Putin's Wars: From Chechnya to Ukraine

By Mark Galeotti

THE FINANICAL TIMES - BEST BOOKS OF 2022

'The prolific military chronicler and analyst Mark Galeotti has produced exactly the right book at the right time.' - The Times

A history of how Putin and his conflicts have inexorably reshaped Russia, including his devastating invasion of Ukraine.

Putin's Wars is a timely overview of the conflicts in which Russia has been involved since Vladimir Putin became prime minister and then president of Russia, from the First Chechen War to the two military incursions into Georgia, the annexation of Crimea and the eventual invasion of Ukraine itself.

But it also looks more broadly at Putin's recreation of Russian military power and its expansion to include a range of new capabilities, from mercenaries to operatives in a relentless information war against Western powers. This is an engrossing strategic overview of the Russian military and the successes and failures on the battlefield.

Thanks to Dr Galeotti's wide-ranging contacts throughout Russia, it is also peppered with anecdotes of military life, personal snapshots of conflicts, and an extraordinary collection of first-hand accounts from serving and retired Russian officers. Russia continues to dominate the news cycle throughout the Western world.

There is no better time to understand how and why Putin has involved his armed forces in a variety of conflicts for over two decades.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Nov 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9781472847539

Mark Galeotti

Mark Galeotti is a scholar of Russian security affairs with a career spanning academia, government service and business, a prolific author and frequent media commentator. He heads the Mayak Intelligence consultancy and is an Honorary Professor at University College London's School of Slavonic and East European Studies as well as holding fellowships with RUSI, the Council on Geostrategy and the Institute of International Relations Prague. He has been Head of History at Keele University, Professor of Global Affairs at New York University, a Senior Research Fellow at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and a Visiting Professor at Rutgers-Newark, Charles University (Prague) and the Moscow State Institute of International Relations. He is the author of over 25 books including A Short History of Russia (Penguin, 2021) and The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War (Yale University Press, 2022).

Book preview

1

Introduction

The annual Victory Day parade through Red Square says so much about how war and the military are seen by the Kremlin and the Russian people alike. Although there is also room for solemnity and reflection in the overall commemoration of the perhaps 27 million Soviets who died (14 million of them Russian) in what they call the Great Patriotic War – the Second World War – the parade itself is an unapologetic celebration of triumph and military power. Thousands of soldiers arrayed in their ranks delivering the traditional Ura! cheer, the latest military hardware rumbling over the cobbles, the ‘Victory Banner’ (or at least a faithful copy of the original red flag hoisted in Berlin by the 150th Rifle Division) carried the length of Red Square by a goose-stepping honour guard of the Moscow Commandant’s Regiment Honour and Colours Guards to the strains of ‘Sacred War’:

Arise, you mighty motherland,

Arise for Sacred War

To crush the evil fascist hordes,

Unite and drive them back.

Foreign dignitaries and ambassadors will be invited to join the watching crowd, from wartime allies to present geopolitical fellow travellers. Nonetheless, they are there not to participate, but to witness, because for the best part of two decades, this has been Vladimir Putin’s show. He only went through minimal reserve training at university, then had his national service obligation waived by joining the Soviet security and intelligence service (KGB: Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti), but nonetheless he has done everything he can to associate himself with his country’s martial glories. The photo opportunity of Putin in a jet’s cockpit, hefting a new gun, or driving a tank has become a cliché (and also the subject of many a cringingly sycophantic calendar). So too, presiding over Dyen Pobedy, Victory Day, is an unmissable chance to connect himself not just with triumph, but also a specifically Russian one.

The Russian Great Patriotic War ran 1941–45, beginning with the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, not the invasion of Poland in 1939 (after all, Stalin also bit himself off a piece of this traditional enemy at the same time), nor even the occupation of France. It is also celebrated on 9 May, not 8 May as elsewhere. This is not, as some conclude, a bloody-minded statement of independence, simply a product of differing time zones: by the time the final peace treaty had been concluded, it was next morning in Moscow.

But there is also something more specific about Victory Day, and that is the degree to which it is still genuinely a national event. The skies are almost always blue (not least thanks to the Russian air force seeding potential rain clouds with dry ice to make them precipitate before the day), and loudspeakers around the city are blaring patriotic tunes. Couples walk the streets wearing matching pilotkas, the distinctive khaki sidecap of the Red Army, and children hand flowers to veterans, whose chests rattle and glitter with their old medals. Of course, the Kremlin does everything it can to stir up and encourage this expression of nostalgic patriotism, from the huge murals extolling past generals, to its take-over and then relaunch of the ‘Immortal Regiment’ movement in which people march holding the black-and-white picture of a fallen family member. This is not just some empty, state-mandated ritual, though. People tie the black-and-orange St George’s ribbon, symbol of Russian military success, to their car rear mirrors not because Putin tells them to, but because they want to.

Much the same is true of the militaristic and patriotic t-shirts you can pick up in kiosks around the city or, if you want to go up-market, the over-priced Army Stores like the one sited – in what I cannot help but suspect is an act of retail trolling – right in front of the American embassy on Novinsky Boulevard. (My favourite has a picture of Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on the front, and Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu on the back, with the caption ‘If you don’t want to talk to Lavrov … You’ll have to deal with Shoigu.’) It is precisely the way in which cynical state propaganda and genuine popular enthusiasm converge on the nation’s military and its wars that is striking, distinctive and, at times, disturbing.

Army Games

Like many, I never really lost the inner nine-year-old who rejoices at the sight of armed soldiers marching in lockstep, or the rumbling, squealing, slab-sided lumps of metal that are modern war machines. To a large extent, it is probably because we have never had to face them in war. One of the best ways to get a sneak preview of the latter is to bag a place along Tverskaya, one of Moscow’s great radial boulevards, during a repetitsiya, one of the rehearsals in the week before the actual parade. The brand-new T-14 Armata tank, with its unmanned gun turret; BMPT Terminator tank support fighting vehicles, bristling with missile pods and autocannon; blocky Ural Typhoon troop carriers in pale grey National Guard livery; there’s more than enough hardware on display. Yet equally on display is the equal-opportunities nature of the crowd. Young women dressed up for a night on the town snap selfies in front of self-propelled guns before heading off to the bar. Pensioners lean on the metal barricades set up along the road by the police and benignly watch BMP-2 infantry fighting vehicles line up in order. Pre-teen girls in pink jackets jostle as eagerly as their male counterparts to watch the hardware. Fun for all the family?

I had a similar reminder of the way war and warriors were still closer to the hearts of the Russian people when, courtesy of no less than HBO Sports, I attended the finals of the Tank Biathlon at the 2018 International Army Games. Billed as the ‘military Olympics’, Russia set up these games in 2015 and they have grown to include over 30 countries participating in more than 30 air, land and sea competitions, from drone-flying to dog-handling. As I wrote at the time, ‘Russia’s successful blending of sport, warfare, soft power, and spectacle is a high-octane form of public entertainment.’¹ The biathlon finals, for example, saw teams from Russia, China, Belarus and Kazakhstan racing T-72B3 tanks (except for the Chinese, who had brought their equivalent, the Type 96) around a course, fording water obstacles and blowing up targets with their 125mm guns. An excitable commentator provided the voice-over and the crowd could watch close-up pictures of the more distant action on great screens facing the bleachers. Like any sponsored race car, the Russian tank was even emblazoned with the logo of Uralvagonzavod, its manufacturer.

From the state’s point of view, this is an exercise in military soft power, bringing together once and potential future allies, from India to Israel. It’s also something of a showroom in advance of the serious arms dealing. It is a huge exercise in military public relations, though. Away from the deafening roar of the tank engines, the Alabino testing ground is converted for the duration of the event into something of a military theme park. It is not just that there are tanks to be clambered over, and displays to be watched. Kids queue up for a chance to shoot an AK-74 assault rifle, while their proud parents take pictures to send to granddad. There are souvenirs for sale in the Voentorg PX service booths, and then the family can head to the big olive drab mess tents – surely one of the rare times people pay good money for the privilege of tucking into Russian army kasha (buckwheat porridge) and stew.

Russia and War

All nations have to some extent been shaped by wars, after all – not just fighting them, but building the tax system to pay for them – but this is especially true for Russia, a country with no natural borders, located at the crossroads of Europe and Asia. The very origins of what would eventually become Russia lie in invasion, with the advent of Viking – ‘Varangian’ – conquerors in the ninth century, and since then, its people have been the targets of whomever is the rising military power of the age, whether the Mongols in the 13th century, the Teutonic Knights, Poles or Swedes in the 13th, 17th or 18th centuries respectively, Napoleon in the 19th or Hitler in the 20th. The Russians have not simply been on the defence, though. The very boundaries of their nation in its various incarnations – Muscovy, Tsarist Russia, the Soviet Union and now the Russian Federation – have to a large degree been drawn by wars, products of the balance between Russia’s capacity and desire to expand, and the will and strength of neighbours to resist.

Wars have also shaped Russia’s myths, its stories about itself. When Prince Dmitry of Moscow defeated the Tatar-Mongol Golden Horde at Kulikovo in 1380, it was an impressive feat of generalship, but by no means such a turning point as would later be claimed. After all, two years later, a Golden Horde army would take and sack Moscow and force Dmitry to swear renewed fealty to the Khans, and it would be another century before the Russians were free of the so-called ‘Mongol Yoke’. Yet Dmitry was able to spin it as a triumph and it was subsequently mythologized as proof of a fundamental message that Vladimir Putin would later embrace: that when the Russians were divided, they were prey, but when they were united, they were unbeatable.²

The success of the ‘People’s Militias’ driving Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth forces out of Russia in 1612 was hijacked by the new Romanov dynasty to burnish their patriotic credentials (even though they had done their fair share of collaboration with the invaders). Defeat of the French in 1812 – in what the Russians call not the Napoleonic but the ‘Patriotic War’ – was not only a case study in the value of defensive depth, but became an excuse to avoid reform at home for the next 50 years.³ Defeat in the Crimea forced the beginnings of reform on the regime,⁴ but then another in the 1904–05 Russo-Japanese War rocked tsarism,⁵ being seen as a symbol of a wider malaise of backwardness and incompetence in the empire. The disaster that the First World War brought to Russia finally brought down a dynasty that had endured for three centuries. Conversely, the epic story of endurance and then victory during the Great Patriotic War consolidated the Soviet Union’s status as a superpower, and conveyed on the brutal Stalinist police state a legitimacy at home that had hitherto escaped it.

There was nowhere to go but down, and in hindsight, that’s exactly the trajectory the Soviet Union took. To be sure, it was able to crush peaceful expressions of protest in its new imperial possessions: East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968. However fearsome it seemed in the nose-to-nose confrontation in Cold War Europe, though, until 1979, the closest the Red Army came to fighting a war was a seven-month undeclared border conflict with China in 1969, much of which was actually fought by Border Troops. In 1979, however, the Soviet Union, already in what proved terminal decline, followed in the footsteps of Alexander the Great and the British Empire and headed into Afghanistan (admittedly, as the United States would later demonstrate, this seems an imperial temptation as irresistible as it is injudicious). A textbook commando operation to seize the capital, Kabul, and depose the erratic Afghan dictator Hafizullah Amin,⁶ was the start of what would prove a painful and difficult war. The Soviets never lost on the battlefield, but they could not win against the rebels, either.⁷ Ten years later a new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, admitted defeat and brought the boys home.

Defeat in Afghanistan – a relatively limited war, for all its brutality, whose toll of some 15,000 Soviet lives lost in a decade was dwarfed even by deaths on the country’s roads* – was not in itself a cause of the Soviet collapse, but instead it was almost a metaphor for the reasons behind its fall. A nation with an economy that was falling increasingly behind the West’s; ruled by old men out of touch with what was going on in their own country, let alone outside its own borders; being hollowed out by corruption, cynicism, alcoholism and apathy. I remember once talking to a Ukrainian afganets – one of the veterans of the war – who had only been back less than a year. He recounted tales of officers who launched raids on Afghan villages purely as excuses to loot, of soldiers selling guns for hashish, of political officers who by day would lecture them that they were there to help the legitimate government against US-backed mercenaries, and by night pass round a bottle and curse out the Kremlin leadership as bitterly as any of the men. Then, when that afganets came home, he returned to food queues, empty promises of a new flat, and triumphalist news that Soviet victories were being fêted by a happy Afghan people on TV. No wonder he went from disillusion to nationalism, getting involved in the anti-Soviet activism that would soon help midwife an independent Ukraine.

Then, at the very end of 1991, after miners’ strikes and inter-ethnic unrest, an abortive hard-line coup and declarations of independence from many of the constituent states of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, President Gorbachev signed his last decree, dissolving the Union. Russia was its own master, but in a crumbling house and a rough neighbourhood. The 1990s, as will be discussed in Part One, were to a great extent a time of chaos and crisis. Post-Soviet Eurasia faced border disputes, communal violence and economic freefall. The Russian military, gripped by indiscipline, criminality and demoralization, could not even quell a rebellion in the North Caucasus region of Chechnya, whose population accounted for only around one-hundredth of the Russian Federation’s.⁸ Internationally, the former great power was regarded as a great problem, an irrelevance except when it came to its under-secured nuclear arsenal or the erratic foreign policy of its first president, Boris Yeltsin.

Putin

When Yeltsin was replaced by Putin, it is perhaps unsurprising that he was so determined to do something about all this, and as Part Two shows, he quickly moved to begin to rebuild the military, throwing it into a second Chechen war that saw the rebels finally subdued with a mix of extravagant firepower and the deployment of loyal Chechens. Hopes of a pragmatically positive relationship with the West – he even floated the idea of Russia joining NATO – soon soured, though (see Part Three). Increasingly, Putin would see Russia’s military strength as not just a guarantee of its security but also what would make the country a credible international power again. He stepped up his campaign to revive Russia’s military capabilities, thanks to bountiful oil and gas revenues (see Part Four).

Nonetheless, the Kremlin was well aware that even rearmed, Russia’s military strength was not NATO’s match, and that in any case open conflict would be disastrous and self-destructive. Hence, as Part Five discusses, the rise of new forms of warfare, often covert and indirect, fought by cyber-attack, disinformation, assassination and mercenaries. These have been deployed to greater or lesser extents in the range of conflicts in which Russia has engaged since, from the five-day war in Georgia in 2008, through the annexation of Crimea in 2014, to interventions in Syria and beyond, culminating in the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Nonetheless, Russia under Putin – and his successor, whoever and whenever that will be – still faces serious challenges. As Chapter 28 considers, these range from the near-inevitability of renewed conflict in the North Caucasus to growing rivalries within the countries it considers to be its ‘Near Abroad’, its sphere of influence. Above all, will a rising China, so far publicly hailed as a great ally, become a threat? Or maybe the real question is when it will do so. Either way, Putin – a man clearly thinking of his place in history – has, like many a prince or tsar before him, turned to military might and warfighting as a crucial instrument not just in re-asserting his country’s place in the world, but also in rebuilding a national myth of pride, glory and success. He is actively recreating a narrative of Russia’s evolution through the centuries that emphasizes the lessons that suit his interests: that the world is a dangerous place, that Russians need to stay united and disciplined, that to look weak is to invite attack, and that, as Tsar Alexander III memorably asserted, ‘Russia has just two allies: its army and its navy.’

And yet opinion polls show that Russians themselves seem unconvinced. They may have celebrated the return of Crimea to Russian control but they were sceptical about the undeclared war in the Ukrainian Donbas that ensued and led to the 2022 invasion,⁹ just as they are lukewarm about the deployment to Syria, however much the state media hypes it as a successful modern ‘techno-war’. Most simply do not see Russia as being under a military threat, even while the Kremlin’s propaganda machine pumps out all kinds of toxic claims of Western plots and looming dangers. For all that, the armed forces are a symbol of national pride and power, and while not all Putin’s wars can be considered victories, there seems no likelihood of any pacifist turn under Putin – or, quite possibly, under his eventual successor, whoever that may be.

This was made starkly clear in February 2022 when Putin unleashed a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. By that stage, this book’s manuscript had been completed, but it was impossible to ignore this extraordinary escalation in his belligerence and audacity. The main body of the text has been lightly edited in light of this and a new chapter added to reflect the situation as in June 2022.

Note

* Some 40,000 Soviets died directly or indirectly from road accidents every year in the 1980s.

PART ONE

Before Putin

2

Born in Chaos

I was sitting in the lieutenant’s pokey little kitchen in an overcrowded flat half-way up a tower block in Moscow’s impoverished southern Chertanovo neighbourhood. It was 1990, and he had just made it back home from a year spent in Tajikistan after his unit was withdrawn from Afghanistan at the end of that nasty war. He was not in a good shape; apparently he still had nightmares replaying the time he almost didn’t get out of a burning BTR personnel carrier when it hit a mine, he obsessively fiddled with a red star cap badge, and he drank vodka like, well, a cliché Russian. He was angry and haunted, but certainly no fool, and he was sure tough times were coming. ‘It’s all going to fall apart, you know, and when it does, everyone is going to prey on us. They always do. When we’re weak, they come, they always do.’ He took another swig from the bottle. ‘And before you know it, we’ll need another vozhd’, a ‘boss’.

He wasn’t alone in such assumptions, and considering Russia’s deep-seated historical fears about its security, it is easy to understand why the events of the late 1980s and early 1990s created such concerns in Moscow, and contributed to a consensus within the elite that their country needed a strongman to replace Boris Yeltsin and reassert regional hegemony over a Eurasia riven with border disputes, inter-ethnic rivalries, historical grudges and potential foreign interference.¹

The Soviet Disunion

After all, the collapse of the USSR was in some ways extraordinary in its bloodlessness and orderliness, compared with the break-up of so many other multi-ethnic states, such as the Austro-Hungarian Empire before it or Yugoslavia in the 1990s. The three Baltic States – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – had only been annexed in 1940, and were likewise the first to declare themselves independent, in 1990, although this was only really achieved the next year. While there were growing nationalist movements opposed to the Soviet Communist Party in the other 12 constituent republics that made up the USSR, it is questionable whether they really expected or, in some cases, wanted a rapid dissolution of the Union. Rather, the 1980s had seen the country grind to a halt: the economy was in chaos, the shops were empty, and attempts by Mikhail Gorbachev to try to reform the system actually seemed to be making things worse. The campaign of glasnost, of ‘openness’ or ‘speaking out’, had unearthed all kinds of dark episodes from the recent past, from Stalin’s murderous purges to the incompetence behind the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, when an accident at a power plant in Ukraine blew a plume of radiation across Russia and Europe.

As Gorbachev increasingly saw the Communist Party and its iron grip on the political system as the key problem blocking reform, he began a limited democratization of the system. This encouraged and empowered a whole new generation of political leaders to emerge, who supported neither Gorbachev nor the Party, but instead advocated more freedoms – and ultimately independence – for their own republic. In some cases, this took an ugly turn. Turkic Azerbaijan and Christian Armenia had a long history of mutual rivalry and intolerance, and there had already been local cases in which Armenians living in cities in Azerbaijan were attacked, driven out, or even lynched. In January 1990, though, in what was the harbinger of later violence, Azerbaijan’s capital Baku experienced a seven-day orgy of violence that left around 50 ethnic Armenians dead and thousands driven out, before Moscow declared martial law and sent in troops bloodily to impose order, at the cost of some 150 more lives.

Desperately, Gorbachev looked for some way to contain the looming chaos. In the winter of 1990–91, he even began to lean towards the hard-liners who felt that there needed to be a reassertion of political order – by force if need be – to allow economic reform. In January 1991, they used this to try to break a stand-off between Moscow and the nationalist leaderships of the Baltic States with violent clashes in both Lithuania (where 14 civilians died when KGB special forces and paratroopers of the 76th Guards Air Assault Division seized the main TV tower) and Latvia, where hundreds of thousands of people gathered in the capital Riga, vowing to defend it.

In fact, Gorbachev was already regretting his flirtation with reaction, realizing that it would just push more republics into secession. In March 1991, the government held a referendum on whether people ‘consider necessary the preservation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics’. A resounding 77.85% voted yes, but in part because the more radical republics – Armenia, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania and Moldova – boycotted it. A majority of Soviet citizens still wanted some kind of Union to be preserved, but arguably it was already too late. Gorbachev took this as an opportunity to open negotiations with the leaders of the constituent republics, and by summer had hammered out an agreement that would have transformed the USSR from being in effect an empire, into a genuine federation. Republics would be free to leave this new ‘Union of Soviet Sovereign Republics’ if they wanted, most powers would devolve to the republics, and the central government would just be responsible for key roles such as foreign affairs, defence and communications. The age of the Communist Party’s dominance would have been over, the massive Red Army would be slimmed down, and the much-feared KGB, that united political control, domestic security and foreign intelligence, would be broken into more manageable services. Defence Minister Marshal Dmitry Yazov, Interior Minister Boriss Pugo and KGB chair Vladimir Kryuchkov, hard-liners all, would have to be retired.

Unfortunately for Gorbachev, since he had backed away from his alliance with them, Kryuchkov had had him under constant observation. His every move was watched, every conversation recorded. Indeed, this was taken to ludicrous extremes, with one surveillance logbook entry reading ‘18:30. 111 is in the bath.’² Gorbachev was ‘Subject 110’, his wife Raisa 111. No wonder, then, that Kryuchkov and the rest knew what was in store for them, and decided to act first.

The August Coup

By the beginning of August, the final draft of the new Union Treaty had been hammered out through lengthy negotiations in Novo-Ogaryovo, a government estate outside Moscow. It was to be signed by Gorbachev and the heads of the republics choosing to remain in this reformed state on 20 August. The process had been gruelling, and on 4 August, an exhausted Gorbachev headed for his summer home at Foros in Crimea for a fortnight’s rest before returning to Moscow for the official signing. It was not to happen.

The hard-liners realized that this was their last chance to avert what for them was little short of treason. Kryuchkov quietly began to prepare for a coup. Trusted KGB officers had their summer leaves cancelled, an order was placed for 250,000 extra pairs of handcuffs, and he even had papers drawn up to relieve Gorbachev of his duties on supposed mental health grounds. On 17 August, he convened a gathering of likeminded hawks in a KGB safe house on Tyoplostansky Passage, in Moscow’s south-western suburbs. There, a final decision was made to act. A delegation flew down to Crimea to present Gorbachev with an ultimatum to shelve the new Union Treaty and declare a state of emergency and let them ‘restore order’ their own way, or else stand down and let his deputy, Gennady Yanayev, take over as Acting President.

They seem genuinely to have believed that Gorbachev would bow to the inevitable and bless their venture. When he damned them and threw them out, they were visibly shaken, but the die had been cast. The KGB controlled all communications to and from the Foros mansion, and promptly cut him off. His personal security team was also made up of KGB officers, but they remained loyal to Gorbachev. Other KGB armed officers blockaded the mansion, though.

On the morning of 19 August, Soviets awoke to the news that Gorbachev had ‘temporarily stepped down for reasons of ill health’, and a ‘State Committee on the State of Emergency’ was in charge. As regular TV and radio programming was replaced by broadcasts of the ballet Swan Lake, paratroopers from the 106th Guards Airborne Division and troops from the 2nd Guards Tamanskaya Motor Rifle and 4th Guards Kantemirovskaya Tank Divisions – elite ‘palace guard’ forces – rolled into Moscow, some 4,000 soldiers in all. It was a coup, but a singularly inept one. The eight men of the State Committee – including Kryuchkov, Yazov and Pugo, along with Yanayev as their lightweight figurehead – seemed not to realize how Gorbachev’s reforms had kindled a new spirit of resistance, and truly believed that a stern press conference and the sight of tanks on the streets would be enough to cow the population and wind the clock back to the early 1980s.

They were wrong. Out of over-confidence or under-planning, they failed to arrest Boris Yeltsin, the elected president of the Russian republic. From the White House, Russia’s parliament building on the banks of the Moskva River, he announced his opposition to the coup, and called for a general strike. Crowds began to gather around the White House, but on that first day, everyone was waiting to see what would happen. Had the so-called ‘Gang of Eight’ been willing and able to strike quickly and ruthlessly, then they might have carried the day. The police, for example, experienced record levels of absenteeism, as officers called in sick to avoid having to commit one way or the other.

It soon became clear that the plotters lacked a real strategy, though. On TV, Yanayev was hesitant, trembling, drunk. Soldiers in Moscow began openly siding with the crowds, including the crews of ten tanks from the Kantemir division, albeit without ammunition. Boris Yeltsin, in a moment that defined his image for years to come, clambered onto an armoured vehicle in front of the White House to address his supporters. While Soviet TV and radio did not cover it, the international media did, and across the USSR, people gathered around radios to listen in.

The next day, tensions rose. Col. Gen. Nikolai Kalinin, commander of the Moscow Military District, announced a curfew that night, while the head of the KGB’s Alfa Group anti-terrorist commandos, along with Gen. Alexander Lebed, a hard-nosed veteran of Afghanistan and the deputy commander of the Airborne Troops, mingled with the defenders to consider how best to take the parliament building. Their conclusion was that it would be a bloody affair, as the crowds were getting bigger and more determined.

Nonetheless, the ‘Gang of Eight’ decided to go ahead with what was called Operation Grom (‘Thunder’), involving Alfa and the parallel Vympel commando group, as well as three companies of tanks, paratroopers, Special Designation Police Unit (OMON: Otryad Militsii Osobennovo Naznacheniya) riot police and the paramilitary security forces of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD: Ministerstvo Vnutrennykh Del) Interior Troops. The expectation was that there would be at least 500 civilian deaths, maybe more. Although figures such as Kryuchkov were comfortable with that, many more were not. Lebed and the head of the Air Assault Forces (VDV: Vozdushno-Desantniye Voiska), Gen. Pavel Grachyov, remonstrated with Yazov; even members of Alfa and Vympel were making it clear they would refuse to attack the White House.

Just after midnight on the 21st, a platoon from the Taman Division clashed with defenders who were moving busses and street cleaning trucks to form a barricade: three civilians were killed when panicked troops opened fire. This seems to have shocked Yazov into refusing to sanction military action, although it may simply have been that he did not want to risk giving orders that might not be obeyed. Either way, the troops began to be pulled back, and the coup began to fall apart.

A delegation of plotters flew to Foros, apparently to try to rebuild bridges with Gorbachev: he refused to see them. He flew back to Moscow, but the triumph was not his, but Yeltsin’s. The Russian president had a deep grudge against his Soviet counterpart, who had first promoted him to Party First Secretary for Moscow in 1985 then ditched him in 1987 when he made too many enemies. Yeltsin had agreed to the new Union Treaty primarily for fear of what the hard-liners would do. But they had made their move and failed, so Yeltsin had no reason to continue to back Gorbachev.

Symbolically, the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Bolshevik secret police, was toppled from its place in front of the KGB headquarters. The old institutions of state power and control were now in ruins. Yeltsin ruthlessly expanded his powers and publicly humiliated Gorbachev, suspending the Russian Communist Party and making it clear he no longer was willing to sign the Union Treaty. After some months of fruitless wrangling, Gorbachev bowed to the inevitable, especially after the leaders of Belarus and Ukraine joined Yeltsin. On 25 December 1991, as his last act as Soviet president, he signed a decree resigning his position – and dissolving the Soviet Union.

The manner of the passing of the USSR would have significant impacts on the future security situation in Russia and the rest of post-Soviet Eurasia. It precipitated a peaceful, but unexpected partition, which left all kinds of challenges still to be resolved. A once-unitary military structure was fragmented, leaving troops, arsenals and, above all, nuclear weapons scattered across the region. Defence-industrial supply chains were broken. Communities of ethnic minorities were left outside ‘their’ nations, creating the basis for future conflicts. It also catapulted Boris Yeltsin, a man who until then had been defined essentially by domestic politics and opposition, into power over a nuclear-armed and crisis-gripped remnantof a superpower at a time in which old assumptions and power relationships alike were being re-examined.

Boris Yeltsin: The Man without the Plan

The tragic irony is that Boris Yeltsin, post-Soviet Russia’s first president, was ruthless and focused when he had an enemy to defeat, but had almost no real vision for the kind of country he wanted to build after he had won. Politically, he believed in democracy – but only when it suited him. In 1993, he was locked in a stalemate with the Supreme Soviet, the parliament he inherited from when it was elected in 1990, and which was packed with Communists and nationalists. He resolved it by sending in the same forces that had hung back in 1991, to shell and capture the White House. This was a breach of the constitution, but he simply held a referendum that retrospectively revised it to clear him. Likewise, when the Russian Communist Party looked likely to win the 1996 presidential elections, on the back of widespread public dissatisfaction at massive levels of poverty and unemployment, Yeltsin struck a deal with the so-called ‘Seven Bankers’, a collection of oligarchs, financiers and media moguls. They threw their money and their weight behind a campaign of bribery, scaremongering and outright vote rigging that swung his re-election.

They were, after all, personally invested in maintaining the status quo. The Russian economy was in a terrible state, and the crash privatization campaigns which took place in the period 1992–96 may have been necessary both to move assets out of state hands and to allow some inefficient industries to fold, but they concentrated massive amounts of wealth into relatively few hands. Banks, corrupt officials, and well-connected entrepreneurs were able to pick up assets at bargain basement prices.

To a large extent, the West was happy to turn a blind eye to all this. They too did not want to see Russia falling into the hands of Communists or ultra-nationalists. After all, in the 1993 elections to the new parliament, the State Duma, the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) – which was and is neither liberal nor democratic, but rabidly nationalist – received the largest share of the vote. It was also because the greatest Western concern related to how the post-Soviet space could be stabilized, especially in regard to the approximately 45,000 nuclear weapons the USSR had amassed, as well as the materials and expertise which could be used by states or even non-state actors to develop their own weapons of mass destruction.

What made this even more problematic was the state of not just the Russian military, but its command structure. Many within the Soviet High Command had been in broad sympathy with the August Coup. Defence Minister Yazov had been one of the State Committee. The acerbic and able Deputy Defence Minister and Commander of the Army Gen. Valentin Varennikov had been one of his main allies. Former Chief of the General Staff Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, another of the giants of his generation, committed suicide after the failure of the August Coup, leaving a suicide note reading ‘I cannot live when my Fatherland is dying and everything that I have always considered to be the meaning of my life is destroyed.’³ Not feeling – with, in fairness, some reason – that he could trust the High Command, at first Yeltsin declared himself Russia’s defence minister, more than anything else because he did not know to whom he felt he could entrust the job. In May 1992, though, he opted for Pavel Grachyov, the paratrooper commander who had crucially refused to support the August Coup, who had been acting as Yeltsin’s deputy.

As will be discussed in Chapter 4, this was a decision which made sense in political terms, but was a disaster for the military. Grachyov was a brave and energetic officer, who had served two tours in Afghanistan and been made a Hero of the Soviet Union – the USSR’s highest award – for his performance there. On being made minister, he was also elevated to the rank of full army general – making him, at age 44, the youngest in the country. It soon became painfully clear that he was out of his depth, especially in a time of crisis and retrenchment. He lacked authority with his peers; he lacked a wider sense of the strategic needs of the time. I remember being out drinking with some paratroopers at the time of his elevation, some of whom had served in the 103rd Guards Airborne Division in Afghanistan when he had commanded it. I asked them what they thought of his becoming a minister. There was a brief embarrassed silence, then one almost apologetically said he was molodets, which in context means a ‘good lad’. It’s how you might describe a promising recruit, not the minister of defence. When even his own ‘blue berets’ had their misgivings, this was not a good omen.

Indeed, this was to be evident in the politically inevitable but logistically nightmarish task of withdrawing from empire and bringing Russian forces back from their far-flung bases. This pre-dated the end of the USSR, but became all the more complex as new nations began not only to look to their own security interests, but to turn to their scavenged portions of the Red Army to resolve old and new disputes, and settle domestic scores. Freed from the enforced and skin-deep fraternalism of Soviet rule, geopolitics were to return to the former Soviet Union with a vengeance and like it or not, Russia – as both the largest successor state and also the one that had in effect broken the USSR – could not but find itself involved.

It is understandable that little thought had been given to the formation of post-Soviet armies when, until those crowded final months, few had seriously anticipated the collapse of the USSR. Ironically, the only people who had given this some consideration were the Soviet General Staff which, since 1990, had been quietly moving tactical nuclear weapons and some of the infrastructure of the strategic forces out of the rest of the republics and back to Russia. Beyond that, though, there was little planning and no consensus, even though according to the 1991 Belavezha Accords between the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, a loose new union, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), was formed, which initially included Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Uzbekistan. It had its own supreme military commander – Marshal of Aviation Yevgeny Shaposhnikov, one of the senior Soviet commanders who had hung back from supporting the August Coup – and provisional control over joint forces. In practice, though, in the immediate aftermath of the end of the Soviet Union, control of its forces and assets de facto