The War in Chechnya (Eastern European Studies (College Station, Tex.), No. 8.)

by Romanas Sedlickas, Stasys Knezys

Release Date: September, 1999

Edition: Hardcover

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Flawed account of a messy war

This book was touted as an objective and evenhanded analysis of the military side of the Chechen war of 1994-96. It is simply not so. In fact it often reads like a propaganda pamphlet, pro-Chechen and anti-Russian in this case.

To give it a due credit, the book has some strong points. It is sufficiently detailed and provides a complete timeline of the conflict. Its analysis of war, while very partial, contains some interesting insights (for example, on the role of military terrorism). At the same time one of the book's drawback is highly derivative description of the events. It seems the authors have never been anywhere near Chechnya or interviewed main participants of this war. Instead they rely almost exclusively on reports written elsewhere - mainly in Russian and western newspapers (and also Lithuanian ones).

The authors begin with political circumstances leading to war. Like other parts of the book the description is very biased. They hardly mention, for example, a series of terrorist acts and hostage-taking (including several instances of kidnapping buses with schoolchildren) persisting in and around Chechnya in 1994, which was a final trigger for hostilities as lawlessness and violence in Chechnya has grown to intolerable proportions. Any western government in these circumstances would be just as hard pressed to "finally get tough on terrorists" as Russian government in the late 1994. Both sides, Russian and Chechen, can be faulted for gradual escalation and eventual stumbling into the brutal war. Much more objective and substantial take on this issue can be found in A. Lieven's "Chechnya: The Tombstone of Russian Power".

In describing the military side of the war S. Knezys and R. Sedlickas use many sketches and maps, with level of details sometimes down to individual vehicles destroyed or soldiers killed. These maps, however, often feel disconnected from the story and offer fairly little help in understanding combat situations. The narrative often resembles the language of a bureaucratic report. There is no comparison, for example, to the Mark Bowden's "Black Hawk Down" in vividness of describing gritty details of military engagements in a modern war. In fact, the writing reminds of Prussian pedantry that Lev Tolstoy mocked in "War and Peace": "First battalion marches..., second battalion marches...". Authors managed to make one of the most ferocious combats in recent history simply boring.

They also use very unconventional English transliteration of names and locations (based, it appears, on Lithuanian spelling). Not that the authors make even this consistent. For example, Yeltsin spelled as traditionally in English literature, while phonetically similar first letter in other names is spelled with "J" (e.g. Jegorov, or sometimes Jagorov). The authors are fairly sloppy and occasionally spell the same name differently within a single page (for example, Dudaev's wife name is alternately called Ala, Alla or Ada). One of the authors (Knezys) was educated in Soviet Union and surely has at least a basic grasp of Russian. Yet Russian names and places mentioned in the book often sound as if they are distorted on purpose to lose original meaning. Is it a quirky excursion into Luthuanian nationalism? There is nothing wrong with presenting the point of view of smaller nations, but distorting grammar and phonetics for this purpose looks downright silly.

Describing humanitarian aspects of the war authors detail almost all Russian atrocities ever mentioned in media, of various degree of credibility, but barely mention at all the Chechen ones, including well-documented horrible tortures and mutilation of captured Russian soldiers (and often civilians). They write, for example, how Chechens allegedly protected Russian POWs in the basement of Dudaev's presidential palace in Grozny, as Russian troops were storming it. What they don't mention is that Chechens fighters tied (and even nailed) many captured soldiers to windowsills, often stripped naked in January cold, while their snipers were shooting at attacking Russian troops using these prisoners as covers.

Almost every operation by Chechen forces is described as complete success from military point of view, while on Russian side - invariable bungling and failure. This is in line of how it was often portrayed in the media, but doesn't necessarily stand the scrutiny of common sense and logic (although Chechens indeed often proved to be very capable fighters). For example, authors describe Chechen attacks on parts of Gudermes in December '95 and of Grozny in March '96 as well-planned and perfectly successful "rehearsals" of the eventual operation to take Grozny in August '96, after which Russia decided to end the war and withdraw its troops. Despite being army officers, the authors apparently can't comprehend a simple concept: there is no such thing as a "repetition" of a military operation. In case a of pre-planned decisive strike, the army unit either completes its task, or fails at it and falls back to prepare and plan anew, with modified means and tactics, while the other side makes its own conclusions and designs countermeasures. Undoubtedly, had the Chechen army attack on Grozny in August '96 been not successful, they would have called it yet another "planned rehearsal", just as previous operations in December '95 and March '96. Similarly, they call terrorist raids on civilian targets inside Russia by the bands of field commanders Shamil Basaev in June '95 and Salman Raduev in December '95 (fully justified in author's description, even as these attacks included cold-blooded killing of civilian hostages) as total successes from military point of view. This is arguably the case for the first raid (Basaev's), but less likely for Raduev's band, which lost more than half of its fighters (Raduev was recently captured by Russian special forces and is now in prison).

Overall, the book is too flawed to receive a high mark. Nevertheless, it remains the most detailed military account of Chechen war in the western media, and can be recommended to readers interested in this subject.

Good Newspaper-style Chronology; not a good book

It seems fairly obvious that the two authors were in a rush to get this book out before the competition, since there is not much depth here, and more than a few typographical errors. One major annoyance was the spelling of commonly-accepted place- and proper names with the Lithuanian variant: confusing if you use other sources about the war.

This is basically a blow-by-blow of the war in Chechnya from December 94 to the end of 1996. While initially, I had hope for some insights, what I found was more of a chronology of the war, basically gleaned from Lithuanian (and some Russian) newspapers. Unfortunately, the preface triumphs this achievement as one that come to us through the "native" eyes of east Europeans, who are not subject to the bias of "western sources." What I found especially disappointing was the fact that the authors did not conduct one interview for the book (contrasting with the works of some supposedly "biased" Western journalists such as Carlotta Gall, who was actually IN Chechnya, and interviewed President Dudaev twice).

I don't mean to say that you have to actually be present in the war zone to write a good history of the war, but I simply did not see how Knezys and Sedlickas' book was all that original or insightful.

On the plus side, if you do not want to search for a chronology of the war in the internet, this may be useful - however, all of the Russian-language newspapers cited can be accessed by Westerners through FBIS.