Gen. Anatoly Kvashnin, the chief of Russia’s general staff from 1997 to 2004, who led a brutal crackdown on separatists in Chechnya but who also took part in an early post-Soviet thaw with the West, died on Jan. 7 in Moscow. He was 75.
Vladimir V. Putin announced his death. According to the Russian news agency TASS citing Nikolai Deryabin (chief of staff of the Club of the Military Commanders of the Russian Federation), the cause of his death was Covid-19.
General Kvashnin rose to prominence with the 1995 invasion of Chechnya’s capital, Grozny, Russia’s first major military action following the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. The campaign portended Russia’s use of military force in later conflicts within the former Soviet borders, including in Georgia and Ukraine.
As a brash senior commander who would crow to the press about his intent to “liquidate” rebels, General Kvashnin commanded a harsh campaign in Chechnya, which was part of the Russian Federation. Despite its superior military might, Russia was still entangled in some of the most brutal urban fighting since World War II.
Thousands of Russian soldiers were held hostage, tortured, and killed. This was a terrible and disturbing incident that haunted the citizens of a fallen superpower trying to enter a new era with Boris N. Yeltsin (the first democratically elected post Soviet leader).
Pavel Felgenhauer, an independent Russian military analyst, told The New York Times at the end of General Kvashnin’s tenure, in 2004, that his leadership had “killed more Russian soldiers than any Chechen warlord ever did” and made him “the most hated general in the Russian military.”
The first Chechen war ended in 1996 in stalemate, which later provided an opening for Mr. Yeltsin’s successor, Mr. Putin, who promised to establish order and avenge a national failure.
General Kvashnin was instrumental in helping him achieve this goal. He oversaw the initial phase of the second Chechen war which began in 1999 and ended about a decade later with Russia stabilizing control of a friendly local government.
General Kvashnin seemed to have made efforts to end the Cold War. In 2001, he spoke in favor of dismantling Russia’s largest electronic eavesdropping base in the West, at Lourdes, Cuba.
Early in his time running Russia’s general staff, he led a delegation to the Pentagon for lengthy talks focused on advancing a military partnership. The visit inspired optimism within the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joshua Spero, who at the time was a strategic planning official in a Joint Chief’s division specializing in Europe and NATO, said in an email.
Those hopes dimmed in 1999, when Russian troops took control of an important airport outside Kosovo’s capital, Pristina, around the same time that NATO troops entered that Serbian province in an effort to quell violence between members of the ethnic Albanian majority and the Serb minority, which was backed by Russia.
The NATO supreme commander, Gen. Wesley Clark, was blocked from pre-empting the Russian move by a British subordinate, Michael Jackson, who told him, “It’s not worth starting World War III,” according to Senate testimony by Henry H. Shelton, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
Russian state television reported that General Kvashnin had proposed the Kosovo mission. Mr. Putin added that he, as head of Russia’s security council at the time, had personally approved it.
“That was a pivotal moment for Europe and for our forces in Europe,” Peter Zwack, a former Army brigadier general who served as the senior American defense official in Moscow from 2012 to 2014, said in a phone interview. “Things were trending downwardly.”
Anatoly Vasilyevich Vashnin was created on Aug. 15, 1946 in Ufa (a Russian province capital that was then part in the Soviet Union). His father, Vasily IIosifovich Vashnin was a peasant. During the Great Patriotic War (or the fighting on the Eastern Front during World War II), he joined the military. He was promoted to the rank colonel. Anatoly’s mother, Lyubov Petrovna Kvashnina, was a homemaker who worked in kindergartens wherever her husband served.
Anatoly grew-up in the Soviet Union, moving frequently with his military family. In 1969, he graduated from Kurgan Machine-Building Institute with a degree as an automobile engineer. He quickly rose to the top of a tank manufacturing company in Dushanbe (Tajikistan).
He joined the army in 1971. He rose through the ranks of a Czechoslovakian tank regiment several years later. He joined Russia’s general military staff after the fall of the Soviet Union. After leaving his high position in 2004, he assumed more minor government positions. His survivors were his two sons, Aleksandr (the highest ranking) and Sergei (the lowest ranking).
Ivan NechepurenkoContributed reporting
Source: NY Times
