Cold Files 001: The First Chechen War, Part 1. The City That Ate an Army

COLD FILES is Project Leaflet's archive series: deep reads on the wars and atrocities most pages will not touch. File 001 covers the Chechen wars in two parts. This is Part 1: December 1994 to August 1996.

The file

On New Year's Eve 1994, the Russian Army drove four armored columns into Grozny expecting a parade. Sixty hours later, one brigade of roughly 1,000 men had been reduced to about 160 survivors who fought their way out. The war that followed killed tens of thousands of civilians, flattened a city of 400,000, and ended with the Russian military losing a city it occupied to a force a tenth its size. Almost nobody outside the region watched it happen, because the country doing it held a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, and the people it happened to had no way to make the world look.

Credit where due: the framing of this file follows a thread by @polishzach that put the Chechen wars back in front of a lot of people. We pulled every number in it against primary sources and built out the rest.

The oldest grudge in Russia's empire

You cannot understand December 1994 without February 1944.

On 23 February 1944, the NKVD loaded the entire Chechen and Ingush nations, roughly 480,000 to 500,000 people, into cattle cars and deported them to Central Asia. Operation Lentil. Villagers too remote to transport were shot or burned. Estimates of the dead from transit, hunger, and exile run from a quarter to a third of the entire population. The survivors were allowed home only in 1957, four years after Stalin died, to find Russians living in their houses.

Every Chechen commander Russia faced in the 1990s was a child of that exile or raised by its survivors. Dzhokhar Dudayev, the Soviet air force general who declared Chechen independence in November 1991 as the USSR collapsed, was born in exile in Kazakhstan. When Moscow's tanks rolled in 1994, Chechens were not being asked to imagine what Russian rule at gunpoint looked like. They remembered.

"Two hours, one airborne regiment"

Through 1994 the Kremlin tried to topple Dudayev on the cheap: covert funding of the armed opposition, then a disastrous November tank raid on Grozny using Russian soldiers hired as "volunteers," who were captured and paraded on television. Humiliated, Boris Yeltsin ordered a full invasion on 11 December 1994.

Defense Minister Pavel Grachev had boasted that he could take Grozny in two hours with a single airborne regiment. The plan his staff actually produced was not much more serious. Roughly 38,000 troops were assembled for the operation, but only about 6,000 went into the city on New Year's Eve, in four columns under Generals Pulikovsky, Babichev, Rokhlin, and Staskov. Military doctrine wants a 6-to-1 advantage for urban assault. The Russians went in outnumbered by the roughly 15,000 fighters defending the city. Many of their vehicles carried conscripts who had never fired their weapons, in composite units scraped from five to seven different commands, with no city maps, radios on open channels, and no coherent orders beyond "drive to the center."

The Chechens let them drive.

A Russian Mi-8 helicopter brought down outside Grozny, December 1994. Photo: Mikhail Evstafiev, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The railway station

The 131st Independent Motor Rifle Brigade, the Maikop Brigade, rolled into central Grozny on 31 December almost unopposed and occupied the railway station by mid-afternoon. Its commanders reported the city was quiet. Then the city closed behind them.

Chechen fighters operated in three and four man hunter-killer cells: an RPG gunner, a machine gunner, a sniper. They worked from basements, upper floors, and alleyways simultaneously, below and above the elevation arcs of Russian tank guns. They killed the first and last vehicles of each column to lock the rest into the street, then burned the trapped armor at leisure. Fuel and ammunition inside the vehicles did the rest.

By 3 January the Maikop Brigade had effectively ceased to exist. Around 160 of its roughly 1,000 men escaped the station area. Twenty of its 26 tanks and 102 of its 120 armored vehicles were destroyed. Its commander, Colonel Ivan Savin, was killed. Official Russian accounting later admitted 157 dead from the brigade; counts of nearly 800 killed, captured, or missing across its battalions have been cited since the earliest studies of the battle. Across the assault force as a whole, the US Army War College's study records the first column losing 105 of 120 armored vehicles. Russia's own General Galkin reported 225 armored vehicles as irreparable losses in the first month and a half, including 62 tanks.

The army that was promised a two-hour victory then did what it knew how to do. It stood off and demolished the city. At the peak, Russian guns were firing roughly 4,000 artillery rounds an hour into Grozny. The presidential palace fell on 19 January after the defenders evacuated it; organized fighting in the city ran into early March.

Who was actually in the buildings

Grozny in December 1994 still held a few hundred thousand civilians, and here is the detail that should never be forgotten: a large share of those who could not flee were elderly ethnic Russians. Chechen families mostly had relatives in mountain villages to run to. Pensioners from Grozny's Soviet-era Russian population had nowhere, no money, and no one coming for them.

Sergei Kovalev, Yeltsin's own human rights commissioner, estimated some 27,000 civilians died in the first five weeks of the battle. A Tufts University review puts the battle's civilian toll at 25,000 to 30,000. Lower estimates, like historian Anatol Lieven's, still run to 5,000 dead. Human Rights Watch documented indiscriminate strikes on hospitals, markets, and an orphanage, and estimated at least 350,000 people displaced. OSCE monitors who reached the city described "an unimaginable catastrophe." Moscow was, in significant part, shelling its own ethnic kin to rubble, and the shells did not distinguish a fighter from a grandmother.

A Chechen fighter near the burned-out presidential palace in Grozny, January 1995. Photo: Mikhail Evstafiev, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The dirty war: Samashki and Budyonnovsk

What Russia's forces could not win in Grozny they prosecuted across the countryside as zachistki, "cleansing operations." The name that stands for all of them is Samashki. On 7 and 8 April 1995, more than 3,000 Interior Ministry troops swept the village after its elders failed to hand over weapons the village mostly did not have. Memorial documented at least 103 civilians killed, with its minimum estimate running above 112; the ICRC reported around 250; survivors and human rights groups counted up to 300. The documented methods included grenades thrown into basements where women and the elderly were sheltering. No one was ever punished for Samashki. That impunity became the war's signature.

The war's cruelty was not one-sided. In June 1995, Shamil Basayev led fighters 150 kilometers into Russia proper and seized a hospital in Budyonnovsk with roughly 1,500 hostages, demanding an end to the war. Russian forces stormed the building twice and failed; 129 people died, most in the rescue attempts. Prime Minister Chernomyrdin negotiated with Basayev live on television, and the fighters bused home behind human shields. Human Rights Watch called it perhaps the most heinous violation committed by Chechen forces in the war. It also forced the first real ceasefire. The lesson both sides took, that atrocity produces negotiation, would poison the next decade.

August 1996: losing an occupied city

By summer 1996 Russia claimed Grozny was pacified. Dudayev was dead, killed in April by a missile that homed in on his satellite phone. Yeltsin, facing re-election, declared victory.

On 6 August 1996, Aslan Maskhadov, the ex-Soviet colonel who ran the Chechen war effort, sent roughly 1,500 fighters back into Grozny against a garrison of 7,000 to 12,000. They did not assault Russian positions. They flowed around them, in small groups along routes scouted through a city they knew house by house, and by morning's end the garrison was not defending Grozny, it was besieged inside it in isolated strongpoints. Within three days some 7,000 Russian troops were surrounded. General Pulikovsky answered with an ultimatum: 48 hours for civilians to leave, then the destruction of the city with everything in it. An estimated 220,000 civilians fled under the deadline.

The bombardment never got the chance to finish the job. Yeltsin's security chief Alexander Lebed flew down, cut the ultimatum dead, and on 30 August 1996 signed the Khasavyurt Accord with Maskhadov. Russian forces withdrew from Chechnya. Official Russian figures for the August battle alone: 687 dead, over 1,400 wounded, 18 tanks and 69 other armored vehicles lost. A tenth-strength irregular force had taken a garrisoned city from the army occupying it, and won the war.

The ledger, so far

Official Russian figures admit 1,376 soldiers killed and 408 missing in the first battle of Grozny alone; serious estimates for the full 20-month war run to 5,700 or more Russian dead, with veterans' groups claiming far higher. Chechen fighter losses were tallied by Russia at around 6,700 killed by spring 1995. Civilian deaths across the First War are most commonly estimated at 30,000 to 100,000, out of a pre-war population of roughly one million.

And the war was not over. It had only paused. Chechnya got three years of broken de facto independence, warlordism, and kidnapping economies. Russia got a new prime minister named Vladimir Putin, a string of apartment bombings, and a reason to come back and finish what the artillery had started.

That is Part 2: the second siege, the phrase "the most destroyed city on earth" entering a UN assessment, the filtration camps, and how a quarter of a nation ended up dead or gone.

Cold Files publishes deep reads like this once or twice a week alongside The Daily Sitrep. Subscribe below to get the next file when it drops.

Sources consulted: Timothy L. Thomas, "The Battle of Grozny: Deadly Classroom for Urban Combat," Parameters, US Army War College (1999); Human Rights Watch, "Partisan War in Chechnya" (1995) and related reporting; Memorial Human Rights Center documentation of Samashki (1996); Sergei Kovalev commission estimates; Anatol Lieven, Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power (1998); RFE/RL retrospectives on Budyonnovsk and the First War; OSCE statements, January 1995; standard references on Operation Lentil, the Battle of Grozny 1994-95, the August 1996 battle, and the Khasavyurt Accord. Framing credit: @polishzach.