Decorated Soviet Army general who aligned himself with Yeltsin in the break-up of the USSR and rose to be Russian Defence Minister
Pavel Grachev was a senior Soviet army officer who became Russia’s Minister of Defence under President Boris Yeltsin. He came to prominence as an influential commander in the Soviet Union’s Afghan campaign. The later failure of the first Chechen campaign brought an end to his career.
Pavel Sergeyevich Grachev was born in 1948 in the village of Rvy in the Tula region, just south of Moscow, the son of a locksmith and a dairy farm worker. He joined the Soviet Army in 1965, graduating with honours from the Ryazan Higher Airborne Forces Command School in 1969, a qualified German-language interpreter and Airborne Troops platoon commander. After some command experience, he continued his training at the Frunze Military Academy, graduating in 1981. He served as commander with the Airborne Troops in the Baltic, but most notably as commander of the 103rd Guards Airborne Division in Afghanistan. He was honoured as a Hero of the Soviet Union in 1986 in recognition for his service and the minimal losses that were incurred by units under his command in combat in Afghanistan.
The Afghan campaign made Grachev’s reputation as a soldier, but it was his role in the 1991 coup attempt that brought him into the realm of politics and led ultimately to his appointment as Defence Minister.
When hardliners sought in August 1991 to resist Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms, which for them meant the collapse and dismemberment of the Soviet state that they had taken solemn oaths to serve and protect, the Defence Minister Dmitry Yazov, a Second World War veteran, ordered Grachev’s troops to be deployed in Moscow to protect strategically important sites.
Grachev obeyed the orders but, crucially, took no further action. When the coup attempt collapsed, he was seen as having declared his loyalty not to the new state, Russia, but to Boris Yeltsin. He rose quickly, becoming Defence Minister in 1992 after brief periods as chair of the RSFSR Defence and Security Committee and deputy defence minister.
When the 1993 constitutional crisis came, culminating in a dangerous stand-off between President Yeltsin and the Russian Parliament, Grachev ordered his troops to fire on the parliament building, the White House, despite months of holding out for balance and a neutral army. In so doing he decisively backed Yeltsin against his opponents, leaving himself open to the oftrepeated charge that he was more loyal to the president than to the country.
In Russia in the early 1990s great liberalisation went hand in hand with rampant corruption that spread throughout all the chief agencies of state. It was a chaotic, lawless time.
Foreign influence in many areas went unchecked. Separatists in Chechnya received funds, equipment and training from external powers. Gorbachev had sent in troops to quell separatism in the Baltic states. They failed. Yeltsin faced a serious separatist threat in the country’s south and ruled that the issue could be resolved only by force.
However, the army was weakened, like the other institutions of state. Warehouses and weapons stockpiles were poorly protected, and supplies found their way from Russian storage facilities to Chechen separatists even as military intelligence indicated that they were preparing to make a violent claim for independence.
The web of conflicting personal interests at the heart of power in Yeltsin’s Russia had a direct impact on the development of any strategy of government. There was little co-ordination between political and military initiatives, which had disastrous consequences for the Russian Army during the first Chechen campaign.
As casualties rose, Grachev increasingly became the target of criticism. He was widely represented as the brutal commander responsible for sending untrained, ill-equipped conscripts to the front line as cannon fodder. He felt he had been unfairly made the scapegoat for the disastrous campaign.
Amid much criticism, he retired as defence minister in 1996, after four years in office. He then served as chief military adviser to the general director of Rosvooruzhenie (now Rosoboronexport) until he retired in 2001.
He remained a controversial figure. Some praised him for taking a visionary approach to the Russian military-industrial complex — insisting on the need for privatisation, and for holding the army together at a time when every other institution of state had all but collapsed. Others viewed him solely through the prism of Yeltsin’s partisan political world, his success in Afghanistan dwarfed by his presiding over the bloodbath in the Caucasus.
Grachev died after being in hospital with acute high blood pressure. He is survived by his wife, Lyubov Alexeeva, and their two sons.
Pavel Sergeyevich Grachev, soldier and politician, was born on January 1, 1948. He died after a short illness on September 23, 2012, aged 64
'Бій відлунав. Жовто-сині знамена затріпотіли на станції знов'
