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.

I was told about a soldier's mother who wandered around the military base in Mozdok, tugging at the sleeve of every passing commander and showing a certificate that read: "...not listed among the living, killed, wounded, or missing." The certificate was a carbon copy, and the name and surname, as always in such bureaucratic documents, were filled in by hand.

"And where did your son serve?" Colonel Alexander Chikunov asked her when she approached him at the hospital entrance, where he was recovering.

"In the Maikop brigade..."

"I couldn't look her in the eyes," Sasha would tell me later...

Then, in Grozny, eyewitnesses to the January offensive told me how and what it was like. From that January, I learned many new details of how and why untrained boys died under the command of half-trained generals. But quite recently, in the summer of '97, I heard words from Said (more on him later) that still resonate within me:

"I remember in the Staropromyslovsky district, the streets were littered with soldiers' bodies, like peas."

Like peas...

In late spring, the State Duma's Defense Committee held semi-closed hearings on the causes of death of Russian servicemen in Chechnya. I felt nothing but shame at those hearings: according to the logic of the highest military general staff, if not for bad soldiers and bad officers, good generals would surely have won this war.

How much is messed up there —
Can't be covered by lines.
And again we are blamed for everything.
Only don't betray me, Motherland,
Don't betray me.

I couldn't endure it to the end. And not just me. Major Vyacheslav Izmailov and Internal Troops Colonel Alexander Chikunov, participants in this war, also left the meeting early.

Shame for the generals...

After that January slaughter, none of our generals found the courage to say: "Enough! We've already lost too many men in a few days of war. Like peas..."

Later, much later, in Grozny, when a fragile peace was established, I saw Vasily Efimovich Sidorov, who, a year and a half after his son Andrei's death, found his remains. I wrote about this in "Novaya Gazeta" too. I received a call from the Ministry of Defense, from the "hotline"—a special phone number where parents try to find traces of their missing sons—and was informed that Private Sidorov was not on the Ministry of Defense's lists.

"How is he not on the list?"

"It means he was on the combat roster. Or they forgot to enter him," my interlocutor from the Ministry of Defense sighed sadly.

And there are many such examples. They were sent from other units. To hide losses, they shuffled the boys like a deck of cards between different units. They changed entries in military IDs. They were sent to Chechnya by deception (as Sergei Smirnov, a correspondent for "Novaya Gazeta," once recounted about a "battalion of orphans" specially prepared for Chechnya, in the confidence that no one would miss them—there was no one to miss them).

Then, in January '95, I did not yet know the full extent of this baseness...

... "We have to try to fly out from 'Severny.' Something should be going from there," Yuri Zaitsev suggested.

They saw me off. Just as we see off guests in Moscow – from the center to Sheremetyevo.

Only we rode in an APC.

I sat on the armor at first, to survey the surroundings one last time.

"Roads are becoming safer by the hour, numerous convoys — superfluous... Around us rode 60 Cossacks, behind us trailed a loaded cannon with a lit fuse..."

A broken road, pops of gunfire, cannonade beyond the Sunzha, a corpse by the road, another, another... An APC rushed towards us at the same immense speed as we were, a red Soviet flag fluttering on it, and some hit song blaring at full volume... Either "Na-Na" or Lyuba Uspenskaya... Who the hell knows...

Generals – they are also different:
Those in trenches with fighters – beautiful,
Those in offices – hideous.