Issue #06/61, March 25 - April 7, 1999  

By John Dolan

Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power by Anatol Lieven Yale University Press New Haven and London 1998 $42.00

Writing about war seems to bring out the worst in journalists. They hide their obvious delight in the chaos and slaughter behind unconvincing, earnest exclamations of the "Can't we all just get along?" type, and then reveal their sexual excitement with Tom-Clancy like drooling descriptions of some particularly sexy weapon. Good writing about war is rare enough that it deserves to be celebrated. And in this book, Anatol Lieven has managed to write well about the Chechnya War, one of the most difficult and unpromising of all wars.

Most of the English-language reporting on Chechnya has been a desperate search for the proper angle--in other words, "Who's the good guy and who's the bad guy?" A quick look at the map reveals that Russia is the big guy and Chechnya the little guy, and that's good enough for most journalists: Russia's the bully, Chechnya's the tough little guy standing up for himself. This sort of journalistic stance actually has deep roots in what Lieven calls the "Russophobe or paranoid western school of thought concerning Russia."

Lieven begins his book with a quick, slashing attack on much of the contemporary nonsense peddled about Russia. This part of the book reads almost like an eXile editorial edited for politeness. He names the primary distributors of the Russophobe idea; Richard Pipes, Zbigniew Brzezinski et al.; only to reject their view of Russians as genetically driven imperialists, pointing out quite reasonably that if Russians really were as aggressively nationalistic as we are always told, it seems unlikely that the recent history of the Baltic States and Central Asia--where millions of Russians were stranded after the dissolution of the USSR--would have been so quiet. Lieven then identifies the other and more influential belief about Russia: that Russia has set out, almost against its will, on the one and only path to the future: the path of free-market capitalism leading, admittedly slowly and painfully, to a state which looks something like the US or Northern Europe. As Lieven repeatedly points out, there is absolutely nothing in the present structure of Russian "capitalism" to suggest such an evolution, and nothing inevitable about it anyway; after all, most of the non-communist world does not live in economies like those of the US but in places like Mexico, Indonesia and Pakistan, which are defined by the very features shaping Russia: oligarchy, corruption, stagnation. Why should Russia, which seems already well on the road to such a structure, continually be identified as a pilgrim nation headed for an American-derived paradise? There are no logical reasons, as Lieven points out. (I suspect that the real reasons are not the sort which their adherents would like to bring to consciousness: that Russia is a northern nation inhabited by white people, and thus must come to glory sooner or later.)

But though Lieven begins his story of the Chechnya war by cutting through the Russophobe lies spread by the western press, he does not take the Russian side in describing the war itself. In fact, as he makes clear, he likes the Chechen. He doesn't like the Chechen out of some gloppy Westerner's admiration for all exotic peoples; in fact, he is quite blunt in his dislike for most of their neighbors, and particularly the Azeri and the Georgians. He likes the Chechen for the very thorny arrogance which makes them so hated (and so feared) throughout the Caucasus. As Lieven describes them, the Chechen begin to come alive, strutting about the pages of his book like fighting dogs, saved from absurdity only by their absolute willingness to die for their clan and their honor. He describes them with such enthusiasm that it's difficult not lo like them along with him. He never quite says that he took their side in the war, and he certainly doesn't describe them as sweet or tender beings. They simply come to represent for him a pattern of honor not found in more modern societies, which is admirable in itself, outside morality: "Since December 1994, I have come to look on the Chechen people almost as on the face of Courage herself--with no necessary relation to justice or morality, but beautiful to see." As Lieven implies more than once, all of us who live under Voltaire's shadow have a secret longing for something which will overcome the Golden Rule, and give us something warmer. The Chechen, he says, have found it. Lieven's admiration for the Chechen is unstained by the usual endangered-species pathos found in such descriptions. Instead of sighing that these marvelous anachronisms, the Chechen, will soon be ground under the tank-treads of modernity, he suggests that their resistance to Modernism may make them uniquely successful in a post-modern world, while modernity burns like a Russian APC in the streets of Grozny.

Lieven thus sets the scene for the Chechen/Russian war by portraying a Russian population which is not only not nationalistic or aggressive but in fact paralysed by the loss of the Soviet state which gave it its only identity, facing a Chechen population utterly sure of its place in the world, its ethnic identity, and its right to defend its home ground. Pictured in this way, there is no David vs. Goliath struggle in the offing: in fact, it is the demoralized, apathetic Russian conscripts jammed into their horribly vulnerable thin-skinned APC's outside Grozny who deserve our pity. And of course, we know what happens: those miserable conscripts, unpaid and sometimes unfed, absolutely lacking any idea of what they are supposed to be doing, are sent into the "urban forest" of Grozny without maps. That, for me, was the crowning touch: sending your troops into a huge city without any street maps. What did the Russian commanders say? Some tourist-y line like "Let's all head for the centre of town and meet up at the statue of Lenin, OK? Right, everybody got their dog tags on...just in case?? OK, see you soon!"

What followed must have been one of the most grotesque comedies in military history: thousands of armored vehicles driving down dead-end streets, piling up one behind another, too afraid to get out of their vehicles and find out where they were...a more inviting set of targets has not been offered since Bunker Hill. And the Chechen, familiar with every alleyway, unburdened with armor, were ready. They simply waited til the tanks and APCs drove by, then hit them in the rear (where armor is thinnest) with rocket-propelled grenades, or simply dropped grenades down on the thin top armor from the rooftops--as easy as hitting a schoolbus with a water balloon. It was a slaughter.

By the way, can anybody out there tell me what the hell use these APCs are good for, anyway? They were supposed to protect troops from small-arms fire and shrapnel as the armored column zoomed across Europe--but they can't protect anybody against even the lightest shoulder-fired anti-armor weapon. Take the standard old RPG-7, the Ford Model-T of antitank weapons. Been around forever; everybody's got one, every villager from here to Burma; cost about the same as a six-pack of coke; can be loaded, aimed and fired by the most hopeless bubblehead; and is guaranteed to turn the inside of even the fanciest American APC into a stew of molten aluminum, with six infantrymen screaming out their last few minutes as they are cooked from inside by superheated shrapnel made out of what used to be the vehicle's hull. The APC, even in its souped-up current US version, the IFV, has one purpose and one purpose only: to keep the shareholders of FMC corporation in a good position to pay for their Lexus's and liver transplants.

Sorry. Had to get that off my chest.

The doomed assault on Grozny is the high point of Lieven's story. Having described the slow winding-down of the war from the attack and subsequent bombardment, his book takes a strange turn: we lose his own very effective narrative voice and get a slightly more academic ethos, in which names like Gramsci and Fukuyama--names one hardly expects to hear in polite company--begin to be invoked as authority. I hadn't run into this sort of thing since grad school, and really expected better of a writer so clearly intelligent and courageous as Lieven. Surely he knows that Gramsci is just a last-ditch saint to be invoked by Marxists who've run out of bigger names, and that Fukuyama is..well, a joke, really, with his delusions of millenial fulfilment. Of course, Lieven is critical of both these figures. In particular, his polite contempt for Fukuyama is a treat to read. But the fact that, having told the real story in his own words in the first half of his book, he felt obliged to tell it again, translated into the argot of the cowardly and facile, was disappointing in itself. This may be related to the fact that the book was written under a grant from something called the Peace foundation or Bipeds for Peace or something like that. You know how it is with these Quakers: you have to translate everything into their delicate language or they can't (won't) hear it. But it's still a pity, because the core story told in the first half of this book is so beautfiul and so moving: the great Russian people, betrayed so many times and at last deprived even of an identity as a tribe, their tribal identity eaten along with their souls by the Empire which used them as beasts of burden, confronting a smaller, hotter and more cohesive people, also chewed up and spat out by that Empire, but still aware of itself as a tribe. It's an important story to remember: the small hot tribe wins; the huge, gutted, betrayed and reviled tribe loses. Again. And faces the prospect of nothing but further losses, further betrayals, further humiliations.

Oddly, the logic of Lieven's reading of the Chechen war leads to some sort of redemptive nationalism for Russia. The analogy he makes is the Turkish nationalism which grew up in the ruins of the Ottoman empire, and for the first time allowed members of the dominant ethnic group to celebrate themselves as Turks, not as Ottomans. In the same way, a new nationalism would allow Russians to feel pride in themselves as Russians, not as Soviets. Lieven emphasises the suffering this might mean for other peoples on the borders or within the territory claimed by the new nationalism; but if the alternative is a comatose Russia, subjected to what the eXile has previously called "State Nihilism," surrounded by aggressive ethnic groups and denied all sources of pride, will the net suffering be less? Or will we simply reckon it less, when its victims are Russians?