Читать книгу Black Earth: A journey through Russia after the fall - Andrew Meier - Страница 23

WE WERE, AT LONG LAST, on the outskirts of Aldy, an ancient village of overgrown fruit trees and low-slung tin roofs on the southern edge of Grozny, the Chechen capital, and Issa was singing, “Moi gorod Groooozny, ya po tebe skuchaaayu … no ya k tebe vernuuus, moi gorod Grozny moi.”

He was an imposing figure, just over six feet, his chest and shoulders so broad he appeared taller. Issa liked to keep his silvering hair shaved on the sides of his head and at the back of his neck. The cut lent him the stern air of a military man or a Soviet bureaucrat of stature, an image, as was no doubt the intent, to intimidate at the checkpoints. More often silent, Issa broke into song when the air around him grew too quiet. Now, just as the roadblock, the last one before Aldy, rose into view, Issa was singing at the top of his lungs.

“Moi gorod Groooozny,” he wailed. “My city, the city of Grozny, oh, how I miss you, but I shall return to you …”

There were four of us in the rattling Soviet Army jeep, known endearingly as a UAZik, pronounced wahzik, in the common parlance. Lord knows what image we projected to the well-muscled, sunburned, and deeply suspicious Russian soldiers at the checkpoints. Sometimes they were drunk. Nearly always they were scared. In Chechnya, I’d learned, checkpoints were the measure of one’s day. People did not ask, “How far it is?” but “How many checkpoints are there?” Each day we crossed at least a dozen.

On this sweltering morning in July, we had already passed seventeen. The posts were the center of activity amid the ruins of the city. Conscripts maintained the constant vigil, checking the cars and their passengers, while their officers, hands on radios, sat in shaded huts off the road. But this post was nearly empty, and the OMON officer who stopped us, a pit bull from Irkutsk, was not in a good mood. His arms and neck glowed with the burned pink skin of a new arrival. He wore wraparound sunglasses and a bandanna over his shaved head. Tattoos, the proud emblems of Russian soldiers and prisoners, covered his biceps. “Slava” (“glory”) adorned the right one. It could be a name or a desire. He wore no shirt, only a green vest fitted with grenades, a knife, and magazine clips to feed the Kalashnikov he held firmly in both hands. His fingers seemed soldered to it.

We may have looked legit, but we were a fraud. Issa ostensibly was a ranking member of the wartime administration in Chechnya, the Russians’ desperate attempt at governance in the restive republic of Muslims, however lapsed, Sovietized, and secularized. He had the documents to prove it, but the man who signed them had since been fired. Issa knew the life span of his documents was limited. At any checkpoint his “client,” as he had taken to calling me, could be pulled from the jeep, detained, interrogated, and packed off on the next flight to Moscow.

At fifty-one, Issa boasted a résumé that revealed the successful climb of a Chechen apparatchik. Born in Central Asian exile, in Kyrgyzstan, five years after Stalin had deported the Chechens in 1944, he had graduated from the Grozny Oil Institute in 1971. For twenty-one years he worked at Grozneft, the Chechen arm of the Soviet Oil and Gas Ministry. He spent the last Soviet years, until Yeltsin clambored onto the tank in 1991, in western Siberia, overseeing the drilling of oil wells in Tyumen. He spoke a smattering of French, a bit of Arabic, and a dozen words in English – all learned, he liked to tease, during stints in Iraq and Syria.

As the Soviet Union collapsed, life went sour fast. Djokhar Dudayev – the Soviet Air Force general who was to lead the stand against Moscow – returned to Grozny, and the fever for independence seized the capital. Issa, then a director of one of Chechnya’s biggest chemical plants, took up arms against the insurgents. In the fall of 1993, more than a year before Yeltsin first sent troops into Chechnya, with Moscow’s backing Issa and his fellow partisans rallied around a former Soviet petrochemicals minister and staged a pathetic attempt to overthrow Dudayev.¹

He was careful not to dispense details, but the scars were hard to hide. His right forearm had a golf ball-size hole, remnants of a bullet taken on the opposition’s line north of Grozny in September 1993. The bullet had pierced his arm and lodged in his left shoulder. A few months later Dudayev’s freedom fighters got him again. Kalashnikov fire had ripped his stomach, intestine, and lungs, leaving a horrific gnarl of tissue in the center of his body. He’d moved his family-a wife, two boys, and a girl – to Moscow. But he wanted to be clear: He never wanted to fight. “We never loved the Russians,” he said. “We just hated that corrupt little mafiya shit.” He was speaking of Dudayev, the fallen independence leader, the man many Chechens, much younger and more devout, now called the founding martyr of the separatist Islamic state, the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, as Dudayev had ordered his native land rechristened.²

In front of me, behind the wheel, sat Yura. Projecting a genuine sweetness, he was a good-looking kid with blue-green eyes and blond hair that his mother cut short each week with a straight razor. He had thin cheeks, covered with freckles and shaded by the beginnings of a beard. Just twenty-two, he was lucky to have made it this far. He belonged to one of the world’s most unfortunate species; he was an ethnic Russian born in Chechnya. “Our Mowgli,” Issa had jibed, equating Yura with Kipling’s jungle boy. Everyone laughed. There was no need to explain. Mowgli was raised by wolves. The Chechens, centuries ago, had made the wolf their mascot, the embodiment of their struggle.

The last of the crew, bouncing beside me in the back seat of the car, was Shvedov. It was a last name – few ever learned his first – that meant “the Swede.” There was nothing, however, Swedish about him. He had a tanned bald head and a scruffy dirty brown beard and mustache. He carried an ID from the magazine the Motherland, but his paid vocation was what is known in the field as a fixer. For decades he earned a living, or something approximating it, by getting reporters in and out of places they had no business being in. Usually genial and often hilarious, he could be brilliant. But Shvedov’s greatest attribute was that he did not drink. I had known him for years but never traveled with him. After only three days I discovered my own heretofore unknown homicidal urges coming on strong. Somehow I had missed Shvedov’s worst sin: He talked without pause. (When he did not talk, he clacked his upper dentures incessantly on a set of lower teeth blackened by a lifetime of unfiltered Russian tobacco.) A colleague who traveled with him often had offered a tip: “Keep a cigarette in his mouth.” But even smoking, Shvedov talked.

THE SIBERIAN PIT BULL barked at Yura. “Turn off the car,” he instructed. Issa politely tried to ply his documents, but the soldier would have none of it. “Forget your papers, old man,” he shouted. Shvedov, seeing the worst coming, proffered his press card from the Motherland. The OMON officer from Irkutsk had never heard of the honored Soviet monthly, which Shvedov insisted still existed, even though its readership could no longer afford to subscribe. “Stay in the car,” the officer yelled at the insistent bald man in front of him, before turning his sights on me.

“Get out,” he then commanded me.

One thing I’d learned about checkpoints long ago was it was best not to get out – ever. By now we had been stopped so often a routine had formed. A soldier would approach, profanities would rain, we would offer documents, another soldier would lean closer, we would wait, and then, the formalities exhausted, we would be waved through. Silence, I had learned, was the best policy. But this fellow wanted me out of the UAZik. He yelled again. He wanted to frisk the car, search its innards, rummage our bags. I tried to demur. I offered to help.

Undeterred, he opened the door and, with his Kalashnikov, nudged me aside. He lifted the seats, opened the metal canisters underneath, and, maintaining his silence, rifled our bags. When he was done, he grunted and jumped from the UAZik. Yura sat frozen until Issa ordered him, through his teeth, to turn the key, turn the goddamned key. As we moved on, I watched the soldier retreat to his roadside squalor, half a tent strung to a tree and a broken chair posted in the hot sun. With his back to us, he flicked his left hand sharply through the air, as if to swat an insect. We were beneath him.

We drove on, numb to everything but the sun, the dust, the bumps. Issa had stopped singing. Only the roar of the helicopters overhead accompanied us, and then, suddenly, as we turned off the road, the silence returned. We had entered a village without discernible life. No cars, no people. The first trees were tall, bare stumps, their branches shorn long ago. Then yards, all untended, their green veils grown too thick or too thin. Everywhere the branches, heavy with fruit, hung low. The season had come, but no one was picking. Everywhere there was only the weight of the still air. We had arrived.

I had marked Aldy, this Chechen village, on the map of Chechnya I had bought on a Moscow street corner months earlier. Aldy was the destination I’d set myself and shared with no one when I began the journey to the south. Something horrific, unspeakable, had happened here five months before. On a cold Saturday in midwinter, Russian forces had committed one of the bloodiest of the Chechnya massacres in this village. No one will ever know the true body count, but in Aldy on February 5, 2000, Russian soldiers had summarily executed at least sixty civilians.

A half circle of a dozen Chechen men, some lean and strong, others gray and bent over, huddled in a caucus as we drove in. Yura parked the UAZik across the road from them. They did not move from the lonely shade. One man, young, fit, and prominently armed, gripped the Kalashnikov on his shoulder. He wore full camouflage and tiny sunglasses. He could have been on either side, a fighter loyal to the rebels or a Chechen police officer in the Russians’ employ. Issa didn’t like the look of the sunglasses.

I got out, alone, and walked toward the men. One of the older men was separating leaves from a thin branch in his hands. As I approached, the young Chechen stepped forward. In his hands was the AK-47, shiny and new. Strapped across his chest was a leather bandolier, bulging with clips, grenades, and a pair of wooden-handled knives. A century and a half earlier Alexandre Dumas père had noted the Chechens’ love of weaponry during a romantic romp across the Caucasus in 1858, a time when the Chechens struggled against the tsar. “All these mountain fighters are fanatically brave,” wrote the creator of The Three Musketeers, “and whatever money they acquire is spent on weapons. A Chechen … may be literally in rags, but his sword, dagger and gun are of the finest quality.”³

I told the armed man that I was a journalist, an American. I’d come to talk to people who were here the day “they” came. We did not shake hands, but he nodded and shifted the rifle from his hands to his shoulder. “Walk with me,” he said. The sunglasses, their gold frame catching the sun, covered his eyes. Slowly we crossed the dirt road and headed away from the jeep, away from my guides, away from the Chechen men standing against the wall of metal gates and fences.

Oddly, a calm enveloped me. I kept walking, afraid to lose pace. Three options formed in my mind. This fellow is taking you around the corner, just out of sight of your companions, where you’ll be summarily executed; or he’s intent on kidnapping you, leading you to a house nearby to be sold on down the road from there; or he’s bringing you to see someone – an elder? – who will listen to your best introduction and then either bless your presence in the village or send you away.

I had come to Aldy prepared. By March an amateur video, forty-six minutes long, made by the villagers had surfaced in Moscow. It featured corpses and widows. I had interviewed the lucky ones; the survivors who’d made it out. I had studied the reports, detailed and methodical, of the human rights activists. But I wanted to learn more than the extent of the massacre. I wanted to understand the motivation behind the horror. Aldy was not, as an American diplomat, a man of high rank and expertise in Russia, had tried to convince me, “just another case of Russian heavy-handedness.” It was a conspicuous illustration, in miniature, of Russia’s military onslaught in Chechnya.

The young Chechen led me on. But even before we reached the gate of the house, a wave of relief hit, and my shoulders settled. I knew where we were going. I had memorized a hand-drawn map of Aldy’s long streets. We were calling on the man the fortunate ones had told me to see first, Shamkhan, the village mullah.