Soviet dead of World War II, situated in the muddy courtyard in front of the administrative building. In a gesture symbolizing the rebirth of normality in the city, Chubais is to preside over the rekindling of the eternal flame that in most Russian cities commemorates the fallen. Wielding a long torch, a frail local war veteran lights the flame. "May this flame never go out again," he declares.

The fire springs to life. The dignitaries turn to leave. The flame goes out. A quick-witted official shoves the torch into the hole to give the appearance of fire. But one of the local urchins who has been watching the ceremony with amusement grabs the torch and parades around the yard, waving it triumphantly. The mufti is suddenly hustled away at a trot by his armed guards, who seem spooked, while Chubais goes to a nearby building and tells the assembled press that power will soon be returned to the city.

Mikhailov hurries us back into our military trucks, and we speed off with our escort of armored personnel carriers to a waiting helicopter. On the flight back to Moscow, Mikhailov stays up in first class. There is no final question-and-answer session. And when we arrive at an air base in Moscow, he strides off the plane as if we do not exist.