The leaders of these power ministries have had three tries at
subduing Chechnya but have botched the campaign month after month,
turning it into a national crisis and threatening Yeltsin's own
position. Because they have not been removed as a result of the
failures, the impression that Yeltsin depends on them personally is
growing.

Phase one of the campaign began during the fall of 1994. Relying on
the "Abkhaz Model"--using local proxies to achieve Moscow's ends--the
power ministries organized and equipped Chechen opposition clans to
attack Dudayev. Those attacks failed; the Abkhaz model did not work.

Phase two began on November 25. Reinforcements of Russian troops from
elite units like the Kantimirov division, which protects Yeltsin's
position in Moscow, were added to the Chechen opposition forces.
Reporters were briefed that they would seize Grozny and occupy the
presidential palace the next day.

Ignoring the ridges that dominate Grozny, the attack made straight
for the center of the congested city and the presidential palace with
tanks. Not surprisingly, the attack fell apart and the Chechen
opposition and their Russian allies retreated to their bases,
ignominiously.

The KGB and MVD having completely mismanaged these first "covert"
operations to destabilize Chechnya, Yeltsin dumped the mess in the
lap of an utterly unprepared army. Most of the senior Russian army
commanders opposed it, but Minister of Defense Grachev accepted with
alacrity. Yeltsin issued a 48-hour ultimatum for Dudayev's forces to
lay down their arms; it was extended several times, showing the
muddle in Moscow, but finally the invasion, phase three, began on
December 11. Once again the attack disintegrated. When Chechens who
found themselves in the path of the invasion took hostages, Russian
commanders refused to advance or to fight for the release of the
hostages. Moscow tried again with a grand assault on New Year's Eve.
Once again the troops went straight into the center of Grozny, were
cut off there and either burned to death in their tanks or
surrendered in panic.

The tactical orders seem to have been given, not by any military man,
but by Nikolai Yegorov, a former collective farm chairman appointed
by Yeltsin to coordinate the destruction of Chechen independence.
Yegorov, according to one army general's conjecture, had read as a
young communist some party textbook that explained how, in 1917, the
Bolshevik sailors had been ordered to seize the palace, the railroad
station, and so forth. So Yegorov gave the same orders on the last
day of 1994. The timing of the attack, according to some Russian
sources, was determined by Grachev's birthday, January.

Yeltsin responded to the disaster by adding intensive, wildly
inaccurate bombing and shelling to the ground assault on Grozny.
These tactics were more effective, although at the cost of enormous
numbers of civilian casualties and refugees, including many Russians.
By mid-January, the Chechen militias had abandoned the presidential
palace. By early February, Grozny was virtually destroyed, and
Dudayev's forces were apparently pulling back from what had been his
main base of support.

Thus Yeltsin succeeded in greatly weakening Dudayev--but at the cost
of his own last link to the democratic movement, most of his
remaining popular support, the remaining support for a Russian
connection in Chechnya, and tens of thousands of civilian and
military lives. The weakening of Dudayev has not meant the
strengthening of Yeltsin's administration; resistance has not ceased
in a single town where it was going on previously. As of January 24,
the Russian headquarters in Grozny still worked underground for fear
of Chechen snipers in the surrounding buildings. What Yeltsin has
actually accomplished is to add to the already wide areas of the
Russian Federation that are not controlled by any government.

Four Conclusions

So what were the reactions in "chauvinist, assertive Russia" to the
invasion? Contrary to that characterization, virtually all the
democratic forces and public opinion as a whole have been
passionately opposed to the Chechen war. The Communist Party opposes
the fighting in Chechnya vehemently. The biggest surprise is what the
Russian nationalists did. Zhirinovsky, the most extreme nationalist,
has become one of only three prominent politicians supporting the
war, but his party's first reaction was condemnatory: "The
anti-national government in the Moscow Kremlin conceives the war in
Chechnya as an endless war, till the death of the last..."--Russian,
one might think, but no--"...Chechen." This oddly cosmopolitan
sentiment passes, in the Russian context, as ultra-nationalist.

As for the army, the bulwark of nationalism, General Gromov, deputy
minister of defense, and General Lebed, both officers on active
service and heroes of the nationalist-communist opposition, denounce
the policy of the president and defense minister. On December 16,
General Ivan Babichev, the commander of the western third of the
Russian attack forces and of the elite Pskov airborne division,
announced publicly that, regardless of orders, he would advance no
further: "...we are not going to use tanks against the people."
Rather than being removed from his command for mutiny, Babichev was
apparently sent to command a quiet part of the front, where he made a
personal non-aggression pact with the opposing Chechen fighters.
(Later he was somehow persuaded to return to the battle.) As the
destructive war against civilians ground on, many other officers and
units of the army and security forces refused to be involved,
resigned or returned home without orders.

This is all very strange. From it, I think one may draw four
conclusions. First, Russia does not have a government in the normal
sense of the term: an organization where the decisions of higher
officials are binding on lower officials. The Soviet state has been
disintegrating since 1985, and we can see now that Yeltsin's attempts
to knit it back together after the October 1993 street fighting have
failed.

This is not just the conclusion of a Western academic. Andrei
Kortunov, perhaps the most brilliant foreign policy specialist of the
Moscow establishment, has concluded from the Chechen war that "Alas,
today there is no state as such--as the West understands it--in
Russia." From a quite different part of the political spectrum
General Alexander Lebed simply asserts, "The state no longer exists."
The adventure in Chechnya has made the situation even worse. The head
of Yeltsin's own presidential administration has recently stated that
"manipulating the situation in Chechnya, reactionary forces in
individual regions are trying to tear pieces of power away from the
federal authorities....These problems must be solved as soon as
possible."

"Yeltsin is president of Russia, period," said President Clinton's
"senior official," using the title to block inquiry into the reality
it is supposed to express. When we speak of a president, we mean
someone who is the head of a state that he can generally deliver on
important issues. If there is no state, in the sense of a hierarchy
of officials habituated to obey each other, there can be no president
in the sense that interests us diplomatically. It is worth quoting
Kortunov once again:

"Boris Yeltsin no longer has control over the actions of his
enforcement structures and in general has a very vague idea of what
is happening outside the Kremlin. And since this is the case, what is
the point of the current summits, talks at the highest level,
international conferences and consultations, and so on? Talks with
the president become a meaningless exercise in rhetoric."

The second conclusion to be drawn is that the culture of foreign
policy debate in Russia today is a Western democratic culture. That
is, it has the same messiness as equivalent debates in the West, with
everybody making charges about everything. There is no national
unity. Without a public consensus on the existence of a real threat
and public confidence in the government, the government is not able
to rally people. If the present Russian government had the
patriotism, legitimacy and competence to carry out difficult efforts
on behalf of Russian national interests, this sort of public climate
would be a real obstacle to serving the public interest. But with the
political system that Russia has at the moment, half-formed and
half-collapsed, it has to be considered as an aspect of democratic
checks and balances. That is why it is vital that some vague sense of
democracy in Russia be maintained. The disorder of Russian public
debate restrains, for the moment, adventures that would be injurious
both to Russia and to us.

By refusing the Yeltsin government's attempt to mobilize them for war
in Chechnya, Russians have shown that, in a profoundly important
respect, they are like us. This is perhaps the biggest surprise of
the Chechen crisis. Our opinion-makers tend to present Russian
officials as Western-oriented, but to imply that there are vast
forces of aggression and intolerance within the Russian people. This
conventional wisdom now seems to be almost the opposite of the truth.
On one side there is a small circle of ex-communist officials who are
trying to recreate the USSR with a Russian label, using the brutal
and cynical tactics that the communist regime fostered. On the other
side of this issue there is the vast bulk of the Russian people. Like
their Western counterparts (but unlike the Chechens and Serbs) the
Russians of today do not like fighting, killing and dying. There is a
deep horror of using the state's armed forces for any serious
purpose. In fact, Russians seem less willing to use force than
Americans and possibly equal today's Germans in their distaste for
it. Perhaps, as in Germany, the brutalities of the totalitarian
regimes, against the background of latent coercion that these regimes
exemplified, have discredited in a lasting way the use of force.

Essay Types: Essay