Shevchuk (DDT) in Chechnya

In 1991, a number of states on the Soviet periphery declared independence from the USSR. That same year, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic was renegotiating the relationship between its center and its 88 federal subjects, generally ethnic enclaves that arose as a result of Stalin-era “nationalities” policies. At this time, the Chechen national independence movement, led by Dzhokhar Dudaev (1944-1996), attempted to secede. Violent tensions ensued, both between Dudaev and other actors in the region, and between Chechnya and Moscow. Russian Federal troops engaged in the fighting and, in November 1994, Yeltsin issued an ultimatum to Dudaev to submit to Moscow’s rule. Despite parliamentary opposition, Yeltsin’s minister of defense, Pavel Grachev, pledged to take the Chechen capital, Grozny, by force in under a week, initiating the First Chechen War. This large-scale assault failed as low-morale Russian Federal troops took heavy casualties while indiscriminately shelling Chechen positions. Grozny did fall by March of 1995, with upwards of 30,000 civilians killed (many of them ethnic Russians) and conflict spreading into neighboring regions. Dudaev was killed by a Russian missile in 1996; meanwhile, Chechen forces attacked Grozny several times and unfurled a terror campaign against Russians in that city and elsewhere. Eventually, on 31 August 1996, the two sides signed the Khasavurt agreement, which promised a withdrawal of Russian Federal troops in exchange for Chechen demilitarization. By this point, at least 50,000 Chechens and 10,000-15,000 Russian soldiers had been killed, although the precise numbers are disputed. The Second Chechen War would start three years later, triggered both by Chechen attacks on Dagestan and by a campaign of Russian apartment building bombings that some commentators attribute not to “Chechen terrorists,” but to a Putin-authorized FSB false flag operation.

In January 1995, Yuri Shevchuk, the leader of DDT, one of Russia’s most-prominent rock bands throughout the 1990s, decided to visit the troops near Grozny and see the war for himself. As a rocker who came on the scene in the 1980s, he had earned his share of ill will from local Party authorities in his hometown of Ufa and was closely linked to the Soviet liberal intelligentsia culture. During perestroika, Shevchuk had been firmly on the side of democracy, but by the early 1990s was vocally criticizing both Yeltsin and the KPRF. He saw the events of October 1993, when Yeltsin shelled Russian parliament, as a civil war resulting from both sides’ incompetence and cynicism, and was disgusted by Yeltsin’s approach to conflict in Chechnya. A self-proclaimed pacifist, Shevchuk earned the love of the Federal troops he met at the front. In their many interviews, soldiers recalled the rocker’s bravery on the ground, while Shevchuk, for his part, has regularly extolled the human virtues of the average Russian soldier and his commanding officer. In future interviews, Shevchuk would go on to recount experiences of PTSD and heavy drinking as the outcomes of his Chechen sojourn. Following Russia’s first incursion into Ukraine in 2014, he would refer to his 1990s visits to the troops as his “Hemingway period” and declare that he was not willing to repeat it. This hesitation was probably informed by the sense that in the 2010s, dismissive moral bothsideism regarding Russia’s imperial conflicts no longer seemed as convincing to Russian liberals as the Chechen wars seemed in the 1990s.