Chechnya: A Small Victorious War

Chechnya: A Small Victorious War, Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal, London: Pan Books, 1997, 416 pp. (to be released in March 1998 by New York Univ. Press, under the title, Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus).

The story of how a small band of guerilla fighters faced the might of the Russian army and won is bound to be interesting. Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal, two correspondents from Moscow’s English-language daily, The Moscow Times, have written a gripping eyewitness account of the 21-month war in Chechnya.

After a description of the New Year’s Eve invasion of Grozny, the book explores the root causes of the war. The early chapters give history and background to the struggle, including a fascinating section on Chechen culture, where the authors argue that Russia’s failure in Chechnya was due to its deep-rooted misunderstanding – and underestimation – of the Chechen people.

The story then takes us through the nineteenth-century wars in the Caucasus, the Chechens’ forced mass exile to Kazakhstan (where Chechnya’s current leadership came of age), the Kremlin’s power struggles and the decision to invade, and finally the events of the war up to the Chechens’ recapture of Grozny.

The book contains a vivid cast of characters – the plump Russian mother who ran into Grozny under heavy fire with Chechen fighters to rescue her prisoner son, for example, or the nineteenth-century fighter and escape artist Imam Shamil who once sentenced his own mother to 100 lashes. The authors are sympathetic to all the war’s victims, from the fierce Chechen fighters, to the pathetic, barely trained Russian soldiers, to the mostly Russian civilians hiding in bunkers and being bombed by their own government.

The only figures for whom the authors have no time are the Kremlin leaders who decided to invade, such as Defense Minister Pavel Grachev, head of the Presidential Security Service Alexander Korzhakov and, ultimately of course, Boris Yeltsin himself. At every turn, the Kremlin leadership seemed plagued by incompetence and a stunning disregard for human life. The decision to invade Grozny on New Year’s Eve, 1994, for example, was rumored to have been made at a drunken birthday party. And the book’s ironic subtitle refers to a comment made by then Security Council Secretary Oleg Lobov that Russia needs a “small victorious war to raise the President’s ratings.”

At book presentation recently held in Moscow, Carlotta Gall had this to say about her motivations for telling this story: “[coauthor] Tom, like me, thinks that Chechnya has been forgotten since the war ended.” Accused by some of being “a bit too pro-Chechen,” Gall makes no bones about her feelings. “I think the war was wrong,” she said. “I think it should have never happened.”

– Anna Hoare