The Weight of Imagination: Rapes and the Legend of Women Snipers in Chechnya

Abstract

This account from an alcoholic veteran describing the capture of Grozny in 2000 is fiction: very little testimony exists on the rapes committed by Russian troops since 1999 in Chechnya. If sexual violence occurred in the “filtration camps”, at control posts, in military barracks and during village raids, their scale is difficult to assess, if only because of the victims’ silence. The lack of evidence makes it even more striking that several sources of different types (testimony from victims and soldiers, literary texts, press articles) trace a link between rapes and the legend of women snipers in Chechnya.

From overhead, our helicopters sprayed the area with anti-tank missiles, down below we were firing all our mortars, and then all at once, this tousled bitch shot out into the street, stinking of cellars and burning. So we caught her round her thighs: “So who are you?” Any fool would have known that this was a sniper. As for her, she began to scream: according to her, her twelve-year-old daughter was supposed to be in the cellar and her legs, that’s what she said, were torn off [...] So this kid of 12, she was a sniper too! All these people, all of them, they are all savages. With them, soon as they can walk, everyone shoots [...] Well let her die! That’s what I thought. She carried bandages to these wretched boeviki and she was telling us rubbish: “Seda” she shouted, “Seda! My little girl!” and we led her up to the sixth floor, we satisfied her female lust, for the last time .. what a joke .. and then we strapped F-1 grenades round her and threw her out of the window. She didn’t even have time to cry out: level with the second floor, all the grenades exploded. She was torn apart. Not a bit reached the ground.²