"We'll shoot them in front of your eyes, do you want that?"

Vladik, of course, did not want that...

I could never have imagined that two years later, this story would continue.

That was a completely different time: there was a small and fragile peace in Chechnya.

I flew to Chechnya to negotiate a prisoner exchange, carrying two lists: Russian soldiers and residents of Chechnya held in Russian prisons and pre-trial detention centers.

I flew through Ingushetia. Next to me on the plane was a member of the Ingush parliament, a Chechen by nationality.

He asked why I was flying. I explained why. He asked me to show him the list of Chechens arrested in Russia.

He read it for a long time. I watched how carefully he studied the Chechen surnames, which to me were all the same in their spelling (just as, probably, typical Russian surnames were the same to him). Then he told me:

"Free this guy. He's my uncle's nephew... You know, they gave him seven years for taking a jacket from some journalist."

"I know that journalist!" I replied proudly.

That's how it worked out. Or didn't.

And finally.

In my report, I included an extensive interview with Movladi Udugov.

As I already said, I'm not going to change anything: it was what it was. Especially since the time of the Chechen wars is very compressed: a day felt like a week. And each day I remember was different from the last. And—the person in that day.

I never found Movladi Udugov likeable (especially since he once put me on a list of enemies of the Chechen people—for no good reason, just because I provided a small foreword to an American report), but at the time he was a vice-premier, and I wanted to learn unknown details from him about the political decisions that led to the war.

From both the Moscow and Chechen sides.

What was true, what was not in what Udugov said then—I don't know. But you won't get the truth in Moscow either!

Therefore, I don't regret that interview with him.

But I learned one small detail, a nuance of his biography, that explains his attitude towards Moscow and Russia.

It turns out, in 1978, Udugov applied to the journalism faculty of Moscow State University and failed to pass the competitive exam.

"They didn't accept me because I'm Chechen!" he is convinced. And no matter how much I tried to convince him that it was nonsense and absurdity: he just didn't pass, I myself missed the passing score by one point!—I couldn't prove anything to him.

But in Moscow, meeting with the dean of the journalism faculty, Yasen Nikolaevich Zasursky, I told him:

"If you had accepted Udugov, maybe there wouldn't have been a war!"

We both laughed at this absurd assumption, but on the other hand, sometimes a mere trifle, a bit of nonsense, a speck of dust, can change the entire course of history...

Notebook Four: Year 1998

Civil war,
Broken roads.
Silence exploded,
And many won't be awaited.

Why did the Soviet army defeat the Russian army in Chechnya? This question has long bothered me.

Not because, of course, I dreamed of Pavel Grachev taking a parade of victorious warriors in the center of Grozny. On a white horse, naturally.

In this war, there is only one victor – the scoundrels who earned their meager billions on someone else's blood.

I think about something else. About what I had never thought about before—about military art. Do you need to graduate from the General Staff Academy to, like in January '95, throw defenseless tanks into the narrow streets of Grozny? What is the point of a Communications Academy if they were firing at their own due to its absence? What kind of rear services specialists are these, with all their academies, directorates, and hundreds of generals, if soldiers were asking for bread from passing Chechens?

After all, in the end, builders, engineers, and teachers who became field commanders and front commanders won the war against professionals whose training cost taxpayers dearly.

The two warring sides were united by only one thing: everyone mastered military science together—in the ranks of the Soviet army. Did some master it better? Did others turn out to be failing students?

Now is the time to figure out what happened.