Читать книгу Black Earth: A journey through Russia after the fall - Andrew Meier - Страница 27

ROSTOV HAD ITS pleasures, but the hotel was not among them. The phone rang incessantly each night – always females, always the same question: “You need girl now?” – before I pulled the plug from the wall. Then they took to knocking on the door. Worse, one morning I got out of bed to discover the sheet blackened with blotches – dozens of dead cockroaches. So when after a week Shvedov flew down from Moscow, I was happy to see him.

He arrived kitted out for battle. He wore Red Army surplus: old khaki jacket and trousers, layered with pockets and liberally frayed. It was Shvedov’s idea of camouflage for journalists. He’d also brought the satellite phone I’d rented in Moscow and an old army backpack stuffed with six cartons of papirosi. Native to Russia, foul-smelling and absurdly strong, papirosi do not even pretend to be cigarettes. Stuffed with rough tobacco, they end not with a filter but with a long, hollow tube of rolled cardboard. Their drag, made famous by Jack London, is so coarse even hardened smokers – Russian, French, Vietnamese – beg off. Papirosi, however, have a singular virtue, never lost on Shvedov. They are cheap. A pack runs under five cents.

By then the world had heard of Andrei Babitsky, the Radio Liberty reporter who had dared report from the Chechen side of the war and been arrested by the Russians. Babitsky had suffered a dubious POW “swap,” when the FSB staged a videotaped handover, turning the reporter over from its officers to masked men, who were almost certainly FSB operatives. Held captive for months, Babitsky had become a cause célèbre.⁴ Nobody, however, outside a small circle of Moscow journalists, had ever heard of Shvedov. He did not write much, and he did no radio. But he was one of the best in the business. Born to a father who toiled in the upper reaches of GOSPLAN, the Soviet planning ministry, Shvedov did have a degree in journalism – Moscow State, late 1970s – and a string of credentials – BBC, NTV, Moscow News–not all of them false. Given the Kremlin’s strict ban on journalists’ traveling independently in Chechnya, the robust kidnapping market, and the only other option a government tour in a press herd, I sought out Shvedov.⁵ I came to regret it, but he was well recommended. Just as it was hard to imagine Chechnya without war, it was hard to imagine Shvedov without the war in Chechnya. Since Moscow had moved to quash Dudayev’s rebellion in 1994, he may have traveled to the region more than any journalist. Oddly, he never called the republic by its name. To him, it was always the Zone.

I had hoped things would get better farther south. I tried to talk Zhenya, the shy Cossack, all elbows and bony arms, who had driven me around Rostov, into delivering us to our next stop, Nalchik, capital of Kabardino-Balkaria. The small republic was sleepy and well within the borders of Russia, but Zhenya hedged. He had long been out of work. His income now derived from his Lada, but his face contorted at the prospect of crossing the city limits. “Down there,” he said quietly, “you never know quite where you are.”

Zhenya would go only as far as Mineralniye Vody (Mineral Waters), the first of the weary tsarist spa towns that lay a long day’s drive to the south. We left Rostov as the car market opened, well before dawn, moving southeast along the Rostov-Baku Highway. The Route 66 of the North Caucasus, the road had once carried Soviet travelers directly through Grozny to the shores of the Caspian. Now, thanks to the years of bombings, assassinations, and war, it was clogged with checkpoints.

As we drove south, the road itself seemed to take a leisurely, southerly dip. All the while, Shvedov smoked without pause and rarely let a moment pass unbroken by commentary. He drove poor Zhenya crazy. He tried the radio but caught only static. Zhenya had mastered the Russian technique, passed down through the generations, of economizing on gas. He would accelerate only to take the car out of gear and coast, repeating the procedure every time the road regained its slope. I sat in the back of the Lada, alone, watching the landscape evolve. Thin stands of willows now ran through the sunflower fields, lining the creeks that rent the earth. Every so often pastures appeared, stretches of green where mottled cows grazed, the fattest I had seen in Russia.

By afternoon we had driven eight hours and crossed into the krai, or administrative region, of Stavropol. We had also, even before we saw them, felt the mountains. As we approached Mineralniye Vody, the dark massifs of the Caucasus appeared, giant shadows like clouds against the summer sky. At first the peaks stood stiffly in a tight row. Yet as we drove on, they rose ever higher, each revealing its own grandiose contours. One peak towered-above the others: Elbrus. Too large for Zhenya’s cracked windshield to compass, it seemed a castle in the sky, insurmountable and unreal. At 18,510 feet, Elbrus, the two-headed cone of a sleeping volcano, was not only one of the pillars of the Caucasus but also the highest mountain in Europe.

We had reached a fault line. After the green fields and streams, now before us spread the dusty foothills of the mountainous bridge that linked the Black Sea to the west with the Caspian to the east. For centuries the mapmakers have marked the Caucasus as the dividing line between Europe and Asia, Christendom and Islam. Stretching more than six hundred miles, since the Soviet fall the range has separated Russia from the former Soviet states of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan to the south. The lands north of the massifs, known collectively as the North Caucasus, comprise seven ethnic homelands, some gerrymandered, some legitimate, that fall within the borders of the Russian Federation. In all, the region is a linguistic and ethnic labyrinth, where as many as fifty different peoples speak their own tongues. In the first post-Soviet decade the pot boiled, gaining fame as the Caucasian Cauldron, an impossible corner of the world fated to suffer “ethnic hatreds,” “religious divides,” and unwanted attention for its oil. Yet as our little Lada chugged on south, taking in the expanse of rock, snow, and ice, I could not help wondering if geology, not geopolitics, still governed these lands.

We drove on, trading Zhenya for Khassan, Cossack for Caucasian, to Pyatigorsk, the Town of Five Mountains, a resort, founded in 1780, where the Good and the Great took the waters. For the aristocracy of nineteenth-century Russia, it was their Baden Baden. In 1841, Lermontov, at twenty-six, died here in a famous duel. The spot in the woods nearby where he fell remained a destination for Russians. The town still offered grand vistas and poplar-lined promenades, but it no longer looked noble, much less restorative. Even on a fine summer day Pyatigorsk looked depopulated and defoliated. The warfare to the east and west had taken a toll. The tourists now stayed away.

By dusk we had reached Nalchik, the inert capital of the tiny republic of Kabardino-Balkaria. We settled into a white-columned sanatorium, an old Soviet retreat among the firs, refashioned by a Turk into a hotel, the Grand Kavkaz. Kabardino-Balkaria was best known as a source of mineral water, mountain horses, and soccer stars. But it was also a prime example of the Bolshevik manipulation of the peoples of the North Caucasus. Kabardino-Balkaria, like its neighbor Karachaevo-Cherkessia, was a Leninist creation. The genius of Lenin, Ali Kazikhanov, editor of Severny Kavkaz, explained, was to throw the Kabardins and Balkars together in one hyphenated republic in 1921, separating them from their natural allies the Cherkess and Karachai. As Kazikhanov told it, the history sounded like a Bolshevik game of checkers, with national destinies at stake. The Kabardins, by far the majority, were related to the Cherkess, while the Balkars shared a Turkic tongue with the Karachai. Each had a separate history, but Moscow entangled them, forcing rivals to share homelands. “It wasn’t just ‘divide and conquer,’” said Kazikhanov. “It was ‘divide, conquer, and tie up in trouble.’”

I remembered Lenin’s pushpins. Years earlier I’d driven into the woods outside Moscow to Gorki Leninskie, the estate where Lenin died in 1924, to see a replica of his old Kremlin office, complete with his desk, books, and paperweight – a bronze chimpanzee knitting its brow. (Yeltsin had ordered the original office removed – along with Stalin’s – as part of his extravagant renovation of the Kremlin.) One wall of Lenin’s study was covered with a map, its southern edges dotted with pins, each a different color. Lenin had kept a close eye on the ethnic and religious labyrinth of the Caucasus.

The Soviet map was drawn to maintain a false balance, the editor Kazikhanov said. Contradictions intended to preoccupy the natives. It was easy for him to explain the history of hatred between the Kabardins and Balkars. He belonged to neither group. He was a Kumyk from Dagestan. And he edited, naturally, a newspaper printed in Russian, the only language common among the peoples.