I am very interested in the Chechen wars, and how a tiny republic was able to take on the heir of the USSR and win (at least in the beginning).
Sources like this:
Say that more tanks were destroyed trying to take the capital, Grozny, than during the battle of Berlin.
Is there any truth to this claim?
Also, what is the best estimate for how many Chechens and Russians died in the first war?
I have seen on the high end: 150,000 Chechens (out of a population of 800,000) and 20,000 Russians.
On the low end: 40,000 - 60,000 Chechens, and about 4,000 - 5,000 Russians.
Any help would be appreciated.
The best guesses that I've seen for losses in the Battle for Grozny suggest something like 400 armored vehicles were lost by the Russians. This includes both tanks and armored personnel carriers.
On the other hand, the Soviets lost just short of 2000 tanks and SPGs/tank destroyers in the Battle for Berlin.
So while it's a great story, and the Chechens did indeed kick the Russians in the teeth in Grozny, at least to begin with, they never came close to killing as many tanks as the Germans did in the streets of Berlin.
I recently co-authored a book of statistical and descriptive information about civil wars over the last two centuries. We estimated 4000 Russian battle-deaths and 6000 Chechen battle-deaths in the First Chechen War, which is consistent with data from the Correlates of War Project. The source cited for the estimate is Clodfelter's Warfare and Armed Conflicts: A Statistical Reference to Casualty and Other Figures, 1500-2000, published in 2002.
Note that the term "battle-death" refers only to combatants who died (from all causes in the theater of operations), not to civilians. We estimate that 60,000 Chechen civilians died, in addition to the 6000 combatants.