This is not like the previous chapter. Please do not read this if you are having a bad day. If you have questions I'll be slightly later than usual as I need to take a minor break due to how depressing the research for this has been - it's nothing serious but it's not good to be constantly reading about this topic, specifically in this chapter's case about what the Republika Srpska army did in Bosnia and the Interahamwe did in Rwanda.
Screaming
[1]
Extract from ‘A Continent of Fire’ by James Melfi
Manga artist Kentaro Miura when asked about the inspiration for some of his most ghoulish scenery from his magnum opus ‘Berserk’ would cite the images and stories from the Russian Civil War. The ‘inspiring’ imagery would indeed be of perhaps the most horrific nature of any conflict in modern history. While Rwanda was certainly replete with atrocity, the fact that Russia was seen as a relatively developed and civilised country, of Tchaikovsky and Tolstoy, made the destruction of the centrepiece of Orthodox Civilisation and knowledge that it’s children committed it as horrifying as the land of Beethoven and Goethe creating Auschwitz. While something of a romantic narrative would emerge in the form of the FER/K, nothing could be less romantic about the situation west of the Urals. While the FEK had its ‘Jesus-face’ flag, Lebed had his ‘tiger’ flag borrowed from Siberian independence supporters, and the Kaliningrad government held the traditional tricolour while the Nevzorov government maintained the imperial tricolour, the Stalingrad government was nothing less than the old Red Flag.
Following their amnesty by the NSF in 1994, those who had staged the August 1991 Coup attempt had finally returned to government under Anpilov as the Right Bloc of the NSF did not want to dilute their power. Vladimir Kryuchkov (a Stalingrad native) returned to his former role as head of the rechristened KGB, with Viktor Alksnis transferred into becoming the head of Army Group North against the Petrograd government. Marshall Dmitry Yazov, tried in absentia for the massacre of protestors in Lithuania in 1991, was appointed head of Army Group East to battle the Uralic Alliance. Anatoly Kulikov (already infamous for presiding over the Samashki and Vedono massacres) would ultimately complete Soviet Russia’s military line up, by leading Army Group South in the Caucasus, but Yazov’s appointment had its own blowback. The blowback was that General Igor Rodionov sided with Petrograd, as he had a personal vendetta against Yazov for forcing him to take the fall for the massacre of protestors in Tblisi in 1991 - his experience would be badly needed by Petrograd who were mainly relying on paramilitary leaders to shore up their initial forces. Gennady Yanayev, however, would not find as easy a fate as his co-conspirators, as his becoming acting President during the 1991 Coup made Anpilov paranoid of attempts to seize power. As a result, the KGB discreetly murdered him in June 1995, despite sincere loyalty. Valentin Pavlov would flee north to Petrograd, knowing his involvement with the private sector would make him a target in the south, lending his voice to Petrograd to save his life given he was certain to receive jail if he fled abroad.
The Stalingrad government was generally expected to crush the Petrograd government easily, given that it had the larger forces, more nukes, the Black Sea Fleet, the very nominal endorsement of the NSF east of the Urals, more foreign support and a more experienced collection of generals and political leaders. Despite that, many problems remained, notably the fact they were entombed on three sides by advancing forces. The Circassians were marching to the Black Sea, the Bashkirs had surrounded Orenburg and Petrograd had seized the lion’s share of Moscow. While they technically received foreign support, the most they received were a trickle of volunteers from Ukraine (often fleeing arrest by Ukrainian authorities for being NSF supporters) or occasional shipments over the Caspian from Iran. But the biggest problem by far was Anpilov, who not only sought to create a cult of personality around himself but to rebuild one around Stalin. As they were headquartered in the recently renamed Stalingrad, Stalin’s face appeared lovingly in public for the first time since the 1950s. The KGB was empowered in ways Kryuchkov could only have dreamed of during the Gorbachev era, as those who thought they were allowed a private joke at the regime’s expense as in olden days were quickly removed of the notion at their impromptu execution sites. An atmosphere of terror unseen since the late 1930s pervaded the city - it was estimated that by the end of the conflict, almost one half of politicians in Stalingrad had been shot by their own side, each replacement more sycophantic than the last.
The two main follies of the regime would strike all communities with similar harshness, the first being Anpilov’s economic policy. Regarding the 1930s industrialisation as a necessary blood sacrifice for prosperity, Anpilov returned to economic Stalinism as the effective solution to the crisis of production, in particular grain acquisition to feed the troops. It should be noted this virtually ignored the lessons of the First Civil War, with the return of War Communism and the squelching of the last final businesses mad enough to still exist. The entirely inevitable result would be famines on par with the worst of the anarchy in Siberia, and even Kim’s North Korea. Refugees would primarily use Ukraine and Kazakhstan as their point of departure, fueling much to the region’s tensions, being sent practically on top of the shoulders of the overwhelmed Kaliningrad population. This was exacerbated by the second issue, conscription. The Reds had taken to forced conscription of entire villages, cleared out of their male populations to join the army. Sometimes they forcibly conscripted pensioners, sometimes they forcibly conscripted children, with some mothers begged the army to accept their prepubescent boys to join the army as there was a better chance they would survive the famine. Child soldiers were a frequent war crime in the Soviet Russian regime, often used to meet conscription quotas as the recruiters knew they would be against a firing squad if they didn’t meet the quota. But naturally, this created problems of supply, with many of the villages perishing in the winter as their male population was stolen. While all were equally worthless in Soviet Russia, it seems some were more worthless than others. Ethnic minorities that were conscripted, instead of being sent north where they would have some level of motivation, were often stuck fighting their own ethnic group in the Urals and Caucasus, further sinking motivation. Jews were perhaps the most shat upon group in the whole Red Army, forcibly conscripted into units that invariably considered them born-turncoats. Jews that had stayed in Russia were typically amongst the most loyal and patriotic, but no Jew escaped the serial torture that followed them around the encampments, demoted to figurative (and even sometimes literal) footstools beneath even the lowliest private, a communal punching bag that still failed to stop the violence the units committed against each other.
The best demonstration of this came in the Battle of Orenburg in early January. The Tatar and Bashkir troops were outnumbered, despite being the ones on the attack, but the Communist forces themselves were a barely coherent rabble often conscripted into units without even ammunition or sometimes even weapons. Some had their girlfriend’s tampons hanging from their wounds since bandages weren’t around. Others were caught trying to shoot while the safety was still on, and often committed friendly fire on accident, and sometimes on purpose to find a space to flee and surrender. Anpilov reiterated the ‘Not One Step Back’ order and began to create a network of commissars to enforce his ever more ruthless orders. Many of the commissars ended up being directly from the criminal class and would use their power to rob and abuse the soldiers under their command. On February 15th, Orenburg (the unofficial ‘Asiatic capital’ of Russia) completely fell to Uralic forces, opening up a railway link into the Uralic breakaway republics that further relieved pressure on them but further cemented the division along the Urals. Still, the Anpilov government refused to recognise the breakaway states, forcing the Uralic Alliance to set their sights further still. They concluded the time had come to march to the Volga and clear the eastern bank along the Kazakh border. But to do that, they had one significant city in the way: Samara.
Extract from 'One Soldier’s War in Russia' by Arkady Babchenko
The ten of us are stuck in the basement of the apartment in the south side of Moscow. We hadn’t even met each other until ten minutes ago, all of us having only been conscripted into the Red Army at gunpoint a week ago, our training now somehow complete. The shells from the north side of the river are so loud that you’ve already accepted death as a certainty and a mercy. Like me, several have already had a tooth blasted from their mouth from the ritual army beatings that have only started. Where is our food coming from? Who knows. Ammo? Who knows. Water? Who knows. We look around as if trying to find weak links in the team to exploit. There is no friendship, no comradery, only hatred for everything and everyone in this rotten city we can’t escape from. The lieutenant we’re waiting on orders from is too drunk to retain consciousness, so we’re stuck here until further notice, slowly becoming experts in deducing how loud the incoming explosion is going to be based on the decibels of the shell whistle. At the bottom of the stairwell is the only certainty in the room, because we all know he is the first person we’d all kill at the first opportunity: the commissar, polishing his gun since its worth more to him than any of us. We hate him, he knows we hate him, and he does not hate us because he needn’t waste his time in hating us: we’ll all be dead soon anyway. Despite this, he seems to take enjoyment in the idea of ruling over us. Every KGB agent in this festering shithole seems to want to play with the conscripts like children play with dolls when the generals aren’t looking.
We’re mostly relieved he doesn’t seem to be the not infrequent type of commissar who uses his power to rape some of the younger conscripts, or sometimes pimp them out to commanders for extra money. Many children were recruited specifically for this purpose - sometimes mothers even encourage it as a way for their boys to avoid the fighting and ensure food. Instead the person who is more likely to put a bullet in us than any of the Nashis is this miserable dwarf who walks with one arm lifeless like he’s had a stroke. For someone who will inevitably kill at least some of the people standing around me, including very likely me, the main aura that he exudes is not ruthlessness or cruelty, but astonishing averageness. He was the man who was six seats over from you in the cinema, the fifty-eighth man you walked past on the street on a busy Saturday, the one ahead of you in the line for the grocery store. He was visibly no one - a borderline artificial person. We will probably die to this bastion of complete averageness, whom we are more afraid of than the Nashis. This is what real death looks like - not screaming across a battlefield as the mines and shells explode around you, or hand to hand combat with the enemy, it’s getting shot in the back of the head at nine at night with one minute of preparation by a guy who has accomplished as little as you with a life as meaningless as you and who will die as meaninglessly as you. Five minutes after robbing everything you ever had and ever will, he will forget he even did it, and your family will not find even a hair of you to mourn over, if they survive either.
Finally, as if he’s detected the fear and hatred against him, he raises a firm eye against all of us.
“Your weapons will arrive shortly. You will join the counteroffensive to retake Moscow. The city will be liberated from the Fascists with the next week.”
We wonder whether he thinks we’re stupid enough to believe him or if he’s trying to weed out those stupid enough to openly question him. We all say nothing, which only makes him more talkative.
“Does everyone here speak Russian?”
No one knows whether it’s safer to open their mouths or not. A few nod.
“Then you’re Russians. Russians defending your homeland from foreign meddling and Fascist insurrection. You don’t have to believe in Comrade Anpilov to believe that. The fact is I don’t really believe in Communism myself. I can be honest with you as you can be honest with me. Don’t consider me the ‘Commissar’, just think of me as ‘Vladimir’.”
We would laugh if we knew we wouldn’t be shot. He can be honest because he has the gun, because his word is more important than all ten of ours put together. If we had lived long enough to report what he said the only difference would be that our families would be included in the firing squad’s target practice.
“I chose to support this government. Why? Because I’m a KGB man - once a KGB man, always a KGB man. You have your reasons too.”
Of course we have our reasons. We’d be killed if we didn’t, perhaps killed if we do and in the case of the two Tatars in our group, will plead to be killed immediately if we fall into the hands of the Nashis.
“Do you think you have it bad? Having to defend Moscow from Barkashov’s thugs? How do you think I feel, when I saw this country at its peak? When a Russian officer like me could fly to work in Dresden as easily as he could fly to his Black Sea Dacha? When the Americans, British and the French had to sit together just to equal us? Now seeing St. Basil’s being nothing more than a pile of rubble and memories, the Kremlin a smouldering hole in the ground? You were kids when the Union fell. You have no idea what the pain is of seeing the most glorious empire in the history of the world reduced to a shambling corpse at war with itself. An empire that was subverted and destroyed from within. And even if you get your legs blown off, your intestines pulled from your gut, or your brains leaking from your skull, all that pain will never hurt quite like knowing what we lost.”
What makes someone say this? Even as teenagers we knew that life in the Soviet Union was garbage compared to the West. How could the adults think it was a good idea? Because he was in Germany? Because he was in the KGB and never had to stand eight hours in a line for bread? Because he never had to wait ten years for a car? Because he never saw Afghanistan veterans shooting up heroin in the alleys? Because he was allowed to go abroad when we couldn’t? I could look in his eyes. This wasn’t a man at war with himself. This wasn’t a man broken by nostalgia. He was the calmest person in the room, and the calmest person I met in my whole cursed week that consisted of my entire ‘training’ experience. He wasn’t in Moscow at all, but in Dresden. He was back at home, back when he was someone and not one of the anonymous taxi drivers of the Yeltsin years. Pointing a gun and ordering people around. And us sad fucks were going to be his dollset.
Extract from ‘The Unstoppable Tragedy: The Second Russian Civil War’ by Peter Hodges
The Circassian Revival was one of the more stage-managed productions of the entire conflict. The story was too good to be true, literally. The myth of a nation rising practically from the coffin to wreak vengeance on the descendents of their killers like a gypsy curse owed more to Sölƶa-Ġala (formerly Grozny) and Kyiv (formerly Kiev) than anyone else. For the Icherkerian Federation, Dudayev had already grown weary of Islamic influence in his country and wanted to create an ethnic ally rather than a religious one. The Ossetians, being Christians, made reluctant allies with Dudayev as a result. But it was Kyiv that ended up contributing perhaps more than any other group. The Crimean annexation had caused an explosion in nationalist groups, with many wanting to invade Crimea in the chaos of the Civil War, despite Anpilov saying that a Ukrainian invasion would be considered worthy of a nuclear strike. Many in the Ukrainian army warned that any attempt to seize the Crimea would be an utter disaster. President Lukianenko, still wanting to release the pressure valve of tension in his country that had exploded due to the number of Russian refugees, would consult with Ichkeria and found a solution both could arrive on. They agreed to send Ukrainian nationalist militias to fight alongside the ‘Circassians’ army, which in reality was already heavily augmented by Ossettians, Inguish and Chechens. To further reduce the culpability of Kyiv, it was agreed that many of the oligarchs would pay up front for the costs of the militias while getting recompensed on the backend in the form of generous state contracts, the most prolific likely being ‘The Chocolate Warlord’ Petro Poroshenko. While this was useful in getting some menacing people out of Ukraine, it also served another purpose, slightly more hair-brained. The hope was that the Circassian forces could break through to the Black Sea, then march northwards before ultimately stopping near Kerch. The hope was that the Russian side of the Kerch Strait could cut off Crimea - potentially liberating the land by means of starving out the defenders. Lukianenko insisted on the possibility despite the misgivings of Ukrainian militias.
At the same time, the number of returning Circassians eager to pick up guns and defend their reborn nation was still significantly higher than expected. The Turks were by far the largest contingent, but others had flown from subsidised flights from as far away as Australia on only the most tangential ancestry claims. Unlike the Red Army, most of these troops would be trained behind the lines for months before they were sent to the front line, leaving the Caucasian natives and militias to do most of the fighting. It was in the South where Red Army troops would be at their most motivated, given that their opponents held both followers of Stepen Bandera and Dudayev, two figures of immense hatred among Russians in particular and not exclusively. On February 27th, ‘Circassian’ forces would reach the Black Sea and surround Sochi. Fearing intervention from the Black Sea Fleet, the Circassian armies instead spun southwards towards the small port of Adler near the Georgian/Abkhazian border, taking the mostly abandoned town without a struggle. This now opened a new way to bring in supplies, primarily from Turkey. This would also subtly mark the final end of the Soviet Caucasian borders, as the last Russian controlled territory that touched the Georgian/Azerbaijani borders was now gone. It is suggested that this event was a significant accelerator of the genocidal events that were already happening in Petrograd.
The last piece of the Caucasian puzzle was Kalmykia, which was the only majority Buddhist area in Europe. Dudayev strongly supported ‘liberating’ the region whether it wanted to or not. But Dagestan would prove an issue. The power sharing between the ethnic groups and Islamists was causing conflict, as the Islamists refused anything to do with Kalmykia except conquest in the name of Islam. Dudayev had a lot of influence but almost none with the Islamists, including his own country’s. Shamil Baayev, one of the most sadistic of the Chechen commanders was rapidly growing a significant power base within the country and increasingly had the ear of the Khadyrov clan. He likewise was angered by Dudayev’s refusal to ‘reconquer’ everything up to Rostov, even going as far as to say that Ukraine was illegitimate because it was once under Islamic rule and consequently an ‘occupied’ part of the Islamic world. While Dudayev had been fooled into believing that the Dagestanis could be won over, the reality was that at a ground level the Islamists were already securing their positions. Dagestan’s porous borders had been thrown open wider than ever before, as Jihadis across the world made their home their in the name of crushing an atheist government murdering Muslims. One of those thousands of Jihadis moving to Dagestan would be the leader of Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden.
Extract from 'Ultimate Evil: Petrograd's Genocide' by Adrian Brown
On January 3rd 1995, the entire adult male Caucasian and Central Asian population of Petrograd found themselves roused from their beds by the local police, army, and naturally Nashis and found themselves ordered to report to the centre of the city. That evening, as they all stood in the city centre, many sincerely believed they would be mowed down with machine guns right there, while optimists hoped they would be bartered like slaves to the West. Instead, a significantly worse fate than either was about to begin. They were told that due to fears of insubordination and dual allegiances, they would now be the initial members of the ‘Honorary Russian’ battalion. Their reward would be Russian citizenship if they could survive the war and the ‘National Republic of the Russians’ won, with citizenship immediately granted to their families if they should fall on duty. If they ran away or joined the enemy, their families would be considered state enemies and dealt with accordingly. Some were reportedly relieved, believing that they would ensure their families could live a safe life in Russia that many feared would be lost with the commencement of the Civil War. Few could conceive of what was going to happen.
The purpose of the Honorary Russian Battalions were not to fight, but to be killed.
The battalions would not be under army control, but Nashi control. They would not be given training, clothes, or even weapons, because that was not the purpose of the Honorary Russian Battalions. Their main task would be to walk over minefields, act as bait for Communist artillery to be shelled and reveal their positions and to be tortured for the amusement of Petrograd troops. The Nashis, the most avowedly racist part of the Petrograd government outside Barkashov’s exterminationist RNU, treated their forced conscripts in a way that one of the very few survivors described as ‘unprecedented in the history of the animal kingdom. We were not treated like dogs, because they are often treated lovingly. We were not treated like insects, because one can see an insect without wanting to crush it. We were not treated like rodents, because none actively seek to kill those that do not bother them. We were treated like how the demons would torture the damned in hell. We begged for hell. We begged for the hell of any religion over another moment of this agony. But suicide would only mean the death of your family and children. Those without either invariably killed themselves in the first few days. The worst pairings were the Azerbaijanis and Armenians, because the Nashis wanted to demonstrate their superiority over both of them. If they had an Armenian and Azerbaijani together they would force them to fellate or sodomize each other in front of the battalion as an act of public humiliation, invariably crying in shame while the Nashis laughed. It was as if to say, ‘you fought for all those years to see who was better, but now let us remind you that you are both worthless compared to us and all your wars between each other meant as much to us as a war between ants’. Because of how quickly the battalion was killed, we would literally stop off at villages and forcibly recruit every non-Slav and often the local prisons regardless of ethnicity. With the coming of the criminals, the camps became a nightly scene of murder for infringements no one could keep up with - no one stole because we were all certain we were going to die. The cruellest among us would even kill other members of the battalion to make it look like a suicide, ensuring the killing of their wives and children back home.”
One of the dead from the Honorary Russian Battalion was Ruslan Khasbulatov, who just over a year before was the Chairman of Russia, who had stood tall to President Yeltsin in the struggle for Moscow. He died anonymously after stepping on a mine on February 17th 1995 near Smolensk. At the same time, some foreign volunteers actually became some of the overseers of the battalions, notably American Timothy McVeigh, who would infamously write in his diary, “I was at first a little confused at how these Caucasians were not white, but then I remembered they were like Jews, so they only looked like they were white.” Thus Russians who were born in Russia, spoke Russian, knew nothing but Russia, some of whom had served Russia, knew the songs of Russia, saw the extent of Russia, who breathed the Russian air and were born from Russian soil … were beaten, shot and tortured by people born outside of Russia, who couldn’t speak Russian, knew nothing of Russia, who hadn’t served Russia, knew not the songs of Russia, saw nothing of Russia, who neither breasted Russia’s air not was born from its soil … because the former was not ‘truly’ Russian. It was a system as monstrous as any that could be conceived.
But unfortunately, the lives of the women and children were not much better. They had been shipped out of Petrograd and all the major cities into concentration camps in the cleared territories. When boys came of age (15) they would be sent to the Honorary Russian Battalions to be killed. The fate of the women was to suffer the same fate as the women of Bosnia, only on an industrial scale. The Petrograd government had an often contradictory view of race, but it seems that purebloods in particular were seen as the enemy while a mixed Slav-Caucasian/Central Asian person would be Russian if the influence of those communities perished and they were resettled in a Russian environment. While this meant no 100% extermination as in the Holocaust, it would lead to industrialised rape being used as a method of war. Women of child-bearing age in the camps were raped by multiple guards for the purpose of rearing ethnically Slavic children. Those who attempted to abort the resulting pregnancies were shot - some legitimate miscarriages resulted in the women being executed. Captured non-Slavic women were sent to these camps from miles around for these purposes. It is estimated that by the end of the war 100,000 women had been sent to the camps and were systematically raped. One survivor of the camps would recall, “You woke up in the morning to screams, you had your breakfast to screams, your lunch to screams, you screamed every time you were raped that day, and you tried to ignore the screams as you went to bed. Everyone screamed. There was not a single time you didn’t hear somebody scream.” Some victims desperately tried to get black eyes for no other reason than the vain hope they would get less attention. Perhaps the most horrifying thing done at some of the camps was to women who were caught trying to escape. Copying a technique from the Rwandan Genocide, camp commanders would often send the woman who tried to flee to be raped by an AIDS-infected prison inmate. The woman would then die in extreme agony over the coming weeks and months as she was similarly infected, perishing in the appalling conditions of the camps. The only good thing that came from such unimaginable atrocity was that the eventual convictions in connection to the Genocide Years would be the first in history to consider rape in a genocidal context. [2]
The atrocities committed by Nationalist forces during the Second Russian Civil War are consequently generally considered the worst of any of the parties during the conflict, even before they reached their horrifying climax at the end of the war. It therefore shouldn’t have been a surprise when on March 4th 1995, that they would be the ones who unleashed a new brand of horror into the world. With the Reds having built up significant forces in the region, and after confirming which way the wind was blowing, the Fascists shocked the world by shelling the Obninsk Nuclear Power Plant.
[1] Forgive me, this was meant to be the audio recording of the Well to Hell Hoax. But firstly it was impossible to find a version that played cleanly, and secondly it unearthed a lot of primal fear in me that made it hard to do this chapter. I'll explain below.
[2] Unfortunately, almost everything I wrote is a direct copy of what the Bosnian Serb armies did to Bozniak women, including the construction of camps precisely for the purpose. The Rwandan Genodide ‘rape squads’ were also horrifyingly real and used to extract a slow death out of the victim. Just another of the things I've learned in creating this TL that I regret knowing.
