Every so often a lengthy newspaper or magazine article arrives that all but demands a fuller and even longer treatment. Such was the case in the Oct 31. issue of The Sunday Times magazine in London, which published translated excerpts from the diary of a Russian spetsnaz officer who served for more than a decade as one of the Kremlin’s shadowy fighters in the Chechen wars. (Access to the article is protected by a pay-to-view firewall; to read it, you’ll have to buy at least a temporary subscription.) The two Chechen wars, fought since the Soviet Union disintegrated between Russian federal forces and shifting bands of rebels who have carried the banners of separatism, jihad and revenge, have seen waves of violence as chilling as most any accounts of war. Fueled by racism and an urge to settle bloody scores, both sides have joined in a descent to the bottom, engaging in unsparing campaigns against each others’ civilian populations. Untold thousands of civilians have vanished or been killed. A wave of emigration followed, and criminality took hold. The tiny Chechen republic was leveled in the process, only to be rebuilt in recent years as a new police state controlled by a megalomaniacal young Kremlin proxy,Ramzan Kadyrov, who rules the land by collective punishment and fear. If the paired words — insurgency and counterinsurgency — conjure dark associations, Chechnya is the example that summons some of the most severe forms of political violence of our time: hostage-taking in a theater, a public school and a hospital to leverage political demands; suicide bombings; indiscriminate shelling of rebel strongholds; assassinations; beheadings of captured combatants and suspected informants; mass arrests and incarcerations; public displays of the dead as warnings to others; systemic use of torture, and more. Much of this is has been rigorously documented by human-rights investigators and a small cadre of journalists; the shape of war-fighting in and near Chechnya is broadly understood. But accounts of participants have been few. The Sunday Times article, "The War in Chechnya: Diary of a Killer,” prepared by The Times’s long-serving Moscow correspondent, Mark Franchetti, marks a valuable step toward gathering participants’ accounts. In a series of first-person vignettes from an anonymous officer’s diary, it offers a front-line account of characteristic forms of Russian-Chechen campaigns — roundups, torture, extrajudicial executions of detained rebels and the almost casual killing of civilians who happen to be in the way. It also captures some of the frantic energy and sorrow of firefights, in which this officer, who gave his 120-page diary to Mr. Franchetti, was often engaged. The result is a portrait of confused dehumanization, of both relishing in fighting and agonizing over the results.
Soldiers’ memoirs are basic artifacts from which any given war can be further understood. They are also potentially risky to rely on, especially in wars for which a large body of individual accounts are not available. As any veteran knows from listening to fellow soldiers’ bar stool accounts, survivors of war sometimes veer into cartoonish description, and accounts of events can be laden with exaggeration. These risks are amplified in a diary like this one, which in its published form presents a series of undated entries. (The Sunday Times said in the article’s introduction that it had removed locations and dates to protect Mr. Franchetti’s source.) Without the original manuscript available for review, it’s not possible to verify these accounts against a larger body of material.
But Mr. Franchetti is not new to the Chechen wars. He is one of the few remaining Western journalists who has troubled to cover a ghastly beat several years after it slipped from most newspapers’ pages, doggedly returning to his subject when many journalists moved on. And his collaboration with Dima Beliakov, a Russian photographer with rich connections throughout the Russian security services operating (to put it euphemistically) in the North Caucasus, has often granted him insights that have borne out. Questions will linger about this anonymous officer and his motives for coming forward. But any reader interested in comprehending what befell Chechnya will be left with a hope that a full treatment of this diary — with dates, locations, names — will become available with time. Perhaps there is a book to do, which would be a valuable addition to the all-too-thin libraries available on an important chapter in the histories not only of Russia and the Caucasus, but also of modern war.
The diary as available now is a complex offering. It provides a departure point for confronting the ways that war can unravel its participants. Mr. Franchetti’s source appears, variously and by his own accounts, as vicious, grim, bitter, alcoholic, criminal, angry at his country but deeply faithful to his fellow fighters, many of whom were killed and whom he feels he has let down. He departs the stage nostalgic, even aching, for a quiet family life. For those trying to understand the slippery new counterinsurgency doctrine, which has swept like a religion through the Pentagon in the past five years, this abbreviated diary also carries insights into how Russia’s forces have pursued their own Eastern brand of counterinsurgent tactics, unapologetically matching brutality with brutality, seeking less to win, as the tin-eared slogan says, Chechnya’s "hearts and minds” than to exhaust the Chechen population. The article is, on many levels, a deeply engaging and frighteningly realistic view of a world rarely exposed.
Excerpts are below. For a fuller read, visit The Sunday Times.
We got hit from two sides crossing a settlement. Our commander told us to move faster, but we got hit anyway. We moved on, taking cover behind a row of houses, and could hear a firefight just ahead. Suddenly, my eye caught some shadows, one behind a window, the other at the entrance of a basement. I lobbed a hand grenade into the cellar, and sprayed the window with machine gun fire. When we walked up to check on the outcome we found two bodies, an old man and woman. Bad luck.
Counterintelligence got wind of a group of female suicide bombers. We stormed their safe house and nabbed three women. One was in her forties, the others were young – one barely 15. They were drugged and kept smiling at us. The three were interrogated back at the base. At first, the elder, a recruiter of shahidkas [female suicide bombers], wouldn’t talk. That changed when she was roughed up and given electric shocks.
They were then executed and their bodies blown up to get rid of the evidence. So in the end they got what they’d craved.
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