While everyone is alive

Be afraid of people who are ready to defend the interests of the state at the cost of someone else's human life

On March 1, 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin submitted to the Federation Council “an appeal on the use of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation on the territory of Ukraine until the socio-political situation in this country normalizes.” This happened exactly on the fourteenth anniversary of the death of 84 soldiers and officers of the Pskov 6th company near Ulus-Kert. Almost 20 years have passed since the beginning of the First Chechen War and 15 years since the beginning of the second, and the question “why did our guys die?” remained unanswered. Not a single one of the tasks of “pacifying Chechnya” was solved, and the people could not be brought back. And unborn children will never be born. Now, when the machine of war with the people of fraternal Ukraine is standing with its engine running, it is very important to remind everyone of the cost of war. This is the only thing that can unite society and unite it around life, and not around death.

According to official data, the irretrievable losses of the Russian Armed Forces in the First Chechen War (1994-1996) amounted to 5,552 people, including 3,680 military personnel and 1,872 employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and other federal departments. The number of wounded is 16,098 people.

During the fighting in Dagestan at the very beginning of the Second Chechen War (August - September 1999), federal forces lost 280 people killed and 987 wounded.

Without taking into account losses in Dagestan, according to official data, in the Second Chechen War (1999-2009) 3,684 military personnel of the Ministry of Defense, 2,178 employees of internal affairs bodies, and at least 202 employees of the FSB were killed (data until September 2008). The number of wounded (as of 2002) was 15,549 people. Later, information about the wounded differs among departments.

The Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs reported that as a result of the two Chechen wars, 2 thousand 984 employees of the department were killed, about 9 thousand were injured.

According to the Committee of Soldiers' Mothers of Russia, the official statistics of losses of federal forces in Chechnya are underestimated by approximately two times, there is still no unified register of the dead, the information is scattered across departments and is not fully available.

The number of casualties among the civilian population of all nationalities (this data does not include militants) was not announced; the figure fluctuates, according to various Russian estimates, from 15-20 to 40-80 thousand people. No one counted the losses of civilians. The number of refugees is in the hundreds of thousands.

The result of the Second Chechen War was the transfer of Chechnya for hereditary use to the Kadyrov clan with a colossal tribute paid by the budget of Russia, which lost thousands of lives, to meet the needs of the new Chechen ruler. De jure, Chechnya remained part of Russia; de facto, Sharia law applies on its territory and Russian laws do not apply.

To buy the loyalty of the previous Chechen regime of Aslan Maskhadov, a man with a Soviet higher military education, significantly less money would have been required, and there might not have been thousands of casualties.

The main price of the Chechen wars is not the new splendor of Grozny. The main price of the Chechen wars is the graves throughout Russia. Only the dead of the 6th company are buried in 30 regions of Russia and the former USSR.

The number of parents who died untimely is twice as high as the number of their children who died tragically.

One should come to soldiers’ graves not during official ceremonial rallies, but simply together with the relatives of the dead. On their birthdays, wedding days. People will tell you a simple thing: “Damn this war.” They will say it quietly, without strain, not emotionally. They will say it is hopeless, because nothing can be fixed. The mother will say: “I wish I could go there, to him. I'd rather meet."

Damn this war.

For those who are now in a militaristic frenzy shouting “To Crimea! To Kyiv! To Lviv!”, there is perhaps only one antidote: to personally attend at least one funeral of a soldier or officer who died in an unjust war.

Look at the parents, widows, children - who managed to have them. And most of those who died in Chechnya did not have children. And now it will never happen again.

“They have such a profession! Soldiers always die in war!” - can be heard from all sides.

Yes, there is such a profession - to defend the Motherland. It is intended for domestic, not occupational wars.

There is no need to decide the fate of other people. There is no need to send other people's relatives to war. Send your son, husband, brother, friend to war. Go to war yourself, in the end, if your hands are itching so much.

War fume is a terrible paralytic gas. At some point, a person’s brain becomes saturated with it and begins to perceive reality differently.

This gas will disappear from any still living head after the first personal funeral. After official answers that the deceased was a contract soldier and voluntarily chose this profession. After the disabled survivor tells how he and his dead brothers in battle were abandoned to the mercy of fate, betrayed personally and sold wholesale - just as it was with the 6th company.

War is the last vile act of power. War shows either the inability of a politician to resolve conflicts peacefully, his complete mediocrity and professional unsuitability, or his focus specifically on war, his personal desire to become famous through blood. That is barbarism. Both are worse.

The primary task of any statesman, any politician is to take care of people, preserve the people, not allow people, the people to slide into a state of brutality, not to provoke hostility and anger.

A week ago, even before Putin addressed the Federation Council, relatives of Pskov military personnel told me that units of the 76th division and Pskov special forces were already in Ukraine, in Crimea. They are among those who, without identification marks on military uniforms, carry out military tasks on the territory of a foreign state - blocking airports, seizing military units of the Ukrainian armed forces, providing the background for a change of power in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea.

They are there by order, but outside the law, outside the right. Officially, there is no fighting going on there. Officially, our soldiers are not there at all. The Russian authorities publicly renounced them to the whole world, denying what was obvious to everyone.

People in uniform were cynically betrayed. They were told that they were in another place. They even named the Leningrad region as the place of the “exercises,” and then stupidly distributed photographs from the “exercises” in which the southern landscape and landscape are clearly visible.

If - God forbid - something happens to one of our guys, they and their relatives still have to prove where they were and that these were really military operations. Otherwise, the state can save on costs.

They told the relatives of the victims of the 6th company in response to the question: “Why are some of ours Heroes of Russia, and others only with Orders of Courage?” that it would not be possible to pay everyone the same benefits - there is not enough money.

But there was enough money to send people to that undeclared war.

On March 14, 2000, on the day of the funeral of the Pskov soldiers of the 6th company, one thought was heard in Pskov, covered with wet snow: this war be damned. In the Kremlin, on Vechevaya Square, in the Trinity Cathedral, at the Orletsovsky cemetery, on the streets, on buses, in houses, people, without saying a word, repeated the same words: damn this war.

Hear these words today to all those who felt joy from the news of the possible outbreak of hostilities. Stop this itch.

The face of war is not orders, parades or books about immortality.

The face of war is the face of a dead soldier, almost indistinguishable through the thick glass in a zinc coffin.

So far, all our soldiers in this new, already announced, but not yet declared Ukrainian war are alive.

Nothing irreparable has happened yet.

Everyone can return home alive. And without blood on your hands.

The line between human and inhuman now runs along the line of justification or rejection of this war.

She is still looking closely at her possible victims.

She has not yet swung her scythe, or opened her bottomless black cloak.

The most important thing a Russian citizen can do now is to say: “No to war.”

This could not be said in 1994 and in 1999.

The price of silence was truly terrible.

Understand this simple idea: everyone is still alive.

This is the most important thing now.

You can't be silent.

No to war.