"In war the moral is to the physical as ten to one."

--Napoleon

The Chechen War may come to be seen as one of the greatest disasters
in Russian military history, greater than Tannenberg, greater than
Tsushima; not, obviously, because of Russian losses, which have been
limited, but because of what Chechnya has revealed about the
humiliating depths of contemporary Russian military decline. Quite
simply, the Russian army today is weaker in relative terms than it
has been for almost four hundred years--a fact which, if it persists,
may be of incalculable significance for the future of Eurasia.

The hard evidence of the Chechen War should make Russian military
weakness in the conventional field obvious to everyone--but it is
still necessary to emphasize and repeat it, since so many in the West
have a vested interest in avoiding the issue. It is also true of
course that even when the present state of the Russian army is
admitted, a major question remains as to whether this collapse is
temporary and reversible, or is likely to prove long-lasting.

This question is obviously of key importance in the context of a
possible Communist return to power in Russia. I myself believe that
the Communists could do little in the short term to turn the army
into an effective fighting force--partly because the reasons for its
present collapse have above all to do with morale, and are linked to
deep changes in Russian society and culture; and partly because a new
round of ideologically-inspired Communist mishandling of the Russian
economy would make Russia even less able to pay for major military
reform than it already is today.

The evidence suggests, too, that the Russian generals are well aware
of their forces' weakness--how could they not be?--and that they
themselves would speedily disabuse a new Russian regime of any plans
for major external aggression. The consensus among Western military
attachés in Moscow is that it would take ten years at least to work
such a transformation, and then only in favorable economic
circumstances--which are unlikely to be forthcoming.

One would be tempted unequivocally to rejoice in this weakness--and
it certainly ought to make the Balts and Ukrainians feel safer--but
for two worries. The first is that the demoralization of the army
derives partly from the demoralization of Russian society, which is
literally that--a lack of the most elementary social morality,
leading to a wholesale criminalization that indirectly threatens the
West as well. The second concern is that, sooner or later, some
outside power will be tempted to take advantage of Russian military
weakness--as in previous ages they certainly would have done. For
since intercontinental missiles do not suffer from demoralization,
Russia may become a very weak conventional power and yet remain a
very--indeed increasingly--dangerous nuclear one. The very weakness
of the conventional forces would encourage an early recourse to the
threat of using nuclear ones--as Russians have already threatened
unofficially in the case of NATO expansion to the Baltic States.

Communist hopes of restoring the Soviet Union are partially shared by
the Yeltsin regime, which speaks less expansively of "reintegrating
the CIS." Both ambitions are largely negated by the facts of Russian
military and economic weakness, and also by a sheer lack of what can
only be called national will. Since much of the Western debate about
Russia today--and for that matter, much of the debate in Russia
itself--revolves around the question of rebuilding an empire, it
seems fair enough to ask what the great European empire-builders, or
imperial bards and prophets, would have made of Russia today. Their
answer seems quite obvious: Rudyard Kipling, Alfred Milner, and
Alfred Thayer Mahan would say that this is a feeble, shiftless,
demoralized, decadent, undisciplined people. In particular, they
would say that the Russian ruling elites are utterly cynical and
corrupt, that they are ruthlessly obsessed with short-sighted
personal gain, and that their patriotic rhetoric masks a fundamental
lack of all real patriotism, spirit of self-sacrifice, and capacity
for fulfilling great imperial tasks. Looking at the faces of the men
now surrounding Yeltsin, it would be hard to deny the truth of this
portrait.

Failure at Every Level

On the other hand, how Kipling would have loved the Chechens! In
fairness to the Russian soldiers, one must admit that in the Chechens
they have run into extraordinarily brave, tough, resourceful, and
skillful opponents, who would have given even the best army in the
world a hard time. This is not the place for an extended analysis of
the Chechen fighters, but it may be said briefly that their success
stems from a perhaps unique combination of "primitive" and "modern"
military qualities. Primitive in that most Chechen units have been
formed spontaneously on the basis of familial and neighborhood links,
and the individual Chechen soldier has been motivated and disciplined
primarily by considerations of personal and familial honor and shame;
"modern" in the sense that the Chechens have used with great success
relatively large-scale military units and sophisticated weapons
systems. Their success in this regard, for example, contrasts sharply
with the general failure of Afghan mujaheddin groups which I
accompanied in the late 1980s. Underlying these successes is an
immensely high morale rooted in Chechen national history and
traditions.

Western military analysts should be looking hard at Chechen military
success and Russian failure. The West's victory in the Gulf War has
contributed to a current obsession with technological superiority;
but it cannot be stressed too strongly that the deserts of Iraq and
Kuwait, as flat and bare as a parade ground, were a highly unusual
battlefield. As the world's cities spread and spread, it is likely
that more and more wars in the future will take place in settings
like that of Grozny. Urban fighting at the best of times is a bloody,
nasty, hole-and-corner, terrifying business, in which artillery and
airpower are of limited use, and small groups of men often have to
fight alone, separated from their officers and chain of command. The
key to success is thus above all good infantry; and the key to good
infantry is less equipment than a mixture of training and morale. The
Russians in Grozny had neither; but to fight such a war successfully,
Western troops too would need not just assiduous preparation, but a
strong moral conviction that the war in question is necessary--or one
could say, to use an antique phrase, a belief in the righteousness of
their cause. The Rangers' fight in Mogadishu was obviously a small
disaster compared to the Russian assault on Grozny, but may still
serve as a warning about the risks of this kind of war.

The bloodiest single Russian defeat in Chechnya, and a striking
example of the mixture of demoralization and tactical incompetence
affecting the Russian forces, happened on December 31, 1994, when
several Russian armored columns launched a massive assault on Grozny.
The result was a virtual turkey-shoot. As a Chechen fighter told me,
"The Russian infantry wouldn't get out of their armor to fight, so
their vehicles had no cover. We just stood on the balconies and
dropped grenades onto them as they drove by underneath." Several
hundred Russian soldiers died in the course of a few hours, and
complete disaster was only narrowly averted.

This was a failure at every level--the individual soldier, the
tactical platoon and company commander, and the generals who sent
their troops into the city with no plan and, as prisoners told me
later, often without even any maps. Drivers were told simply to
"follow the vehicle in front." The fighting in Grozny in particular
also drastically exposed a classic failure of the Soviet (and Russian
imperial) army: its acute lack of good and respected non-commissioned
officers (NCOs).

As in Afghanistan, poorly led, poorly trained, poorly motivated
infantry simply will not leave the shelter of their armored personnel
carriers to brave enemy fire in the open. The result is of course
that the safety of these carriers proves largely fallacious. The
rocket-propelled grenade, or more precisely the hand-held anti-tank
rocket, has been the Queen of Chechen battles. In urban areas and
broken country, and in the hands of men trained in the Soviet army
and knowing the precise weak spots of Soviet armored vehicles, it has
had a most devastating effect.

But if Grozny would have presented any army with a horrible problem,
the same cannot be said of the campaign in Chechnya as a whole. The
most astonishing aspect of the war has not been the botched assault
on Grozny, but the repeated tactical failures since, beginning with
the failure to surround Grozny by driving armored formations and
motorized infantry through the open country to the south, and
continuing with the failures this year to trap and destroy Chechen
units, even when these were cut off and surrounded in Gudermes,
Pervomaiskoe, Novogroznensky, and elsewhere. The usual problem in
fighting guerrillas is to get them to stand and fight. In Chechnya,
the Russians have repeatedly had the Chechens pinned down--and then
let them slip away.

The portrayal of Chechnya as ideal guerrilla country is to a great
extent a false one. Only the southern third is mountainous. Most of
the rest, where most of the fighting has taken place, is rolling open
plain--ideal tank country, as demonstrated by the fact that the
Soviet army had a tank training school near the Chechen town of
Shelli. The Russian army's failure to use tanks and motorized
infantry to surround and destroy Chechen positions shows that it is
no longer even capable of the massive armored assaults that used to
be its tactical hallmark.

In many ways, the behavior--and the failure--of the Russian army in
Chechnya is reminiscent of that of Western armies in wars like those
in Algeria and Vietnam. The difference is that those were big
countries, with big populations, hundreds of thousands of square
miles of territory--much of it ideal guerrilla country--and with
bordering states that supported the guerrillas. At around six
thousand square miles, Chechnya is hardly bigger than Connecticut.
For guerrilla units (up to battalion or even regimental strength) in
an area this size to be able to run rings around what is supposed to
be the third largest army on earth is nothing less than bizarre. Only
an army in a truly advanced state of decadence would allow it to
happen.

Shortage of Men, Shortage of Spirit

Part of the reason for the failure of the Russian army is that even
numerically it is not nearly as strong as it looks. Indeed, recent
reports have suggested that the Russians are even incapable of
launching two local offensives in Chechnya simultaneously. This may
seem absurd for a force with a paper strength of 1.7 million men, but
the real disposable strength of the army is much lower, and the
number of effective combat units lower still. According to Western
estimates at the start of 1996, the Russian Defense Ministry (as
opposed to the Interior Ministry forces) had only seven divisions
that it even pretended were "battle-ready."

As Chechnya glaringly demonstrated, several of these "elite"
divisions were also greatly under-strength. Thus, according to their
official strength, the Russian forces that moved into Chechnya
(including formations from supposedly elite, "battle-ready" units
like the Kantemir Motorized Infantry Division and the Pskov Paratroop
Division) should have numbered some seventy thousand men. The real
figure, according to Russian and Western analysts, may have been as
low as twenty thousand--which was simply not enough to do the job.

The soldiers, including the officers, of the Pskov Division whom I
met on the road to Grozny in December 1994 were dressed like tramps.
Soldiers from the Kantemir Division whom I met later in Chechen
captivity were not "crack" troops by any serious international
standard--the privates, and even the NCOs, were simply conscripts,
several of them with less than six months' training. Some of the
"elite" Interior Ministry units like the paramilitary police, OMON,
and the police special reaction forces, SOBR, hurled into Grozny to
replace the shattered motorized infantry in January and February
1995, were thrown together on a few days' notice from individual
"volunteers" drawn from special police units all over the Russian
Federation. They had then been sent to fight without even a chance to
train together for so much as a day.

All that said, shortage of troops--even of crack troops--can only
very partially explain the Russian failure, which has occurred in
every field. In the analysis of Western military attachés in Moscow,
the only arm that has functioned at all competently has been air
transport. The rest--from intelligence through artillery, armor,
infantry, airborne troops, special forces, the air force--have all
failed miserably and repeatedly to do their job and achieve their
goals.

Failures of equipment and training also provide part of the
explanation, stemming above all from the savage cuts in the military
budget over the past seven years. For two years before the Chechen
War, the Russian air force commander, General Pyotr Deinekin, had
been warning that lack of money meant that his combat pilots were
getting only ten hours of flying time a year, and that this was
insufficient to maintain even basic combat efficiency--a warning
absolutely borne out by the event. In January of last year, I was
sitting with Chechen commander Shamil Basayev at a Chechen military
command post (a former Soviet military base) in the southern suburbs
of Grozny while Russian fighter bombers made repeated attempts to hit
the hill on which it was situated. Each time they missed or sheered
off without dropping their bombs, despite the fact that the only
weapon the Chechens had arrayed against them was a single heavy
machine-gun. So acute was the Russian shortage of competent and
determined pilots that early last year they were reportedly reduced
to creating combat squadrons for the war from test-pilots and
aerobatics teams.

In the same month, I was staying at a house in Grozny near which the
Chechens had established a mortar, which went on firing for day after
day, apparently from exactly the same position. Once again, repeated
Russian attempts to hit it failed. A veteran French war correspondent
was utterly bewildered: "But the Russians have equipment to track
where mortars fire from, every modern army has it, that's why you
have to keep moving mortars around. What are they playing at?" The
old Russia hands present proposed a variety of explanations: that the
equipment had all been defective (due to the lack of replacement
spare parts, the greater part of Russian military equipment can only
survive by cannibalizing other equipment); that it had all been
broken and never repaired; that it had been illegally sold (possibly
to Chechen "businessmen"); that the only men who knew how to use it
had left the army and had never been replaced; or finally, that it
contained some alcoholic or potentially alcoholic element--in which
case no further explanation of its fate was necessary.

But as this last explanation suggests, even many of the
military-technical failures come down in the end to a failure of
morale. Russian pilots who knew what they were fighting for, loved
what they knew, and were willing to risk death for it, would have hit
that hill, machine-gun or no machine-gun. The Russian soldier in
Chechnya--like the American soldier in the later years of the Vietnam
War--simply does not want to be there, let alone to fight and die
there. As with Western armies in similar circumstances, many of the
brutalities and atrocities committed by the Russians in
Chechnya--from the reliance on indiscriminate air-bombardment, to
random attacks on civilians--stem ultimately from this deep
demoralization.

The only explanation, too, of successful Chechen raids deep into
"Russian-controlled territory" is that (leaving aside the possibility
of bribery) Russian posts confronted with well-armed, determined
Chechens frequently just stand aside--something I've seen with my own
eyes. As one conscript admitted to me last February, "You know,
whatever they say in Moscow, I don't really think this is Russian
land, and so this war has nothing to do with me. I don't want to die
in a game by the leaders to cover their own mistakes and crimes." The
belief that "the real rulers of Russia today are the mafia" is as
widespread among Russian soldiers as in society at large.

This is a clear difference from the Russian armies that conquered the
Caucasus in the nineteenth century. No one ever accused the soldiers
of the Russian imperial army of a failure to stand still and be shot
at. One reason for this was obviously a mixture of blind serf
obedience and fear of their own officers; another was the obvious
willingness, shown by the casualty figures, of those officers to
stand and die with their men. Those officers were recruited from the
Russian elite, and whatever their other faults, were committed by
personal conviction and family tradition to the Russian empire and
Russian glory.

Today, as I heard again and again from Russian officers, with only
minor variations, it is a case of, "We serve in the army because
we're not trained for anything else. These days, who'd be an officer
if you could work in a bank?" One of the most personally impressive
and apparently highly-motivated Russian officers I met in
Chechnya--the commander of a SOBR special police unit--confided to me
that he was planning to leave the service to become a private
security operative, as were several of his subordinates.

The ordinary soldier's and officer's contempt and loathing for "that
brothel in the Kremlin" was extreme, open and, as far as I could
tell, virtually universal. If the dominant cliché to be heard on the
Chechen side is that "One Chechen is worth a hundred Russians", one
frequently heard on the Russian side is: "A fish rots from the head."
The "head" in this case means not just Yeltsin and his entourage, but
also Defense Minister Pavel Grachev and to an extent the entire
military hierarchy, riddled as it is with outrageous corruption and
outright theft. These military attitudes may be of critical
importance if in the weeks or years ahead the Yeltsin regime has to
call on the army for support in a power struggle.

As to the Russian military command, it seems most unlikely after the
Chechen experience that it will seek or agree to any more military
adventures in the foreseeable future. The evidence--especially the
complete lack of planning--suggests very strongly that it was not the
generals who sought military intervention in Chechnya. Indeed, my
information in August 1994--three months before the invasion--was
that the General Staff, the commanders of the North Caucasus Military
District, and Military Intelligence (GRU) were all advising strongly
against it. This was essentially a politicians' war, if among the
politicians we include Defense Minister Pavel Grachev, for whom
personal political survival has long since become the overriding
concern.

Old Fears and Current Realities

This reiteration of Russian military weaknesses may strike some as
redundant. After all, it has been the stuff of literally tens of
thousands of reports by Western journalists on the ground. Yet as is
so often the case, the message of the news pages has failed to get
through to many of the op-ed writers, who still write as if a Russian
army which has so utterly failed in Chechnya poses a major threat to
Ukraine, the Baltic States, or even Central Europe; or could be made
to do so in a few months or years.

For example, a supposedly "expert" briefing paper compares the
position of the Baltic states today to that of South Korea in
1950--the argument being that if NATO does not give them an explicit
security guarantee, Russia may take this as an invitation to attack,
on the analogy of Dean Acheson's failure explicitly to include Seoul
under the American security umbrella. Now, if pressed, no doubt the
authors of this analysis would qualify their remarks and point out
that there may be other means of pressure short of outright
invasion--which is quite true. Nonetheless, you don't have to be a
deconstructionist literary critic to figure out that the mental image
at the heart of the Korean parallel is that of hundreds of thousands
of infantry pouring across the border, driven by a fanatical ideology
and iron-willed leaders; cut down in their thousands, they continue
to advance, charging with the bayonet, climbing over the bodies of
their fallen comrades.

This is a powerful image, with deep roots in traditional Western
fears of the Russians ("with snow on their boots") and the "East" in
general. It is also grotesquely, fantastically far from the reality
not just of the Russian army today but of any army that could
conceivably be created on the basis of contemporary Russian
society--unless Russia herself were to be invaded. On the basis of
what I've seen over the past few years, I firmly believe that one
Estonian volunteer fighting for his home and his homeland could see
off ten or more unwilling Russian conscripts--and there are tens of
thousands of volunteer militia in the Baltic States.

This is not the eighteenth century, and successful modern armies
cannot be constructed on the lines of Catherine the Great's armies,
of conscript masses driven into battle by fear of their own officers
and NCOs. For one thing, highly educated technical specialists are
far too important; for another, the ordinary soldiers fight not in
large, easily controlled columns, but in small, dispersed groups. In
these circumstances, men lacking a real will to fight will not
advance into serious enemy fire. Why on earth should they?

The failure of many Western analysts to fully acknowledge Russian
military weakness is due partly to a tendency among "military
analysts" (too many of whom have never commanded troops or seen a
battlefield) to add up numbers rather than to look at the human
material and the human realities of combat; and partly to the
currently fashionable emphasis in Western commentaries on the
continuity of themes in Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet history.
Even in the hands of real experts, this emphasis is liable to beg as
many questions as it answers. In the hands of non-experts or the
simply bigoted, it becomes an excuse to indulge in shallow
generalizations and to avoid any necessity of living in Russia,
studying the real situation on the ground--or even for that matter
learning the Russian language. While certain ideological patterns may
have continued, Russian society today, especially among Russian
youth, is very different from any that has previously existed on
Russian soil. Above all, it is profoundly unideological. Western
scholars may attach great importance to ideological traditions, but
they are not high among the priorities of most Russian students, as
Taylor Dark made clear in the last issue of The National Interest.

From Hypocrisy to Cynicism

The conviction that their country is a great power and should behave
as such is nonetheless probably eternally rooted in the Russian mind
(as it is to a lesser, and less menacing, degree in that of the
French, for example) and this will intermittently make Russia an
uncomfortable presence. Russia will also do its best to maintain some
form of sphere of influence over its immediate neighbors. The
question is, however, what price would Russians be willing to pay for
the restoration of great power status in the sense of a new
territorial empire--and here the evidence is largely of a deep
unreadiness for personal and national sacrifice, whether in lives or
money. This has been apparent for years now, and can only have been
strengthened by the bloody shambles of Chechnya. The great majority
of Russians are "cheap hawks"; and whatever may be possible in
Central Asia, Ukraine, and the Baltic States--in other words, the
areas that matter most to the West--is not possible on the cheap.

It is important, therefore, not to take what either Russian
politicians or ordinary people say too seriously. Not every American
reader of Soldier of Fortune magazine would have made a good U.S.
Marine on Tarawa; and not all the Russians who roar about how Ukraine
is really part of Russia would be willing to go there to kill and
perhaps die--or send their sons to do so--to back up their claims.

A very representative figure in Russia today is the woman who, after
expressing a range of aggressively chauvinist opinions, admits that
she would do anything to save her son from serving in the army, both
because of the risk from the Chechens and, more importantly, because
the army itself is such a notoriously brutal, brutalizing, and
dangerous institution for its conscripts. An enterprise on the scale
of the restoration of the Soviet Union would require a people with a
steely sense of national solidarity and of commitment to national
goals--and you do not find many such people in Russia today.

The gap between rhetoric and real feelings is greater in Russia than
elsewhere, for obvious reasons. The whole Brezhnev era was one long
education in the meaninglessness of public statements, as made by
everybody from the general secretary to the humblest "citizen." Only
such a past could have produced a figure like Vladimir Zhirinovsky,
for whom public rhetoric is everything--but also exactly nothing.
Even in his own mind, it probably has little connection to reality,
and his ordinary followers vote for him not because of his "program",
but because the noises he makes cheer them up. It is all in the
strictest sense a political circus.

It must also be stressed of course that Zhirinovsky's "party", with
its grotesque greed, hypocrisy, and corruption, could not conceivably
act as a base for restoring Russian economic strength, social morale,
or military might--even if Zhirinovsky himself were really interested
in taking power rather than in making money. Nor could any other
party currently present in Russia provide such a basis. The
Communists are essentially a party of nostalgia, with correspondingly
high support among the elderly, and nostalgia for a past of
security--economic, moral, and physical. With a few exceptions, the
Communists are not a force for marching against the rest of the world
"bis alles in scherben fällt" ("until everything falls to pieces"),
as the Horst Wessel song had it. They don't have the fire in their
bellies to carry out a new grand social and cultural
transformation--and if they tried, the effort would soon collapse.
And because the Russian armed forces share--often in exaggerated
form--all the ills of Russian society, a general political and
ideological transformation is also very unlikely to come from within
the army itself.

To understand this, you have to listen to what Russian youths are
saying in discos, cinemas, and workplaces. What most of them are
definitely not expressing is a desire to go and die for the
Motherland. Today, Russian youth culture is overwhelmingly
non-militarist and indifferent or hostile to the idea of
self-sacrifice and military discipline. The admired figures among
Russian youth today are some version or other of the "New
Russians"--bankers or mafia-type "businessmen", with their luxury
cars, ostentatious lifestyle, and strings of "girlfriends." Poor old
Captain Ivan Ivanovich doing his duty in Grozny simply doesn't get a
look in. These attitudes are not simply the result of the
transformations of the past few years; they were bred through the
last three decades of Soviet life.

The lack of underlying militarism in a society as cynical and
would-be materialist as that of Russia today should not be
surprising. The Soviet Union was notoriously a society that, in
theory at least, was in a state of permanent military
semi-mobilization, both economic and ideological. When that state and
its controlling ideology collapsed, society and culture swung
ineluctably to the opposite extreme. In the words of Igor Kon, "Under
Soviet rule, Russia was the most hypocritical country in the world.
Now, it is the most cynical." This effect was apparent, long before
the Soviet Union fell, in the steadily diminishing psychological
returns, especially among Russian youth, from the endless flow of
patriotic material on the Second World War emitted by the state in
the Brezhnev years, and from the extreme disillusionment resulting
from the losses and futility of the Afghan War.

Soviet propaganda concerning the memory of the "Great Patriotic War"
also contained its own central flaw from the point of view of
maintaining a military spirit in society. The constant repetition of
Russia's immense sacrifices and suffering in that war was intended to
strengthen national pride; but "twenty million dead" is not a figure
calculated to encourage a frivolous attitude to warfare. During the
Afghan War, by contrast, the regime was careful to conceal the number
of Soviet casualties.

Since the Soviet collapse, Russian television has contributed, partly
unwittingly, to spreading fear and hatred of war. Concerning
Chechnya, by the end of 1995 most Russian channels had become
agencies of state propaganda in what they said: the fixed
characterization of the Chechen forces as "bandit formations", the
admiring interviews with Russian troops, and the reporting without
comment of the most outrageously false official statements. But what
they have been showing is different. Most Western TV stations, at
least since Vietnam, have presented a relatively edited and sanitized
visual version of war, and Western armed forces have tried to keep
them as far as possible from the firing line. Not so Russian TV.
Whether because of basic honesty, courage, sensationalism, or sheer
brutish insensibility, it tends to show the unvarnished truth--and
several years of looking at piles of brains, charred bodies, and
severed limbs on the evening news about Karabakh, Tajikistan,
Abkhazia, and finally Chechnya has not left Russian viewers with many
romantic illusions about warfare. Chechnya therefore may be said to
have provided a fresh argument to those Western journalists who argue
that really forthright, even gruesome, coverage of war is in fact a
force for peace.

The lack of military spirit in Russia and the Russian army today