Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus

Carlotta Gall
and
Thomas De Waal
April 15, 1998

The Caucasus and the Caspian: 1996–1998 Seminar Series

Strengthening Democratic Institutions Project
John F. Kennedy School of Government

Presentation

Thomas De Waal: Our book set out to be the first draft of the history of Chechnya. As reporters covering the region, it was very obvious that people on the spot were very ignorant of what had happened last year, let alone what had happened two hundred years ago. The Chechen conflict had very deep historical roots, and very complex issues involved, and there was an enormous, crying need for a book that analyzed the whole thing from start to finish, which is basically the ambition we set out to fulfill. It is obviously a very difficult ambition.

There were two tenets running through the book, which we took as central and sacred. First of all, the Chechen war was not an inevitable war. Some people see it as a conflict which, from 1991, was bound to happen. In effect, Russia drifted into a war in Chechnya. We absolutely reject that thesis. We think that it was a war which could have been avoided, a war which could have been resolved by negotiation before it happened. The second thesis is that the Chechens deserve to be taken seriously in their own right. Too often the Chechen war has been seen as some sort of extra-political factor in whether or not Yeltsin would survive. This is part of the symptom of seeing Chechnya through Russia, which is part of the problem of the conflict in the first place. The Chechens are a very sophisticated people with a long history. They are very different from the Russians. They have their own traditions, and by taking them seriously, we start to understand the contours of the issue.

If we look at Chechnya on the map, you begin to understand the problem immediately. It is a very tiny country of about one million people, with a very large northern neighbor of about 150 million people. In the last two hundred years, and in the recent present as well, there have been two strains in that relationship. One is the strain of resistance to Russian rule, which saw almost permanent conflict in the 19th century and intermittent conflict in this century, with this recent war as the most obvious example. The second strain is the pragmatic relationship — that the small Chechens have always had to get along, on some level, with the large Russians. Therefore the Chechens have learned to be pragmatic, and on some levels to cooperate. The story of the war is how the second relationship failed and how the first one took over again. To make a big generalization, Russia provoked the resistant strain in the Chechens, and became victim of its own stereotype of the “warlike Chechen.”

Let me do a brief historical sketch. The first key to the war is how different the Chechens themselves are on many levels. First of all they are a very distinct ethnic group. They have almost no close relations in the area — only the Ingush. On the very compact geographical territory which they completely dominate, they comprise over ninety percent of the population, and have a very well-structured, well-ordered society. They are very flamboyant and very Spartan in the old sense of being good at fighting a war. This is in strong contrast to Dagestan, for example, to the East, which is very fractured — lots and lots of different nationalities — and also very hierarchical. The French ethnographer, Ernest Chantre, observed in the 19th century that the Chechens have no major leaders; they form distinct communities of leading elders who make the decisions collectively. This makes it much more difficult to conquer them and to co-opt them, because you can’t take over the leadership, because there is no leadership as such. These horizontal links are preserved in other ways as well: in the system of teips, a clan structure (there are close to one hundred and fifty teips throughout Chechnya); and also in Sufi Brotherhoods.

The Chechens are Sufis. You often see the old men, who really are the pillar of Chechen society, praying in those traditional papakhas, which are the hats made out of Astrakhan wool. The old man praying, and the young man with his Kalashnikov: these are the two clichés of Chechen society.

The Chechen tradition of resistance is evident throughout the 19th century. Under Imam Shamil, the Chechens fought for thirty years, until 1859, as part of what has been called the longest guerilla campaign in history. When the North Caucasus was subdued — and even after Imam Shamil’s surrender in 1859 — the Chechens still would not be subdued by Russia. This continued through the events of 1877, Denikin’s attacks during the Civil War after the Revolution, and Collectivization. Every few years there would be a new rebellion in Chechnya.

On top of this tradition of resistance lies the Stalinist legacy, which begins to demonstrate how the Chechens were really the most outcast Soviet nation. In February 1944, the entire Chechen nation — all 400,000 of them, plus the 100,000 Ingush — was deported to Central Asia. Basically, within a week they were all packed into trains and dumped on the steppes of Kazakstan. Hundreds of thousands of them, about a quarter of the population, perished from cold and typhus. As exiles in Central Asia, they were the lowest of the low.

Within living memory, this attempt at gradual genocide of the Chechens, at abolishing Chechnya as a place and deporting the entire Chechen nation, endures as a huge trauma. That is a strain which has lived through modern Chechen politics as a politics of genocide, very similar in some ways to the politics underpinning Armenia, or Israel. This recent memory of genocide also created a nation, in the sense that when the Chechens came back in 1957, they were no longer a collection of villagers, but were now identified as a common whole — they were all Chechens.

One must not forget that the Chechens were also semi-Russified within the Soviet Union. Though Chechen traditions survived, they became Soviet citizens in the sense that they lived in tower-blocks and spoke Russian and dressed in Soviet-style clothes.

Nevertheless, from 1991, the status of “outcast nation” became explicit, and the sides drifted into war. We firmly believe that this drift was not inevitable. It lurched from step to step, and eventually, right before war broke out in 1994, the situation was more out of control than it had been. The main cause of the descent into war involved massive political incompetence, mainly in Moscow, but also on the part of Dzhokhar Dudaev, the Chechen President.

The collapse of Empire is the most obvious causal factor for the drift into war. Chechnya, or Checheno–Ingushetia, as it was in 1991, was one unit in the vast power struggle between the center and the regions, between Yeltsin and Gorbachev, which led to the break-up of the Soviet Union. The Chechens played this very artfully. At first, the nationalist movement worked with Yeltsin, and had contacts with the Yeltsin camp. As the Soviet Union began to fall apart, and as Russia, rather than the Soviet Union, began to be identified as the enemy, the Chechens then switched sides to Gorbachev. This contributed to the failure of Yeltsin’s attempt to crush the Chechen bid for independence in 1991.

Dzhokhar Dudaev, the Chechen leader, played a very strong role. He is an extraordinary and very difficult figure, in the sense that he was more of the Soviet General he used to be than the Chechen nationalist he became. He did not spend very much time in Chechnya, and since he was a child he had had a very romanticized attitude about Chechnya, which, in many ways was formed more through his reading of Russian romantic poets than of his knowledge of Chechnya on the ground. He was a very proud man, a very charismatic man, extremely impulsive, didn’t take advice, and ultimately a very inspiring military leader. But he was an appalling politician. When the war broke out, the role of military leader was one he had been born to play. Unfortunately, the role of conciliator, a man to stop the war, was not a role he was very good at playing.

I first went to Chechnya in January of 1994, and say without exaggeration that it was the most extraordinary place in the former Soviet Union. In the markets in Grozny, everything was for sale. Goods — from TV sets to French perfume, to whatever you wanted — were being flown in from the Middle East, breaking Russian customs and airspace. It was probably one of the few place in the world where guns are openly sold on the street corner. Lots of Mercedes were cruising the streets. It was a pure fantasy world, in many ways.

The Chechens were rather fed up with the deal they had received — the eccentric, independent state, which wasn’t really independent. In the resolution of this issue, both the traditional pragmatism and resistance of the Chechens played a role. The pragmatic element focused on dissatisfaction with the Dudaev regime and was ready for some kind of accommodation. The resistant element led the Chechens to insist that they did not want a Russian-brokered deal. The very strong and proud Chechen streak led to the idea that “we must sort this out in our own way.”

Unfortunately, many opportunities for compromise were lost. Ruslan Aushev, the President of neighboring Ingushetia, was an ideal intermediary. He told us that at one point he thought had arranged a meeting between Yeltsin and Dudaev which would have sorted the whole thing out. Dudaev was due to fly to Moscow and they were going to come to an agreement on some kind of special status, but at the last minute everything was canceled. This kept happening, largely because of the institutional incompetence of Russian politics: the fact that they had no proper nationalities policy, and the fact that Yeltsin preferred to divide and rule. In fact, Yeltsin encouraged different Chechen policies, all of which were competing with each other. Therefore, the enemy was not the Chechens so much as the man in the next office.

In my investigations, I became keen to overthrow two general misconceptions about the start of the war. The first misconception centers on a kind of domino theory, that Russia was worried that if Chechnya broke away, other places would break away, too. I do not agree with this at all — Chechnya was completely an exception. There was no other real candidate for breaking away from the Russian Federation. Tatarstan, which was the only other candidate, had cut a deal in February of 1994. Nowhere else was nearly as militant; they all had much larger Russian populations. Therefore, Chechnya was very much the exception. Even if Chechnya became independent, there was no real sign that anywhere else would seek to become independent, too.

The second misconception is that the war had to do with oil. However, the oil lobby in Moscow was lead by the Prime Minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin, and was very pragmatic. They were not interested in starting a war. Chechnya’s oil wealth was very minimal. The only issue was the pipeline going from Baku to the Black Sea, and yet that issue really did not have to be resolved until about 1996. To say that they would start a war over this possible future (2 years) pipeline route would have been a massive overreaction.

The start of the war has very much to do with internal Russian politics: the big, power politics which dominated Russia in 1994, following the lurch to the right signified by the success of Vladimir Zhirinovsky in the 1993 parliamentary elections. Suddenly, big power politics were on the agenda, and the hard-liners began taking over the Kremlin. People like Alexander Korzhakov and Mikhail Barsukov, and different factions of the army, led by Pavel Grachev, were all becoming more influential. Because of the different Chechen policies, they were all working against each other, until one policy finally ended in a spectacular failure on November 26, 1994.

Chechnya was awash with guns in 1994. Every village seemed to have its own private army. Moscow’s main policy in 1994 was to try to arm these people, particularly in the North, to overthrow the Dudaev government. This policy ended in spectacular failure on November 26, when an operation to overthrow Dudaev ended in a fiasco. Within days, the war had started.

The start of the war was a result of the competition between the strategy of covert overthrow of Dudaev and the strategy of military intervention. When the former strategy had failed, the proponents of the latter were given the green light by Yeltsin himself. On November 29, 1994, the Security Council, the body that made key decisions on defense and security issues in the Kremlin, met. From an interview with Yuri Kalmykov, the Justice Minister, who was at that meeting, but has since died, we got quite a clear picture of what happened. Yeltsin himself had already made up his mind. He had decided, after the failure of the covert operation, that he was going to escalate. The hardliners had basically got what they’d wanted, which was a small, victorious war, projected to boost Yeltsin’s authority and make him more hard-line and authoritarian. They were all asked to vote first, and discuss later, and there was only one item on the agenda, which was to vote in favor of military intervention in Chechnya.

A few days later, I was in Grozny, and the bombs were already falling. This was before the ground invasion. That the bombing actually started before the ground invasion is a commonly forgotten fact. They bombed all the airfields around Grozny and there were some civilian casualties. At that point, the Chechens had been driven into their historical tradition of resistance. Dudaev, however many of them disliked him, was the only leader. And so, we have a war in Chechnya.

Meanwhile, I left Grozny on December 4, 1994, when I was working for the Moscow Times, and my replacement arrived. Little did we know how big this was going to be.

Carlotta Gall: I flew down on the first day of the war to cover the Russian build-up, and when we were on the plane we heard that they had invaded. The tanks rolled in on December 11, 1994, and there was a terrible three-month battle for Grozny. The central street, Prospekt Pobedi, and the whole center was as bad Dresden, Stalingrad, even Hiroshima. The Russians invaded with their tanks, and for two weeks they floundered around. When they finally drove their tanks into the city, on New Year’s Eve, 1994, the Chechens wiped them out in a terrific battle. The Chechens knocked out 200 tanks and killed about 2,000 men, just in one night. After that, the Russians used other tactics: they literally bombarded every section of the city, and the whole center, for about a kilometer radius.

The Presidential Palace was then the center of the resistance. It was the former Communist Party headquarters, a horrible, old, gray concrete building with eleven floors, and where Dudaev had his office. When the war broke out and the bombs started falling, the Chechen leadership moved down into the basement, where they lived for about a month. Like most public buildings in Russia, the Presidential Palace had huge, extensive reinforced bunkers. Dudaev actually was evacuated quite early, but his chief of staff, Aslan Maskhadov, who is now President, stayed there right until it fell on the 18th of January. To take it, the Russians had to finally bomb it from the top. They hit it with a penetration bomb, which went right through the eleven floors and into the basement, killing people in the basement. There were about one hundred fighters, seventy Russian prisoners, and nurses and doctors in the bunker. They evacuated the building that night — to escape, they simply ran out and across the river. Two days later the Russians moved in and took the palace. The Russians, of course, called it a big victory. And it was, but it had taken them a whole month. That was a pattern throughout the war: the Chechens tended to abandon a place, pull out in the dead of night, run off through the Russian lines, and then the Russians would move in and take it.

The Presidential Palace remained throughout the war as a central symbol of resistance. In fact, there was a huge demonstration there in February 1996. Finally, the Russians blew up the remains of the building, because even as an empty carcass, it was still a very potent symbol.

By February 1995, many civilians had been living in bunkers for six weeks under bombardment. Many civilians managed to flee during a lull in the bombing. In Central Grozny one would find apartment buildings with evidence of an aerial bombing, with huge bombs that hit right through all the apartment floors. One also saw apartments that had been bombarded from the side using Grad missiles, which are fired from a multiple-missile launcher. They make a tremendous noise and are very terrifying. Outside of the center of Grozny, which was built-up with apartments, one would find whole districts of one-story residential buildings that were also just completely demolished.

Fred Cooney, a senior aid-worker who disappeared in Chechnya during the war, reported an incredible statistic. He had also been in Sarajevo, where, in the worst time of the bombardment, he counted 3,500 detonations in a day. In Grozny, he counted 4,000 in one hour, so the scale of the bombardment was just unbelievable. It was probably the worst thing any modern city has seen since the Second World War.

One of the most shocking things about the bombardment of Grozny is that most of the people who stayed were actually Russian. Before the war, Grozny was a city of about 400,000 people, but when the real battle started, there were only about 150,000 people in the city. The majority of these residents were Russian, or non-Chechen ethnicities such as Armenian or Georgian. Most of the Chechens living in the city evacuated as the bombardment started. They had relatives in villages, or they just went to the neighboring republics. The Russians, however, tended to stay put. Many of them said they had nowhere to go; they had no relatives. Many said they were old, or they were sick, or they were poor. But I also think that perhaps they just did not think their own government would try to bomb them. They thought the conflict would all be over quite quickly and that they wouldn’t be touched. Clearly, for the residents who stayed, it was a terrific shock to have to live through such a heavy war. Take for example the case of a Russian man that I met named Slava. He is still alive, though he is homeless now. He survived the whole of the battle of Grozny, three months of war, living in a bunker in the Hotel Kavkaz. His wife, who was an invalid and was also Russian, actually died in the bunker after a few weeks. He said that the bombardment was so heavy and so frightening that they didn’t dare take her body out, so they just pushed her body out the back into the snow, because it was winter at the time. Only much later did they dare go out and bury her. Slava is now penniless, and living on the charity of Chechens.

Life in a bunker was dreadful. It was very cold, as there was no heat other than that from small fires. There was no water. People had to walk out and risk their lives every morning to try and find some water. Many people actually died in the bunkers from what was called the “catacomb cough.” When Tom interviewed a woman who was in a bunker of fifty people, he learned that six people died in six weeks from this “catacomb cough.” Another eight died when they went looking for food or water during a lull. They never returned, and they were presumably killed by shells.

After the months of bombardment in Grozny, everyone that I met had the same story: we’ve lost everything; we only own what we’re standing in; everyone’s been killed. It was just a constant series of terrible stories. Some of them went mad. For example, I met one Russian man sitting by a knocked-out tank. This man had lost all his family and was homeless, and had gone mad. He sat by the tank and kept repeating “bednyi tank, bednyi tank,” which means “poor tank, poor tank.”

Though we do not have precise figures, we estimate that 20,000 people were killed in the three months of fighting in Grozny. Overall in the war, I estimate about 60,000. There are many soldiers and civilians who were never found. Approximately 1,500 Russian soldiers are still missing in action. Most of them disappeared in the first months of the war, in Grozny. The battle was so fierce that they were just blown apart, or never found. The same number of civilians is still missing: 1,500 never found. Many of them were killed in Grozny and buried in mass graves on the edge of the city.

The Russian conscripts fighting the battle were very young. Most of them just did not know what they were doing there. It was a complete surprise that they were actually driving into a battle. I remember one soldier said to me that they thought that Dudaev had a small number of presidential guards; they didn’t realize he had a whole army. I think it was a huge shock to them that they were being attacked. They had a pretty terrifying time. They were terrified of the Chechens because they had been told so many terrible stories, and they were terrified of being re-captured by their own forces, who do not treat prisoners at all well. As we saw in the Second World War, Russians have a tradition of being nasty to people who fall into the hands of the enemy as prisoners.

The Chechens ultimately released most of the young conscripts. If their mothers arrived, they would give them over to their mothers. The officers had a much worse time with the Chechens.

Russian mothers traveled throughout Chechnya looking for their sons. Months later, after the first battle for Grozny, one would find mothers living with Chechens, traveling around Chechnya with photos, asking anyone if they know about their sons. There were lots of these women, and they were always searching, traveling, asking, telling their stories. Their hope was always that their sons had been taken prisoner and were being held somewhere, but in fact, I fear that most of them were killed in those first days.

The Russian soldiers very rapidly lost any respect they might have had in the war. I think they were scared most of the time, so they got drunk and took it out on civilians. Soldiers would make many arbitrary arrests and executions, or take part in looting — really bad behavior. There were quite a few people with criminal records who were drafted into the army specifically to fight in Chechnya, and a lot of them behaved really badly. If there were any Russians or Chechens in the region who were anti-Dudaev and wanted to see some law and order brought, they were very quickly put off by the behavior of the Russian Army. The army very quickly lost all support they could have had if they had brought in a swift and correct regime. They totally lost any support they might have had in the first weeks of the war.

The Chechen fighters present a stark contrast. They were mostly village boys, and although some had their guns before, many of them picked them up in battle as a sort of a trophy from a dead Russian soldier. Some of them served in the Russian army or the Soviet army, even if they hadn’t done any military service (because after 1991 they didn’t serve) they were trained and they were good hunters. They often used guns and handled guns. Moreover, the Chechen fighters were very resilient, very jokey, very high-spirited — basically, just perfect guerilla fighters. They were very independent-minded, very tough mountain boys who could hike up a mountain with no trouble at all. They were natural fighters.

The morale of the Chechen fighters was phenomenal. Even in the bad times, they would all sit around and crack jokes. In visiting their camps, it was almost clear that these guys could not be beaten. They were quite well-organized and they looked after themselves. They would go to the front line for a forty-eight hour shift, and then they would come back to eat and to rest. Sometimes they would be sent home to their home village, where their families would cook for them and look after them, and then they would return. They were a very self-sufficient army.

A very typical scene during the war would find a man praying at his house. While the Chechens are not fundamentalists — they like to drink, for example — during the war they tended to do a lot more praying. Religion did become stronger. In fact, very few of them drank during the war.

Another typical scene involved the old women of the region, who were just amazing. Because they could go through Russian checkpoints more easily than men, they would travel all over the place and hold large demonstrations. They would block the tanks on the roads, and hold very noisy vigils, chanting and clapping all night. Again, they were a very strong part of the Chechen resistance.

During the war, the Chechens carried out two hostage raids into Russia. The first one was in June 1995, in Budennovsk, and the second was in Kizlyar, Dagestan, in January 1996. In Kizlyar, the Chechens took approximately one hundred and fifty hostages. When they tried to drive back into Chechnya, they were surrounded by the Russian forces in the border village of Pervomaiskoye, and there was a massive battle.

The events in Pervomaiskoye led me to realize that the Russians would never win the war. At that point, it became clear that the threat of terrorism to Russia could just go on forever. The Chechens would always have some young men who could continue to go into Russia and take innocent hostages and commit these horrible acts. Russia would never resolve the problem by bombing and trying to wipe out villages. In this regard, Pervomaiskoye was quite an important moment.

In the end, the terrible Russian morale ultimately took its toll. In August 1996, the Chechens seized Grozny back again, and they surrounded many of the Russian units and brought them completely to a standstill. When Alexander Lebed went down to Grozny, he saw immediately that the Russian soldiers had just given up the fight. Lebed said that he was not simply referring to the 18 year old conscripts, but to the professional units of Interior Ministry soldiers — no one wanted to fight anymore. Indeed, in interviews with Russian soldiers, everyone used to say, “Nobody needs this war.” The Russian soldiers were very badly treated. They were badly fed, always dirty, and according to Lebed, they even had lice. Lebed reckoned that partisan soldiers in the Second World War were better clothed. The Russian experience in Chechnya is a lesson in how not to treat an army and to get men to fight.

In the period since the war, the situation in Chechnya has not been very good. The Chechens have received de facto independence. They threw out the Russian army, and they are running things on their own. But it is a pretty bad state of affairs. They are talking to the Russians, but they are not really achieving anything. This situation may continue for a long time. The Chechens have not found anyone to recognize their independence. It is likely that no one will recognize Chechnya until Russia does, and Russia is in no hurry. Russia’s dealings in Chechnya since the war have not been very constructive. Russia is just trying to let the situation in Chechnya drift and forget about it.

 

Discussion

Question: Isn’t there a deadline for a final decision on the status of Chechnya?

Gall: There is a deadline — 2001. The two sides agreed to defer any decision on status until 2001. But my feeling is that they won’t achieve anything by that date. In 2001, they will perhaps have to conclude another “fudging” agreement, which will not acknowledge independence, but which also will not say Chechnya is within the territory of the Russian Federation.

Question: On what do you base the figure of 60,000 dead in the war, because of course it is a pretty contentious figure?

Gall: It is, and General Lebed, as well as the Chechens, have cited the even higher figure of 80,000. But I asked Aslan Maskhadov about it, and he said, “Well, we’ve gone through every village and noted down all the people killed, and that’s the figure we’ve come to.” But my feeling is that that’s a bit high. I have based my numbers on the figure produced by the organization Memorial. They reckon fifty thousand. They did an original survey of Grozny, though, in which they estimated about 27,000–30,000 people had been killed. But the basis of that survey was a bit makeshift: they asked a lot of people how many people they knew had been killed. As a result, I use a lower figure of 20,000.

We still really do not know, because many people did not have relatives or anyone who had ever identified them. So, the figures are vague. Regarding the Russian soldiers killed, the official figure is approximately four thousand, though I suspect as many as ten thousand Russians were killed. When I went interviewed Russian soldiers about the earlier battle, they all said, “We know people who’ve died who are not on the official lists.” Therefore, I think there has been an awful lot of fudging on the Russian side, and you have to consider the official numbers to be too low.

Question: Have you ever seen a figure for Chechen fighters as opposed to civilians?

Gall: I have asked Maskhadov, who says two thousand were killed, and Basaev, who says three to four thousand. Basaev basically says there were more because there were many volunteer fighters who joined. While they were not called fighters, they died fighting. Basaev collected that statistic from every village commander.

Question: So you figure maybe 50,000 civilians, 10,000 military?

Gall: Approximately 60,000 were killed in the war — a lot for 21 months and a population in Chechnya of only one million people.

Question: In your research, did you ever come across any indication that the United States told Yeltsin, “Go in there. Clean it up, but don’t spill too much blood?” This is a rough paraphrase of something that Strobe Talbott is supposed to have said.

De Waal: We did not find anything as definite as that. Andrei Kozyrev has said that the OSCE (or the CSCE, as it then was) had a summit in Budapest in the first days of December 1994, at which basically no one was interested in Chechnya. Kozyrev said that he took their silence to be a kind of passive assent. He does not admit to any kind of encouragement, but he got the impression that the West thought it would be over quickly. Kozyrev’s interpretation was that since the West was not going to raise any fuss, with a nod and a wink, intervention would be acceptable to the West. This is a theme picked up constantly by the liberal politicians we talk to — people like Yegor Gaidar and Sergei Kovalyov. They said that they found themselves in the funny position of being the liberal, pro-Western politicians in Moscow, whom the West had supported on political and economic liberalization. Yet suddenly, when they stood up to the Chechen war and to Yeltsin, they found themselves on their own. These politicians accuse the West of abandoning them by keeping silent. Gaidar insists (this is debatable) that during the period between December 11, when the troops went in, and December 31, the storm of Grozny, the war could have been wound down and there could have been a negotiated settlement. At this time, the Moscow establishment was split and Yeltsin’s advisers had very different opinions. Yet the West persisted with this monolithic view that “this is what the Kremlin believes and we can affect the Kremlin,” though the West made no attempt to influence that debate. The West’s silence was treated as assent. At that key moment, when the West could have exerted an influence to put a brake on things, the West did nothing. People like Yegor Gaidar felt that they should have done more.

Question: If I remember that period correctly, during the summer of 1994, and later, didn’t Dudaev make a number of overtures to the Russian side, saying ‘I’d like to talk’? And didn’t the Russian side apparently take that as a sign of weakness?

De Waal: I think it is very hard to generalize about Dudaev because he would change his mind within a few hours. It was clear that he was in constant contact with the Kremlin. He would make up to three or four phone calls a day. After Joseph Stalin, he was probably the man fondest of using the telephone. He was constantly on the telephone with all sorts of people in Moscow, and constantly wanting to talk. There were two planks he would use. One was “I am the leader of this free nation that has been resisting Russia for three hundred years.” And the second was, “If only I can talk to Boris Yeltsin, then we can cut a deal in thirty minutes.” This was the paradox of Dudaev: on the one hand he had this very proud Chechen side, and on the other side he did want to talk. He did make overtures, and when they were rebuffed, he would get very aggressive again. He would call Yeltsin a drunkard and Yeltsin would get personally offended by this. Constantly, the two egos of the two presidents, to put it very crudely, would often get in the way of a meeting. There was a constant stream of interviews where people said, “If only there had been a meeting between Yeltsin and Dudaev, maybe the two presidents could have suffered their pride to take a small knock and sorted something out.”

Question: So Dudaev was on the phone during all this that was going on, and he was calling?

De Waal: Even in December 1994, he was constantly on the phone. Even during the war, he was out there, up in the hills on his satellite phone. I believe he even held a seminar here at Harvard over the phone. Some mischievous Chechen told us that at one point they took Dudaev’s phone away, because they thought he was getting in the way by using his phone all the time.

Question: What can you tell us about the assertions that Russian soldiers and officers sold their weapons to the Chechens.

Gall: I think that is where the Chechens got most of their weapons. The Russian press wrote much about how the Russians left a lot of weapons to the Chechens when they pulled out of Chechnya. From what I saw at the very early days of the war, the Chechens had very little weaponry. Fred Cooney thought that a lot of weapons from Chechnya had gone to Bosnia before the war. When the war actually happened, the Chechens were rather short of weapons. Most of the weapons they Chechens had were either seized in battles or bought from corrupt Russians — commanders who were about to leave to go home after a tour of duty, soldiers who wanted to have some vodka, anything.

De Waal: I did find a Chechen businessman who had been in New York when the war started, who went back to Moscow and then to his home village. He decided that his contribution to the war effort would be strictly financial. He told me the whole sequence, how he was a middleman and he was buying weapons directly off of Russia units, always those about to depart, and they didn’t care that their successors would have these weapons used against them. He uttered the immortal phrase, “Russian weapons, Chechen spirit, and American dollars will win us this war.”

Question: How about outside assistance to the Chechens from other countries?

Gall: Certainly no governments helped, but there are some people who helped. Azerbaijan helped quite a lot, not necessarily with money, but by allowing Chechens to operate in Baku and cross the border. It seems that there was a certain amount of arms smuggling from Baku across Dagestan and into Chechnya, though this was at quite a low level. More often, wounded Chechen fighters were brought out to Azerbaijan and treated there, or taken on to Turkey. Other countries provided a certain amount of jihad funding. There was money coming in from the Middle East, Turkey, or the Diaspora. But again, not huge levels — nothing like the scale of Afghanistan. The Chechens were really on their own in that sense. Any financial help usually came from lone businessmen who had some dollars, maybe as much as a million dollars.

De Waal: Mercenaries were relatively few in number. I met perhaps four mercenaries. There were four Ukranians whom everyone met. There were also possibly a few Jordanians of Chechen descent. On the most mythical level there were these Lithuanian women snipers who had been in Nagorno–Karabakh and Abkhazia — no one had ever seen them — and then turned up in Chechnya and no one ever saw them there.

Question: What about the legendary Khatab, from Saudi Arabia?

Gall: He arrived with fifty men in February 1995. Basaev claims that he sent a lot of them home because they had a huge problem feeding them and housing them and equipping them. But certainly Khatab is still there and he still has a bunch of men.

Question: In the year 2001, Russia and Chechnya going to have to re-negotiate the status of Chechnya, and a lot of that negotiation will probably depend on who is leading Russia at that time. Does the Chechen leadership have any thoughts or preferences as to the leading candidates? Would they like to work with Lebed again, because they’ve dealt with Lebed in the past, or are they fearful of Luzhkov because of some of his more nationalistic stances? Or do they not have time to even think about it at all.

De Waal: Luzhkov is an interesting case. Although he takes a nationalist stance, he is also very much in the pocket of the Chechen Mafiosi in Moscow. Luzhkov has some very senior Chechens working for him in what he is financing and in what he runs, although these people are not necessarily supporting Chechnya. Umar Dzhabrailov, at the Radisson–Slavyanskaya Hotel, is the primary example. It is very difficult to judge whether Luzhkov’s financial interests come first, or his nationalist rhetoric. Lebed went down to Chechnya for the inauguration of Maskhadov, and was probably the most senior Russian politician to do so, but again, he is a very difficult man to judge. My impression is that it is far to early to tell.

Question: Lebed went to the celebration in Nagorno–Karabakh as well, right?

De Waal: Yes, absolutely. He was there February 18th of this year.

Gall: Luzhkov has actually gone on record as having changed his opinion. Earlier this year, he actually said, “We should give Chechnya its independence, and block it off, surround it, and create a border.” I think that even Lebed can change. I got the distinct impression from the Chechens that when brokering the peace deal, Lebed had said, “Don’t worry. In 2001, I’ll be President, and you’ll get your independence.” That was definitely the feeling at the time. Lebed has since become much more careful. Who knows what any President would do? It would depend on how well the future President won the elections, and how sure he felt. But as more time passes, the more confident Russia might become, the more secure it might be to give independence to Chechnya.

Comment: The Chechens right now are still holding out a faith for Yeltsin. It is interesting that they still think that Yeltsin is the kind of individual who might go down there and look at things and just say, “Well, OK. You’re independent.” Strangely enough, even though they insist on having full protocol when he comes down, and then creating some barriers to him coming down, I think they really want him to show up. They know that he is a bit of a loose cannon, as we have seen in a lot of places. He says things that his press secretary has to correct, somehow, later on.

Gall: I think Yeltsin is capable of making the grand gesture. Before he leaves power, he just might want to clear up one of his worst messes.

De Waal: I interviewed Maskhadov when he was in London last month, and he said, “When I met Yeltsin, President to President, in an hour and half we got more done than we had in a year.” Yeltsin enjoys using this phrase, “President to President”. When there was a deadlock about the withdrawal of troops from Estonia, he invited Lennart Meri, the Estonian President, to Moscow, gave him a couple of bottles of vodka, and in about two hours cut through about two years worth of issues. A comment made by a senior official in an off the record briefing provides another clue about what Yeltsin might do. When we asked about Chechnya, this official complained about Yeltsin. He said, “We’ve got Yeltsin on too long a leash with Chechnya. Some advisers let him talk too long to Maskhadov and he was giving too much away.”

Comment: A lot of people were unhappy with the agreement signed, which stated that Chechnya was a “subject of international law,” a term that the Chechens loved and seized.

De Waal: Yeltsin has definitely gone through all sorts of positions on Chechnya. Let me read you this quote from August 11, 1994: “Armed intervention is impermissible and must not be done. Were we to apply pressure against Chechnya, the whole Caucasus would rise up and there would be such turmoil and blood that no one would ever forgive us. It is absolutely impossible.” A very wise analysis by Yeltsin in August 1994, and then, three months later, he changed his mind.

Question: Was that decision primarily thrust upon him by the military? Or was it a political decision supported by the military.

De Waal: I think it was very much a political decision. It is very difficult to penetrate the Kremlin politics, but we tried very hard. I personally did about twenty interviews to answer that very point. The only thing I can say is that in the period leading up to the outbreak of war, a very authoritarian, very tough political group led by Korzhakov was very much in the ascendant. Oleg Lobov, Secretary of the Security Council, uttered a loose phrase about ten days before the invasion, that “the President needs a small victorious war to boost his ratings.” At the Security Council meeting, they kept talking about Haiti, “Look what Clinton just did in Haiti! We can do the same thing in Chechnya.” In vain did Yuri Kalmykov, the Justice Minister and a member of the Security Council, try and point out that Haiti and Chechnya were two very different cases. Pavel Grachev, the Defense Minister, also allowed himself a loose phrase, that “we could take Grozny in two hours.” He wanted to please the President, but he was not a serious political player. He was cajoled into supporting this political decision. However, there is some evidence that Grachev himself was beginning to get cold feet. We have this on rather bad authorities: Sergei Kovalyov quoting Andrei Kozyrev quoting Grachev, but nonetheless, it fits with what any military man would see, looking at such a situation.

Question: How do you think the Russian military and the leadership miscalculated so badly. How could they have completely misassessed the capability and preparedness of their own force, the capability of the Chechens, everything. Was it just something institutional?

Gall: My feeling is that it is institutional. The Russian army does not examine itself. I don’t think they ever really did a proper review and change after the war in Afghanistan. A few leaders did resign, and refused to take command of the Chechen expedition. General Eduard Vorobev was asked to take over command of the operation, and he refused. Boris Gromov and some other generals did resign over the war, but it did not have any effect. Perhaps their resignations made Grachev have a few qualms, but he pushed on, regardless. The whole system, which is just not working, rests on acceptance of the fact that “an order is an order.” People on the ground repeatedly told us this. It was clear that they were against things, and yet they just had to push on. This is the Russian military for you. It is very top-heavy, and allows very little leeway for commanders on the ground. Even the generals on the ground were speaking out in Grozny, because they saw that the politicians made the decisions for them, and not did not give them any leeway or credit for their views. The Russian army has not changed properly nor learned lessons since the collapse of Soviet power.

De Waal: There is a Kremlin culture that has not really changed enough from Politburo days, in the sense that once a decision is made, everyone supports it unanimously. There is no sense that the decision could be changed. Everyone acts in order to prove the Boss is right, rather than to do the best thing within certain circumstances. I think this is certainly the case between November 26th and December 11th, 1994. A lot of people thought it was a bad idea, but none of them were brave enough to say so.

Question: Turning to the final attack on Dudaev, did you come across any evidence that the United States transferred some technology through Israel to the Russian military which assisted them in honing in on his telephone conversations?

Gall: I did not find any evidence, though the Chechens do blame the United States for helping the Russians do it. I did get one story from a French contact that the Japanese had actually given special technology such as computer equipment. But my overwhelming feeling is that the Russian military had the technology. It is very easy to track a satellite signal, because it is an open signal, not closed or high-tech. The difficulty is getting your planes in the air, or your ground-to-ground missile honed in on the target quickly. There are some theories that they tried such an attack a couple of times before. They hit some poor Slovak worker, who was using a satellite telephone in Ingushetia, the day before. And then they nearly killed Yandarbiev two days later. He was also using a satellite phone. He literally had hung up and moved away, and a missile hit. So I think they were trying it quite a lot. Most people say they were lucky to hit the target, but I do not think it was particularly difficult. It does look like they probably had prior notice as well that he was going to make a phone call at that time.

Question: Do you think that Dudaev’s death marked a turning point in the war? There are certainly plenty of people in Russia, and Chechnya itself who have said that he had become an obstacle to any compromise deal.

De Waal: It is true that within weeks of Dudaev’s death, Yandarbiev went to Moscow, to the Kremlin, and it was much easier for Yeltsin to shake hands with a Chechen President whose name was not Dudaev.

Gall: On the other hand, though, from what we learned, Yeltsin had actually agreed to meet Dudaev when he was killed. It is not clear if it would have been carried out. Yeltsin had come pretty close to it several times. But literally the day before Dudaev’s death, Chernomyrdin announced at a cabinet meeting that Yeltsin was going to meet Dudaev.

Question: Might that have been subterfuge to cover up the fact that they were about to take him out?

Gall: The sources I have in Moscow say that Dudaev was killed by the military against Yeltsin’s orders. They were acting on their own. They were retaliating for a devastating raid that killed many soldiers. Grachev had to speak to parliament and explain what happened, and it was very humiliating for him. It is perfectly possible that there were two parts acting independently, or it could have been a double ploy of the Kremlin. This is where you get into conspiracy theories, as we don’t really know.

De Waal: After Dudaev’s death, the Chechens suddenly inherited a collective leadership which operated much more efficiently. Dudaev had often continued in eccentric ways, changing his mind every day, and sometimes calling for war to the last Chechen. The leadership which took over worked much better.

Question: Do you think that the war would have ended in August 1996, had it not been for the Chechen rout of the Russian forces in Grozny?

Gall: No, that was what precipitated it. It would not have ended without that.

Question: So you could have seen the war continue irrespective of Dudaev’s death?

Gall: Well, after Dudaev was killed, Yandarbiev came to Moscow. There was a big peace deal before the Presidential elections, and then the war continued again within days after Yeltsin was re-elected. The Russians at that time cynically needed a peace deal because they wanted to show Yeltsin was moving towards peace, because it was an unpopular war, but they had no intention of stopping. I was actually in Chechnya when the bombing resumed. It was a definite strike at still trying to win it militarily. They did a bombing raid on a village where the whole Chechen leadership was together at a large conference. They nearly all got hit. The Russians really had every intention of carrying on the war, so I think it was only when they were absolutely brought to a military standstill that they made peace.

Question: How much of a factor do you think Chechnya was in the Presidential elections? For example, Gaidar made a video about Chechnya to show during the election campaign. However, most likely nobody saw the video, as it was shown only by one Russian TV program early in the morning, just days before the election. Obviously in the public opinion polls the war was extraordinarily unpopular. We have had a lot of discussions here with people from Yeltsin’s campaign team that suggest that Chechnya was a factor. I am wondering about your assessment as to how much difference you think the conflict made.

Gall: The amazing thing was that when I was in Chechnya before the elections, I was literally the only journalist in Chechnya, Russian or foreign. Foreigners had completely dropped off covering Chechnya that year, but the Russians did, too. On the Russian side, it was a political decision to not cover Chechnya, to not touch it, because is was so damaging for Yeltsin. If you talked to Russian journalists who were even totally against the war, they said, “Yes, but we can’t let the Communists get in.” It was really a conscious decision of the Russian media. Instead of covering the war in a different way, they just tended to stay away. From the spring of 1996, the conflict in Chechnya just dropped off the television screens.

Question: Do you think if Yeltsin had not been running against Zyuganov — if it had been someone else — that Chechnya could have brought down Yeltsin?

Gall: I always thought that the war was a huge handicap, but in the end, it was such a clear decision. Although Yeltsin was hated for the war, it just dropped off the agenda.

De Waal: I think that sector of the population who was against the war was torn, because it was exactly that same sector of the population who wanted to see the Communists defeated. As you say, if there had been a more democratic opponent of Yeltsin, possibly — but that would have been virtually unthinkable in Russia of 1996. the Presidential elections? For example, Gaidar madInstead, much of the Russian intelligentsia wrang their hands, but basically voted for Yeltsin. One voter assessed the choice by stating, “Look what the Communists did to our grandfathers. I have no faith in the Communists, and I have marginally more faith in Yeltsin.”

Question: Do you think there is a Russian policy now to isolate Chechnya? And what do you see behind the kidnappings? Obviously some were done to raise ransom, but were others done for political reasons?

Gall: I think some of them were. It started with the murder of the six Red Cross people in Noviye Atagi, in December, 1996, which I think was a Russian attempt to scare away the foreigners and stop observers coming to the elections. And then, after the elections, the kidnapping started, and I think it was politically motivated. If Russians weren’t doing it themselves, then it was Chechens working for Russians. Even people like Ivan Rybkin, the former head of the Security Council, admitted that some of it was political. Russian journalists were being kidnapped just before Maskhadov met Chernomyrdin. And again before a meeting between Yeltsin and Maskhadov. So there did seem to be a political message.

However, the kidnapping of foreign journalists and foreign aid workers was more a question of money. They started paying big ransoms right from the beginning, and it just spiraled. Although there are definitely some Chechen criminals and former commanders kidnapping just for money, I do not think that only the Chechens are money driven. Some of the criminals might be pro-Moscow. The kidnapping that is happening in Dagestan is very suspicious. Two Swedes were kidnapped in Dagestan, and were taken into Chechnya. Four Frenchman were taken in Dagestan by Dagestanis and were handed over, or probably even sold, at the border. My feeling is that pro-Moscow people are creating the problem, and they are also making money on the side. I feel very strongly that Chechens are not the ones doing the kidnappings in Dagestan, even if the hostages do end up in Chechnya. There is definitely a Dagestani connection that is possibly pro-Moscow.

Although it is hard to prove, I think there is definitely a hand in Moscow behind some of it. On the other hand, you have to remember that the vast majority of people who have been kidnapped are ordinary Chechens, or “richer-than-ordinary” Chechens, and that is purely criminal. While some of is politically motivated for revenge, as when Doku Zavgaev’s nephew, or Khasbulatov’s brother, were kidnapped, but most of the kidnapping is for money, and it is Chechen against Chechen. In a situation after a war, in which people haven’t got money, but they’ve got guns, there will be high crime. It happens everywhere.

Question: Have either of you been reading about the two British hostages? Because it was a bit surprising that they weren’t released on the eve of Maskhadov’s visit to London.

De Waal: During the last few days before he left, Maskhadov made an extremely intense effort to have them released. There was one operation which combed house-to-house in one area south of Grozny where he had had a tip that the hostages were being held. The Chechen government is now using a new policy, which seems to be effective, of offering a reward for information, on the principle that people do want money and will thus give tip-offs as to where the hostages are held.

Comment: That’s a rather damning and depressing fact, that they weren’t able to secure the release of the hostages.

De Waal: This operation showed that to call the kidnappers a gang is understatement — they in fact are a small private army. In the case of the British hostages, there was basically a pitched battle for their release, which the authorities unfortunately lost.

Gall: What I was told was that the people holding the hostages are Wahhabis. I think that this was a big shock for the authorities, because Wahhabis are very well armed, and indeed almost an army. The authorities were ambushed as they were on their way to the place. They were tipped off that the hostages would be located, and some of their men were killed, and so they pulled out.

Question: But are these Chechen Wahhabis? Chechen converts? Or are we talking about outside forces, like Saudis or Pakistanis?

Question: Why would they be motivated by money in that case?

Gall: Well, they do make money out of it — that is how the Wahhabis make money when they are not fighting a jihad. When they are fighting a jihad, they send home the videos and they get lots of funding. Now that the war is over, it is possible that they are running short of money. They did similar sorts of kidnappings in Afghanistan. They are probably not very concerned that it is actually ruining Chechnya, that this kidnapping shows that it is barely an operating state, with such high crime. The Chechen who told me about this was very disheartened. She is a Chechen journalist, and until then she was pretty convinced that the Wahhabis were not doing this sort of thing, that they were still friends of the Chechens.

Comment: There is hope that Shamil Basaev, along with Maskhadov, could bring order, unless Vakha Arsanov, the Vice President, is resisting. However, it is not a very positive sign that they were not able to secure the release of the British hostages, because the one thing that could have done well for Maskhadov in a London visit would have been that.

Gall: I was in Chechnya about a week before Maskhadov’s visit to London, and both Basaev and the head of the anti-terrorist unit said, “we don’t want to release them just before the visit,” or at least, “we don’t care about Maskhadov’s visit, because the last thing we want is for everyone to think that we were holding them all along, and then we suddenly pop up to produce them.” They did not want to make a political move that would perhaps show that they could have done it six months earlier. However, I think they were just saying that in case they failed, because it seems they did try quite hard. But I am convinced that Basaev is going to try and make a big effort to try and clear this up, but it does mean that he is going to go against some pretty powerful people, including former commanders. He must pick his battles, for he cannot do it all straight away.

Question: There has been some speculation that some of the kidnappings are part of a concerted effort to keep “the West” out of the region, in the form of international aid organizations, Western journalists, and others. Could that be part of the picture? Have you heard any discussion? Certainly some of the Chechens that we have talked to in the past have also noted this fact.

Gall: I think that explains the murder of the Red Cross workers, and I think that was Moscow-organized. The aim was to scare away the foreigners and prevent any foreign aid and investment from coming. It has been very successful in that sense — the crime has frightened people away. There are very few journalists and foreign aid workers who go down there. When I last went to Chechnya, I was there for 48 hours and I had armed bodyguards the entire time. This is really the only way you can operate. So the scare tactics have worked, but whether it is Moscow that is continuing to do it, or whether it is people like the Wahhabis, I don’t know. I have not been able to interview people like Khatab. I have talked to some of his men, and they are not at all like the usual type of Wahhabis I met in Afghanistan, who do hate all foreigners. In Afghanistan, the murder of some UN officials by Wahhabis was definitely an attempt to frighten away Western aid and to create a state where the West did not meddle. The Afghans then threw the Wahhabis out. I have always been confident that the Chechens would do the same, because they do want the West. They do not like to be told how to run their lives by anyone, the Wahhabis included.

My opinion is that Basaev has total control over Khatab. Khatab will not act against Basaev’s orders. He fought under him throughout the war, and they have a very good relationship, so I do not think Khatab is doing it, and I do not think Khatab would step out of line like this. But there is another Islamic group that is even more shady, whom I have never even met. This group could perhaps be responsible for some of the kidnappings. The Russians, however, insist that the Wahhabis are the a very large threat, and are causing many problems in Dagestan. While this threat may be exaggerated due to the Russian great fear of fundamentalism, it is really unclear what exactly is going on with these groups.

Question: What has happened to Ruslan Khasbulatov these days? Where is he now?

De Waal: He is teaching his students macroeconomics at Plekhanov Academy.

Question: He is staying out of Chechnya, then?

De Waal: He is completely staying out of Chechnya, where he is widely blamed for the fact that every time he has intervened, things have gotten much worse. Also, every political project he has touched has turned to ruin.

Question: Would you talk briefly about the demographics after the war? You said earlier that there were a million people there, and 90% were Chechens. What impact has the war had on the demographics? Has the Russian native population left? Is there a huge gap in the 20–30 year old male population that is going to appear later? Are the 60,000 people who have died uniformly distributed, or mostly old, or mostly young? What is it going to look like five years from now?

Gall: I do not have any accurate figures, but I know Lebed said that after the war that there were 30,000 Russians left in Chechnya. Most of them are pensioners. A lot of them are invalids. I went to Chechnya the in June of 1997, when there was a big Russian festival in the Orthodox church. The church is actually in ruin, but they rebuilt the chapel next door. One of the Russians at the festival did say to me, “we’re all sitting on our suitcases.” I think many of them were trying to get out of Chechnya. Many of them, if they still had an apartment, were trying to sell it. I remember meeting Armenians there as well, and they said, “we’re trying to leave; there’s no future here.” There are no jobs, and they just did not know how they could find a way to survive. A lot of them were teachers, or specialist workers in the oil industry, etc..

Comment: So you are going end up with Chechnya full of Chechens.

Gall: Yes, I think so. However, the other strange thing is that there are almost no men — no young men, or men of working age — in the villages. They have all left, too. Basically, they have gone to Russia, or abroad, to work.

De Waal: This was a classic thing, actually. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, the jobs in Chechnya were not filled by men. Grozny was full of working women, and this was thought very shameful on the Chechen culture, but in fact, most of the men were working all over Russia and sending remittances. And I am sure that pattern is becoming re-established after the war, because there is no work in Chechnya, so men leave to work on building sites in the rest of the Caucasus.

Comment: It seems that you would getting an ever-smaller Chechen population.

Gall: No, because they come back, and they also have large families. Sometimes one brother stays with the family, and the others go abroad.

De Waal: It is seasonal work, so they would come back in the winter.

Gall: But many Russians are leaving in fear, not simply because there is not much to do there any more. Also I have heard, from people who run organizations helping refugees and forced-migrants in Russia, that many Russians are coming from Chechnya who say that they have had their apartment confiscated. There is a kind of hysteria spreading around because of that. But that has been happening since 1991.

Question: What figures do you accept for the people who are now in the republic? How many left? How many are displaced persons?

Gall: There are still considered to be a couple of hundred thousand Chechens who are living in Dagestan or Ingushetia or Moscow, because their houses are destroyed. There were about 350,000 living outside of Chechnya during the war, and they have not come back, either because they can not, or they do not want to.

Comment: I think the OSCE has a figure of 400,000 displaced persons, including some who are displaced within Chechnya, and some elsewhere.

Gall: And they still stick by that figure?

Comment: I don’t know, which is why I was wondering if anybody had looked at it recently.

Question: What is the situation with external international passports for the Chechens? I understand that they cannot get them.

Gall: That is a very sore point, actually. To give one example, I just was in Norway at the end of last month doing a book tour. A famous Chechen journalist who covered the whole war, was supposed to come with me. After eight months she still did not get her passport, and could not come. So, I think it is a huge problem. Many people say, “Oh, you just bribe, and you go and you pay extra, and you get the passport.” But she tried every avenue of bribing, as well as doing it officially through the Security Council in Moscow, and she still could not get a Russian passport so she could travel abroad.

Comment: Maybe it was her. Maybe the Russians didn’t want her.

Gall: I think it is a huge problem. It is a huge problem for Russians, as well. It takes Russians three months to get a passport to go abroad. The huge bureaucracy is an obstacle, and you have to bribe if you want to get anything done in Russia today. Of course it is doubly difficult for a Chechen, and for a famous Chechen, who was with the resistance, it is even more difficult.

Comment: But there is the other side of it. Russia actually likes Chechens to travel on Russian passports.

Gall: The Russian press made a big deal of that when Maskhadov went to England recently. They all said, “Ah, and he was on a Russian passport.” But I do not know if that means that they will actually give out Russian passports.

Comment: The Russian authorities do provide passports rather willingly if they are official Chechens. When Maskhadov first went to Saudi Arabia, he had a special passport with no stamp. It never said ‘Russian Federation’ on it, and that was a compromise that Rybkin had made.

Gall: But Maskhadov has always had his Soviet passport, which is still valid. I asked him after the war, in October 1996, whether he could travel abroad. I asked, “How will you go? What is your passport?’ And he said, “I have still got my Soviet passport. There is no problem.”

De Waal: That is certainly how Dudaev used to travel abroad.

Gall: And the Soviet passport does not run out. The English one is ten years at a time, but the Soviet one doesn’t run out.

Comment: We are talking about two different kinds of passports: the regular passport, which is a citizenship passport, does not run out. But you need a separate passport to travel abroad, and this passport runs out in three years.

Comment: But they were trying to extend the Soviet passport for them specially, to avoid the political implication. We had this problem when arranging a meeting of Chechen and Russian officials the Hague.

Question: Can you tell us something about Khozhakhmed Noukhaev and his proposal for a Caucasian Common Market? What is your assessment of all of that is going on behind the scenes?

Gall: I think he has a good idea and he is a very bright guy. He was very close to Dudaev and he supported Yandarbiev in the elections. I think he is very much a Chechen nationalist and he would like to do something for the Chechens, as well as make another fortune. He bankrolled Maskhadov’s trip to London. He is very rich, obviously, and he is moving his money out of Russia to the Caucasus. He wants to invest in the Caucasus and help it attract investment, not only for himself, but for Chechnya. After interviewing him many times, I think he is genuine on that issue. His idea for a Caucasian Common Market is a serious idea. It is based on the original European Community, which, as you remember, in post-war Europe joined together France and Germany, in particular, in a strategic common market based on steel and coal. One country made steel, the other had coal. They made this deal, although they had been enemies, and they actually both benefited terrifically. The Common Market was a huge help to get Europe back on its feet.

Noukhaev’s idea is that Chechnya needs something similar to the economic community that developed in post-war Europe. By becoming involved with its neighbors, including southern Russia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and even Armenia, and tying them together with economic ties that promote trade, they will cement peace and prosperity. I think he is absolutely right on that, and I think that the pipelines are the perfect example. The pipeline issue is the one issue on which the Chechens say they see eye-to-eye with Russia.

Question: Do you think it is possible to operate the pipeline, in the long-term?

Gall: I do. You know the Chechens are great deal-makers. They could make a deal with the Devil, quite frankly. They really do use common sense when it comes to the pipeline issue, and they do see eye-to-eye with Russia. I think they know that the pipeline is in their interests, and it is in Russia’s interests. There are wrangles over the tariffs, and for a long time they held out on the deal because they wanted other things, such as for their airport to become an international airport. Russia agreed that they could have international flights coming to the Grozny airport, if they got the pipeline going. Maskhadov, who, I think is a slightly naïve deal-maker, agreed. Of course they still have no international flights coming to Grozny, but the pipeline is working. If they were bloody-minded, they would say, “Ok, switch off the oil,” but they haven’t. They are pragmatists. They realize that it is in their interests as well as Russia’s to have the oil flowing, so they are sticking to their bargain — they are guaranteeing that there will be no attacks on the pipeline. I do not think there ever was a problem with that, actually. The oil men in Baku who think that attacks on the pipeline are a problem just do not know the Chechens. The Chechens are not going to smash something that is profitable to them.

Question: You said the pipeline is working. Oil is being pumped out of the Caspian and flowing north through the pipeline. But the oil that is coming out at Novorossiisk — is it that Caspian oil? Or is it different oil?

Gall: At first it was different oil, partly because the Russian network blends everything — they don’t really differentiate. Certainly I know that the AIOC, which is the Azerbaijan International Operating Company, has lifted its own oil from Novorossiisk. Again, they say it’s their own oil — it was given to them, but they do not know if it is the actual oil. They are talking of setting up a quality bank in Novorossiisk. And that is when the Chechens will be really under the test, because there is a possibility that they will siphon off stuff for themselves. If the AIOC sets up a quality bank, then they really are testing that it is their oil.

Comment: It seems to me that they have to, because the oil that comes out at Novorossiisk would be of lower quality than what has been put in at Baku.

Gall: Well, no, because the Russian blend is pretty good. So far the AIOC is not too worried. They are quite happy with the Russian blend. There is a very low quality Russian oil, which is from Tatarstan, but they are not getting that; they are getting standard Russian blend. Quite frankly, Caspian Sea oil is very good, but Siberian oil is good, too. But they might, in due course, try to set up the quality bank, which will mean the oil will go into special storage, and then you really will have to check that what they put in one end comes out.”

Question: Is the Dagestan bypass, that the Russians have proposed, a serious alternative?

Gall: A photographer, Stanley Green, has just gone down looking for it. He is looking to see if they are really building the pipeline in Dagestan. He is on an assignment for Time magazine, so you might see something come out in Time in the next few weeks. My feeling is that the Russians probably are building it, and probably are serious. Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov was the person who first started to talk about it. The Chechen attitude is, “Ah, it’s not real. They’re just trying to do it to put the pressure on us.” But there are people like Noukhaev who say that they are very foolish if they do build the pipeline in Dagestan, because there will be Chechens who will go and blow it up. It would be so easy to knock out, but oil men usually say that it’s very easy to fix, “Just send out the engineers and we’ll fix it in a day.”

The oil men in the Caspian say that they can’t wait to get any route that doesn’t go through Russia. They all say that problems include the tariffs, the extra tolls, and the fact that there are several Russian companies in on the deal: Transneft, Lukoil, all sorts of Chechens, and Dagneft, which is in charge of the Dagestani route. They say that it is just such a nightmare dealing with Russians, and it is really very expensive. So that is why they are very keen for the southern routes. People are also seriously looking on the east side of the Caspian. British companies are seriously negotiating swaps with Iran, because that is the cheapest route of all. The way that Russia deals in the oil business is just not commercially attractive. That will be the bottom line in the end.