It wasn't easy for me to research and record this episode. Combing through the testimony of dozens of Russians who were violently purged, expropriated, raped, murdered, enslaved... It really hammers home just how terrible the Russian 90s were and how evil and disgusting Yeltsin's comprador prostitute regime was. The story of Russians in Chechnya after 1991 is just bleak and depressing with virtually no redeeming aspects at all. Redemption came in the shape of the Russian sword, but even the soldiers were eventually stabbed in the back and betrayed at Khasavyurt... It's not hard to understand why Putin rode into power easily on the promise to end Chechen terrorism & replace the plutocratic Yeltsin regime with something dignified.
Here's one of the many accounts of survivors who were lucky to escape. The story of refugee Nina Baranova:
It was in May 1993. Our neighbor Sakhrutdin barged into our apartment with a rifle. He brazenly walked through the rooms and said: "Leave this, leave this, and leave that. Take the rest. You have three days to pack." Arguing was pointless. We were far from the first to be kicked out like this, and more likely among the last.
The problems had started back in 1990, when the first “happy letters” appeared in mailboxes — anonymous threats demanding that we leave peacefully. By 1991, Russian girls began disappearing in broad daylight. Then Russian boys started being beaten on the streets, followed by outright murders. In 1992, they began evicting wealthier residents from their apartments. Then they moved on to the middle class. By 1993, life had become unbearable.
My son Dmitry was beaten in broad daylight by a group of Chechens. When he came home, he was a bloody, dirty mess. They had damaged his auditory nerve, leaving him deaf. The only thing keeping us there was the hope of selling our apartment. But no one wanted to buy it, not even for a pittance. The most common graffiti on the walls back then was: “Don’t buy apartments from Russians; they’ll be ours soon anyway.” Six months later, the most popular Chechen slogan became: “Russians, don’t leave; we need slaves.”
Thank God, we managed to escape in time. Three days after Sakhrutdin’s visit, we were already packing the container. We couldn’t understand why Sakhrutdin was watching the process so closely. Then I heard our Chechen neighbor, Khava, calling out: “Nina, come here for a moment, I need help.” If I hadn’t gone to her, I wouldn’t be alive today.
“See that bread truck?” Khava said to me. “You only have a few hours left to live. As soon as you leave the city, they’ll kill you and take your belongings.”
I immediately went to my sister, who had a Chechen acquaintance in the village of Pervomayskoye named Said. He had already joined Dudayev’s forces by then but hadn’t completely lost his conscience. Said and his men escorted us to the Ossetian border. The bread truck followed us the whole way. When Sakhrutdin and his team realized they wouldn’t get anything, they opened fire on the truck bed. For several years after that, we slept on bullet-riddled beds.
The “best” of the Chechens walking around with weapons would say, “Leave peacefully.” The worst didn’t say anything — they just killed, raped, or enslaved. About a third of the men in the republic roamed with weapons in hand. Another third silently supported them. The rest sympathized with us, mostly urban Chechens, but what could they do when even the elders sat on benches smiling and saying, “Let more Russians leave.”
