War Against The People

A description of the massacre of Chechen civilians by Russian troops at the village of Samashki in April 1995:

Then the Russian troops started an operation that has become notorious throughout Chechnya, the zachistka, a 'mop-up operation', or more literally a `cleansing'. Officially it is a house-to-house search for rebel fighters and arms caches, but it has become synonymous with looting, violence and mass detentions of the male population. Tense and swearing, the Russian troops screamed at three men who emerged from one house to lie down. They used Salavdi Umakhanov as a hostage to check the rest of the buildings, then forced the three into the garage, pushing them down into the car repair pit before opening fire. Only Umakhanov survived.

The killing and burning continued the following morning. The constant explosions kept most people hiding indoors or in their cellars, but two old Chechen men, Supyan Minayev and Zahir Kabilov, both Second World War veterans, sat on a bench outside Minayev's home. `They won't do anything to a veteran,' his wife, Malezha, remembers him saying, as he sent her and their daughters away before the storm. He was wrong. Russian soldiers shot the veterans point-blank and dragged their bodies into the house and set it alight. Malezha, still sifting through her fire-gutted house three weeks later with her daughters, held out a tiny pair of scissors fitted with a nail file, charred and rusted from the fire. He bought them in Germany in 1944,' where he fought in the Soviet army. `He was so delighted with them,' she said. They were all she had left. She had buried an unrecognizable blackened eleton that was her husband in the garden behind the charred ruins of her home.

Anatoly Shabad, barred by Russian troops from entering the village, borrowed a dress, slippers and headscarf and climbed aboard the bus with some women being allowed through just days after the massacre. `The women knew immediately, they noticed things. There was some detail. I had a woman's coat on and I could never remember which way it was supposed to do up,' he recalled with a laugh up,' he recalled with a laugh. Inside the village he started investigating. What he found convinced him that there had been little or no battle at all.

`As regards the character of destruction, it was evident that it was not from war. For example, you see a house burnt, and the fence shows not a sign of battle, not a bullet-hole or shrapnel mark. The fence is completely intact. So we understood that there was no resistance, they were simply burning. All the destruction was not from artillery nor bombs, it was just houses set alight.'

The operation in Samashki was not a first for Russian troops. The Soviet army had acted with impunity for ten years in Afghanistan, repeatedly marching off the entire male population of villages and probably executing them. In one notorious incident they gassed dozens of villagers hiding in an underground irrigation channel. Shabad says he saw similar operations in NagornoKarabakh, the Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan in what was still then the Soviet Union in May 1991. `It was done to terrify,' Shabad said. `It was successful because the neighbouring village, Achkoi-Martan, capitulated,' he added.

No Russian officer was tried or punished for Samashki, although a number of those in the Sofrinskaya Brigade were removed to other jobs in semi-disgrace, S. said. `Some of them had already turned,' he said, twisting his hand against his head to mean crazy. In July 1995 the Military Prosecutor's office declared there was insufficient basis to conclude that the mass killing of civilians in Samashki was illegal. A Parliamentary Commission, chaired by Stanislav Govorukhin, a film director better known for his nostalgic nationalist film The Russia We Have Lost, concluded much the same. The commission lost some credibility when four members refused to sign its final report. In an extraordinary scene in the Russian Parliament Govorukhin then publicly denounced his fellow-Duma deputies, Shabad and Kovalyov, for what they had said about Samashki, and called for them to be put on trial for inciting hatred and 'Russophobia'.

Perhaps more than anywhere Samashki showed that the war was against the entire population of Chechnya. Kulikov talks of 'liberating' villages from the fighters but he was really using all means, including terror, to force the villagers to expel the fighters themselves. Samashki is still being torn apart by recriminations between fighters and elders who blame each other for allowing the disaster. As in any guerrilla war, the division between fighters and civilians was vague. Fighters moved among the civilians and often lived at home, inevitably endangering the lives of their own people. Their hit-and-run attacks on Russian posts brought swift retaliation from the Russians on the nearest villages. `They come and talk to us by day, and then they shoot us at night,' complained one Russian soldier manning a checkpoint. The Russian soldiers began to see every citizen of Chechnya as the enemy.


from Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus, by Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal (1998)