Battle of Grozny

The Battle of Grozny opens in the account as an assault whose scale is measured against the siege of Sarajevo: where Sarajevo endured 3,500 detonations per day at the height of its siege, Grozny faced 4,000 per hour at the beginning of the siege in December 1994. The city was laid waste as completely as Vukovar. The contrast in tempo makes the bombardment’s intensity stark, while the comparison places Grozny within a wider pattern of urban destruction in the wars accompanying the breakup of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union.

Bombardment and Urban Destruction

The Russian army did not hold back. The account gives the bombardment’s peak rate in a compressed numerical comparison: thousands of detonations over a day in Sarajevo, against thousands in a single hour in Grozny. It does not detail individual strikes or provide a casualty count; instead, the city’s devastation is conveyed through the comparison with Vukovar, another city described as laid waste.

Chechen Resistance

The Chechens answered the assault with a guerrilla war marked by both ferocity and cruelty. They burned Russian soldiers inside their tanks and carried out bloody terrorist actions on Russian territory. The resistance therefore extended beyond the devastated city: the battle’s violence was not confined to the siege lines, but also appeared in attacks within Russia.

Conscripts and the Failed Promise of a Swift Victory

The fighting trapped 40,000 young conscripts in a war they had been told would be a victorious lightning strike followed by a triumphant return. Among them was Zakhar Prilepin. Instead of the quick campaign they expected, the conscripts found themselves bogged down in a conflict compared to the war in Afghanistan, which had afflicted their fathers and older brothers. The promised victory thus gave way to an experience of prolonged combat and uncertainty over who would return.

The Aftermath in Historical Perspective

The account sets the battle against the short interval between two wars that sent young Russians home, if they came home at all, crippled, humiliated, and suffering hallucinations. After Mikhail Gorbachev withdrew Soviet troops from Afghanistan in 1988, only six years of peace separated that war from the beginning of the siege of Grozny. The battle consequently appears not as an isolated campaign, but as the renewal of a cycle in which one generation’s war was followed, after a brief respite, by another.