2 January 2025
by Lev Shlosberg
Source: Facebook
The “New Year’s assault” on Grozny was 30 years ago. The Minute by Minute project is recreating this horrific assault day by day, and in the chronicle of total madness we can catch glimpses of the current terrifying days.
18+ THIS MATERIAL (INFORMATION) HAS BEEN PRODUCED AND DISTRIBUTED BY THE FOREIGN AGENT LEV MARKOVICH SHLOSBERG OR CONCERNS THE ACTIVITIES OF THE FOREIGN AGENT LEV MARKOVICH SHLOSBERG
On December 6, the final pre-war negotiations took place in Ingushetia. Minister of Defense Pavel Grachev flew in to meet with Dzhokhar Dudaev. The discussion took place behind closed doors, but once it was concluded, photographer Vladimir Svartsevich was called into the office to take a picture.
Svartsevich witnessed an exchange between Russia’s Minister of Defense and the President of Chechnya:
– So, Dzhokhar, is it settled?
– No, Pasha, it is not settled.
– So, Dzhokhar, will we go to war?
– Yes, Pasha, we will go to war.
The shelling of Grozny began at 5 AM on December 22, 1994, but it wasn’t until December 24 that leaflets were dropped from airplanes attempting to explain the army’s actions to residents. Many people could not or did not have time to flee the city and take refuge in the countryside.
According to human rights organizations (Memorial in particular) several thousand civilians were killed or wounded during the initial artillery shelling and bombings.
On December 26, 1994, Pavel Grachev told journalists: “We will not storm Grozny. In mid-January we will begin to push [the militants] out of the city.” That very day, at a meeting of the Russian Security Council, the decision was made to storm Grozny.
A little over a year after the storming of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, the armed forces of the Russian Federation were deployed in the highest-stakes political conflict within post-Soviet Russia. The army became a direct and essentially decisive participant in political affairs. With extraordinary speed, against the backdrop of dramatic economic reforms that did not improve most people’s circumstances, the country made its way from the courage and euphoria of 1991, after successfully resisting military force, to the shock and horrors of 1994, with the transformation of the army into the militant vanguard of the new government.
The story of the storming of Grozny is replete with horrid details of war, each as shocking as the next; and the picture taken as a whole is a catastrophe in the truest sense of the word.
Here are the numbers given by the General Staff of the Russian armed forces, for the period between December 31, 1994, and April 1, 1995: 1,426 troops killed in Chechnya, 4,630 people wounded, 96 taken prisoner, and about 500 missing.
According to Russian data, here are the numbers for Dudaev’s armed forces between December 11, 1994, and April 8, 1995: 6,690 people killed, 471 people captured (General G. Trosheva stated this figure was over 600 people); number of wounded unknown.
A significant number of civilians also lost their lives during the battles for the city, but the exact death toll remains unknown, as the Russian authorities never conducted an investigation into the casualties. An observation mission by human rights organizations conducted a study to assess the extent of civilian casualties in Grozny between December 1994 and March 1995. Sergei Kovalev, the human rights ombudsman who visited Grozny during the assault, believed that 27,000 residents died during the five weeks of fighting. This estimate was automatically accepted by the authorities and still remains the only count.
One resident of the city later testified, “There’s no water in the city – there’s no electricity, and the water pumps aren’t working. And then, say, the Grad launchers begin shelling. And the strikes come from multiple launchers at once, sometimes hitting the city for 10-15 minutes at a time. Then the shelling ends, and you go outside and see bodies here, bodies there. Elderly people lying there. There’s a sled nearby, with a water jug. The elderly can’t run quickly, they don’t even attempt to. But they have to go out to get water.”
Between February and March of 1995, the bodies of the deceased residents of Grozny that were collected from the streets and the rubble were taken by special burial teams to the Central Cemetery, where they were buried in designated pits.
The new Russia born in the first years of the 1990s was never to emerge from the New Year’s storming of Grozny. Out of the First Chechen War grew the Second, which became the bloody birthplace of a new regime. The horrific new year of 1995 marked a new era for Russia.
Translated by Nina dePalma
