Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 5- Pavel Grachev

Episode Date: August 14, 2018

On this episode we talk about Pavel Grachev, the Russian Minister of Defense who ordered the storming of Grozny while piss drunk during the First Chechen War. Follow Lions Led By Donkeys on twitter. Follow Joe on twitter Follow Nick on twitter

Девушки отдыхают Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe, and that is Nick. That's right. This is our once a week fucking sleepover. It's not a sleepover. It's weird weird it's a weird sleepover since i turned 30 tomorrow you'll be fine we always do it yeah it's weird that i turned 30 and i'm like still alive did not expect to live this long i think that's how we all feel yeah that's what i've told my parents you guys have to start at a really. I told them, give me my insurance money. Just throw it in the casket with me.

You're like 22. That's all you need. That's all you need. You didn't even start losing your hair yet. Well, I did when I was 22. It's getting thinner, you dick. Which sucks. Because even the fucking barber shop is like,

yo, dude, you got some really thin hair in the back of your head i was like oh sweet cool balding yeah hey at least you made i think i started balding when i was 20 but it's because i won the genetic lottery and uh my dad was like completely fucking bald by the time he's 25 but you got that good armenian blood that just means i have hair literally everywhere except where i'm balding. And a cell phone plan to come with it. Yeah, when I turned 18, if I didn't join the army, I actually had a job lined up as a skincare specialist in a mall. Sweet kiosk. Yeah, real pushy. Anyway, so today is episode five, which is 5 episodes longer than we ever thought we'd go. That's very true.

And today we're talking about the great and powerful Pavel Grachev. The drunkest and most corrupt ministers of defense who's probably ever existed in modern times. Yeah, but he's also kept his word. He did. No, he definitely went back on his word on a few times. One time, definitely someone will talk about that. Very true. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. I mean, so Pavel Sergievich Grachev was born in the Tula Oblast in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Russia on January 1st, 1948. in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Russia on January 1, 1948. He entered military service in 1965 in the Airborne Corps and graduated from the Ryazan Higher Military Academy in 1969. And I guess I should probably warn our listeners now that there's a lot of names that we have no business even attempting to pronounce. Yeah, we'll try our best. We'll try.

We'll try our best we'll try we'll try like so there's so many fucking names that are shouldn't even exist i i apologize ahead of time for whatever blood feud i'm about to start it's just vowels yeah and backwards r's he uh he was generally regarded as a mediocre at best by his colleagues um he was you know passable he wasn't a great military officer he wasn't cadorna and graduating the top of his class he wasn't custer and graduate at the bottom of his class he was he was there he was a bump on a log and nobody really noticed him a little speed bump just drunk off his fucking ass the whole time though i mean and drunk even for russians like people noticed how fucked up he was and this is soviet times where pretty much every source ever says the military is nothing but a drunken mess the whole time um but yeah he was so drunk that even they were like bro you need to slow it down and that's saying which is fucking insane yeah um yeah in 1981 soon after graduating the frunzee military academy he was deployed to

afghanistan uh where he served as the deputy commander to the 345th guards airborne regiment um which is strange that i apparently have something in common with this guy that we both fought in Afghanistan in the same area. We may have pooped in the same ditch. Probably. Yeah, we're poop brothers. It's like Eskimo brothers, but significantly worse. Better. Yeah, I guess it is better.

So his unit managed to find itself in just about the middle of every single major soviet operation of the war and that included operation storm 333 which was a covert soviet operation to assassinate the afghan president hafizullah amin and replace him with communist friendly uh babar al kamar and that's actually what started the entire war but this is also the russian way of clandestine. Which have we... It was a joke. It was fucking terrible. They just choppered in... Well, they didn't chopper in. It was a civilian airliner.

It was a Russian military airliner. It was painted to be a civilian airliner. And just full of paratroopers. All outfitted in Afghan National Army uniform. And the funny part was there was also a regular Soviet Army attachment that was in on this operation, but they weren't told that, hey, there's going to be some dudes, some very Caucasian-looking motherfuckers. All they painted was a little sign that says, don't worry.

No big deal. Yeah, pretty much. Don't pay attention to this plane. It was a friendly sign that says, don't worry. No big deal. Yeah, pretty much. Don't pay attention to this plane. It was a friendly fire clusterfuck entirely. The paratroopers hit the ground. The Russian regulars started shooting at them. But it was an assault on the presidential compound itself to overthrow the president of Afghanistan. The unit also found itself involved in the Battle of hill 32 34 which is one of the most famous

battles of the entire war there wasn't really a whole lot you know everybody says it's like the soviets vietnam where effectively they were all firing fighting over nameless hills who just had numbers and nobody really gave a shit about them. Their tactical importance would run out as soon as the Soviets left. Same situation. But this battle involved one platoon of Soviet paratroopers and nearly 500 enemy fighters, including special forces from Pakistan, who were fighting on our behalf. And by ours, I mean the United States.

There might be an international listener or two who's tuned into us. But obviously the U.S. was heavily involved in the Mujahideen activity against the Soviet military. But we're actually going to get much deeper involved in that in a further episode that we have planned out. So we'll talk about that later. We'll go into too much detail in the battle because there isn't really what we're talking about here. But just so you know, there is a totally bitchin movie actually since we spent the entire last episode shit talking soviet war movies um the russians actually came out with a really good movie called the ninth company and you should totally watch it i think it's still on netflix oh i think i've seen it it's the only russian war

movie that isn't like total propaganda and i say that as someone who grew up watching you know black hawk down and pearl harbor which are like nothing but dripping with propaganda but it was so bad it's a michael bay movie that ends like how to pay the bills oh god um yeah but the ninth company isn't just propaganda it's a pretty solid war movie and like they actually point out good points about how the war is totally pointless and meaningless for soviets they do throw in this weird button about a magical fucking necklace at the end but if you just ignore it it's pretty cool anyway um grouchoff was awarded the title of the hero of the Soviet Union for executing combat missions with minimal casualties, which we assume by Soviet standards means he attempted,

he just didn't attempt to make a sweet pair of boots out of the skin of all the dead conscripts. Because the Soviet war was fucking terrible in Afghanistan. They lost tons of people over there. I just want to know what minimal casualties is to the soviets at this time so minimal they just didn't report them um which means they were probably terrible yeah so there's like holy shit um it should be noted by all accounts he was pretty much drunk the whole time um which if going by soldiers accounts of the soviet afghan war which pretty much everybody

is trashed all the time um he was like even drunker than drunk Russian standards like even worse than what we were talking about before um the Soviets drank so heavily during the Afghan war there's actually a a plane known as the MiG-25 that used alcohol to cool its radar systems and uh it used like a ton and a half of ethanol alcohol and uh the soldiers that came to the flying restaurant because they kept drinking all of its booze. It's like any mechanic I know. Yeah. Like if I can imagine the mechanics that we had in the army, if there was a way to drink JP8 and not fucking die, they would do it.

All the fucking redneck mechanics I know. Yeah. They would find a fucking way. Yeah, totally. But like a grand chef is so drunk that once again someone made a note of it and they're drinking fucking jet alcohol um but this you know this is the reason why u.s soldiers aren't allowed to drink when we deploy um because if you stick a whole bunch of of us in some desolate outpost and then actually gave us

access to booze do you know how little fucking war fighting that would have actually gotten done like there's literally nothing else to do out there the taliban could have just walked right in and shot me as i was passed out next to the port of shit or covered in my own puke like there wouldn't have been a war to fight and i i i'm assuming that might be the lesson to learn from the soviets venture in afghanistan, usually after a day binge of drinking or a night binge of drinking, I usually like to take a good nap. Yeah, you don't like to really go on like a 12-hour counter-terrorist patrol. Right.

Touch myself a little bit. Yeah. Watch a little bit of shows here and there. Drink some more afterwards. Yeah. So, Gradchef returned from Afghanistan to the Ranking Major General and graduated from the General Staff College in 1990, after which he was appointed the head of all airborne troops in the USSR. That's a pretty big posting. Paratroopers were a huge part of Soviet propaganda.

And at this point, he hasn't really shown himself to be totally incompetent. Maybe he's tripping and falling backwards into success or something. That shit worked? Yeah. What the fuck? People noted he was actually a really good small unit commander, but whenever he was put in charge of large-scale operations, like Operation Magistral or anything else that happened in the Soviet war in Afghanistan, he fucked it up bad.

And really the only reason why the Soviets succeeded is because they just had overwhelming firepower most of the time. So whenever the picture got larger than what his drunk ass could see five feet in front of him, it just went to hell. Yeah, well, we will get onto this throughout the whole podcast, but he was known for his incompetence in military leadership throughout his time in the Russian... Large scale. Right. He was a great small unit commander, but, you know, a great platoon leader doesn't exactly make a great company commander.

Right. And then again, we also talk about how it was undocumented, like, small casualties in their eyes. Right. So we don't exactly know well this is the soviet times they still and to this day insist like 15 000 soviets died in this war and it's significantly more than that right um everybody knows that they just want to admit it right um not to mention they they fucking lost a ton of people like they're still finding random old white-haired dudes that people thought were afghans

turns out and they're gonna bust out into a slob squat and start speaking russian but they also have tracksuits on yeah and yeah i mean if he was so good at some things and just so bad at others like if he was an ice cream flavor, he'd be like, pralines and dick. Only the finest ice cream flavor. He was not good at everything. But this is where things get really complicated, because this might surprise you. We're not super well-versed in the downfall of the Soviet Union, because I was born in 1988, as the Afghan war was ending. And Nick because i was born in 1988 as the afghan war

was ending and nick you were born what 91 or two and four yeah shit like that so you were born as the chechen war was starting right in the 90s like the end of the cold war soviet union yeah pretty simple but not very it was really complicated and violent yeah like we're not boomers we didn't like live through this so we only know what we taught ourselves i mean we're both public school kids from the hood so right and the soviet was playing fucking divide and conquer around this time you're thinking of command and conquer fuck you and i did play command and conquer and so fuck you. So during the chaotic breakup of the USSR, he ended up falling into the open position of first deputy minister of defense,

mostly due to the fact he was really loyal to one Boris Yeltsin, the chairman of the Presidium of the Soviet Union. Now, this is like during chaotic times, loyalty means a whole lot more than competence. And not only was he loyal, he was a loyal military man. A military man who was a hero. He had a title that said it. So that was way more important than him getting belligerently hammered and vomiting all over the place in the middle of meetings or whatever else he did.

So in 1991, there was an attempted coup by Kremlin hardliners, and the dying gasp to hold on to the USSR. This was during Glasnost, when the Soviet Union was attempting to become more free, in that they were going to loosen restrictions on press and everything else. And obviously, some people that were up top knew this was going to be an issue. When you're in a country of half a billion people or whatever the population was, and you know that everybody waits in line for clothes and bread and jeans. And potatoes.

Yeah, and whatever else, you're okay with it because everybody's got to do it. But then when the press is freed up and you find out the truth that you know some people don't actually have to do this you're gonna start getting pretty upset so they knew that and they wanted to stop it so they started a fucking coup so they the paratroopers that Gratchev was still in charge of were ordered to assault the Russian parliament building where Yeltsin was held up. Grachev may have been smart enough to know that he owed the guy his political position

or was drunk and missed his old drinking buddy because they were drinking and hunting buddies. Either way, he defected to Yeltsin's side. Now, without going into the complexities of the post-Soviet politics, I'll just explain it as simply as I possibly can. Yeltsin won. The coup leaders did not. And Yeltsin nearly got kicked out of office a couple years later again,

and Grachev just continually kept him in it. So even when the russia became the or when the soviet russia became so the russian federation free from the shackles of the ussr um you know the shackles they created for themselves because this is russia this isn't like armenia kyrgyzstan uzbekistan like they did this to themselves um russia had what was called the supreme soviet it was a it was their parliament it was congress it was you know whatever the legislating body of government was was called but yeltsin fucking hated them because he wouldn't let them do whatever they whatever he wanted he

was you know this since the 20s this is a country that its leader was effectively ruling by decree now that yeltsin was in charge, he kind of wanted to run it that way and couldn't. This again was around a time of really confusing with this whole Soviet era type shit. Yeah, it was a new country. It was a young country. They hadn't been in the Soviet Union since they resourced Russia.

So they didn't really know what a functioning parliament looked like. Eventually, Yeltsin got to the point where he decided to take his ball and go home and simply fired the fucking Supreme Soviet. In case you're wondering. Supreme Soviet. Yeah. In case you were wondering how the fuck this was legal, it wasn't. It was strictly prohibited in the Russian Constitution that the Supreme Soviet could not be dismissed by the president. This was combined with massive public unrest because they apparently knew the Constitution better than the president did.

We're making shit up as we go. We're confused. Let's do this shit. I mean, this is also combined with the free fall of the post-Soviet economy. They lost half of their GDP in a couple years. You know, that's nuts. That doesn't happen. People don't really talk about that, but people are hungry, they're poor, and they are pissed, and they saw it as Yeltsin's

fault. People took to the streets. This is the first time they're able to do that without getting fucking disappeared by KGB. And maybe they're a little pissed off that the president just fired half the goddamn government the supreme soviet instead of just walking away got together and decided that no in fact yeltsin's a dick and he's fired for violating the constitution uh yeltsin instead called up

his buddy gratchev and told him to make with the tanks. And Gratchiff made with the fucking tanks. He rolled out of his... Do the shit that you do. Yeah. He's like, you know what? Make those cannons sing. He rolled out of bed, probably surrounded by a graveyard of vodka bottles, not entirely sure where he was,

covered his own vomit and piss, and read off his guy's buddy's tanks. Before long, Gratchiff's soldiers shelled the shit out of the parliament building until his drinking buddy got his way. In the end, estimates put the number of dead around 2,000. The Supreme Soviet was dissolved

and Yeltsin instead created the state Duma, which still exists to this day. Grachev was now totally secure in his position as minister of defense. Not only did the president fucking own one he's pulled him out of the fire his ass on the fire twice now um but you know now things kind of leveled out

there wasn't coups every couple years and you know russia could get on its way trying to form something resembling a modern state they're just trying to form Russia, which is like forming every other country, but a lot more blood. Khrushchev now decided it's a great time. Cold War is over. Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore. Cold War is over. It's now time to launch a massive reformation of the Russian military. See, after the collapse of the Soviet army, which was mostly russian but that's the bill of the of the army the massive uh defense spending

was not all on russia's shoulders back in the day now it was and they could not afford it the fucking check on that one yeah they can't just like a azerbaijan armenia pay your fucking taxes yeah we get to fund these... That didn't happen anymore. Fucking time and dash on that shit. Yeah, the country was completely broke. They couldn't hope to really reform the army. Gradshift's plan was to slash the army in half, which is almost entirely made up

of conscripts, and replace them with contract soldiers in an attempt to professionalize the army. Much of the same thing the US didS. did decades before, they were just following their lead, you know. But because Russia was completely broke, it never happened. In fact, the defense ministry, led by Grachev, only received half the money it asked for in 1993.

Not even enough to pay the soldiers that it actually had. And conscripts didn't make a lot of money. Worse, it left no money at all for maintaining the vast amount of equipment its military had in its stores or train the fucking conscripts it was rumored at this time due to lack of money that soldiers didn't even receive basic training they don't need that shit yeah you don't even need a fire rifle uh just get sent out to your first duty station yeah and uh everybody just kind of wiped their hands figure it out i mean your guns it's yeah it's kind of like a hands. You'll figure it out. Finger guns.

It's kind of like a gap year. Grachev probably wasn't assuming he was about to be balls deep in a giant war that involved tens of thousands

of soldiers and he didn't think this would probably bite him in the ass but in general it's still a stupid idea. He probably didn't expect that all to happen

as the Soviet Union was following and they were trying to form their own mother Russia their government and whatever the fuck they were trying to form their own mother Russia, their government and whatever the fuck they were trying to do.

Well, another reason why the fucking military reformation failed is because the Russian military is being stripped mind for just about everything by everybody in any position of influence, including Grachev himself. Like selling shit off?

Everything. Like, shit off? Everything. Like, I would say everything that wasn't bolted down, but they sold those too. Countless small arms and vehicles, helicopters and jets were sold off to anybody with money. Fucking going on a business sale going on. And I never thought I would say this, but they actually did a pretty decent representation

of how this went down in the Nicolas Cage movie, Lord of War. The noted documentarian nicholas cage they sold everything and it wasn't necessarily 100 legal but it wasn't illegal either it was like this weird gray zone and there was no law in place to stop them so everything the generals all line their pockets as the military stripped down to skeleton parts. Yeah, the fire sale. By 1993, assets that were marked for sale

by the generals were in the amount of 200 trillion rubles, which was four times the amount of Russia's actual budget at the time for the military. And they pocketed this shit. None of this shit went back to the Ministry of Defense. None of this shit went back to the states. That's nuts.

Yeah, I mean, they pocketed it all. None of this shit went back to the Ministry of Defense. None of this shit went back to the state. Yeah, I mean, they pocketed it all. And it was all legal. The efforts that were put in place to hide it were half-assed at best. According to the president's decrees, the sales of the assets belonging to the Soviet armed forces stationed in the former East Germany were supposed to be sold for the construction of new houses to settle the officers, who are all returning back to Mother Russia from the construction of new houses to settle the officers

who are all returning back to Mother Russia from the former satellite state postings. Instead, this is where our buddy Grachev comes back into play. He was personally involved in the gathering of these funds. Instead, he bought himself two brand new Mercedes 500Ss without even trying to hide it. The press dubbed him Mercedes Pasha, which is an old Turkish word for aristocracy. I know what you're thinking. Two cars, even Mercedes? It isn't even that much of an embezzlement of government funds. I mean, shit, look at

the current EPA head, Scott Pruitt. That guy spends more money than two cars worth on desks for his office. Well, the two cars equaled the cost of housing for about 100,000 homeless Russian military officers at the time. What kind of Mercedes-Benz? 500. 500 S's. 500 S's? That's what they were called in the journalist expose. I can buy one. Right.

It's probably like 15 bucks now. So remember how I said the press... Those are like pieces of shit. Yeah, dude. Holy fuck. They're only luxury by 1993 Russia standards. Like, they only look good if you're smoking Marlboro Reds in a tracksuit. 100,000 fucking housing? Yeah. Holy

shit, those houses must have fucking sucked. I don't want to know what the Mercedes looked like as much as I want to know what the planned housing looked like. No, I want to know what the planned housing looked like. I think it was just built out of other shittier conscripts. Holy shit, these look like

shit. That's fucking Soviet luxury, bro. holy shit these look like they look like shit that's fucking soviet luxury bro he gave off as a gift like that's horse shit he gave one off as a gift and he kept the other one for himself like he wasn't even trying to hide it that's horse shit I wouldn't want that as a gift yeah like here's a gift like thanks but could you not

yeah I want to pay insurance on this it's not even fucking done fuck you dude so we gotta trade titles fuck we gotta go to the dmv god damn it no it's a whole day you remember how i said the press knew about gratchev's embezzling and gave him a nickname well gratchev knew the press knew about what he was doing because obviously he wasn't trying to hide it um so gratchev dispatched several officers under his command to take care of

these uppity journalists in a way that would make vladimir putin smile and i'm pretty sure when he smiles when vladimir putin actually cracks a smile you hear the screaming of children like this shit don't happen but it would happen here so one day the journalist a 27 year old individual named dimitri kolokov received a call at work urging him to go to the moscow train station and pick up a sad suitcase that was full of documents that would further incriminate russia's general staff and state duma like it is a juicy fucking pot sounds like a fucking career opener for him right it almost sounds like a fucking trap. Yes. Like Where's Admiral Ackbar?

Right. So Kolodov ran down to the station, picked the suitcase up and brought it back to his office. Ready to fucking, you know, fight the power. He opened it and the goddamn thing exploded like something out of an Acme cartoon. Spy versus spy.

Yeah. Every single person that was connected to this assassination has been connected to grad shop in some way um all of them have been involved in the paratrooper units back to the time when grad chef was in charge of them in afghanistan to include the colonel who's in charge of the intelligence brands of the paratroopers and if you're asking if anybody's ever since for us the answer is of course no they haven't this is russia they probably get promoted or something um one colonel did get arrested and nothing ever came of it right gratchoff for you know his benefit said that it was totally the mafia that blew this journalist up even though koldov never was even writing about the mafia. Give him a fucking break, dude.

Yeah. It wasn't him. Yeah. He was like, fuck it. I am too hungover to deal with this. It was the mafia. Meanwhile, in the Russian Federation as a whole, ethnic and religious tensions were at an all-time high.

The Soviets kept this under a tight grip. I mean, they had like hundreds of different ethnicities and tons of different religions all under their one iron curtain um that made up their massive empire but people knew what happened if you stuck your neck out behind the iron curtain like the mass deportations and engineered starvations had happened before like we're about to talk about the first chechen war here the dirty war um but it should be noted that decades before like within the same generation of chechens they had all been fucking forcefully deported because people the soviets were worried about chechnyan nationalism before then the ukrainians were forced on the holodomor, which is an engineered starvation famine that killed

tons of people. It was a horrible fucking genocide that most people don't even know about to this day. So people knew to stay in line. The Soviets had their ways to stand about dissident. But this is the Russian Federation we're talking about, and their weakness is no secret.

They were hardly able to keep their government operating, let alone bring the shambling corpse of the military to bear on anybody who threatened to break away. Most of these smaller republics did fall in line. They saw the benefit of being part of the Federation. One, however, did not. In 1993, the Chechen Republic of Ichkaria declared full independence from the Russian Federation,

with former Soviet Air Force General Dzhokhar Dudayev as its president. Almost immediately afterwards, a full-on Chechen Civil War broke out. Fucking Russia didn't seem as independent at all. They didn't even seem there. No, they never accepted their independence. Right, no. They always said,

no, you're part of us. I think the other smaller republics were smart enough to understand that, like, you know, there was the Oshetias and Ingushetias who wanted independence but just kind of stayed in the Federation. Right. Because they knew that Russia was never going to accept them breaking away. Exactly. And Chechnya has had its fair shares of invaders in the past.

Like most people that in the Caucasus Mountains. And the cool thing about the Caucasus Mountains, not really that cool, but whatever. I would argue that the people from the Caucasus Mountains are pretty awesome. You may be from the Caucasus Mountains. I'm clearly not biased

in these situations. Though, in comparison, the Armenians have not been as good as fighting off invaders, because we've just been conquered by everybody. fucking like, oh, Wermach, you guys want to fight?

Like, all right, cool, let's go. We'll join you. Yeah, you guys are pretty cool. You guys seem like a pretty good

fucking people to hang out with. But the Caucasians of the Caucasus Mountains have been stated as saying, like, that only Caucasians can beat Caucasians. And,

you know, Russia ended up proving them wrong on that in the second Chechen War. Right, which... But that's ten years from now. We don't go into that at all, because that's after, what, 2000? That was 2000. 2000, 2001? Yeah, something around there.

No, yeah, something around there. I don't remember. Yeah, fuck it. We'll have to look into that. 2000 time frame. It was the new millennium. Y2K. Yeah, and unfortunately for the Chechens, the Russians still thought it was the 1980s.

But, you know, afterwards, after Dudayev declared independence, a full-on Chechen Civil War broke out. Even though the vast majority of Chechens favored splitting with russia chechens had a deep independent streak among them um and the main reason why the civil war existed is the people fighting them weren't actually chechen um it quickly became obvious that russia was supplying arms training mercenaries and regulars to pro-russian chechens and they did this clandestine like yeah like some would call them the little green men from Crimea. It's almost like this is a thing they do on the fucking reg. Or that's still happening in the Donbass today in Ukraine.

And Russian clandestine-like shit is fucking not clandestine at all. Hey, people call it the Russian bear for a reason and not the Russian ninja. They're not good at this shit unless they're stabbing people in the calf with a fucking umbrella full of plutonium or ricin um so russia adamantly denied that anything to do with the violence in the region though they obviously didn't accept the region's attempt to break away. Like most Russian foreign entanglements, it had the nuance of a drunken bear. 20 Russian regulars were captured by Dudaev's men, along with 80 other Russian civilians who worked for the FSK, or the Federal Counterintelligence Agency. After pointing out that the criminal was the the kremlin was fist deep in their affairs

and still not winning mind you yeltsin has back against the wall you'd be fist deep and not fucking winning yeah apparently not what the fuck yeah because russia was definitely fist deep up in chechnya and they were that's true they were fighting back um but you know yeltsin has back against the wall yeltsin probably didn't want a war. No. He talked a big game. He talked, you know, how they need to fall back in line with the Federation. But the verbiage that was used in the war of, you know, forcing them back into constitutional law and rule, that was what Gratchev said. That was his idea.

This whole war was effectively his idea right um and his good friend yeltsin was totally i mean why wouldn't he trust him at this point gratchev had never done him dirty he only could trust him though um it was probably a good point to say that like maybe you should think more about this before committing a war against your own people. Not trust your fucking frat buddy that you drink with on a regular basis. Yeah, and even then, I mean, you have to realize that Chechens, while an ethnic minority, had been part of the Russian SFR through the entirety of the Soviet Union. Like, they were russians right but i wouldn't even say that ethnic minority because they're like as many mountains as there were in the fucking cauxas mountains were just as much much ethnicities and uh languages oh sure there's

chechens and ingushetians and oshetians all across the border there's a shit ton of like well all of them are minorities in comparison to the russian majority but i mean all of those minorities were a thing and they knew they knew that these especially the chechens won independence right because that's why they were forcibly deported in the first place um but gratchev began to poke and prod his president about a military solution to the Chechen problem. He told Yeltsin that he could, quote, retake Grozny with a single parachute regiment within a couple of hours of open warfare. Yeltsin, and it was probably his worst decision as president,

and that's saying something, believed him. On December 4th of 1994, the Russian Air Force began an indiscriminate carpet-bombing campaign of Chechnya. Khrushchev boasted that the invasion would be, quote, a bloodless blitzkrieg that wouldn't last past the 20th.

On the 11th of the same month, Russian forces launched a three-pronged attack towards the capital of Grozny. Their blitzkrieg. Yeah, and the Russian blitzkrieg is like apparently way slower and shittier because I feel like the German blitzkrieg of World War II would actually be better.

They're going through shitty mountains in the Caucasus. I still feel like the Wehrmacht of World War II would have done a better job than the Russian army of 1994. They would probably do the same shit. They'd be looking at each other side by side, fucking history, history, like, fuck you, we'll make it first, and keep going.

Not go fucking anywhere. I'm willing to bet Hitler's master race soldiers from fucking 70 goddamn years ago would be better trained. Blonde and blue-eyed, goddammit. I'm willing to bet they're better trained and equipped than the fucking dudes ever. Oh, yeah, they're better trained. I can believe that. They're better trained and equipped, even though these dudes hypoth in it. They're better trained and equipped even though these dudes

hypothetically all had AKs. Caucasus Mountains? No. Fucking no way. Last time I checked, the Wehrmacht took this area over in World War II without that much of an issue. Though most of them all wanted to join the Germans to kill the Russians, but still, that's a different argument entirely.

They weren't even trying. They were just like, eh, whatever. I don't take it. Now, Grachev probably should have known that the Russian military was a total shell of its former self. He had helped make it that way. The conscripts, many of whom had been drafted during the lean post-Soviet times,

almost to a man, had never even fired the rifle. They had not been any maneuver training, army-wide, for two years. Soviet times, almost to a man, had never even fired the rifle. There had not been any maneuver training, army-wide, for two years. And, you have to think, so they haven't done maneuver training in two years. A conscript's term of service is two years.

So that means a minority of the conscripts and this giant fucking army had actually done real live maneuver training in any sort of unit level. You're just there to get beat and not learn anything. No, you're there to serve the motherland, man. Apparently so. That means the only people in the entire military who had definitely taken part in these trainings were like senior leadership.

Even worse, Grachev should have known the strength of the enemy. Because the rebels had a few weapons, vehicles, and jets. And mountains. They loved their fucking mountains. More importantly than that is that they had weapons and materials that gratchev himself as minister of defense had fucking sold duty of yeah they had a fire sale yeah who wouldn't take that over 40 000 small arms hundreds of anti-tank weapons 50 tanks and a couple dozen armor vehicles along with a handful of aircraft were all sold to Chechnya right before independence.

So they knew on paper what they had. And they were still better armed. Who had the receipt for that? Fucking Gratiot did. Yeah, he was looking at this shit. No fucking way. He had a dacha all built up, built on fucking

dude I have's money. So the US Army actually runs into issues kind of like these all the time. This is my counterpoint. It's not a good one, but I felt like I had to make some kind of counterpoint here. During the peak of the Iraq and Afghan wars, the Army would take soldiers who hadn't done any actual field

craft or maneuver training in months or maybe even years, put them through a fast-paced pre-deployment cycle of training and marksmanship and everything else for and they'd be good to go in about six months right do that oh yeah they do that yeah but the russians wouldn't be so lucky the russian army would go from peacetime to full-on military invasion within two weeks plenty of time yeah they got this you got this bro most yeah do the shot of akio be all right. Most of the soldiers that went over the border into Chechnya were using old, hand-me-down

weapons, as Gratia Fitzel buffed the good ones. They'd be driving vehicles that hardly functioned and were decades old because they were the only ones worthless enough to not be bought. The soldiers are- They're also operator level, so- Yeah, that's operator level maintenance, so that's on them. Yeah, totally their fucking fault. The soldiers are mostly unpained, untrained,

and completely and totally demoralized. At the order to invade, some units just didn't go. Fuck. Holy shit. They just stayed at the border. Like, nah, bro. Fuck that, dude.

Well, the funny thing about that was there was was like and they knew about the invasion they knew they were coming for grozny because uh there were chechen women praying russian soldiers not to invade grozny everybody knew it'd be a bad idea everybody was like no they won't they're not that stupid. Soviet Doctrine of 1994 might as well have been Soviet Doctrine of 1984 and that was like old conventional warfare of you storm in and you take the capital, war's over. Right. And that might work when you're fighting

a uniformed military service that they weren't. They were fighting battle-hardened guerrilla fighters who were outfitted better than their standing army was we love the fucking mountains and they loved the chance to kill some russians after generations of oppression mountains are fucking cool too um so some units who didn't just refuse to move, just sabotaged their fucking equipment so they couldn't leave. What the fuck?

Deadline this shit now. Thousands of conscripts just ran off in the middle of the night so they didn't have to fight. That's fucking awesome. In one incident, Gratchoff's crack paratroopers, the dudes that he fawned over, were dropped behind enemy lines. They quickly realized that the radios didn't work and they cannot talk to anybody for support or anything and that they've effectively been abandoned they just walked up to the first chechen patrol and surrendered to them this is like the seals just saying fuck it and surrendering to isis that almost reminds me of the meme i told you about this with Chief Wiggum's son from The Simpsons going, I'm clandestine.

With it wearing a SEAL shirt with a trident on it. Not clandestine at all. So in comparison, the Chechen rebels were motivated and led by an intelligent corps of former Soviet military officers. Like, Dudaev himself was a general, and he wasn't the only one there was fucking dozens of them i mean when there's mass conscription from every sector of soviet life you're gonna end up training effectively everybody who could possibly end up putting up weapons against you right um in most cases they're better armed and trained than the russian counterparts they moved in small groups and were highly mobile. I mean, they knew how to stand up and fight because they were trained in the old Soviet doctrine,

but they knew how to fight old Soviet doctrine because they were trained in it. So they decided small, quick-moving attack groups like these same dudes probably fought in Afghanistan were the perfect way to defeat this army. probably fought in Afghanistan was the perfect way to defeat this army. They wreaked havoc on the Russian columns and left long trails of burned-out vehicles and dead soldiers behind them. In return, Grashev ordered

mass artillery barrages and bombings of every sign of life in an attempt to keep the Chechens at bay. It was like indiscriminate World War II type shit. It's like thousands of guns and missile batteries all firing at the same time it's pretty much all the russians knew how to do just fuck shit up and continue to fuck shit up i mean it was successful in beating the enemy back but it was a whole lot

more successful in killing tens of thousands of civilians it's hard not to be successful if you think that way yeah if you kill everybody. After a withstanding weeks of bombardment, the Chechens retreated to the capital of Grozny. The Russians, not wanting to rush into a city of angry dug-in enemy fighters, decided to

flatten it instead. They unleashed what has become the worst bombing Europe has seen since the destruction of Dresden during World War II. This is including rockets and artillery and carpet bombing, full-scale annihilation of an entire modern city. The Russians made several attempts to break into the capital, all of them ending in horrible bloody failure. In one attack, the Russian army managed to lose the entirety of the 131st Mykop Motor Rifle Brigade in a board attack on a train station.

Almost lost to a man. I mean, now, think of any military engagement that we have been in in our lives. If the U.S. Army lost an entire fucking brigade you think some changes might happen yes like when two dudes die commanders get fired no yeah no yeah for sure and yeah grouchef lost an entire brigade and this is a motor rifle brigade this is like they're supposed to be like the backbone of the entire soviet military and and is still the backbone of the russian federation military they're operating on the old motor rifles supported by tanks supported by close support helicopters who are also getting fucked up too right um you

know uh gratchev seeing the writing on the wall decided fuck it i don't need to change my tactics because they're still working. I mean, Russia is still slowly inching forward. They're just crawling over bodies of their own dead that get there. A slow pace. Yeah, the road is paved with their dead. He attacked over and over again. He was at one point quoted as saying, because he was asked, why are you sending motor rifle units in

supported by light infantry and not tanks? He said, quote, only incompetent commander would ever send tanks into the streets of Grozny. He was absolutely right in that. The streets were pretty close together, making maneuver difficult. The old Soviet block apartments were too tall.

The tanks can elevate up to engage enemies based on the roofs right um and most of these buildings had basements in them uh so they couldn't lower their guns to take them either this about pavel's house same thing yeah exact same shit except the whole city now not just one house yeah no not one house fucking a whole city of people who are trying to fuck you up because this city was still

had a shit ton of civilians and a shit ton of military personnel into it it's still heavily populated at the time and even though they've been bombing

and discriminating there's still large swaths of the city that have something standing that looks like buildings right but I mean

almost every military that has learned over the last 30 years, sending armor into a modern city is just a really good way to kill a lot of tankers. Yeah. So, Grachev was obviously too smart to do that. That was until New Year's Eve 1995. Grachev was celebrating his birthday in Moscow.

You know, Grachev's normal, like, baseline behavior was drunken asshole. Like, just sloshed all the time. Fucking rage. So you can only imagine how absolutely wasted he was getting on his birthday. In the midst of this party, I've done a lot of dumb things on my birthday. Like, I turned 30 on

Sunday. I'm probably not going to do anything stupid. Well, in comparison. I've done all sorts of dumb shit. I've vomited out of my moving car going down the highway I've gotten into bar fights you name it Grachev got one up on all of us

and one up on everybody probably in the history of ever he got trashed and decided to order a massive armored assault on Grozny but I don't know why anybody that would take that order would be like, yeah, dude, he's just really fucked up. Don't listen to really that.

They were just like, oh, yeah, take that for everything. I don't know. Like, there's not some, like, it's not like he had some phone where he just picked up and it was, like, linked to every fucking battalion. The fucking red phone, the black phone. Pick up the red phone, fucking attack. Do it. Yeah, like, somebody was dumb enough to think this was a good idea,

even though they knew he was fucked up. I mean, because, like, you know, it's a birthday party, so he's probably shit-faced at, like, 2 a. Yeah. Like somebody was dumb enough to think this was a good idea, even though they knew he was fucked up. I mean, cause like, you know, it's a birthday party. So he's probably shit face at like 2 AM. Um, but yeah,

under strict orders, the tanks and armored vehicles drove into the city at a parade formation. Any fucking parade formation. Yeah. What happened next is best described by a surviving russian officer who said quote the chechens just took out the first vehicle of the column and the last and the rest were trapped in between he also added uh then it was like a shooting gallery it was a slaughter but they looked good while doing it they They didn't, though.

Great formation. Lots of, I mean, I imagine their fur hats caught fire really easily. Most of the Spetsnaz, which is the Russian special forces, surrendered, just straight up dropped the weapons and surrendered to the Chechens. Fuck this. Quote, after wandering around hopelessly for three days without food, let alone any clear idea of what they were supposed to do, a Russian lieutenant colonel was quoted when he returned from Chechen captivity, said, quote,

The only order was to go forward without explanations as what they should do, where they should go, and what they should attack. Where the fuck is forward? Yeah. Russian soldiers were taken prisoner, did not even know why they were there and who they were fighting. It almost reminds me of the Forrest Gump scene where he's playing football

and they have to tell him when to stop. Yeah. And when to go forward. Like, run! They have to tell him when to stop when he hits the end zone. Yeah. Except there's just some asshole from the Kremlin holding up a sign that said forward. But nobody was there to hold up a sign that said stop. Or where the fuck forward goes. Yeah.

When one Russian soldier was asked by reporters what he was doing there, he didn't know who was fighting who. When more captured Russian soldiers were shown on TV by the Chechens, I wouldn't know who I was fighting with the Chechens. Shit ton of ethnicities in that. The mothers went to Grozny to negotiate the releases of their sons. These negotiations took place

in the center of the city without Russian government approval or assistance and while Russian artillery was landing all around them. Some of the prisoners were released on the promise they would never fight in Chechnya again. In the end, Grachev's birthday fuck-up would cost the lives of an estimated 5,000 soldiers and 200 tanks and armored vehicles. Which is really fucking interesting. This is in the fucking 90s. Right.

And apparently, according to the general staff of Russian Armed Forces, a little over 3,800 troops were killed throughout the whole Chechen War. The first Chechen War. Right. And I think it's the Center for Human Rights puts it at something close The first Chechen War. Right. And the real, like, I think it's the Center for Human Rights puts it at something close to

over 10,000. Right. Which is in fucking sane. And they get their numbers based on, you know, the union of soldiers' mothers

and other soldiers' mothers' groups within Russia, which are obviously more reliable in the state themselves because, I mean, they're the moms

of the soldiers like hey vladimir didn't fucking come back like in the chechen casualties can be estimated to reach up to a little over a hundred thousand which is an insane difference yeah a little over two years, two years of just straight fighting for what Russians didn't even know what the fuck they were fighting for. Didn't even know what the fuck they were doing there. They didn't have anything against the Chechens. Right.

And they were demoralized to begin with. Right. They didn't even know what the fuck they were doing. They were never given any training or orders. They never fired a rifle it was like if you graduated from basic training

like I graduated from basic training at Fort Knox and I got in a bus and then the next time the bus door opened I was in Iraq and I had no idea

how the fuck I got there like it's like some really shitty magician trick this is different this isn't Germany

so I know what you're thinking actually you're not thinking this because i don't know why you would but you know this wouldn't happen if gratchev would have got his way and reformed the army he actually did that contract soldier part he succeeded in that into some point um in a way it was hard to keep conscripts in the ranks for any long period of time once the war started. Any conscript that wasn't totally smooth-brained just ran for it or maimed themselves or went to college or did something to get out of service. And even then, there are still gaps you have to fill.

I mean, there's tens of thousands of people you have to put in this war. Kratchev's idea was for the contract soldiers and the model of the U.S. Army. They were known as the Contract Nikki. In order to entice people into enlisting into the Contract Nikki, they were paid a little bit better than conscripts, which is probably still not good. But they were also completely removed from the normal military chain of command.

They were put in their own units and had almost no oversight. This ended up turning them into a little bit more than roving death squads. They ignored rules, raped pretty much at will, burned down villages, got drunk, and went on quote hunts, which you can imagine what that means. They locked civilians up in basements and bolt live grenades down the stairs. They herded families into rooms and fired bursts of automatic weapons fire into them. They tortured at will and mutilated people for sport. And here's a quote from a detention camp soldier from the Chernokazov region. I'm sorry if I butchered that.

You fucked that up. I'm not sure if you know this, but bad Russian is a natural language that I speak. That's something we all speak. The soldier said, quote, Here people are literally massacred. You should hear their screams. Howls of strong men in whom everything that can be broken is being broken. What makes them strong?

Why is it strong? I imagine because they're supposed to be strong soldiers. I mean, generally people think of soldiers as at least something resembling a steady, strong, masculine person. They don't expect them to be screaming out and crying for their mothers in a basement in Chechnya. He said some are sodomized, others are forced to do it to one another. If there is hell, this is it. That's totally fucked. Yeah.

And this is what the contract NICU were doing. This isn't what the Chechens were fucked. Yeah. And this is what the contract Nikki were doing. This isn't what the Chechens were doing. Right. None of this got Grachev fired. Not a single goddamn bit of it. Apparently the bond that holds two drunks together in Russia is just too strong for the simple mass slaughter of your own people to break. It's a fucking frat boy fucking party.

That's all it was. I don't even know. This is beyond that because in every other situation I can think of in history where someone got to the level they're at just because who they are and who they know, they would have been fired by now. But he's still there. But the people were furious. This isn't World War IIi or the soviet war in

afghanistan where they could just crush outlets of popular anger i mean this is in newspapers this is on tv people are seeing like wait our kids aren't coming back and the popular anger was palpable um and russians now had something like a free press and shades of human rights. They could let Yeltsin know about how unhappy they are. And they definitely did. Soldiers' mothers began to voice their outrage at the waste of their children's lives. And that's when they started going to Grozny and doing their own negotiations to save their kids. I mean, that's nuts.

I mean, could you imagine, like, I don't know, fucking any, if I got captured, I can't see my mom flying the fucking can to her and trying to pick me up, you know? I don't think my mom would. Yeah.

She's already got four or five other kids, so she'll be good. We'll figure it out. Yeah. One won't be... Eh. I'd get more to replace her. So Yeltsin stood for re-election in 1996

and he hardly won and everybody knew why he hardly won it's because the war was going horrible and his minister of defense was a complete fucking drunken shithead who kept marching their kids to die in waves seeing the writing on the wall and the angry voices

of the soldiers' mothers Yeltsin finally shit-canned Grachev, and the war ended with a Russian defeat at the Kotz of Yurt Agreement shortly thereafter. If you're thinking that this is the end of Grachev, you'd be wrong. This motherfucker is coming back and back for more. He's got stamina. This guy's fucking slick. Grachev, like that drunken asshole friend that you had in high school,

had just kept tripping backwards into success. Only a year after being fired by Yeltsin did his buddy find him another job and appoint him as head of the State Arms Export Corporation. That sounds familiar. It's effectively little more than an official title for what he did to strip the military bearer of equipment. He was literally put in charge of the same state entity he had been embezzling from only a few years before. I mean, say what you will about Yeltsin.

I mean, his policies were shit. He killed, you know, half a million of his own people. Yeah, he let that happen. He let the oligarchs take control of of russia which led to putin but god damn he wasn't a good friend um he lasted 10 fucking years in that role before he was fired again in 2007 by vladimir putin yeah um this ended up being really the the the falling off point for Gratch. He finally started to slow down in 2010.

I mean, a life of hitting the bottle had left his liver looking something like he left Grosny, and he finally died in 2012. A shell of its former self. Yeah, full of corpses. He had never been seriously impacted or indicted for any of the murder, embezzlement, or incompetence that plagued his entire career, and instead died a hero of the Soviet Union in 2012. Somehow. Not even during a scandal in fucking 07, around that time, 08-07, with that fucking monopoly.

08-07 with that fucking monopoly you know and the craziest part of this whole thing is that there's not any revisionist history on this one except in the west like the Russians just man he's gone whatever move on

like I think it's maybe because they realized what happened to Kolodov and he's fucking dead but you know 1998 is when that colonel was arrested um for that um that assassination and nothing's come of it and I mean since then it's obvious that nothing's ever going to happen to him or his legacy is going to be tarnished or his hero of whatever is going to be revoked because the last russian assassin that got away with it when they killed alexander like likvin yanko in england ended up just getting promoted to the state fucking vision is history is um it isn't really a thing there they don't like see someone as a

giant piece of shit and then backtrack on it like even, even today, Stalin actually has, like, a favorable view in most Russians' eyes. He's from Georgia. Yeah. Or Georgia. Yeah, he's from the Republic of Georgia. His birth name was Yusef Zhugosvili. Right. Yeah, but, I mean, the Russian Man of Steel

wasn't Russian at all. Yeah. But you can tell how they swept most of this under the rug, even with some semblance of free press. And nuance isn't their thing. If you look at Ukraine how it is now, I'm not saying Russia's going to full-on send divisions over the border into Donbass and steamroll the Ukrainian army.

But, I mean, it's, it started the same way in Chechnya, you know? Right. Um, so if you don't have anything else, that's,

I guess that's the way we close out the podcast. Um, this is actually the, the longest podcast we've done somehow. Well, my whole thing about the whole assassin thing with Russia, the assassinations that they did. Right.

Their definition of assassinating and all that other shit is like some spy versus spy, some Acme type goofy shit. That's how I would see it

as like some some motherfucker just sleeps a dude, you know? Like they're not... I see some fucking garage shit happening, some behind the scenes.

Right. Like some cool 007 shit, not like... I know in the first Chechen War they had this high leader in the Chechen military or militia force, whichever one,

that they took out with two missiles. And I don't necessarily consider that assassination. Knowing that assassin... knowing that assassination technically means a murder of an important person in surprise attack for political or religious reasons. I mean, I guess technically it's an assassination, but it's not what I would picture. Yeah, exactly.

I see some, like I said, spy versus spy shit. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like how nowadays our assassination techniques are just drone strikes. And I feel like there's... We need to have some Assassin's Creed type shit, hidden blades happen. We have flying death robots that fire hellfire missiles

at people. I trust hidden blades and shit over that, because it's cool as fuck. I play a video game. I don't know. Our Black Ops people just kind of create secret prisons and torture people a lot instead.

I don't know. That's a different topic entirely. That's true. That can be a different topic. The Global War on Terrorism episode would just be like

100 parts long. It hasn't ended yet. So we're not going to get into it. So that's our episode um you can follow us on twitter uh at jcas99 and nickcasm1 you can follow the podcast at lions underscore bye and uh thanks for you know the positive reception everybody's having to my stupid historical facts that we post from time to time. There's a lot of pictures coming up because

unlike a lot of the things that we've covered, this war is recent. Everybody had a camera. There's tons of video footage. There's tons of pictures of the aftermath of Grozny. I'll make sure to post those as soon as I can on Monday when this

goes live. Like always. If you have any suggestions to us. I know some of you have. Leave them on Twitter. Send them in a DM. Yeah. Just let us know.

And we're trying to figure out a way. To get some. Guests on. Who are. Something. Like subject matter experts. Rather than two drunken assholes in my guest bedroom um i think that's sleepover yeah having a weird sleepover apparently um anyway see you

guys later have a good one