Mikail Eldin - The Sky Wept Fire - My Life as a Chechen Freedom Fighter

Pavel Grachev was Russian Defence Minister from May 1992 to June 1996. He was the architect and director of the unsuccessful assault on the Chechen capital Grozny on the night of 31 December 1994.

Sergey Yushenkov served as a deputy in Russia’s State Duma. In the first Duma, he was Defence Committee chairman. In 1995 he quit the army due to his objections to the war in Chechnya. He was shot dead in Moscow on 17 April 2003.

On the northern fringes of Grozny.

Hamzat Gelayev was a prominent Chechen field commander. From 1995 he was Brigadier General in the Chechen Armed Forces. In February 2004 he was killed in action.

Shamil Basayev was a Chechen field commander. From 1995 he was Brigadier General in the Armed Forces of Chechnya. He was appointed Vice President of Chechnya. He died in July 2006.

Gennady Troshev was a Russian general. A native of Grozny, he fought in both the First and Second Chechen Wars. He is the author of Moya voyna. Chechensky dnevnik okopnogo generala (Vagrius, 2001).

In Chechnya: A Small Victorious War (Picador, 1997), Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal give this account of events: ‘The New Year’s Eve battle seemed at first a great Chechen victory. A small band of Chechen fighters had humiliated a superpower, deflecting the assault of Europe’s largest army and turning on its head the Cold War assumptions that made Russia’s armed forces the most feared in the world. By one estimate Russian forces lost more tanks in Grozny than they did in the battle for Berlin in 1945. The Chechens had seized countless weapons and ammunition and gained a breathing space as the Russian command slowly took in the scale of the catastrophe on their hands. Jubilant, the Chechen fighters roared around the city centre on captured tanks, flying the green Chechen flag. Basayev was one who did not brag. “It was a senseless battle, without logic,” he said. “They just threw their men in.” But as if he knew what was to come, he said the Chechens had shown they were deadly serious. “It is not an empty threat that we will fight to the death.”’

See Chechnya: v kogtyakh d’yavola ili na puti k samounichtozheniyu by Akhmed Kelimatov (Ekoprint, 2003).

Sydnocarb is a stimulant drug adopted by the Russian military during the 1980s. Its use is intended to boost soldiers’ levels of energy and aggression for six to eight hours. It comes with side effects in the form of increased excitability and hallucinations. Users will see the enemy everywhere, with all the consequences that entails.

In 1944 Stalin deported the entire Chechen people to Central Asia and Siberia on a false charge of collaboration with the Nazis, despite the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic not coming under German occupation. More than half the nation died in exile from cold and hunger. The exile lasted until 1959.

Oleg Gazmanov is a Russian pop singer.

In January 1995 the streets of Grozny were strewn with the many corpses of Russian soldiers killed during the storming of the city. The abandoned corpses of soldiers and officers were eaten by feral cats and dogs. Only two weeks later did the Russian commanders agree to a temporary truce to remove the corpses from the streets of the city.

‘Nakh’ is the ancient name for the Chechens, the Ingush and the Batsbi, who are a Christian community of Chechen origin living in Georgia.

Dadi-Yurt was a large village, the site of a bloody battle in September 1818 between the Russian occupation forces led by General Alexei Yermolov and the Chechen resistance. The village was totally annihilated; almost all the inhabitants were killed, including the women and children. Legend has it that the girls of the village danced for their male defenders to raise their morale. And then these girls fell too, charging at the Russian soldiers with daggers. Among the few captives were two boys who were taken to Russia. One grew up to be the famous artist Pyotr Zakharov-Chechenets. The second, Bata Shamurzayev, became a Russian officer who crossed over to the Chechen side and fought against the Russians. In 1851, he sided once again with the Russians and fought against his former comrades. The Tsar rewarded him for his loyalty with 600 hectares of land.

Alexei Yermolov, the Russian infantry general, appointed Proconsul of the Caucasus by decree of Alexander I on 6 April 1816. A bloodthirsty tyrant and slaughterer of the Chechen people.

Alkhan-Kala is a small village not far from Grozny.

Around seventy kilometres south-west of Grozny.

Usman Imayev was the Prosecutor General for Chechnya. He was a field commander and engaged in combat against the Russian Army. He went missing in action in the spring of 1996.

Vedeno is a district centre in eastern Chechnya.

It so happens that the very same clever question, ‘Why aren’t you at your place of work?’ was put to me in December 1994 at the height of the war by Abu Arsanukayev, head of Dudayev’s security service, thereby demonstrating his somewhat modest intellect. And all that stopped him from answering my sarcasm with a demonstration of his power, too, was the explicit intervention of the fighters with whom I’d just returned from the front line. Generally speaking, you’d seldom encounter men of intellect in the Soviet military. The generals, though – Dzhokhar Dudayev, Boris Gromov, Aleksandr Lebed, Aslan Maskhadov – were the exception. Nevertheless, it was Lebed who offered the most vivid portrait of Soviet Russia’s top brass: ‘A general who is not a thief is a contradiction in terms,’ he said in an interview.

Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev was Vice President and later President of Chechnya. He was a poet. He was assassinated in 2004 in Qatar.

The residents of Bamut, Stary Achkhoy and Yandi deserted the villages, leaving behind all their belongings for the use of the resistance. The villages were defended until the end of the first war, in April 1996.

Movladi Udugov was Dudayev’s Information Minister and Deputy Prime Minister under Yandarbiyev and Maskhadov. He set up the website Kavkaz Center.

In May 1995 this bunker-buster was dropped in Shatoy, killing more than fifteen civilians who were hiding in the bomb shelter.

On 14 June 1995 a group of Chechen fighters led by Shamil Basayev crossed into the Stavropol territory in southern Russia and captured the town of Budyonnovsk. They held over a thousand civilians hostage and demanded an end to the war. The operation resulted in a ceasefire and peace talks.

Sheikh Kunta-Haji Kishiev was a peacemaker and Sufi saint, famed throughout the North Caucasus, who opposed the destruction of the Chechen people in the nineteenth-century Caucasian War. He was arrested by the tsarist authorities on 3 January 1864 and exiled for life.

This song is from the 1981 Soviet film Karnaval.

Khankala is a ravine at the entrance to Grozny.