Black Earth: A journey through Russia after the fall

“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.

(#litres_trial_promo) Not surprisingly, in some Caucasian circles, the Germans found support.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.”

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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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

SEVEN (#ulink_27346c2b-fa91-5f96-8776-1544dd3cd295)

WE MADE IT TO NAZRAN, the would-be capital of the would-be statelet of Ingushetia, in time for lunch. Rusik arranged for Soslan, the Small Business Association’s driver, to take us. We drove slowly through the eerie silence of the old Prigorodny battleground – its houses burned out, its fields still fallow – before coming to the border with Ingushetia. Soslan, of course, being Ossetian, could go no farther. Shvedov and I walked across the dirt road to the border post, a hut, and, after haggling for an hour with the Ingush guards, entered the last little republic in the foothills of the Caucasus before Chechnya.

Nazran in the Soviet era was a market town, a dusty assemblage of collective farms that raised cattle and sheep and little else. When in the late 1950s the Ingush and the Chechens returned from their Central Asian exile, they resettled in a single administrative province, first established by Moscow in 1934 and generously named the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic. In 1991, when the Chechens unilaterally opted to end the curse of their hyphenated past, Ingushetia was born by default. Like any fledgling state, it soon gained a president: Ruslan Aushev, a homegrown general and a mustachioed hero of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. Naturally, a president required a seat of power.

Shvedov had dreaded Nazran. There was only one place, he’d said, that scared him more than the Zone, Ingushetia. He’d said it again and again. In Nazran, he’d warned, the price on my head doubled, and his confidence in the authorities vanished. The fighting remained across the border, but the war had seeped everywhere into Ingush life. Nazran was a breeding ground for kidnappers, assassins, bombers. It was also, as a result of a 1994 quid pro quo with the Kremlin, an ofshornaya zona, a new term in post-Soviet jurisprudence that denoted a realm known in the West as an offshore tax haven.

(#litres_trial_promo) Everywhere the red-brick palazzi, as big as any in the woods outside Moscow, testified to the local growth industries in bootleg vodka, petroleum products, and arms. The Ingush hated to say it, and few did, but the war in Chechnya had been good to them.

The Ingush and Chechens speak closely related tongues. Brothers in the Vainakh nation – the word means “our people” – they share many cultural and religious traditions. But the years of war had strained the fraternity. Never ones to fight in the Chechens’ defense, by now the Ingush had turned hostile. In the first campaign they had taken in Chechen refugees. But in the second round, Chechens had flooded across the border. As the storming of Grozny loomed, nearly two hundred thousand Chechen refugees had fled to Ingushetia, nearly doubling the tiny republic’s population.

Outside Nazran we found two dozen Chechen families living in an abandoned pigsty. Shvedov found the irony – Muslims sleeping beside pig troughs – amusing. The camps farther on, however, left even him speechless. Here, for miles on the parched earth, thousands of Chechen refugees were trying to live. They were eating, sleeping, and, on a rare occasion, washing in a city of tents, the likes of which the world saw with regularity now, thanks to CNN and the end of the post – cold war bliss. At the height of the second Chechen war, the Sputnik and Karabulak camps had housed tens of thousands. Six thousand remained.

It was a stifling summer day. In the tents, skin streamed with sweat. The train cars were even worse, much worse. The old Soviet cars, four dozen in all, had been dragged to the edge of the barren field and left to stand in place. There was no breeze and no water, nothing but flies and a rising rate of infection. For 3,657 Chechens, the train was home. The men squatted in the shade of the carriages and watched the day go by. Their wives said they had ceased to be men. There was no work and no money. How could they be men? The women offered dry crackers and black tea. Had it been “back then,” they said, had we been “over there,” they could have hosted me properly. Not all them knew, but nearly all suspected, that the homes they had left behind were no longer.

The talk came to a end when the water truck arrived. The water came from the canal, two miles away. In an hour another truck came. Bread. There was no water here, the women explained. And no flour. There were only children. Everywhere, in the dirt, by the outhouses, under the train cars stopped in their tracks, the children played. So there would be a future, the women said, but what kind?

IF VLADIKAVKAZ BREATHED with the mystique of the nineteenth-century Caucasus, Nazran still lived by Soviet deal making. Whatever it was you wanted – a bottle of beer or a rack of lamb, an interview with the president or a ride to the camps – it was always negotiated through a side door, in the back of the shop, under the table. The epicenter of the negotiations was the Hotel Assa. A place of legend, the Assa was built in the euphoric first years after the Soviet fall as a Western-style hotel and business center, the first to grace this side of the Caucasus. Given the bloodshed and misery a few miles away, the Ingush investment climate had failed to lure many prospectors. The Assa instead since its first days had played host, and faithfully hustled, the journalists and relief workers drawn to the war. On a good day the foreigners nearly outnumbered the agents of the Ingush arm of the Federal Security Service, the FSB. The hotel claimed three stars and possessed, at first glance, the reassuring appearance of a tidy refuge from the dust, an outpost of modernity, if not air-conditioning.

Shvedov had looked forward to the Assa. For days it had been all he could talk of: the balcony one could eat on, the little artificial lake it overlooked, the presidential town houses across the way, the sweet waitresses he knew by name. His dreams all came true. Within a day he was dictating, in a painful recitation of no less than ten minutes’ duration, his four-course meals without a menu. At the Assa we stopped dining together.

It was not hard to see why the hotel had earned a reputation as a hellhole. The Assa had taken a beating. Hotels in the West often offer lists of local restaurants and recommended boutiques. At the Assa, rooms came with price lists-each item and what it would cost if destroyed: “Broken door: $200. Broken window: $200. Broken bed: $300. Broken shower stall: $400. Broken mirror: $200.” The inventory closed with the administration’s sincere wish that its guests enjoy a pleasant stay.

The place at least had color. The restaurant each night filled with Belgian doctors, Danish food distributors, even a crew of Irish clowns in from Bosnia to entertain the children in the camps. There was also a German engineer, a veteran relief worker who’d struck out on his own. Over coffee in the morning and drinks at night, he sat on the balcony, mumbling urgently about the verdammte Chlor, the damned chlorine. He was gripped by an obsession with the cisterns of chlorine gas in Grozny. I had heard of the cisterns, leftovers from an old Soviet plant. The Russians had claimed the Chechens had blown them up, in an improvised attempt at chemical warfare. The Chechens in turn blamed the Russians for shelling the gas tanks. Now here was the German insisting all the cisterns had not been blown up.

“Sie sind tam!” he cried, blending German with Russian. They are there! “Sie sind in very bad shape, diese tanks! They could explode any day, today, yesterday, Morgen. When they do, they kill any brave Chechens who make it nach Hause.”

The German failed, it seemed, to recognize that I spoke English. But he was passionate about preventing the chlorine cisterns from exploding. He had a simple plan. He would cool the gas, liquefy it, and store it in trucks while the cisterns were repaired. He figured he needed only a few thousand dollars, but no relief organization would help him. They all ran, he said, at the word “Chechnya.” And so the poor German had been left stranded at the Assa. Each night he retreated to the balcony on his own, to drink his furies away.

IN THE REFUGEE CAMPS I had sat in a stifling tent drinking strong tea from glass cups with Kuri Idrisov. He was a rarity, a Chechen psychiatrist. In the first war, he’d worked with a syringe, administering morphine day and night. The hospital in Grozny had been destroyed-twice. In the interregnum, now in his forties, he had joined the French crew of Médécins du Monde. For more than a year he had tended to the refugees. His family had moved back to Grozny, to his native village of Aldy, the destination I’d marked on the map I carried every day. The psychiatrist had heard of what happened in Aldy. His relatives had been in the village that day. He had wanted to return with his family, but he said he could not leave. He was hoping to salve the psychic wounds of the children in the tent city.

In another tent the children were listening to Musa Akhmadov. Akhmadov had written a series of books on the Chechens’ customary law, the traditions that governed relations among children and elders, lovers and enemies, known as adat. The psychiatrist had recruited the writer to spend time with the children. Adat, Akhmadov explained, had suffered in the war. It was not a religious but a social code. “The backbone of Chechen culture” he called it. Since the Chechens’ earliest days, adat had drawn the lines between right and wrong. But in the turmoil of the years of war, a new code – Shari’a–the Islamic religious law imported by young men with beards who called themselves Wahhabis had threatened the continuum of adat. Wahhabism, a strict form of fundamentalist Islam that originated in Saudi Arabia, had been carried to Chechnya from the Arab diaspora.

(#litres_trial_promo) The two were incompatible, Akhmadov said. He feared that the youngest refugees, with no knowledge of the laws of old, would fall prey to the Wahhabis. The children, the writer worried, would lose their Chechen heritage in the tents.

As we walked outside, threading among the children, Idrisov did not smile. After the first war he had believed it was the Chechens’ fault. “We’d won our freedom,” he said, “but hadn’t learned how to use it.” Now he thought differently. This new round had convinced him. “Look around you,” he said. “The Russians don’t want our land or our oil or our mountains. They want us to die out.”

DESPITE SHVEDOV’S HOURLY assurances, Issa had yet to appear in Nazran. For days we called Moscow, trying to relay a message to him in Chechnya. Shvedov, for some reason, insisted on code. “The package,” he screamed into the satellite phone, “has arrived and is waiting.” Issa turned up at last, claiming car trouble and the backup at the checkpoints from Grozny. We’d come back late to the Assa when I noticed a large man sitting at a pink plastic table beside the hotel. He was trying to crack pistachios with his fist on the plastic. Shvedov had walked right past him. The man, without looking up from his pursuit, had whistled. Shvedov, fearful the kitchen would close, kept walking. The man called out: “Is that any way to say hello?”

Issa had come to me with the résumé of an opportunist loyal to Moscow. Colleagues he had previously ferried had passed on the collective intelligence: Issa was once a high-ranking official in the anti-Dudayev camp, a staunchly pro-Russian Chechen of the Soviet era. He could be trusted to get you into Chechnya and around the republic – to almost any place no journalist could otherwise get to. But he could not be trusted in any other respect. Rumor cast him as an intermediary in the kidnapping trade.

He looked at me directly, the barest of smiles curling the edges of a thin gray mustache. “My dear Andrei,” he said, “I wish you a pleasant stay in the land the world has forgotten.”

I don’t know what it was. Maybe it was the singing. (He was fond of Joe Dassin, the bards of the Soviet underground, and old Chechen ballads sung, naturally, in Russian.) Maybe it was the way he affected a wordly air. (He mixed, in a single sentence, the few words he knew in French with the few he knew in English.) Maybe it was his gentlemanly manner. (He wore a pressed shirt, a sleeveless undershirt, and polished shoes.) But against my better judgment, Shvedov’s insistent counsel, and all that I had heard, I took an immediate liking to Issa.

It was too dark to set out. Issa, however, did not want to stay in the hotel. He knew it was infested with Ingush security agents, men who had no desire to see him working with an American journalist. We would leave before dawn the next day. This time Shvedov was right: It was best not to let Issa out of our sight. The Assa was short on comfort, but it was long on protection. Each night we ate in the restaurant beside men wearing camouflage bodysuits, their Kalashnikovs slung over their chairs. They were the bodyguards of aid workers. Each night there was gunfire outside, but inside, it was quiet. Until our last night.

It was around ten in the evening. I was alone in my room when I was startled by pounding on the door. I opened it and saw only an ID card shoved in my face and a trio of well-armed men in plain clothes. Two had automatic rifles in their hands. The third, a pale fellow dressed all in black who now refused to show me his ID again, wore two holstered guns, one under an armpit, another in his waist. They said they were police, but I knew they were Ingush FSB.

“You have failed to register with the police,” the lead man said when I showed him my documents. The hotel should have done that, I said. Like all hotels in Russia, it was required to do so. I had given the clerk my passport and visa. “You’ve committed a crime,” he said. It was a bluff, and one poorly orchestrated. All the same the next hour consisted of a spectacle of pounding on doors, rousting aid workers, and seizing passports. It dragged on to midnight.

In the lobby I found an Austrian relief worker screaming at the Ingush FSB agents. He was pleading for his passport. He knew no Russian, had just arrived, and was justifiably confused. He had come from Vienna to build latrines in the refugee camps. I intervened to tell him that the gentlemen said he could retrieve his passport tomorrow. Did he know where the Interior Ministry was? Of course he did, he cried. His bodyguards worked there.

All the while, the agents of the Ingush secret police spoke of arrests, jail, court orders. In time, however, the threats eased. They spoke of “fines” and then of “exemptions.” Before long they simply handed my documents back – with apologies. The lead man in black even offered to buy me a drink. I took a whiskey, a double. Later, once the men had vanished into the starless night just as suddenly as they’d arrived, the relief workers huddled in outrage in the lobby.

What relief organization did I represent? they wanted to know. They were relieved, oddly, to learn I was a journalist. “That explains it,” said a Belgian nurse, a longtime Assa resident. The Ingush agents, she said, hadn’t given them so much attention for months. Moreover, this time they hadn’t really seemed to be after bribes. My presence, the nurse said, explained the goon squad’s interest. She had a thought: “You’re not going into Chechnya tomorrow, are you?”

EIGHT (#ulink_a335e32e-e05f-5acf-8ca1-b1b907a37c31)

THE POISONED EMOTIONS that pervade relations between Russians and Chechens have ample literary precedent. Lermontov’s “Cossack Lullaby” is still sung to Russian children at bedtime:

Over the rocks the Terek streams

Raising a muddy wave,