Читать книгу Black Earth: A journey through Russia after the fall - Andrew Meier - Страница 31

OFFICIALLY IT IS A district of Grozny, but to its residents Aldy is a village. Once it had its own bakery, clinic, library, and bazaar, where the locals sold vegetables. In those days, at School No. 39, nearly a thousand children studied each day. That was all before the first war in Chechnya, back when nearly ten thousand people lived in Aldy. The village lies in the Zavodskoi (factory) district of Grozny. Whoever worked back then, hardly the majority, worked at the plants across the way, producing petroleum and chemicals, cement and bricks. Now, under banners of black clouds, the factories nearly blended into the surrounding ruins. Some stood out. They were still burning.

Aldy sits above a dam, across from Grozny’s largest reservoir. The village comprises a broad rectangle of a dozen streets lined with squat single-story houses, each with its own sheltered courtyard. In the middle of thick greenery, the branches of old trees – apricot, pear, cherry, peach, apple, walnut – twist above the low roofs. Bound together by fences of metal and wood taller than a man, the yards appear linked in a line against the world outside.

Inside, on the other side of the fences, the survivors of the massacre were still numb. Bislan Ismailov, a soft-spoken Chechen in his forty-second year, spoke in a detached monotone. His eyes were fixed on me, but his mind was not here. He was there. For him, February 5, 2000, was not fixed in time. When he spoke of it, he switched tenses without cause. Bislan had not left Aldy. He had been here throughout. Once he’d worked at the fuel plant across the way. Back in the days of Brezhnevian slumber he’d become an engineer. But throughout Russia’s second war in Chechnya, he had collected, washed, and helped bury the dead.

“For months that’s all I did,” he said. “Whoever they bring in, we bury them. Eight, ten, twelve people a day. They brought in fighters and left them. Have to bury them? Have to. They bring them in beat-up, shot-up cars from the center of town … and we buried them, right here by our house, in the yard of the clinic. Right here, sixty-three people – all before February.”

Bislan was thin but not frail. He had dark almond-shaped eyes and long black lashes. His thin black mustache was neatly trimmed. His appearance was impeccable. In fact he struck me, given the words that poured from his mouth, as inordinately clean.

In the last days of January 2000, a few weeks after the New Year’s Day when the Western world breathed with relief at having survived the millennial turn without catastrophe and Putin, in his first hours as acting president, flew to Chechnya to award hunting knives to the troops and tell them their task was to keep the Russian Federation intact, the Chechen fighters had abandoned Grozny. In Aldy, life by then had taken on a strange, brutal routine as it had in nearly every other corner of the city. The nights were filled with shelling, and the mornings brought only more of the encroaching thunder.

“They fired everything they could,” Bislan said. “Bombs, missiles, grenades. They shot from all sides. There were times when we could not collect the dead. We would bury them days later.”

On the morning of February 3 nearly a hundred of the men in Aldy decided to take action. They left their homes and cellars and walked to the neighboring district of Grozny, District 20. They carried torn bits of white sheets as flags and went in search of the commander of the Russian troops, the ones closest to Aldy. They wanted to plead with him to stop the shelling, to assure him they were sheltering no fighters. As the group crossed the field of frozen mud where the Russians had dug their positions, shots were fired. One of the villagers fell to the ground. His name was Nikolai. He happened to be an ethnic Russian.

Until then the villagers had not seen a single Russian soldier during the second war, but in the middle of the afternoon on February 4 the first troops arrived. They were not friendly, but they were “businesslike.” The first group of soldiers came to warn them. They were srochniki, conscripts, drafted into the war. They were young, the villagers recalled, almost polite. “So young the beards were barely on their cheeks,” said Bislan. They wore dirty uniforms, and their faces were covered with mud. They were exhausted. They went house to house, telling the men and women of Aldy to get prepared. “Get out of your cellars,” they said. “Don’t hide and don’t go out in the street. Get your passports ready,” they said. For the next soldiers to check. “Because we’re not the bad guys,” they said. “The bad guys come after us.”

On the next morning, the morning of February 5, the villagers, some seven hundred who remained, sleeping in old coats and blankets in cramped basements, heard something strange. As first light came, and the slopes of the snowy peaks far to the south brightened, as they rolled their prayer rugs out toward Mecca, bent to their knees, and praised Allah, they heard silence. No thunderclaps. Only the sounds of chickens, sheep, and cows. The numbing monotony had broken. The shelling had stopped.

For months the families of Aldy had waited. For months they had been transfixed by one question. They knew the Russians had surrounded Grozny; they only wondered when the attack would come. For days they had stored water from a nearby spring and kept the few fish the men could catch, the belyi nalym that once grew three feet long in the reservoir, frozen under the snow. When the Russians come, they thought, it would be good not to go out. The silence disturbed them, but they welcomed an hour for urgent repairs.

Bislan climbed up onto the low roof of his single-story house with a hammer and three scraps of plastic sheeting. From the roof he saw that his neighbor Salaudi, a mechanic in his forties, had done the same. Salaudi, deaf since birth, had done better. He’d found a sheet of aluminum siding. He was trying to nail it over a hole the shelling had left.

At just after nine, smoky layers of chill mist still blanketed the corners of Grozny. Aldy sits up high. It commands a vantage point over the lowlands that edge the city. But Bislan could not yet see the sun. He only heard the shouts. From the northern end of the village, APCs churned the asphalt of Matasha-Mazayeva. Three bus stops long, Matasha-Mazayeva is Aldy’s central street, the only one that runs the length of the village. At the same time, the Russians came along the frozen mud of the parallel streets, Almaznaya and Tsimlyanskaya. Still more men and armored vehicles filled the roads that run perpendicular, Khoperskaya, Uralskaya, and Kamskaya. Within minutes the village was clogged with APCs and, running on each side of them, more than one hundred soldiers.

They did not all wear the same uniforms. Some wore camouflage. Some wore white snow ponchos. Some wore only undershirts or were naked to their waists. Nearly all wore dark camouflage trousers covered in dirt. Some had scarves wrapped around their necks, and some bandannas. Some wore knit hats pulled down close to their eyes. Some had tattoos on their arms, necks, and hands. Some carried five-liter canisters, marked only with numbers stenciled onto the plastic. But they all carried Kalashnikovs.

These were not srochniki, the conscripts of the day before. These were kontraktniki contract soldiers. The distance between the two is vast. Conscripts stand on the far edge of puberty, often just a few months over eighteen. Contract soldiers, however, are older, more experienced, and fighting for the money. They earn much more than the newly drafted soldiers, and they are in the main far more battle hardened.

Kontraktniki were easy to spot, Shvedov said. “They look like criminals.” With their shaved heads, bandannas, tattoos, and muscles, they tended to look like convicts who had spent too much time on the prison yard weights.

At the edges of Aldy, the soldiers had parked APCs and olive drab trucks whose open flatbeds sat high off the ground. They had blocked all the exits, sealed off the village.

Bislan was nailing the plastic sheet onto his roof when he heard the first screams. He looked down Matasha-Mazayeva, to the houses at the northernmost corner of the village. Two plumes of blue-gray smoke swirled there. The screams grew louder. He clung to his roof and looked down the other end of Aldy. Smoke had begun to billow as well at the southern end of the village. House by house, from either end, the men were moving down Matasha-Mazayeva. House by house they tried to get into the locked courtyards. First they kicked the gates with their boots. When that failed, they shot the locks.

The killing began at the northern edge of the village, on Irtyshskaya Street. The Idigovs were among the first to face the Russians. They were brothers, Lom-Ali and Musa. They stood at the door of their uncle’s small house and tried to reason with the soldiers. There were a lot of soldiers. Too many. There would be no pleading. They were not listening. They screamed at Lom-Ali and Musa.

“Get in the basement!” one barked.

“Come on!” another yelled. “Don’t you want to be in the action film?”

There was no cellar in the house, so the soldiers took them to the house next door. They forced the brothers into the cellar and threw a grenade in. It hit the cold floor and bounced. Lom-Ali, the younger of the brothers, threw himself on the grenade. He was in his late thirties. The shrapnel tore him to bits. Those who collected his body later were certain there must have been more than one grenade. His body had been cut into too many parts. The force of the explosion threw his elder brother, Musa, against the concrete wall. He was knocked unconscious, but came to as the smoke seeped into the basement. He looked for his brother and started to climb out of the cellar.

It was still not yet ten when the men reached the heart of Aldy and started to shoot – in every direction. Smoke and screams filled the air. Bislan climbed down from his roof. He saw people gathering at the corner of Kamskaya and the Fourth Almazny Lane. They had come into the middle of the street to show the soldiers their documents. The soldiers encircled them. They were shooting into the sky, and they were yelling.

“Get out of your houses!” one screamed.

“Go collect your bodies!” another yelled.

Not everyone that morning in Aldy was making repairs. In his small square house on the corner of Matasha-Mazayeva, No. 152, Avalu Sugaipov was making tea. Avalu, like his brothers, was a bus driver. He was forty, and driving a bus was all he had ever done. There was no food for breakfast. He could only put the kettle on. He would make the morning tea for his guests, two strangers who had come from the center of Grozny. One man was in his sixties, the other his late fifties. In Aldy, they had heard, there were still people. Safety, they imagined, was in numbers. Avalu had taken them in. They sat at his small kitchen table, waiting for the water to boil.

A woman, Kaipa, sat with them. No one knew her last name. She and her nine-year-old-daughter, Leila, had come from the town of Djalka. Her husband had died long ago. She had seven other children. The war had scattered them all save her youngest. The shelling in Djalka had become unbearable. They’d moved to another village, and then another, before coming to her mother’s house in District 20 next door to Aldy. At the end of December 1999 she came to Aldy. Shamkhan, the mullah, was her distant cousin.

Avalu lived in his mother’s house. His mother and younger brother had gone to Nazran in November. There were two small houses here – six rooms and a cellar in all. Avalu took in Kaipa and her girl, Leila. They had been living in the second house for a week now.

As Avalu poured the tea, they heard the screams. The men did not want her to, but Kaipa went out. They rushed after her. Just as she stepped out into the courtyard, the soldiers lowered their guns. Kaipa was hit twice, in the head and chest.

“Mama jumped in the air and then fell to the ground,” nine-year-old Leila would later say.

The next bullets hit the two men. They were shot in the face.

Avalu stood at the threshold of his house and held the little girl tight. He told her to go back into the house, and he took a step forward. She turned around and saw his body leap into the air, too. Avalu fell backward, into the house.

Leila ran through the house to the room in its farthest corner. She crawled under the bed and hid behind a sack of onions. She lay there in silence as two soldiers entered the house.

“Pour it,” one said.

She heard something splash against the floor.

“But where’s the girl?” the other asked.

“Don’t kill me,” Leila said, coming out from under the bed.

One of them lifted her out. He covered her eyes with a scarf and, stepping around the bodies, carried her from the house. In the yard, from under the cloth, she saw her mother, lying facedown in a circle of blood. In the street he put a can of meat in her hands. He tried to calm her down. He looked up and found two women staring at him.

“Take her,” he told them, and returned to the courtyard of the house.

The house was already on fire. The women grabbed the girl and ran to the far side of Matasha-Mazayeva. Every night for weeks the girl would need a shot of sedatives to sleep.

BISLAN WAITED FOR the soldiers to turn the corner before he opened the metal gate of his house. He crossed the street and walked into Avalu’s yard. That was when he saw the bodies: two men, badly burned, one shot in the eye, and a woman. Bislan had known Kaipa. He stepped into the house. There, he saw the body of his friend Avalu, lying faceup in the middle of his kitchen. Bislan looked around the kitchen. The teapot sat on the stove, the cups on the table.

ASET CHADAYEVA RAN from her family’s house on the Fourth Almazny Lane. She threw open the gate and ran into the street. She had heard the APCs, but when the screams grew close, she could wait no longer. There in the street, some thirty feet to the right, four houses down, she saw two Russian officers. They were staring up at Salaudi, the deaf mechanic who persisted in trying to fix his roof

“Look at that idiot,” one said.

“Bring him down,” yelled the other.

As one of the soldiers raised his rifle, Aset screamed, “He can’t hear you! He’s deaf!”

The soldier turned toward her and fired.

“Get on the ground!” they yelled.

She fell to her knees. The days had warmed since January. In the first days of February the snow had even begun to melt. The ground was icy and black, half-frozen mud. Her younger brother Akhyad, who’d turned twenty-five weeks earlier, ran from the house. “Come here and show us your documents!” the soldiers screamed. Aset and Akhyad walked slowly, arms in the air, toward the men. As they went through Akhyad’s papers, Aset measured the men’s faces. One, she sensed, was the commander. Aset’s father and brother Timur came out into the street. They pleaded with the commander to let Aset and Akhyad go. Several more soldiers joined the two in the middle of the street. One of them screamed curses at Aset, her brothers, and her father. Tall and reeking of vodka, he stuck the barrel of his Kalashnikov into her ribs, pushed her to the fence.

The commander had had enough. “Svolochi!” he yelled at his own men. “You bastards! Get the fuck out of here! Move it!”

Aset saw an opportunity. There were still many people in the houses, she said. “I can collect them,” she told the commander. “I can bring them to you. That way,” she said, “your men can check their documents faster.” Timur, Akhyad, and their father said they’d stay with the soldiers if the commander let Aset gather their neighbors.

He agreed but turned to Timur. “Walk behind me,” he ordered.

“Don’t worry,” Timur said. “Our people won’t shoot you.”

The commander looked at Timur. “But mine might,” he said.

Aset went down all the houses on Fourth Almazny Lane and on the side streets left and right. She came back with a crowd, two dozen women, men, and children. The soldiers pushed them forward, out into the intersection of Kamskaya and Fourth Almazny.

“You’ll stand here,” they said, “until we’re through.”

The commander came close to Aset. She was carrying as always a green plastic bag. In its folds, a gray wolf, the symbol of the Chechen people, howled. It was the flag of Ichkeria, the free state Dudayev had founded.

“What’s in the bag?” he asked.

Aset had spent the war in Aldy. She too had helped bury the dead. She had collected the bodies, and body parts, and washed them for burial by the mullah Shamkhan. She was a nurse. She had finished her nursing studies at Grozny’s medical college in 1987, in the heyday of Gorbachev and glasnost. She had worked in a children’s clinic in Grozny until December 1994, until the Russians first stormed Grozny. In Putin’s War, at thirty-two, she had become a one-woman paramedic unit. Day and night for months she had nursed the wounded and foraged to feed Aldy’s elderly and sick. She had prepared food for her neighbors, both Chechen and the few stranded Russians, old men and women who had nowhere to go. She had also tended the fighters. They brought medicine from their fortified basements in the city and fish from the nearby reservoir. When the fighters passed through, she had sewn them up. She had cleaned their wounds – with spirt–pulled the metal from their flesh, and sent them on their way. Aset had feared the day they would abandon the city, and when at last they did, it was the first time in Putin’s War that she cried.

“Bandages, medicine, syringes,” Aset answered the commander. “I am a nurse.”

“Then you can help me,” he said.

He grabbed her by the sleeve and pulled her close, away from the crowd gathered at the corner.

“There’s been a mistake,” he said. “Some of my men have killed some of your men. They’ve got to be covered up quickly.”

She looked at him but did not understand.

The commander had blue eyes and light hair. He was neither tall nor short. He was average, Aset said. “A typical, average Russian man.” As she stood next to the commander, his radio crackled. Across the static, she heard a soldier’s call name – Kaban–clearly: “Come in Boar, come in.” In the street his men had shouted the names Dima and Sergei.

The commander seemed stunned. “What the hell are you assholes doing?” he screamed into his radio. “Have you lost your minds?” He looked at Aset and said, almost softly, “Stay with me. Don’t leave my side. Or they’ll kill you too.”

At the corner the men and women and children stood still. They stood close to one another. They did not move from the corner. They stood there, as the smoke grew thick, for nearly two hours.

IN MOSCOW THAT SAME Saturday afternoon I had heard on Ekho Moskvy, the liberal news radio station of the Gusinsky media empire, that in the settlement of Aldy on the southern edge of Grozny a zachistka was under way. To many Russians, the word, meaning “a little cleanup,” resonated with positive overtones. It meant “they’re cleaning out the bandits.” By the time Aldy burned and bled, zachistka operations had become routine, a staple in the “counterterrorist operation.” A zachistka, it was understood, was a house-to-house search for members of the armed opposition. Broadcast on television back home, the endeavor was meant to impress. On the evening news the footage resembled scenes from American real crime shows. Russian soldiers moved house to house in search of bandits, not unlike the cops, guns drawn, who sidle down crack house corridors to ferret out dealers. On the ground the news carried a different meaning.

BISLAN KEPT RUNNING. He went to the next house on Matasha-Mazayeva, No. 160. The Magomadov brothers, Salman and Abdullah, lived here. Flames licked at the porch and the roof above it. He looked left and right. Three houses in a row were on fire. Salman was sixty, Abdullah fifty-three. Bislan had seen them the day before.

The stench of burning filled the winter air. Bislan could not find the Magomadovs in the yard. The Russians set the basements on fire first. He knew that, but he could not get through the front door. It was already aflame. He knew the brothers were in there. The stench was so strong. Then he heard the screams. Bislan broke a side window and climbed in, but in the dense smoke he became disoriented. He could see nothing. A staircase led to the basement, but he couldn’t find it. He couldn’t even find the window again. He ran to a wall, felt the glass pane and smashed it. He pulled himself through and fell into the yard.

The remains of the Magomadov brothers were found days later. They had been in the cellar. Both had been shot and then set afire. In the yard, to the right of the front door, bullet casings were on the ground. Among the ashes in the basement were bullets from 5.45-mm and 7.62-mm automatic rifles, the new and old standard-issue Kalashnikovs. There was also a wrist-watch. It had stopped at eleven twenty-five.

Next door, in front of No. 162, Gula Khaidaev was already dead. He had left his house and been shot before he could step onto the street. Maybe he had heard the screams; maybe he had come out to show his passport. He was seventy-six. Shot three times, in his knee, chest, and forehead, Gula still held his passport in his outstretched hand. A few feet away lay his cousin Rakat Akhmadova. She had been shot in the neck and chest. She was eighty-two.

Malika Khumidovna, a widowed schoolteacher in her forties, who had guided a generation of Aldy children through School No. 39, stood with her back to a wall in the yard of a house on Khopyorskaya Street. Her three girls and mother stood near her. So did thirteen other women. They had slept and eaten together in the basement of the house. It was large, and they had kept glass jars filled with water and kompot, homemade fruit juice, there. Up until the day before, there had been many more women and children here. In January as many as thirty had slept in the cellar.

The soldiers had told them to stand at the cement wall, in the cold. Hours passed. The women dared not move. They stood there, their backs to the wall. The soldiers brought chairs out of the house and sat across from the women. Two soldiers ventured in the cellar and found the jars of kompot the women had kept there. They emerged with smiles and passed the sweet drink among themselves. Every so often the soldiers shot into the wall. The bullet holes traced an arc a few feet above the heads of the women and their daughters.

When their squad leader came upon the scene, he yelled. He told the men to get rid of the women. The soldiers went to work. Two took the children aside, while one led the women into an abandoned house next door.

Malika had already said her prayers. She had asked Allah not for mercy but to light her path. She did not look at the soldier. She averted her eyes. As the women walked into the house, the soldier stuffed a note into her hand. On the paper, he said, was his home address. He told Malika not to worry. He wasn’t going to shoot her or any of the women. She reminded him, he said, of his mother. “So write my mama,” he said. “Tell her I didn’t kill you.”

BISLAN PASSED TWO houses before he entered the yard of No. 170, nearly tripping on the first body. Just by the gate, half on the road, half in the yard, lay Rizvan Umkhaev, a seventy-two-year-old pensioner who in recent years had guarded the parking lot of the TB hospital in Grozny. The bullets had ripped right through him. Issa Akhmadov, a short, muscular man who at thirty-five had never held a job and spent too many years in jail, lay near him. It had been a close-range execution. They, too, still clutched their passports.

Bislan turned toward the house and took two steps forward. He could go no farther. Behind him lay the ghastly remains of Sultan Temirov, whose head had been blown off He was forty-nine. His body was mangled, destroyed by a mass of metal. His head would never be found.

A few steps on, behind the high metal fence of No. 140, seventy-two-year-old Magomed Gaitaev lay dead. He had driven a tractor in the fields beyond the reservoir his whole life. He had lived for years alone. A bullet had pierced the base of his neck and torn his left cheek open as it exited. His chest pocket was open. It held his passport. His glasses hung on the top of the gate to his house.

Across the road, a scene had unfolded that revealed that the villagers were not the only ones afraid. Malika Labazanova, a plump round-faced woman in her forties who wore her dark brown hair in a bun, stood between two soldiers and her front door. They told her they wanted only to search her house. She opened the door. Once they checked the house, one of the soldiers turned to Malika and raised his gun at her. She fell to her knees and pleaded.

He stood over her in the front room of her house and said, “Lie down and don’t move.”

He shot into the air. If anyone knew, he said, that he had not killed her, he’d be killed as well.

At No. 1 Podolskaya Street, a ten-minute walk from the center of Aldy, the terror struck mercilessly. Sixty-seven-year-old Khasmagomed Estamirov, a disabled former chauffeur, had sent his wife, two daughters, and toddler grandson away to the refugee camps of Ingushetia. But the rest of his clan was home: his cousin Said-Akhmed Masarov; his son, Khozh-Akhmad, who had returned to care for his ailing father; and his daughter-in-law, Toita. At twenty-nine, Toita was eight and one-half months into her third pregnancy. Her one-year-old, Khassan, was also with them. He had taken his first steps that week.

By noon his older brother, Khusein, the toddler who had been sent off to the camps of Ingushetia, had been orphaned. The soldiers had killed everyone in the Estamirov house. The old man. The little boy. His pregnant mother. They even killed the family cow. It was trapped when the soldiers set everything they saw aflame. They torched the yard and the house. They burned the family car as well. Then, as the flames engulfed the cow alive, they left.

Khasmagomed’s cousin found the bodies. As he approached the burning house, a mud-splattered APC was driving away. Father and son lay in the yard, side by side. Khasmagomed had been shot in the chest, several times. His wallet was on the ground, empty. The corpses were burned. Toita and her little boy Khassan lay under the awning in the courtyard on the concrete floor. The concrete was pockmarked with bullet holes. Toita, due to give birth in two weeks, was shot in the chest and stomach. Her ring and earrings were gone. Across the threshold to the small house lay the body of the cousin, smoldering. Blood covered the floors and walls.

In the house Khasmagomed had built a small iron stove to keep the family warm. Thirty-two bullet holes had pierced it. Khasmagomed had asked his cousin Said-Akhmed to come live with him. “It’s frightening on your own,” he had said. “Here we’ll be together.”

Here, too, the young conscripts had come the day before, February 4. They had warned the Estamirovs. “The kontraktniki are coming next,” they said. “You’d better leave.”

Khasmagomed, a proud grandfather who could count at least seven generations that tied him to the Chechen land, had stayed in the house he had built. He was retired, and his health was bad. But he had earned Hero of Labor medals for his decades of driving Party officials around Grozny. He did not believe the soldiers. He did not think the Russians would do anything. “They’ll just come,” he told his family, “and check our passports.”

He and his wife had remained throughout the first war on Podolskaya Street. They had lost their first house but rebuilt it from the ground. He did not worry about the Russians coming. He believed they would bring order. So as soon as the conscripts left, Khasmogamed and his son went into their yard. They hung white sheets in front of the house, and on the fence, in white paint, they wrote, “Zachistka done.”

IT WAS NEARING THREE in the afternoon and the sun had still not appeared when the soldiers came back to the center of Aldy, to the Abulkhanov house at No. 145 Matasha-Mazayeva. Five members of the family were living there: the elderly owner, his wife, their daughter-in-law, Luisa, their niece, and her twelve-year-old son, Islam – an old man, three women, and a boy. The soldiers first came early in the morning. They shot the family dog. All day long other soldiers had come – some wore white snowsuits; some had faces so dirty you could see only their eyes.

This time the owner of the house, seventy-one-year-old Akhmed Abulkhanov, tried to give them his passport, but they threw it on the ground. They lined them all up – Abulkhanov, his wife, their niece, her son, Islam, and their daughter-in-law, Luisa – against a wall at the side of the house.

The soldiers swore at them all and grabbed Islam.

“You’ll make a good little fighter,” one said as he laughed.

“Look, you guys,” the old man said, “what are you doing?”

A soldier butted him with his Kalashnikov. They asked for whatever the family had: jewelry, money, wine. The women undid their earrings and surrendered them. The old man said he had no wine in the house and no money. He said if they let him, he’d go borrow money from a neighbor.

Several soldiers went with Abulkhanov as he went to his friend’s house, around the corner on Third Tsimlyansky Lane. Khusein Abdulmezhidov, forty-seven, and his elder sister, Zina, both were home. Zina, a short black-haired woman, had turned sixty not long before. For years she had manned the counter at the bakery in Chernorechiye, the adjoining district just across the dam from Aldy.³⁴ They gave the soldiers all they had, three hundred rubles. It was not enough. There in the yard of his friend’s house the soldiers shot Abulkhanov. They did not spare Zina or Khusein. Alongside their neighbor they both were killed in their own yard.

Aldy lay in flames. Black smoke filled the sky, and the stench was heavy. Whatever the liquid was that the soldiers poured on the houses, it burned well. And long. All along Matasha-Mazayeva Street, Aldy’s central road, the houses were aflame. Even those villagers whose houses went untouched could only stand and stare as the fires gained force. All the while the screams, wave after wave, continued to rise behind the fences. But they were screams of discovery now – of horror, not pain.

By late afternoon, when the soldiers finally left, the list of the dead was long: at least fifty-two men and eight women. In English we call such an event a massacre. The Russian military command, and the investigators who later exhumed the bodies, persisted in calling it a zachistka. Given its privileged place in Putin’s War, the term had moved from the front line into the political vernacular. Although the Russian military command likes to translate zachistka as a “mop-up operation,” the word derives from the verb chistit’, meaning “to clean” or “to cleanse.” Linguistically, at least, Putin’s zachistki were related to Stalin’s purges, the chistki. For Chechens, however, a zachistka had little to do with mopping up and everything to do with cleaning out. To them it meant state-sponsored terror, pillage, rape, and murder.

IN MOSCOW THE following day, a quiet snowbound Sunday, sheets of thick flakes, buoyant and motelike, fell steadily and kept the avenues empty and white. No one had yet heard of the horrors wreaked on Aldy, when Putin, now acting president of Russia, went on television to announce the end of the military operation in Grozny.

“As far as the Chechen situation is concerned,” he said, “I can tell you that the General Staff has just reported that the last stronghold where terrorists were offering resistance – Grozny’s Zavodskoi district – was seized awhile ago and that the Russian flag was raised on one of its administrative buildings.”

Grozny’s Zavodskoi district is where Aldy lies.

“And so,” Putin concluded, “we can say that the operation to liberate Grozny is over.”

The troubles, however, were far from over. All that spring and into the summer, when I arrived in Chechnya, the pace of the war may have slowed, but to those on the ground, both Chechen and Russian, it remained as devastating as ever. After the fall of Grozny the Chechen fighters turned increasingly to a new tactic, low-intensity, but persistent, guerrilla warfare. As in the first war, they bought grenades, land mines, and munitions from Russian soldiers – some corrupt, but some just hungry or awake to the grim reality that Putin’s War would drag on with or without their patriotic duty. Almost daily Chechen fighters ambushed Russian convoys, checkpoints, and administrative headquarters. They killed at night and in the day, choosing their targets at random – a clutch of Russian soldiers buying bread in a local market – or with precision: high-ranking Chechen officials whom Moscow had appointed their administrative proxies in the region.

At the same time, the civilian population grew rapidly. By the summer of 2000 more than one hundred thousand Chechens had returned from Ingushetia. They came home to more than destroyed homes and fresh graves. Chechnya was now under Moscow’s arbitrary rule. The sweeps continued, and with them, the cases of extrajudicial reprisal. Human rights advocates collected new reports of extortions and beatings, rapes and summary executions. For young male Chechens, however, the primary fear was detention. Each month more and more young men disappeared from the streets. At best the detentions were a rough form of intelligence gathering. At worst they served the enforcers’ sadistic urges. But perhaps most commonly, the men were taken hostage merely for ransom. It was also not uncommon that days or weeks later their bodies would be found, dumped at a conveniently empty corner of town.

WE SAT UNDER A TRELLIS heavy with grapevines, in the still, hot air of the narrow courtyard of Aset Chadayeva’s home. Aset, the nurse who survived the massacre, was not here, but I handed a note from her to her mother, Hamsat. Aset told me that without it, her parents would not talk. No one would. Such was the fear, she had warned, in Aldy.

“This man is a journalist,” Aset had written. “You can trust him. Tell him about the Fifth.”

Hamsat had dropped the note and was crying. She wore a dark blouse, a long black skirt faded gray, and a cloth apron around her waist. She wiped her eyes with the end of the apron. Aset’s seventy-two-year-old father, Tuma – I recognized him by his great bald head – came into the yard to embrace me. Around us, sisters emerged (Aset was the eldest of seven children), then cousins and grandchildren. In all, there must have been a dozen members of the Chadayev family here, but only Aset’s father and brother, Timur, sat at the table with me. Timur was in his early thirties. He wore no shirt, only a well-worn jeans jacket. His ribs were protruding. Beneath his long lashes, his eyeballs bulged slightly. Timur, I knew from Aset, remained in shock. “When you gather the burned pieces of flesh of your friends and neighbors,” she had said of her brother, “it affects how you think.”

Aset’s mother, shifting her weight nervously from her left to her right foot, stood behind her son and husband. Her grandchildren brought bowls of candies wrapped in brightly colored wax paper. Her daughters produced flat, hard pillows for me to sit on.

Tuma wandered the square concrete yard, under the green of the arbor, mumbling to no one in particular. Occasionally he turned in my direction, and I could make out what he was saying. The afternoon, like every afternoon for weeks, was stifling. It must have been over ninety degrees.

“We’ve never had such heat,” Tuma said softly. “Never. Such heat. Look at the grapes.”

It was all he could say. He, too, I could see, was crying. Tuma, long retired, had spent his life helping build the concrete edifices of power in Grozny. A construction engineer, he had worked on most of the government buildings that lined the center. In 1992, after the Soviet fall, when everything suddenly changed, he had dreams of his own construction firm, Tuma & Sons. War of course intervened. In the first campaign his house was leveled. Tuma had rebuilt it by hand. Then there had been plumbing, hot water even. Now there was only the outhouse and the well down the road.

“Never had such heat,” Tuma repeated. He wandered beneath the tall walnut tree that dominated the yard. “There’re so many grapes. And all dried up. We’ve never had such heat.”

Timur brought Bislan. They had not always been good friends, but now they were bound for life. Together they had collected the bodies after the massacre. Together they had watched that night as the Russians returned, this time with trucks, big open flatbed trucks. They had watched as the soldiers returned to the houses that had not burned and emptied them of their belongings, of televisions and sofas, carpets and refrigerators. In the morning Bislan and Timor began to collect the bodies. Several they just put in the empty houses. They nailed the windows shut, so the dogs wouldn’t get them. It took six days to find all the bodies.

Timur and Bislan spoke softly. They had had to tell what they had seen more than once already. They had had to tell it to the men who came here before me, the Russian “investigators.” Men who carried video cameras and tape recorders. Men who showed no identification and did not give names. Men who were interested only in what the villagers knew.

As Bislan talked, Timur sat in a far corner of the yard. Hunched over, he stared at the rough ends of his short fingers. He was haunted by more than his memory of the massacre. Since the Fifth the Russians had come for him several times. Each time they took him away he came home with bruises. Only rarely did he interrupt Bislan.

“Forever,” Timur said, when I asked if he would remember the commander’s face. “A typical face, one of those simple Russian faces,” he said. His men, too, he was sure were Russians, not Ossetians or Dagestanis or even Chechens, as some in Moscow had wanted me to believe.

EVEN BEFORE GOING to Chechnya, in Moscow and Nazran I had met survivors of the massacre. I sat and listened, often for hours, at times for days, as they told of the events of the Fifth. I took notes and wrote up the sessions, but these were not interviews. It was testimony.

In an empty hovel on Moscow’s outskirts, where refugees from the Caucasus often lived, lying low from the Moscow police, I spent hours talking with Aset. She had risked arrest, or worse, and come to the capital to tell the human rights advocates what she had seen. I was to meet many others who had been in Aldy that day, but even years later I was convinced that Aset knew more about the massacre than anyone who had survived that day.

The first time we met she spoke in a breathless stream for nearly six hours. She had details on command, chronology in perfect place. She could quote her neighbors verbatim. She was, I feared, too good a witness. I worried that in her shock she had reconstructed the day in greater detail than she could possibly have known. I even entertained the idea that she might have been sent to Western human rights groups and Western correspondents to enhance the story of the massacre. But as I sat and listened to her talk not only of the massacre but of the war that preceded it and the war that had preceded that war, I came to believe her without pause, and I admired her courage. Given the prominent threat of retribution, only a handful of survivors had spoken publicly of the massacre. None spoke more eloquently than Aset. In the years that followed, we spoke often. I played and replayed the day as she saw it. Never once did she stray from her first telling. Never once did she retract or recast those first words.

To her the commander had been human. He had looked at her, she said, and nearly pleaded.

“What do you want me to do?” he asked as they stood together in the midst of the carnage. “My men shoot old men? Well, sometimes old men and young children carry things hidden on their bodies that blow up when you get too close. You know it yourself.”

Aset did. She had seen others do it, and once the men had left that day, she, too, would tape a grenade to her waist. For two days she wore it hidden beneath her blouse.

“I told Timur I was worried about being raped,” she said.

“Don’t worry,” her brother told her, “tape a grenade to your body, and if anyone comes at you, pull the plug.”

Aset bought the grenade from a Russian soldier for four packs of Prima, the cheap Russian cigarettes that Shvedov, when he couldn’t find his beloved papirosi, smoked.

Months later, after we had met countless times, Aset told me what her name meant. It was derived from Isis, she said, the Egyptian goddess. But Aset did not know what Isis had done. Isis had collected and reassembled the body of the murdered Osiris. Isis had impregnated herself from the corpse, becoming the goddess of the dead and funeral rites.

Aset’s black hair hung sharply above her shoulders. Her eyes were deepset and almond-shaped. Her cheekbones, high and round, were pronounced. Hers is hardly a typical Chechen face. Rarer still, for a woman in her fourth decade of life, Aset was single.

“The war,” she said, when I asked why.

SHAMKHAN, THE MULLAH of Aldy, closed his eyes. He lifted his large hands and opened his pale palms to the sky. Every other man, including Issa, at the table did the same. The mullah led the prayer. He began: “La ilaha illa allahu …” (“There is no God but Allah …”) In a moment, he drew his hands together and, with his eyes still closed, swept them down his broad face.

“I cannot speak of the events of February fifth,” he said straight off. “I was not here. I left with the fighters on the night of January thirty-first.”

Shamkhan was not a typical village mullah. Well over six feet and barrel-chested, he was slightly larger than a good-sized refrigerator. Moreover, he was impeccably dressed. Despite the high temperature, he was draped in a brocaded frockcoat. It was made of white cloth and lined with gold stitching. It lent Shamkhan a religious aura that impressed. So, too, did the staff of carved wood he carried in his hand. On his head he wore a heavy papakha, a tall gray hat of Astrakhan lamb’s wool. I was hardly surprised, given his physique, to learn that Shamkhan had been, during his tour of duty in the Soviet Navy, the wrestling champion of the Black Sea Fleet.

He was the son of a mullah, but he came to the clergy “late,” he said, in his mid-thirties. Shamkhan was born in Kazakhstan in 1953, the year Stalin died. He had been the mullah of Aldy since 1996–since the end of the first war. A graduate of Grozny’s technical institute, before the war he worked as a welder in the Chechen gasworks.

“Gas or electric, I could do either, and I earned a lot. But after the death of my father my brothers wanted me to continue my education. So I entered the Islamic University here in 1992. I was about to complete my sixth year in the Shari’a department when the war started. And now two wars and still no degree.”

Shvedov liked to remind Issa and me that before declaring their independence in 1991, Chechens were not the most observant Muslims. “Of all the peoples of the Caucasus,” he said, “the Chechens were the last to find Islam.” As with much of his ramblings, Shevdov’s claim was at best half right. It was true that for decades a folk Islam, not a strict adherence to the laws of the Koran, had predominated among Chechens. It was also true that Dudayev, when he seized power in Grozny, had led a movement for independence first and for religious freedom second. The first chief justice of Dudayev’s Shari’a court smoked Marlboros during interviews. But as the first war raged, more and more young Chechen fighters donned green headbands that declared “Allah akbar” in Arabic. The Russian onslaught did what Dudayev had never envisioned: It turned the rebels ever more fundamentalist. By the time the second war began, the talk was less of independence and more of jihad.

THERE WAS A THEORY on why hell visited Aldy on February 5. It had to do with the brutality of Basayev and his comrade Khattab. I had heard it in Moscow from Russian journalists and in Nazran from Ingush bureaucrats. I heard it from Issa as well. It had to do with the abuses suffered after the end of the first war by the Russians who lived in Chernorechiye, the district bordering Aldy. It was once a workers’ district, home to those who traded shifts at the nearby cement, chemical, and oil works. In Chernorechiye, the story went, the Russians enjoyed the best apartments. After the first war, once the Chechens had retaken Grozny, they exacted revenge. “That they kicked out Russians for apartments, this is absolutely true,” said the reporter Andrei Babitsky. “It happened everywhere in Grozny, but Chernorechiye had a large Russian population. And in the months before the second war, the practice there is said to have grown more and more violent, with Russians leaving their apartments through their windows.”

Chernorechiye suffered a zachistka the same day as Aldy. The theory held that the Russians who had come on the Fifth had come to avenge the Russians killed in Chernorechiye. “WE HAVE RETURNED,” read graffito painted in large letters during the zachistka in Chernorechiye, “YOUR VILLAGE NEIGHBORS.”

There was another theory, one that concerned the question of fighters. In the wake of the Aldy massacre, news stories and human rights reports downplayed the possibility that Chechen fighters had been in Aldy. But the fighters had been there. Babitsky had been there with them. On January 14, in his last radio broadcast from Grozny before disappearing, Babitsky told Radio Liberty’s Russian listeners, “In the village of Aldy, where I was also today with armed Chechens, bombs and missiles hit literally two hundred to two hundred and fifty meters from us.” The fighters had come through the village, Aset said. Some had stayed a few days, only to rest and have her treat their wounds. The nearest rebel base, everyone insisted, had been in the adjoining district, District 20, three bus stops east from Aset’s house.

Babitsky, when I asked him later what he had seen in Aldy during his hellish last weeks in Grozny, was forthcoming. “I was in Aldy nearly every day. In the middle of January I did spend two days there at my close friend’s house.” His friend, Babitsky said, was Kazbek, the commander of Aldy. “I’d thought Kazbek had surely died, but he survived the zachistka. He’d dug a hole in his cellar so deep that even though the Russians threw a grenade in, he lived.”

Aldy, however, was never a rebel stronghold. The fighters were too smart to stay for long. Chernorechiye, Babitsky and other reporters who had been going to Chechnya since the first war told me, was by far the better defensive position. Chernorechiye sat high above the road and, unlike Aldy, boasted multistory buildings. For the wounded, Aldy offered a sanctuary, a rare corner of Grozny where there were still people, good water, and, most of all, medicine. But given the number of villagers who remained in Aldy, the fighters were reluctant to use it as a position. The fighters, Babitsky said, deemed the village too important to risk the inevitable reprisal. “They thought,” he said, “Aldy was a good refuge.”

THE CARNAGE THAT DESTROYED so much of Aldy is not peculiar to our time. Indeed Aldy, unbeknownst to the Russians who arrived on February 5, had a history. A river of violence and sadness found its source there in the eighteenth century, during the reign of Catherine the Great. In 1785 one of the first battles between Chechens and Russians took place when Catherine ordered her troops to storm Aldy, the village that at the time spanned the area of modern-day Aldy and Chernorechiye.

Catherine chose the target with purpose. Long before Yermolov built the line of forts that began with Grozny, Peter the Great had built the Line, a Great Wall of Russian forts and Cossack stánitsas. By 1784 the Russians had finished their critical garrison in the North Caucasus, the fort at Vladikavkaz. But in the following year Catherine’s men suffered an unprecedented defeat on the Sunzha River – at the hands of the followers of a mysterious Chechen holy warrior.

In 1785, Prince Grigori Potemkin – Catherine’s viceroy in the Caucasus and the favorite among her lovers – learned of a potent force emerging from Aldy, a resistance movement led by a shepherd. Potemkin heard the news from his cousin Major – General Pavel Potemkin, who sent an alarming communiqué from the field: “On the opposite bank of the river Sunzha in the village of Aldy, a prophet has appeared and started to preach. He has submitted superstitious and ignorant people to his will by claiming to have had a revelation.”³⁵

Many believe that Imam Shamil, the holy warrior who led the longest resistance to the tsar, was the first great Chechen fighter. He was not. The title belongs to Sheikh Mansour. (Shamil, an Avar from Dagestan, was not even Chechen. Sheikh Mansour was.) History tells Mansour’s story variously. His genealogy, theology, even name, have never been definitively revealed. But in the Caucasus what motivates men and triggers their weapons is not reality, but a perception of reality. In the realm of perceived reality, Mansour is revered as the first in the long line of Chechen holy warriors. He was born a peasant named Ushurma in Aldy. He had the good fortune to come of age just in time for Russia’s southern onslaught.

“Muhammad paid this simple peasant a visit,” Shamkhan told me. “He revealed himself to this young man because he was the purest of believers. The time had come, the prophet told him, to lead a Ghazavat on the Russians.”

In 1783, Ushurma took the name Mansour–“conqueror” in Arabic – and later added the honorific “sheikh.” A devout believer in Sufism, a mystical strain of Islam, Mansour already had a following. Sheikh Mansour led the Naqshbandi Tariqa, or path of belief.

Eager to please the empress, his lover and lord, Prince Potemkin dispatched three thousand troops to capture Mansour. They stormed Aldy but did not find him. Frustrated, they torched the village. Mansour’s men got their revenge. They ambushed the Russians in the nearby woods and killed, the chronicles attest, more than six hundred men. Potemkin had to tell Catherine that nearly half his force had been lost. Many had drowned, trying to flee, in the Sunzha’s muddy waters. An “unfortunate occurrence,” Prince Potemkin called it in his report to Catherine.³⁶ The blood feud had begun.

As Catherine’s men routed his followers, Mansour took refuge in the Ottoman fortress of Anapa. In 1791 he was captured and shipped off to St. Petersburg, where he spent his last years in the Schlüsselberg Fortress, an island prison in the Neva River near Lake Ladoga.³⁷ But Mansour’s spirit never left Chechnya. In Aldy it was especially strong.

“We all know the history of this village. Sheikh Mansour lives on in each of us,” the mullah Shamkhan said, leaning forward on his staff. “We feel his strength every day. We know the struggle began here.” Shamkhan had just come from leading a service for one of the shaheed, the martyrs of the Fifth of February. At the service, dancing the zikr, a religious dance, was Magomed Dolkaev, an elegant elder with a flowing white beard who claimed Sheikh Mansour as an ancestor. No one knew the true genealogy. But as Shamkhan told me, it was not important.

A year and a half later Dolkaev was dead. He, too, had fallen victim to the new times-shot four times in the head by an unknown gunman in his home in Aldy.

ISSA, WHO SAT IN silence as I listened to Shamkhan, could no longer hold his peace. He had observed it all, taking in the mullah and his story with the weary eyes of a crocodile. When he begged permission to interrupt, I consented with a shrug to the inevitable.

Issa leaned forward, squaring his elbows on the table across from the mullah, with a question. “How come Maskhadov,” he said, referring to the military commander elected Chechnya’s president after the first war, “couldn’t build a state that could defend any citizen, no matter his faith?”

His voice had lost its usual calm and was rising. “Where were all these brave fighters when there was not one Russian soldier here? When all you had to do was bury one, or two, or three bandits so that none of this would have happened?”

Shamkhan invoked the name of Allah. He swore that he was “against any embodiment of evil,” that he could not “tolerate Wahhabism,” and was a foe of “any extremism.”

Issa did not let up.

“You say you left with the fighters. Abandoned the village during the siege. You and I speak the same language. Tell me, as the spiritual father of these people, how did we come to this? How can we live like this?”

Shamkhan struggled for a rejoinder. He stiffened his broad back and condemned the plagues that had visited Chechnya since the Soviet fall: the militarism of Dudayev, the romanticism of Maskhadov, the banditry of Basayev, the foreign Wahhabi virus of Khattab, and the venal hunger of the rest of Chechnya’s warlords. “All this we have earned,” he said, “because of our ignorance. Thanks to our lack of enlightenment, we were unable to establish any order.”

The mullah was talking to Issa but looking at me. He said he had never led anyone to any jihad. He said the fighters had wanted to take him earlier from Aldy, that they were afraid the Russians would kill him on sight. He swore to Allah that everything he had done was done not in the name of Dudayev or Maskhadov or Basayev or Khattab, but in the name of Allah and Allah alone.

As the torrent of words poured forth, I realized Shamkhan was talking too much. Then, suddenly, he dropped his guard. He declared his conscience clean. He said he had done all that had been asked of him, that he had journeyed “the path from beginning to end,” the path that was “written in blood.”

Shamkhan, I realized then, had been with Basayev and the fighters the night they broke through the siege of Grozny. “The path” was the fighters’ macabre retreat through the minefields to Alkhan-Kala.

I pressed for details.

“They needed someone to bless and bury the dead,” he said. “So I made this journey with them and with my own eyes saw how they died. If someone were to sit and tell me what they had seen along this path, I swear to Allah, I would never believe him. I would not believe people could die like that.”

The fighters had taken him from Aldy on the last day of January. Before he left, the mullah told his followers to stay in the village. “Do not abandon your homes to the Russians,” he had said. The words, as Shamkhan recalled them, weighed heavily.

The minefields killed hundreds during the fighters’ retreat. Others froze to death. He had stayed with the fighters for the entire trek, from Grozny to the snowbound mountains in the south. He had left the fighters in their mountain hideaways.

Would they fight until the end? I asked.

“What lies in their hearts,” Shamkhan said, “is to me a dark wood.”