Читать книгу Black Earth: A journey through Russia after the fall - Andrew Meier - Страница 28

FOR THREE LANGUID days in Nalchik, I had to avoid the local president. A Kabardin – his prime minister was a Balkar – he had “requested” that I interview him. With no interest in being drawn into a squabble between Kabardins and Balkars, I decided to abandon both. Outside the Grand Kavkaz, I found Ismail, asleep in an ancient Audi. We struck a deal to head farther south, to travel in the shadows of the mountains to Vladikavkaz, capital of the next small republic on the road to Chechnya, North Ossetia.

With the fat end of his fist Ismail banged the tape I’d pulled from my bag into the Audi’s cassette player. And so as we drove on through the operatic scenery, two Russian helicopters now limning the foothills to our right, Eric Clapton accompanied us, singing of tears in heaven. When we reached Vladikavkaz, the sun was a giant ball of burnt orange sinking behind the peak that towered behind the town, Mount Kazbek, another giant of the Caucasus range, on the Georgian side.⁶ The streets, to my surprise, were crowded. Only the day before, a bomb had produced havoc in the central market, killing six and wounding forty-three. The remote-controlled device, a police investigator later told me, had been well made, designed to rip as much flesh as possible. We had descended a rung lower into the cauldron. Vladikavkaz, however, had grown inured to bombings. They had become seasonal. The previous spring a bomb had killed sixty-two. “Market squabbles” the locals called the explosions. With Chechnya so close, the North Ossetians affected an easygoing air, a rare commodity in the region and one they were eager to promote.

“Welcome to the oasis,” said the president of the republic, Aleksandr Sergeyevich Dzasokhov, gesturing grandly like a cruise ship director as we sat down in his office. It was a long suite of oak-paneled rooms, so long it seemed without end. “Surrounded by war, we live in peace with our neighbors and, most important, with Moscow.” Dzasokhov had been a member of Gorbachev’s Politburo. Tall and elegantly dressed, he was more than a silver-haired survivor. He was a patrician master of Caucasian deal making. Dzasokhov knew he was only telling half of the truth. He was well aware of the difference between an oasis and a mirage.

Vladikavkaz, christened as a garrison town in 1818, means “To rule the Caucasus.” The North Ossetians have yet to live up to the bravado, but they have long served as the proxies of tsars and general secretaries in helping tame the unruly tribes of the south. In August 1942 Hitler’s troops planted a Nazi flag atop Elbrus. Hitler wanted the Grozny oil fields and dreamed of taking Baku, with its vast reserves of Caspian oil.⁷ Not surprisingly, in some Caucasian circles, the Germans found support.⁸ How many sided with the Nazis is a matter of historical debate. No one will ever know. To some, the Germans doubtless offered a chance to oppose Soviet power. The Ossetians, however, stood loyal. The Nazi forces got no farther than Vladikavkaz, then called Ordzhonikidze after a Georgian aide-de-camp to Stalin.

In recent years North Ossetia had distinguished itself as a singular outpost of fidelity. Things, however, could have gone very differently. In the last years of the old empire, as minor satraps across the south raised the sword of religion and the shield of sovereignty to revive “ancient hatreds” remembered by few, North Ossetia was the first Soviet tinderbox to explode. In the late 1980s, tensions boiled between the North Ossetians and the Ingush, the ethnic minority to the east – and the Chechens’ next of kin. Both sides claimed the pastoral land east of Vladikavkaz known as Prigorodny, just on the North Ossetian side of the border with Ingushetia.

The roots of the trouble, like much of the present turmoil, began with Stalin, who in 1944 ordered the Ingush and the Chechens deported en masse to Central Asia. On February 23, 1944, Red Army Day, and the twenty-sixth anniversary of the founding of the workers’ and peasants’ army, Stalin tricked the Ingush and the Chechens into coming out to their town squares. They were rounded up and packed off – in lend-lease Studebaker trucks.⁹ For the next thirteen years, until the liberalizing thaw that followed Khrushchev’s secret speech of 1956, when they started to return to the lands, the Chechens and the Ingush disappeared from the pages of officialdom. The Soviet Union had established a tradition, as Robert Conquest notes in his seminal book on the deportations, The Nation Killers, of erasing the existence of intellectuals who had earned the wrath of the state. “Unpersons,” George Orwell had famously called the writers and poets who were erased from Soviet society, if not killed. But as Conquest points out in regard to Stalin’s rounding up of the Chechens and Ingush, among other minorities, “the ‘unnation’ was a new phenomenon.”¹⁰

Before the deportation Prigorodny was Ingush. In the last years of the USSR the Ingush began to exhibit their intention of reclaiming it. In 1992, their Soviet bonds loosened, the Ingush and the North Ossetians went to war over the scrap of land. The fighting cost hundreds of lives on both sides, but the North Ossetians, backed by Moscow, kept their hold on the dry pastures of Prigorodny.

There had been another small war, across the mountains in Georgia, beyond the famed Darial Pass, among the Ossetians trapped in another contrivance of Soviet mapmaking called South Ossetia In 1989 the South Ossetians, with a population of some ninety thousand, had risen up, seeking to break free of Georgia and reunite with their brethren to the north. No nation on earth, however, recognized their sovereignty.¹¹ The North Ossetians meanwhile remained loyal to Moscow. Fealty had its rewards. The tiny republic of fewer than a half million now led the Russian Federation in vodka production. “Ours is a special relationship,” President Dzasokhov said of the coziness with the Russians. “We have a history of understanding.”

In Moscow the North Ossetians had long been seen as kindred Orthodox amid the sea of Muslims, yet they led a double life. The first clue came outside the president’s office: an oil painting depicting a white-bearded warrior charging through the air on a white stallion. “A local hero” the president had called him. “Our own St. George.” The second clue came on a winding road through the mountains. Rusik, a proud native of Vladikavkaz and an old friend of Shvedov’s, was doing his best to keep us on the road, its edges fast giving way to the craggy scarps. He was once a KGB major but in the spirit of the times had reincarnated himself Rusik had made an enterprise out of the town’s aspiring entrepreneurs. He headed the new Small Business Association. The group was “still growing,” he conceded. There was plenty of downtime. When I asked about Dargavs, known as the Village of the Dead, he’d reached for the keys to his jeep.

The village lay high in the mountains a hundred turns above Vladikavkaz. On a terraced hillside in a steep green valley dotted purple and red with wildflowers, the tombs at first looked like giant beehives. But when we neared, they came into focus as tapered mounds of slate stacked tight. The oldest tombs dated from the thirteenth century. Each was a family sepulcher, a resting place open to the mountain breeze and, bizarrely, the eyes of strangers. Peering into the half-light of the shrines, one could not miss the skeletons of generations of sheep farmers. Stretched out atop one another, they lay as straight as they had been put to rest. In the shadows, skin, yellow and thick like burlap, gave glow to the bones.

The balance of the sun, mountain air, and crossing winds, Rusik heard, was perfect here. It had preserved the dead. The Russian guidebooks and the villagers below claimed the tradition had long ago yielded to Soviet secularism. Rusik, however, led me in silence farther up the hill, to a female corpse. “Look closely,” he said, “and judge for yourself.” I could see fabric wrapped around the bones. It was machine-woven, a skirt of faded cotton. The Ossetians, it seemed, had maintained the practice well into the modern era.

Arguably the most Russified of the peoples of the North Caucasus, the Ossetians claimed ancient roots. They were the modern heirs of the Sarmatians, Indo-Iranian sun-worshipers who had pushed the Scythians from the southern steppes by the second century B.C. While their neighbors spoke tongues native to the Caucasus or Turkic languages, Ossetian derived from Persian. North Ossetia had even rechristened itself Alania, after the Alans, a Sarmatian tribe.

Officialdom may have wished to deny it, but the locals remained devout in the old ways. Outside Vladikavkaz I visited Hetag’s Grove, a sacred stand of giant trees amid brown fields where Ossetians bowed before an ancient god named Wasterzhi.¹² I spent a morning in the wood toasting the god with homemade fire brew in the company of three Ossetian soldiers on home leave from Chechnya – and desirous of deliverance. Shvedov dismissed the idea of any local paganism from the start. “Ossetians are Christian,” he insisted, “as Orthodox as Russians.” Rusik, however, kept silent. It was not right, he said, catching my eyes in the jeep’s mirror, to talk of such things.