Notes on an Escapade

The war in Chechnya and the safari of news

The first war in Chechnya gunned its engines of horror through light skirmishing to supercharged Stalingrad-style annihilation in what seemed like days and was no more than a matter of weeks.

Full-colour 3D devastation was harder to grasp than if Grozny had presented its furious, psychotic rape in black and white, with some dust and scratches on the celluloid for authenticity. Perhaps a stirring soundtrack as the soldiers went in, and maudlin solo piano for the aftermath. But the silences were profound between shellings, and the tones and smells were ‘true to life’, and therefore quite surreal.

I had encountered conflict before. The violent uprising in Moscow in 1993, a year earlier, saw Yeltsin order tanks onto the streets to pound a recalcitrant parliament into submission. In 48 hours, I had been beaten up by communist protestors who thought I was a secret policemen, nearly perforated by crossfire at Ostankino TV tower, and had been arrested and jailed in the ‘Matrosskaya Tishina’ high security prison by men who thought I was a left-wing insurgent.

“Did you vote for Thatcher or Labour at your last election?“ asked the interrogating officer, strapped into body armour and with an AK on his desk that he fondled idly. “Err, not Labour,” I said. “Good. You can go in the morning then,” he said.

But I had never been to war. I relished the chance, and got it in November 1994, aged 24, when the government in Chechnya decided to take Yeltsin at his word - ‘grab all the sovereignty you can swallow’ - only to find out he didn’t really mean it.

I picked up a map when I arrived at Grozny civilian airport, thinking it would be handy. Soon the streets were unrecognisable, or entirely erased, and the airport was also levelled. But I kept the map, and have it still. It was printed for tourists in the eighties and cost 29 kopecks. Now it only has value for time travellers and the nostalgic.

My tourist map of Grozny, printed in 1987, with a photo at the bottom of the Minutka intersection, which was to become an infamous free-fire zone.

There was an RAF fly-past during the 75th anniversary of VE Day a few years ago. I heard the aircraft engines first, and then came onto my balcony in central London to watch the lumbering Second World War bombers plod across the sky, and was suddenly sobbing and speechless with grief.

I decided it might have something to do with the wars I had seen, or more specifically the suffering I had witnessed, and somehow the growl of the Rolls-Royce Merlin engines had set me off. Perhaps writing about it would help.

Six weeks was all it took to vomit up 60,000 words about the time I spent in Chechnya. It’s unlikely they will ever see the light of day as a book. For one thing, the tone of much of it now strikes me as strident and self-regarding, and a little too Tarantino. It had been fuelled by a fair amount of neat whisky, to be frank. But the purpose of the writing had been emetic, not to capture the affections of a reader.

Nevertheless, passages of it may have something to offer this Substack. Here’s are a couple, and I might add more in subsequent posts. I based the chapters on street names from the map which were relevant to the scenes described, but which as a rule no longer exist. I have tidied up some sentences where in retrospect the Bell’s made itself felt too insistently.

A first day cover with the postage stamp commemorating the election of Boris Yeltsin in 1991, Russia’s first president.

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‘The Old Commercial Highway’

“They’re fucking smertniki!” said Vadim, turning to me, chucking a cigarette butt out of the window, as I held the Niva jeep more or less straight, round/through the potholes, amid the clogging dust kicked up by those olive-drab petrol tankers motoring down the road in front of us.

“Kamikazes, no?”

“Yeah, probably.”

I’m not listening. I’m trying to remember what the turns would be like in reverse, so that we can get out of the city again, at some point, later that day or evening. It’s easy to get in - but how on earth will we get out? (What if it gets dark? It probably will get dark.)

Because the editors back in London will need to see the stuff we’ve filmed at some point later in the day or evening. Bangs for their bucks. That’s the deal. Though we haven’t filmed a frame yet today.

You get to this part of this town via a road called ‘The Road of the Testimony of Ilyich’. (Which refers to Lenin.) You get to the road itself through other roads coming out of Ingushetia, the republic next door, meandering through villages whose names I struggle to recall now. One was Sernovodsk, which means ‘Sulphurous Waters’ in Russian.

“So who are smertniki?” I ask, tuning back into Vadim’s nasal voice, his southern Russian accent.

“Those guys. The poor fuckers driving these petrol tankers! One unlucky bullet – ‘poom!’ Fucker’s dead! Plus - his passenger!”

“Yeah, but we’re right behind them. We’re dead too, no?”

“Back the fuck off then, Chris!”

He opens another plastic bottle of Fanta. Warm Fanta, inevitably. You can’t get the cold stuff anymore, at least not once you’re across the border into Chechnya. You can get lots of warm Fanta, or warm Sprite, or warm Coke and melted Twixes. Sold by the increasingly desperate at the side of the road, alongside truly inedible shashlik and mason jars of home-made petrol, which we call ‘donkey piss’. It makes the engine freak out. The tankers just ahead of us were bearing something marginally more combustible for tanks or BMPs, armoured personnel carriers, though probably still low-grade. Gotta keep the war fuelled-up.

“Fuck! Every fucking pothole has got your name on it!”

“What do you mean? ‘Got my name on it’?” It was a Russian colloquialism I hadn’t come across before.

“Why do you have to hit every single fucking pothole?”

“I don’t know. I’m trying my best.”

“You’ll bugger the suspension, and then what?”

Good question. I didn’t know ‘then what’.

(Truly – what then? It’s no place for a buggered Niva.)

OK, Vadim. You’re local. Not really local – the term is relative in a land of 11 time zones. But more local than me. You’re from Astrakhan. That’s more romantic, too – sounds magical, in fact. You’re from the mouth of the Mother Volga, and I’m from a townlet in southwest Surrey. Touché. I’m not going to triangulate the geographic and cultural distances, but I’ll accept you’re a bit better at this post-Soviet Armageddon shit than I am. You’re right – it’s hard to navigate the potholes, especially when the so-called road has the topography of Joe Stalin’s smallpox-pitted face. The last time I had driven a car was somewhere near Godalming. A Talbot Sunbeam purchased by my Mum and named ‘Gladys’, after the elderly lady whose inheritance money allowed her to buy it.

None of this quite allows you to talk to me this way, to be frank, Vadim.

“Chris, you’ve gone quiet. Are you scared?”

“Not scared, so much as fucking pissed off, Vadim.” Sweat is dripping into my eyes, there’s obviously no aircon in a car like this, and dust from the tankers is churning through our open windows. Plus there’s a good chance we’ll be shot at in a few moments.

“So: if you like, if you’re Niki Lauda, you drive the bloody car, Vadim. ‘Manufactured with a hatchet’, as you guys say. It’s a piece of Soviet crap.”

As an afterthought: “And why are you wearing that ridiculous body warmer in this heat? Who wears a body warmer to war zone anyhow?”

Vadim Allakhverdiev, in his favourite body warmer, on a road near the Chechen border with Ingushetia. He was the cameraman I worked with in Chechnya much of the time. Vadim was later to be killed in a traffic accident at home in Astrakhan. [My photo]

‘Sunzha (or possibly ‘Factory’) District’

I am pretty sure there was a Sunzha District in central Grozny, though my 29-kopeck 1987 map doesn’t feature one. ‘Sunzha’ being a tributary of the Terek and the river the city was built on. The map does feature two Factory Districts, however: one slap bang in the middle of town and another much further south, near Black River District.

In any case, Sunzha or Not-Sunzha, this was where a lot of the action happened, especially at the start of the conflict. It had the PTT, the Hotel Kavkaz, and the Oil Institute, as well as the Presidential Palace. And the French House wasn’t far off, so named because of the foreign specialists who developed Chechnya’s oil fields in the early part of the century.

My memories of the early war are centred here, as were so many of our reports, which invariably started with the traditional zikr ceremony. It was performed in the main square by two dozen or so men of fighting age, chanting and circling, nearly all in black leather-cum-faux-leather jackets, karakul hats for the rich ones, slip-on shoes and high-waisted black trousers (sort of David Bowie of a few years earlier), whipping themselves into a frenzy of devotion.

Or rather, a shortish old man with an impossibly long white beard and skull cap was doing the whipping, goading them with a long stick, a kind of cattle prod for lads, letting loose a frenzied falsetto yell or two to keep them focused as the men jogged around and around, faster and faster. There’s an awful lot I don’t know about Chechnya’s strain of Islam, Naqshbandi Sufism, but I know the zikr is part of the tradition.

What I also know is that if you arrived late and didn’t get the shot, it was pretty easy to get them to repeat the whole thing. I haven’t filmed much in the Middle East but I imagine if you miss a flag-burning – maybe you got stuck at an Israeli checkpoint, maybe you had one too many yesterday at the American Colony bar - they’ve probably got a spare flag or two set aside in a cupboard somewhere to torch for late-coming film crews.

One of my colleagues later down the career line suggested in all seriousness that we should develop self-igniting American flags, so that you didn’t need to bother with matches and kerosene and the danger to your eyebrows, skin, clothes and shoes.

We think of ‘fake news’ as something quite new, but there’s not a lot that’s authentic about getting guys to repeat a solemn ritual because you need to ensure the opposing broadcasters can’t trump your report. The ‘angry’ demonstrators were as complicit as the film crews. Touch up your demo for the cameras. Touch up your report for the folks back home.

As an example, in a small place outside Grozny, I think it was called Petropavlovskoe – “Peter and Paul Village” – I recall a correspondent I won’t name being filmed again and again, doing his ‘piece to camera’, the part of the report when the journalist appears on  screen. During the recording, he seemed to duck and flinch every few words. Like he had a St Vitus disorder specific to himself, or maybe just to war zones – it was so strange that I couldn’t take my eyes off him. Should I feel pity?

“OK”, I thought, “I just work for an agency.” (Associated Press television supplied raw footage, not correspondent reports). “He’s a professional broadcaster. Who knows how their game works?”

Strange bloke, but Grozny was full of them. And I thought no more about it.

Until I joined his organisation some years later and saw he had been doing the precise same thing in northern Afghanistan, 2001. He had just come back from a trip to the front and I watched him edit the report. The video rushes showed him saying a few words, flinching, and then carrying on with the commentary. The camera operator kept on rolling for a better take. Time after time: talk, flinch, talk.

I worked out what was going on: he was ducking and leaving a gap so that the editor could patch in audio of gunfire or explosions in the final cut.

Soundtrack something like as follows: “Here I am at the frontline – BANG (pasted in) – he flinches! Yet bravely carries on! –  and then he concludes: “where, as you can tell, it’s getting pretty tense…”

Another diversion through the byways of TV chicanery: late nineties in Moscow, and AP decides to provide broadcast services to penny-pinching channels from the Middle East. (They are much, much richer now, but in those days, nobody had heard of Al Jazeera, for example.) Our new job was suddenly to look after their reporters, all of whom were apparently nuts – one a dissident Syrian Christian former theatre director; another a sociopathic, xenophobic Egyptian with the airs of Nasser himself but none of the graces; another a pasty-skinned and elderly Russian with improbably good Arabic which he could only have learned in the service of Soviet military intelligence.

Well, these channels wanted maximum reports for minimum outlay, and one of these three chaps hit upon the perfect solution to everybody’s new headache: he came to work on Monday with five different neckties in his satchel. So we took five different shots of him on the Monday doing his generic sign-off shtick in those five different ties. One for each day of the week to come. Genius.

(As for the Syrian, he introduced us to the pleasure of strong coffee brewed with cardamom and taught us how to swear in astonishingly baroque expletives. Every AP Moscow guy of a certain age can tell you how to go fuck your sister in Arabic; or how you’ll fuck her yourself, if push came to shove.)

A contract soldier of the Russian interior ministry aboard an armoured personnel carrier near the Minutka intersection. Contract soldiers were greatly more feared than conscripts, and with good reason. [My photo]

One night in the Sunzha-or-Factory District we were in the flat where David, the Sky News Moscow correspondent, and the other guys from his team were staying. I knew them well – up until recently, I had been working for David’s show, and we’d had a lot of fun together. We had done some scary things, too. Messing around on the Russian border with North Korea being one example, when Yura the soundman nearly got dragged into a lumber camp for Pyongyang recidivists as the rest of us were pelted with stones by the spitting, berserk North Korean guards. In the end, once we got to Vladivostok, the worst thing that actually happened on that trip was that the dezhurnaya at the hotel kicked off because we were playing ‘penny up the wall’ in her corridor at three in the morning.

The dezhurnaya was typically a weighty, late middle-aged matron with gaudily dyed possibly fake hairdo and a double chin. (If you are British and my age, you’ll recall Mrs Slocombe from ‘Are You Being Served?’.) Plus a hair trigger when it came to instant rage, propelled by an in-built sense of moral offence. Such women sat by the stairs and lift exits at each floor of every Soviet hotel, with a panopticon view of the comings and goings. In theory, they could get you hot water for a cup of tea, but you wouldn’t want to ask. In practice, their job was to monitor every movement along the faded corridor carpet runner to the rooms with their dripping plumbing, and presumably report back anything they didn’t like the look of. And that was quite a lot of things.

Neporyadok – a wonderful Russian word meaning “un-order”. There’s a word for ‘disorder’ - bezporyadok – but ‘un-order’ is subtler, and more morally loaded. Disorder – shit happens. Un-order – you should know better.

Neporyadok could be bouncing off the walls because you were also off your face, or any attempt to get a ‘lady friend’ into a room without paying off said dezhurnaya lavishly with a chervonets – a tenner – to avert her eyes in advance, or indeed playing ‘penny up the wall’ at 3 am in Vladivostok. All that is un-order. I don’t recall the exact rules or the purpose of ‘penny up the wall’, and I think they were being modified subtly by David as he gauged the state of drunkenness of the rest of us and calibrated his moves to win those pennies. (Rouble coins, in fact, and at that point entirely worthless, but now serving as tokens denominated in full bottles of booze when we got back to Moscow.) The rough idea was to throw the first coin at the wall, and see where it landed. Then the idea was to toss other coins at the wall and get them to land as close to the first as possible. Like indoor boules for lonely pissheads. David was one or two shots of warm vodka off the pace, which made him one or two shots of vodka less drunk than me and Yura and “Uncle” Vova, the cameraman, all three of whom he fleeced.

Back to Grozny, and the benighted, booze-reeking flat where we were having a typical war zone kind of a party. Rather a lot of drink, far too many stories about past derring-do, and everyone trying to touch up the cute photographer from the USA.

Suddenly we could hear the movement of jet aircraft in the night skies pretty close by. We weren’t imagining it, and they certainly weren’t Chechen planes – those had all been trashed at Khankala aerodrome and Grozny Northern Airport a few days ago by a remarkably efficient air raid.

It had been carried out, according to official Russian sources, by ‘unidentified aircraft’. Danish, or something, perhaps? Maybe Vanuatu? Who could tell? The planes had mostly been trainers or not even airworthy, but the fact was that President Dzhokar Dudayev had nothing of his own in the skies above his Presidential Palace, which was just down the road from the flat where we were all trying to score some sex, or at least decent cigarettes.

Then, suddenly: louder, louder still, then: WHAM, WHAM, WHAM: fucking big explosions! Sobering. So we instantly sobered up. We grabbed cameramen, tripods, piled into cars, belted our way up Lenin Avenue. Probably the BBC and ITN even shared a vehicle on this occasion. Just let’s get there right now.

Christ: some plaster-dusted pensioner looming crazily in our headlights, hair on end like Samuel Beckett in a hurricane, tottering before a block of flats that was missing most of its front elevation – that is, you could see into the flats like someone had scythed off the front of it like some hellish doll’s house. (Look! The poor sod’s bathroom!)

Smoke and dust and faint cries of characters in the journo vehicles’ limelight, one or two in the morning, some woman in a pinkish dressing gown with hair back-combed by dirt and the blast and the dirt propelled back by the back blast, and someone else dashing between cameramen saying nothing, just open-mouthed, arms spread wide in astonishment that something so hectic could have happened right here, right now, on this hitherto dull-as-you-like provincial street. Look into my eyes, he seems to say. Did you ever see what I just saw?

Swing the car around, point the headlights over there: a massive, smoking crater in the road, and yet someone else, just gazing into it, entranced. Completely captivated.

Conscripts in an armoured personnel carrier. They had wired the grille of a looted Mercedes to the front of the vehicle. [My photo]

I think we agreed that nobody would feed their pictures that night, so as not to dick each other over. In TV news, especially TV agency news, being first was everything, but it seemed insane after this, at this hour, to try to shaft each other (though there was a guy from ITN who might have tried). We’d all get our stuff ready for nine the next day, or 6 am in London. The Russians had actually bombed Grozny! They’d warned that they might, we could hardly believe it, never thought they would, and they had just actually gone and done it.

Except, apparently, they hadn’t:

“Chechen terrorists have now taken to blowing up civilian buildings in order to simulate the appearance of air-raids, which have not taken place. Meanwhile, concerned citizens in regions bordering Chechnya have collected and donated several tonnes of blankets and foodstuffs…”

This was the gist of a statement signed the next day by a deputy prime minister, Oleg Soskovets. A copy of the fax was on my desk in Moscow when I returned just before Christmas. Printed on heat-sensitive paper, it was already fading when I read it. But I still have it somewhere, and it was just about legible last time I looked.

The fax from the government that said Chechen rebels were blowing up buildings to simulate air raids.

I have googled the author: “Soskovets, Oleg Nikolayevich; Soviet, Russian and Kazakh politician. Birthday: May 11^th, 1949.”

Still alive, then. Lucky him. Turned 71 just the other day. I wonder how, where and with whom he celebrated the occasion.

-ends-