Yeltsin’s Path to Chechnya Went Step by Bungling Step

The Security Council is supposedly the Kremlin’s ultimate advisory body. But as these 14 men considered a plan to make war on Chechnya, Yuri K. Kalmykov sensed an oddly brusque formality about the proceedings, as if President Boris N. Yeltsin hadn’t really come for advice.

“I want to discuss another way, a peaceful way,” said Kalmykov, the man in the room that November day who best knew the breakaway republic. Yeltsin cut him off sharply. “We’ll talk about it later,” he recalls the president insisting. “Let’s vote on what we have.”

Without argument, the council approved a four-stage military assault. Yeltsin then let Kalmykov’s idea--to delay the war and negotiate Chechnya’s status--dissolve in inconclusive debate. Russian troops began moving, and Kalmykov, who was justice minister, went home to draft his resignation, puzzled as to why the suddenly hawkish president had bothered to call the meeting.

Nearly four months into a war that has devastated Chechnya, traumatized Russia, humbled Moscow’s army, bled its treasury, damaged its relations with the West and stained his presidency, Yeltsin has explained little of why and nothing of how he decided to start it.

But interviews with politicians, warriors and analysts on both sides indicate that the decision was all but sealed in August, when Yeltsin stopped listening to his specialists on Chechnya--who were counseling against force--and approved a covert operation to topple Chechen President Dzhokar M. Dudayev.

By all accounts, Yeltsin was drawn into the conflict step by bungling step. Dudayev had declared Chechnya independent from Moscow in late 1991, won a rigged election and armed a militia with heavy weapons of the disintegrating Soviet army.

Encouraged by Yeltsin’s reluctance to talk to Dudayev, lightly armed Chechen rebels had risen against the general’s repressive rule and hit up Moscow for help. But the tanks, helicopters and training they had received in response were not doing the job.

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A critical moment came Nov. 26, when Chechens who had been offered $1,000 apiece to storm the rebel capital, Grozny, refused to board tanks, prompting their Russian trainers to take over the job at the last hour. At least 15 Russians were captured in the badly improvised attack, exposing the covert operation and obliging Yeltsin to choose between a humiliating retreat and a full-scale assault for which his army was ill-prepared.

At that point, Yeltsin turned to a secretive, informal circle of advisers who told him that a quick military victory was possible and would boost his approval ratings. They were wrong: The Russian invasion, rubber-stamped by the Security Council on Nov. 29, helped the unpopular Dudayev rally his people to unexpectedly fierce and prolonged resistance in which thousands have died.

While Russian military failures were quickly evident in the field, the path that led Yeltsin to war is only now becoming clear, as some advisers look back with critical eyes on the conflict.

Although Russian forces finally control Grozny and the intensity of combat is somewhat diminished, a parliamentary investigation, expected to last into summer, will make it harder for Yeltsin to put Chechnya behind him, especially as Yeltsin-bashing lawmakers campaign for reelection in December.

Yeltsin’s public statements are unrepentant. He told Parliament that the army, while unprepared, had little choice but to fight: Dudayev’s bid for independence, his “absolutely illegal regime” and hostile militia had posed an intolerable challenge to Moscow’s authority.

“Whether we want it or not, there is no authority that can ensure the force of law without coercion by the state,” Yeltsin declared. “Coercion by the state was used in Chechnya when the federal authorities had exhausted all other means.”

But many questions remain and will hound Yeltsin as he weighs his odds for reelection in 1996. Why did he allow Dudayev to build a militia and then belatedly arm Dudayev’s foes? Why didn’t he negotiate? Why did he underestimate Chechen resistance? Whose influence was decisive?

“All the problems of Russian statehood are reflected in the Chechen crisis, as in a drop of water,” Yeltsin told Parliament. Among those problems, many would add, is a leader who, more so than in previous crises, was ill-prepared, uninformed, reclusive and inclined to use force.

Seeking the roots of the crisis, a parliamentary commission is asking why Moscow didn’t protect its arsenals in Chechnya from Dudayev’s raids in 1991, and why Defense Minister Pavel S. Grachev agreed to leave Dudayev half the tanks, aircraft, artillery and automatic weapons still in the arsenals when the Russian army left the following year.

Lawmakers are also asking how the rebel republic secured oil export licenses from Moscow, and who in the Kremlin may have profited from arms trafficking, bank fraud and other criminal activity that flourished under Dudayev. “For three years, the Russian authorities regarded Dudayev as their man,” said Stanislav S. Govorukhin, head of the parliamentary commission.

Rather than any complicity, Yeltsin says it was his all-absorbing power struggle with Russia’s Soviet-era Parliament, finally dissolved by force in the fall of 1993, that kept him from confronting the Chechen rebellion until early 1994.

At first he promised talks and said privately that he would meet Dudayev in person. A low-level Kremlin delegation was formed last May, but, under instructions from Parliament, it broadened the talks to include Dudayev’s foes. Dudayev was angered. By August, he and the Kremlin were accusing each other of blocking a dialogue.

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In a lengthy review of the Chechen crisis published in the newspaper Izvestia, Kremlin advisers Emil A. Pain and Arkady A. Popov wrote that Yeltsin could not overcome an intuitive distrust of Dudayev, who had made a career in the Soviet air force and had been close to the KGB.

His wariness stemmed in part from a 1993 letter in which the Chechen claimed to possess “vast and trustworthy intelligence” on Yeltsin’s enemies in Moscow and offered to advise Yeltsin on how to repress them. The president simply could not trust someone so “diabolical,” the analysts wrote.

But they added, “Russian political reality at that time was such that the president had to create the semblance of negotiations.”

In any case, Yeltsin’s chief of staff, Sergei A. Filatov, said recently that Dudayev “precluded the possibility” of high-level talks when his militia clashed with armed Chechen opponents last summer.

Still, until the last day, senior advisers were urging Yeltsin to stop short of war.

In late November, Gen. Dmitri A. Volkogonov told him that Dudayev was ready to rejoin the Russian Federation. After the Nov. 29 Security Council vote, Kalmykov, a native of the Caucasus region that includes Chechnya, rushed there to see Dudayev and reported that he was willing to talk to Moscow “without preconditions.” But Yeltsin wasn’t listening.

Kremlin adviser Pain, meanwhile, was pushing his own plan. It called for “peaceful competition between two systems”--Dudayev’s impoverished regime and three pro-Russian districts of northern Chechnya that would get massive economic aid from Moscow. The aim was to win Chechens’ support for renewed ties with Russia and weaken Dudayev’s already dim hopes for reelection in 1995.

The plan made sense to many Chechens. “We could have gotten rid of Dudayev without blood and without war, just by waiting seven months until elections,” said Lom-Ali Shamayev, a rich Chechen businessman. “What’s seven months?”

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Pain, the top expert on ethnic conflict at Yeltsin’s Analytical Center, warned that his plan would not work if the Kremlin aided the armed wing of the anti-Dudayev opposition; that would drive men like Shamayev to fight on Dudayev’s side.

But that is exactly what happened.

“It was simply ingrained in the mentality of our leaders that when they decided to help the opposition take control, the first thing that occurred to them was, of course, military control,” Popov said in an interview.

One reason the Kremlin shied away from Dudayev’s nonviolent foes, Pain said, was former Parliament Chairman Ruslan I. Khasbulatov’s growing influence among them; Yeltsin could not bear to see the pipe-smoking Chechen, who had led the old Parliament against him in bloody conflict in October, 1993, come to power in Grozny.

The armed rebellion against Dudayev was not Moscow’s creation. His foes had been defecting from the Chechen militia or buying weapons on their own since 1992. But, by mid-1994, they had a military force being supplied through informal contacts in various Russian armed services, according to their commander, Beslan Gantamirov.

After a bloody clash Oct. 19, Gantamirov said, the arms supply “took on an official character.” Russia’s Nationalities Ministry procured 11 helicopters and 40 tanks, he said, and the Federal Counterintelligence Service helped his men recruit specialists from army bases in Russia. One specialist said he was paid about $2,000 to train Chechens to drive tanks.

The Moscow newspaper Sevodnya and several other sources said the covert operation was conceived earlier, at an informal Kremlin meeting Aug. 25, with Yeltsin’s prior consent, and also included air force cover for the rebels.

Yeltsin was then consulting closely on Chechnya with counterintelligence chief Sergei V. Stepashin, Interior Minister Viktor F. Yerin, First Deputy Prime Minister Oleg N. Soskovets and Defense Minister Grachev. In September, he named Nationalities Minister Nikolai D. Yegorov to run the covert operation.

Because each man stood to gain from military action, they became known as the “party of war.” Grachev and Yerin had to justify hefty demands for military spending, and Grachev wanted to destroy the weapons he had handed over in Chechnya. Soskovets speaks for Russia’s weapons producers and was maneuvering to eclipse his less-hawkish boss, Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin. When the covert effort failed, Stepashin and Yegorov needed a full-scale invasion to wipe away their responsibility.

“They promised him a quick and easy victory, 100% success,” said Pain, who stopped getting feedback from the Kremlin. “After September, everything that had anything to do with policy in Chechnya was shrouded in secrecy.”

The miscalculations made in secret became obvious in the field.

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Ignoring centuries of Chechen resentment against imperial Moscow, Yeltsin’s party of war assumed that Dudayev could muster no more force against Russian intervention than he had against his foes at home. The inter-Chechen conflict had been a standoff between a few thousand men on each side; the Russian tanks and aircraft meant to tip the balance against him only swelled Dudayev’s ranks with patriots fighting not for a leader but for a homeland.

“If Dudayev had tried to invent something to boost his standing, he couldn’t have done it better,” concluded Kremlin analyst Popov.

Even more damaging was Yeltsin’s failure to prepare his army in advance to finish a covert war that was never an assured success. The army was mobilized only after Dudayev threatened to execute Russian trainers captured in the Nov. 26 tank attack. The timing couldn’t have been worse for the army; all second-year conscripts had just been mustered out.

“Yeltsin is a good tactician but not a long-term strategist,” said Pavel Felgenhauer, Sevodnya’s military affairs correspondent. “He thinks he can pick up the phone and order a military offensive like he orders a limousine. Nobody was planning a war until it became a sudden political imperative. Then they started bungling through.”

Russia’s czars and Communist Party bosses never repented in public, and it is not in Yeltsin’s character to do so either. Some aides say the president privately takes responsibility now for fatal mistakes in Chechnya and is seeking broad advice for a peaceful, face-saving way out but cannot bring himself to dump the men who misled him or to reverse his course.

Meeting last month with foreign editors and correspondents, Yeltsin said his government is “moving more energetically than in the past” to consult elders and community leaders in Chechnya, and trying to organize elections there. But he again ruled out talks with Dudayev, whom he branded a “gangster” and “bandit” who “at a minimum should be put on trial.”

The next day, Yeltsin dispatched Grachev, Soskovets, Yerin and Stepashin--the party of war--to oversee a new offensive in Chechnya. Grachev warned that “military methods for settling the Chechen problem have not yet been exhausted.”

Times special correspondent Matt Bivens contributed to this article from Chechnya.