Chechnya: 30 Years Since The Start of Modern Russia’s Wars
The centre of Grozny, Chechnya, Russian Federation, spring 1995 © James Rodgers
Thirty years ago this week, the Russian army began its assault on Grozny at the start of the Chechen War. In a world currently suffering several wars, including Russia’s war on Ukraine, it is not surprising this anniversary has been largely unnoticed. Yet precisely because of Russia’s subsequent wars–in South Ossetia and Syria as well as Ukraine–Chechnya has huge historical significance. This post focuses on the experience of the international journalists who brought the news of the war to the world. It is extracted from the 2023 edition of my book Assignment Moscow: Reporting on Russia from Lenin to Putin. My next book, on Russia and the West, due out in 2025, will include a more detailed assessment of this war and those that followed.
JOURNALISTS REPORTING FROM CHECHNYA in late 1994 and early 1995 could largely go where they wanted and talk to whomever they chose. Provided correspondents were willing to accept that they would be working with ‘chaos’ and ‘danger’, they could do whatever their instincts suggested, and their nerves permitted.
For those based in Khasavyurt, in neighbouring Daghestan, the day began with the drive to Grozny. The ‘free-for-all’ nature of covering this war meant that the trip involved crossing checkpoints manned by Russian Federal Troops; local Dagestani forces (theoretically loyal to Moscow, but in the extended family culture of the North Caucasus, quite likely to have sympathies with, and possibly distant relatives among, the separatist fighters); and finally into territory then controlled by rebel Chechen fighters who had taken up arms to stop Moscow re-establishing control over the territory.
None of these groups placed any real restrictions on reporters. They occasionally checked media accreditation, but identity documents which said ‘Press’ in the Latin alphabet would usually suffice to show soldiers, who might not be able to read freely in that script, that they were dealing with foreigners. That mean people who would either probably be little trouble to them, or, just possibly, more trouble than they were worth.
A Grozny street, spring 1995 © James Rodgers
Journalists came very close to the fighting. On my first day in Grozny with the BBC team, a Saturday morning in mid-January 1995, we were lucky to escape serious injury when the Russian war planes attacked Minutka Square in Grozny. We had stopped there to talk to groups of fighters, and decide whether we wished to go any further towards the Presidential Palace, the headquarters of the Chechen rebels. At least two of the fighters to whom we had been speaking were killed in the air strike. We left as soon as the planes seemed to have gone.
We, and the other journalists in Minutka that day, were able to get so close to the story that it had become dangerous – Jeremy Bowen, the senior correspondent in that BBC team, later described Grozny then as ‘by far the most violent place I had ever been’ – and yet, in doing so, we had been able to gather insights, an understanding of the conflict, which we could not possibly have got had we been subject to greater control. I remember the composure of the Chechen fighters that day as they carried away their dead and cared for their wounded. I remember the lack of emotion on their faces a couple of days later as we watched – from a safe distance up a hillside – a rocket barrage hitting the city centre.
A damaged apartment block in Grozny, spring 1995 © James Rodgers
However much they were outgunned, none of this suggested that they would be defeated. The real losers in the military confrontation were the civilians of Grozny. The ethnic Russians seemed to suffer most of all. They had no extended family to turn to, in the relative safety of the nearby countryside.
The lot of the conscript soldiers in the Russian army was miserable, too. That morning in Minutka two soldiers were presented to us as prisoners, probably captured during the disastrous attempt to take Grozny on New Year’s Eve. I have often wondered if they ever got home. Other Russian servicemen, the majority of whom were poorly-trained teenaged conscripts like the ones we met, were killed in their hundreds.
In their book on the war, the correspondents Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal wrote that the figure circulating among the troops was two thousand dead on New Year’s Eve alone . Gall and De Waal also cited the experience of the French photographer, Patrick Chauvel, who was in Grozny on January 1st and 2nd, when Chechen fighters took him ‘for a long and dangerous tour of the battlefield’ . Chauvel estimated he saw eight hundred Russian dead in the space of a few hours.
Journalists could talk to combatants on both sides. They could talk to prisoners. They could cross territory held by different parties to the conflict. These were not impressions enough to say for sure how the battle for Grozny would end, but they were enough to see that it would not be over ‘in two hours’.
The lack of restrictions placed on reporting was a consequence of Russia’s weakness in Chechnya. If the army could not control the news media, how could they direct an effective military campaign? There was another factor, too. This was a time when Yeltsin’s administration, for all its flaws, did believe in, and encourage, a free press. Russian reporting of the campaign, fearless as much of it was (especially the coverage by the then new TV channel, NTV), did the political powers few favours.
The experience would change the Kremlin’s views on dealing with journalists.
Extracted from Assignment Moscow: Reporting on Russia From Lenin to Putin, by James Rodgers (Bloomsbury, Second Edition, 2023). © James Rodgers
The author in Grozny, spring 1995