I approached them. They recognized me. And the first thing I heard was:

"Why didn't your Kovalev fight for human rights when we were forced to sell our apartments for next to nothing? When Russians were tormented? When our homes could be broken into every night?"

I understood the state of these people when they almost threw themselves at me with their fists. I believed them when they asked me: "Why did Kovalev come to us escorted by Dudayev's guard?" I even tried to understand them when I heard that our soldiers were met as liberators, although even then I knew that the marauders made no distinction between houses where Chechens lived and where Russians lived.

But I also knew I couldn't write about it.

Not even because I had, and still have, enormous respect for Sergei Adamovich Kovalev and am convinced that every one of his actions is honest, sincere, and courageous.

No, precisely then, in January '95, it was precisely on Sergei Kovalev, Chairman of the Presidential Human Rights Commission, that the perpetrators of the war and the tragedy of Grozny tried to shift all their mistakes, all their crimes, all their military incompetence.

"Why was he sitting in Dudayev's basements? Whose side is he on?" a dead-tired major in Grozny asked me, cursing.

"Everyone has their own profession. And their own calling. Every society is built on the struggle of opposites. Kovalev is doing his job honestly!" I tried to explain to him.

"Oh, go to hell..." he snapped back at me.

If I had written that then, the article would have turned out not against those who started this war, but personally against Sergei Adamovich. But there were enough such articles without me.

Now, I repeat, I don't want to change anything, not a single word, in the reports that were published.

But, naturally, from trip to trip, from meeting to meeting, my attitude changed—no, not to the war itself, but to what was happening around this idiotic and bloody war.

Therefore, now I want to explain what I printed then.

For instance, the sum that, according to the SOBR guy from the Moscow region, various foreign mercenaries received for each killed special forces officer—up to 1,000 dollars—as well as the fact that each mercenary was shadowed by two Chechens—all this belongs to the realm of ordinary front-line legends. Just like the stories, repeated from publication to publication, about the elusive "white tights"—these "tights" appear in all such wars: everyone talks about them, but no one has seen them.

But the Chechen war (just like the war in Abkhazia or Tajikistan or in Yugoslavia itself) was certainly accompanied by stories repeated by word of mouth, and every storyteller claimed to have seen everything with their own eyes: for example, all the horror that Chechens castrated our captured soldiers.

I found no medical or documentary confirmation, no matter how hard I looked.

The continuation with the Yakut gold supplied to Chechnya turned out to be curious.

A few days after the publication, Valentin Logunov, my former colleague from the interregional deputies' group at the Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR, called me. It turned out that he had become an assistant to Yakut President Nikolaev and that an investigation into my publication had already been carried out in Yakutia.

"So what?"

"Such a contract existed, but the firm itself was organized by a swindler and, naturally, no gold was ever delivered."

That's what Valentin Logunov told me.

I don't know, I don't know...

At least, the Prosecutor General's Office sent its investigators to Yakutia. How the investigation ended – I don't know. I wasn't informed, and I wasn't interested anymore.

And one more figure I cited in my first report: about three thousand killed by January 6th alone.

I remember, right after the publication, "Vesti" came to my place in Peredelkino, and I announced this casualty figure on the evening broadcast. The next day, I awaited an official rebuttal—it didn't come. And the next day. And the day after.

I think now that this figure is accurate.

It was then that the Maikop brigade was almost completely wiped out. The ill-fated 201st suffered the same fate.

Why are they sent there,
Mothers again weren't asked.
Why are you always killed,
The best and the most beautiful.