All Captured on Camera: The Last Shots of the Perm OMON

Published: May 14, 2002 (Issue # 768)

For The St. Petersburg Times Eight of the 10 service personnel captured by Chechen rebels after an attach on March 29, 2000, near Dzhanei-Vedeno.

On March 29, 2000, an OMON detachment serving in Chechnya was ambushed by rebel forces, who killed 42 of the 49 soldiers in the column. Now, photos and video footage seen by The St. Petersburg Times shed light on the human tragedy that lies behind the statistics. By Nabi Abdullaev.

BEREZNIKI, Perm Region - When he left for his first mission in Chechnya in February 2000, Sergei Udachin, a 37-year-old OMON officer, took along a cheap Kodak camera.

Before he was killed near the village of Dzhanei-Vedeno in one of the most painful episodes of the military campaign in Chechnya, Udachin had used up about half a roll of film.

He had someone take snapshots of him and his comrades: around a table celebrating a birthday, posing on their bunks in a Chechen kindergarten, standing with their weapons outside their Vedeno headquarters.

The rest of the roll was shot by a Chechen rebel who picked the camera off of Udachin's body. He used it to document troops the rebels had killed and taken prisoner in their attack.

Udachin's family and fellow OMON officers in Berezniki, a polluted industrial town in the north Urals, were to see the photographs only two years later. They said the camaraderie between the men, so visible in the early photographs, was what led them to Chechnya and what still keeps the town's OMON officers going back in spite of the horrors of the war.

Surrounded by birch woods, Berezniki continues to nurse its wounds from March 29, 2000, when 23 of its 101 OMON officers were killed in the attack near Dzhanei-Vedeno.

The rebels, commanded by Abu-Quteiba, a warlord of Arab origin, also killed 19 others: three OMON officers and nine regular police officers from Perm city, six army conscripts and one police officer from Vedeno.

Only seven men from a column of 49 survived to tell the tale. The rebels killed 31 men on the spot, and one wounded OMON officer was later found dead under a nearby bridge. The rebels took 10 men prisoner, later offering to trade them for Colonel Yury Budanov, who was in military custody on charges of murdering a young Chechen woman. The offer was turned down, and the mutilated bodies of the prisoners were either found near the battle site or bought from locals.

"That day a column led by Mayor Valentin Simonov left from Vedeno, where we were based, to the village of Tsentoroi to conduct a mopping-up operation there," recalled Colonel Sergei Gaba, the head of the Perm city OMON, who commanded the 100-member combined team of the Perm region's Interior Ministry forces on its 18th mission to Chechnya.

"It was around 9 a.m. when, part way into the trip, one truck's radiator overheated and the column came to a halt," said Gaba, 40, a stocky man with a crew cut. "The commander then decided to search a sheepfold that stood nearby."

Gaba has a video taken by another OMON officer in the ill-fated column with a desire to record the team's mission. The video, which Gaba played in his Perm office last month, shows how the battle that day began.

On the video, a moustached Simonov cautiously enters the hut, made of plywood and shingles. Suddenly, the door is shut and the camera operator, OMON officer Sergei Sobyanin, shouts: "Dmitrich [Simonov's patronymic], what's there?"

Simonov's voice is audible from inside the hut: "Drop the guns and we will not fight with you." He is interrupted by a burst of fire. Sobyanin drops the camera into the grass and for several minutes only the din of shooting and obscenities in Russian are heard.

"Usually, an attack on a column lasts no more than 15 minutes - after which there is nothing left of the column," Gaba said after turning off the video. "Perm officers fought for six hours." Only after six hours, at 4 p.m., did he lose radio contact with his men, he said.

Fifteen minutes after the fighting began, Gaba, who had stayed in Vedeno that morning, left with another column to come to their assistance, but it never made it.

"As the road entered a gorge, the rebels set fire to the first of our six trucks and attempted to blow up the last one to block any escape," recalled Gaba, who was in the last truck and was shell-shocked. "We had to retreat."

Gaba said he believes that if the first column had passed by the sheepfold there would have been no attack. But once the fighting started, rebels who were hiding in nearby forests joined in and encircled the column.

"According to our later intelligence reports, the rebels had planned to capture Vedeno - an ancient capital of Ichkeria [Chechnya] and the hometown of rebel leader Shamil Basayev," Gaba said. "Having drawn the fire on themselves, OMON officers, at the cost of their own lives, averted hundreds of deaths in Vedeno, as federal troops and aviation were moved there and the rebel gangs were dispersed."

Gaba's squad, together with army troops, managed to get to the battlefield only on the afternoon of March 31, two days after the fighting.

"It was a frightful sight, something so unreal that I still cannot grasp it fully. Two days before I had seen these dead men, most of them in their twenties, alive and cheerful," Gaba said. Many of the bodies had ears, fingers and noses cut off, he said.

Collecting the bodies took two days because officers had to go through a special procedure to avoid booby-traps set by the rebels under the corpses.

"When the first booby-trap went off behind my back and pieces of human flesh hit my back, I thought 'Oh my God, is another one of my men being killed?' But it was a corpse torn by a mine," Gaba recalled. From then on, they tied a rope to each body and dragged it for several meters to make sure it was not mined, he said. His men also recovered the dropped video camera.

The day after the firefight, six survivors who managed to break through rebel positions met up with federal troops. The next day, a Berezniki OMON officer was picked up by the military in the woods with bullet wounds tohis legs. He survived, but lost one leg.

The worst fate awaited the captured officers. The rebels tied their wrists and ankles and cut their throats, Gaba said.

"I repeatedly warned my men: Facing captivity, spare the last bullet or hand-grenade for yourself because if you are seized, your death will be more terrible - OMON officers cannot expect any mercy from rebels," the commander said bitterly. "The only explanation for what happened, which I can accept, is that, in the heat of the battle, the servicemen had spent all their ammunition or were shell-shocked when seized."

Eight of the prisoners are shown in one frame on the roll of film, which was offered to The St. Petersburg Times in late April by a man who identified himself as Maxim Borov and who said that he had bought it in Chechnya for $1,000.

The eight captive men, some with bandages and apparently wounded, are loaded up with several assault rifles with the cartridge clips detached. They appear to have been made to stop for the photograph while being marched through the woods. OMON officers recognized four of their fellow officers among them. The others were three regular police officers from Perm and one military conscript.

Gaba does not believe they lived long. The first body was recovered about a week after the firefight.

"A police officer from Perm, Alexander Kistanov, was brought to us first, by the locals, on April 6. His neck was cut from behind," Gaba said, tapping at one of the men in the photograph of the captives. "I have never seen anything like this, but the Chechens told me it was a kind of execution used by the Arabs."

Late on April 30, Easter Day, he was told at a checkpoint about a fresh burial place not far from the village of Dargo. Eight bodies were found.

"It was raining heavily and getting dark when we began digging them out. Yes, these were our men, decapitated and their wrists tied with rope," Gaba said. "They had been dead long before, and the rebels placing their ultimatum to exchange them for Budanov were apparently bluffing." Up until the bodies of the captives were found, the rebels continued to offer to trade the officers for Budanov.

All the bodies of those who had been killed in the firefight had been recovered by then, but Gaba's men searched for several more days before retrieving the body of the 10th captive.

On the roll of film, which had 24 frames, the first 14 photographs were shot by Udachin, although some did not come out. The 15th frame was of two dead officers, shot in daylight. The 16th and 17th frames were missing, perhaps because they showed Chechens who took part in the attack. The next two frames were of the captives, followed by two blank frames. The final three frames showed dead bodies, photographed at night with a flash.

Last June, a Dagestani court found four men guilty of participating in the attack on the Perm OMON column and handed down sentences ranging from 14 to 21 years in prison. All four were Dagestanis and followers of Wahhabism, a stern brand of Islam preached by the most irreconcilable of the rebels resisting federal control in Chechnya.

Alexander Garres, 25, was among the seven survivors. Half a year ago, when his daughter was born, he left the Berezniki OMON and joined the guard service of the local police force.

"I don't want to talk about that fight because too many opinions are circulating about why I stayed alive when the others were killed," he said bluntly at the very beginning of an interview. His hands, face and upper chest, visible through his unbuttoned shirt, are covered with little reddish scars.

His uneasiness melted as he scrutinized the group portrait of himself with his late comrades and friends. Garres, wearing a striped shirt, is visible in profile behind Udachin, who is holding up a glass.

"The picture was shot on March 19, 10 days before we went to Tsentoroi. That day our convoy returned from Mozdok with provisions, and the boys brought some alcohol," Garres said. "It was somebody's birthday and we celebrated it in our quarters in the Vedeno kindergarten."

It was his second mission to Chechnya, and he made three more after that one. "Going to Chechnya is like an addiction," he said. "It is pure adrenaline in your veins and even now I want to be there with the boys," he said.

Forty Berezniki OMON officers - including four of the town's six Vedeno survivors - and seven regular police officers from the town were sent on their 24th mission to Chechnya in March 2002. Two weeks ago, four of them were flown home dead - their truck had hit a mine near Shali.

Even after such painful experiences and losing many friends, Perm and Berezniki OMON officers - who, unlike those in the military, can say "no" at any time - keep doing their three-month stints in Chechnya and long for them during the safe rest periods at home.

Behind the bravado and their frequent use of the resonant term "adrenaline," what seems to drive the OMON officers is their camaraderie.

Leonid Shcherbakov, a burly sergeant from the Perm OMON, has done six missions in Chechnya. "The worst thing I have ever seen in my life was the sight of my friend blown to pieces by a mine in Grozny," said Shcherbakov, who has a finger-wide pink-and-violet scar across his forehead. "I go there because I might have a chance to save someone else among my friends."

"It is a very strange sense of consistency that we all feel in Chechnya," recalled another Perm OMON officer, Alexei Korchevoi. "When we are there we don't even need to talk to each other. Everybody suddenly understands everything and does what he is expected by all to do."

Commanders have similar feelings. "Despite my family's displeasure, I long for Chechnya," Gaba said. "Not that I want to shoot a bit or need additional adrenaline - I can get it all here in Perm. I long for the human relations that develop there between OMON officers."

Gaba said the officers do not risk their lives for material benefit. For serving in Chechnya, they earn about $300 a month, he said.

They also are not motivated by a desire to do their civic duty. "Here we used to believe that we were safeguarding the constitutional order in Chechnya, but there what we are often occupied with is figuring out how to help the whole team return home safe and sound," Gaba said.

Andrei Korobeinikov, the head of the Berezniki OMON squad, said this is because of the way the war is being waged.

"Sometimes we are just thrown into an open field and get no clear orders for weeks, and all we do is guard ourselves," he said bitterly. "In other instances, OMON, who are trained to deal with special situations - prisoners' riots, release of hostages, the rounding up of dangerous criminals - are deployed like regular troops in the woods and fields."

For those who go to Chechnya, their brothers-in-arms often become dearer to them than their real families.

"The OMON is a disease," Gaba said. "When families begin pressing my officers to quit, more often than not they opt for the OMON and divorce."

There is nothing unnatural in this, said Nina Safonova, a psychologist with the Perm OMON squad.

"The boys trust their lives to their mates in Chechnya and their psyches are tuned for maximum closeness, like that which only the rare family can boast of," she said. "They are family. How can you betray your family?"

In August 1999, in a rare case of a breakdown in the combat brotherhood, 12 officers from the squad left their fellow officers in western Dagestan - which had been seized by Islamic insurgents led by Shamil Basayev and Khattab - and returned to Perm.

"They found themselves in a vacuum here, nobody wanted to talk to them," recalled Safonova. "Most of them then begged me to help them return to Dagestan, but I couldn't. In half a year they all had left the OMON."

Nine OMON officers left the Berezniki squad after the Vedeno tragedy, but even they are not allowed to forget Chechnya.

"They come to the cemetery, where our deceased are buried, and meet their parents, who ask them whether they want to return to Chechnya and take revenge on the Chechens," said Berezniki OMON chief Korobeinikov.

Sergei Prokopov, the Berezniki OMON officer who survived but lost one leg, asked the regional Interior authorities to bend the rules and allow him to remain in the OMON. They agreed, and he now serves as an aide to the duty officer. In the group photo from Vedeno, he is seated behind the man holding the guitar.

The town of Berezniki is mainly an assemblage of crumbling five-story concrete apartment buildings, whose inhabitants work at a giant potassium extracting plant UralKalii. The nearest university is located in Perm, some 200 kilometers away, and there are only two vocational schools in the town with a population of 300,000. Although former President Boris Yeltsin graduated from secondary school in Berezniki, young men today have few opportunities, and service in the police and OMON apparently provides them with a sense of purpose.

"Our wives want to hang themselves, incapable of accepting our devotion to the service," said a police officer in Berezniki, who asked not to be identified and said he had made six missions to Chechnya and Dagestan. "We don't care. Our fellow officers are those that are relevant."

Udachin, the owner of the camera, had joined the OMON a month before being sent to Chechnya.

"I cried for several days after Sergei told me that he was going to Chechnya, but he didn't listen to me," recalled Nina Udachina, his widow. "But he said he was not any better or worse than his fellows who were sent to Chechnya.

"I didn't know what had happened to him until his aunt called us from Moscow on April 1 to say that she had seen his name on NTV on a list of the deceased OMON officers," Udachina said in a flat voice. "I told her it was a bad joke for April Fool's Day, but then I felt it was the truth."

In addition to his wife, Udachin is survived by a 14-year-old daughter.

The wife of Valery Muntyan - who is holding the guitar in the group photo - said she knew as soon as she heard about the tragedy near Dzhanei-Vedeno.

"On March 29, in the late-night news broadcast on NTV, they reported about the column having been rounded up," Yulia Muntyan said, her frail hands embracing her shoulders. "I needed no confirmation about Valera; I knew he had died from that very same moment."

It was his second mission. Leaving on his first one, he told his wife that he had to go because the others were going, she said.

"The second time I protested fiercely, I even went to the hospital with Shurka, our son, but Valera went to Chechnya anyway," she said.

A day before his death, Muntyan wrote a letter to his family, which was received two days after his funeral on April 4. It came in a self-made envelope sealed on all sides with scotch tape.

"Hello, my gnomes," Yulia Muntyan said in re-reading it, her eyes watery with tears. "I am fine. It is a very beautiful place and there are no signs of rebels. ... Remember, Yulcha, Shurka, I love you very, very much. Forgive me for forgetting to tell you this."

"He was my best friend and I taught him how to play the guitar on that mission," said Garres, looking at the photo. "He couldn't play at all and tortured us through the nights with his strum-thrum."

Next to Muntyan in the picture, smiling in the lower left corner, is Mikhail Lomakin, who also was killed in the attack. He is survived by a wife and a daughter. It was his second mission to Chechnya.

"I cried and kept telling him: once you have managed to return home alive, don't enter the river for a second time," recalled his mother, Tatyana Lomakina. "He went anyway, saying he couldn't break away from his friends.

"I was so hurt by him going to Chechnya for a second time that I didn't go to see him off, and now I feel so bad because of it."

Lomakina, 48, who worked as a street cleaner for many years, lives in a rundown neighborhood, the furniture in her apartment heavily worn. New apartments and financial compensation - 250,000 rubles ($8,000) for each family member - went only to the wives and children of the deceased. Their parents were entitled only to a small pension of some 1,500 rubles ($50) per month.

"His daughter kept asking us where her father is, but she has stopped doing it," Lomakina said. "She now knows where her papa's house is [in the cemetery]."

To the bitter displeasure of the relatives of the OMON officers killed in Chechnya, Berezniki citizens call the corner of the town cemetery where local servicemen are buried the Chechen cemetery.

Paved with gray concrete tiles and brightly lit by the sun, the memorial looks well cared for - fresh flowers lay beneath gray marble shoulder-high obelisks and the aisles between them are swept clean. The memorial is fenced on three sides and a vast, clear field lies behind it, a clear reminder that the death toll is far from being complete. Two fresh graves of those who died in Shali recently began a new row of tombs.

Marat Shaikhraziyev, a 35-year-old lieutenant captured by the rebels on March 29, 2000, was buried next to a long wooden table placed near the memorial.

Shaikhraziyev - second from the right in the photograph of the captive officers - was the last of the captives whose body was found.

"An official from the Dargo village administration came to me at the beginning of May and said that the local citizens were ready to sell us Marat's body for $1,000," Gaba recalled. "We were ready to go with him when our reconnaissance officer told us that the rebels had prepared an ambush for us at the place where the exchange should take place.

"I told the Chechen official that he was luring us out to be killed and that if he didn't want problems from us he would deliver Marat to Vedeno himself."

Two days later, on Victory Day on May 9, the man brought Shaikrasiyev's corpse to Vedeno in an open truck.

"When I climbed into it and recognized Marat in what was left of him, I felt enormous relief as if a load had been lifted from my head," Gaba. "I knew that I had to bring back home all my officers, dead or alive."