Nicolai Lilin - Free Fall

Once we were outside the town we looked at what we had left behind: collapsed houses, smoke rising into the air… total destruction, as if every inch of the town no longer existed.

Nosov observed everything, a strange look on his face, neither satisfied nor dissatisfied; if anything, he seemed lost in a strong nostalgia, like when you see something for the last time.

Our captain stood firm, still, holding on to the turret of the tank. At some point he said, under his breath, to himself:

‘Anyone who doesn’t want to be under us will end up underground…’

At the end of my second year of military service the saboteur unit transferred to the mountains. Along with some of the Ministry of Internal Affairs’ special units (called the OMON), we went through the villages to conduct what in our operation order was called ‘clean-up of residential areas’. Obviously this had nothing to do with maintaining sanitation in the mountain territories; it was a very specific and sensitive phase of the counter-terrorist operation intended to ‘re-establish respect for the laws of the Russian Federation’.

We went through the areas controlled by federal forces in order to ‘ensure the presence of the necessary conditions to enable the recuperation of the Chechen community’. It was May, and it was very hot.

By that time, the Chechen plain had been almost completely liberated of enemy forces, but many terrorist groups had survived in the mountains. They had regrouped into small units and continued to attack our military convoys and put any representative of the law to death. They terrorised civilians, too, but more often found them to be sources of support in the fight against the Russian Army and state power. Many families had lost someone during the war and blamed the army for their losses, which is why they gave provisions to terrorists, harboured them secretly or hid arms and ammunition. To us, the Chechen mentality was incomprehensible – it seemed absurd for them to help foreigners from Africa or the former Yugoslavia but to want nothing to do with us, their neighbours, with whom, for better or worse, they had a shared history. They saw the terrorists as heroes, as people who had sacrificed themselves for the good of the Nation – Muslim Robin Hoods.

Obviously we soldiers knew that both Chechen campaigns had been tainted by political and economic interests. As Captain Nosov had often told us, practically branding it into our minds: ‘Always remember that the feared Shamil Basayev, like many other Chechen Islamic terrorist leaders, was trained by our own secret services – we Russians were the ones who taught him to defend himself.’ We had learned from experience how the terrorists were linked to the corrupt officials working in our Command, but no one ever dared to bring up those stories; no one ever released the findings from the investigations conducted by the FSB. If we found out that there was a mole it was because of his comrades, who had reported him or in some cases simply eliminated him, since accidents happen in war every day anyway. These affairs, even if they didn’t reach the ears of the media, circulated widely among soldiers and officers. They were shared in whispers, during pauses between one battle and the next. Often the whispers were about an officer from Command dying in an accident: ‘He fell from a moving tank,’ they would say, which meant that he had been beaten to death by his own men. These stories were always concluded with a statement full of scorn and malice, spat out with cigarette smoke: ‘He liked shawarma [19] A common dish from the Caucasus, similar to kebab – this was a way of referring to traitors. too much…’