Inside Putin’s mind: the lessons of Chechnya

As far as Vladimir Putin is concerned, ‘we are nobody, while he who chance has enabled to clamber to the top of the pile is today Tsar and God’. So said Anna Politkovskaya, the eminent Russian journalist, in her book Putin’s Russia. She continued: ‘In Russia we have had leaders with this outlook before. It led to tragedy, to bloodshed on a huge scale, to civil wars. I want no more of that.’ She wrote those prophetic words almost two decades ago.

A reporter for the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, Politkovskaya came to prominence during the second Chechen war. Her accounts of that conflict, which officially lasted from 1999 to 2000, revealed Putin’s war against separatist rebels in the Caucasus as a hideous, corrupt sham. She reported in 40°C temperatures from the flyblown refugee camps, destroyed villages and flattened towns of Chechnya and Ingushetia. Traumatised people starved in the ruins and yet Moscow, which claimed to be liberating the Chechens, provided no aid.

As for the Russian soldiers: ‘Forget all you have been told about the war,’ Politkov-skaya wrote in her 2001 book A Dirty War. ‘The army you were shown… does not exist. Instead you see exhausted men with unbalanced minds. Then there’s the cold, the filth, scabies, rotting feet, drunkenness. After the soldiers have sat for weeks in a dugout that is more like a swamp, then the war ceases to appear a sacred feat of liberation.’

Tinned rations turned rancid in the heat. Officers treated their men like slaves, in some cases even hiring them out to locals as cheap labour. Recruits were savagely beaten by their superiors, at times with entrenching tools and often for no reason. Many were killed in this way – but in line with Russian military tradition, officers were not punished. Soldiers injured in combat were often not sent to field hospitals, as the officials running the war wanted to keep casualty numbers down.