Did a keyword search on Anatol Lieven's, "Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power, " full text available via netlibrary.com which the SFPL makes available to patrons (if your public or university library doesn't I'll be happy to "loan" my barcode to fellow lbo'sters) pg. 108 >... Galina Starovoitova in February 1996 that there were ‘about 50,000 killed, 250,000 homeless, and 500,000 refugees’ as a result of the Chechen War is as suspiciously rounded a set of figures as one could encounter anywhere.
On the basis of my own investigations in several of the main hospitals at the time (in Urus Martan, Stary Atagi, Shali and Achkoi Martan, as well as in Grozny), and on the usual military assumption of two or three wounded for every person killed, the absolute maximum for civilians killed in the period to the end of January 1995 would be 5,000. The number in the mass and individual graves in Grozny’s central cemetery, as I counted them on 25 May 1995, was 737, with 75 more newly buried at the Karpinsky cemetery outside town. I cannot be absolutely sure of the number in the mass graves, because some of the bodies were lying on top of each other and some were in pieces or had disintegrated. None the less, even making allowance for this, the figure would not have been more than 900.
Of course, the full figure would be much higher, because of the Chechen rule of burying people in their ancestral villages, if at all possible; but I visited the cemeteries in a number of towns and villages in May 1995, and while I found a great many new graves, I did not find a figure which if extended to the whole of Chechnya could add up to, 25,000, or even a third of that number. (For what it is worth, given the source, in September 1995 the head of the Russian-backed Provisional Government, Salambek Khadjiev, gave the number of civilians killed to that date as between 6,000 and 7,000.)4
In January 1997, after the end of the war, Memorial (the organisation founded to recall the crimes and victims of the Soviet era) estimated that 4,379 Russian troops in all had been killed, with 703 missing (partly being held by the Chechens, partly killed) and 705 deserted.
Of course, by the end of the war, after incidents like the killings in Samashki, the bombardment of many towns and villages, and new battles in Grozny and Gudermes, the number of civilian dead might well have exceeded 20,000 – but nothing like the ‘hundred thousand’ mentioned by Lebed and others. If the latter figure had been correct, it would have suggested that more than a third of the entire population of Chechnya had been killed or wounded, which was manifestly not the case. This is not intended to minimise the extent of the Yeltsin administration’s crimes, but a journalist should after all try to be accurate, and not use suspect evidence, even in support of a good cause. <SNIP>
I have many times seen the 100,000 killed in the Chechen Wars of the 90's in the Guardian, NY Times, WaPo...I'll look further in sources like HRW reports. Michael Pugliese
Michael Pugliese