Black Earth: A journey through Russia after the fall

Onto the bank the wicked Chechen crawls,

sharpening his dagger as he goes;

But your father is an old warrior,

Forged in many a battle,

So sleep little one, be calm …

For Russia’s “people of color” there is no political correctness, no cultural police to purge Russian literature of its jingoism. Russian writers have long coveted, and feared, the Caucasus. Although slurs emerged – Lermontov’s “wicked Chechen” is only the most famous – the Chechens were not always cast as bloodthirsty bandits. Pushkin, in his 1822 classic “The Prisoner of the Caucasus,” used the south as a lusty backdrop to probe the nature of freedom. To the poet, the Chechens were noble savages who enjoyed a “Circassian liberty” he could only envy. Lermontov, ironically, was no defender of Russian hegemony. In an early poem, “Izmail-Bey,” he even undermined the imperial campaign to subdue the mountaineers.

(#litres_trial_promo) Still, by the middle of the nineteenth century, as the Caucasian wars raged, a singular image of the Chechens had formed in the Russian imagination. They were merciless thieves, head choppers who would slit their own mothers’ throats should a blood feud demand it. Worse, they lived by taking Russians hostage and holding them in a zindan–a dark pit carved into the earth.

If the Russians had poets and writers to blame for their bias, the Chechens owed their opinion of the Russians in large part to one man, General Aleksei Petrovich Yermolov. Under Alexander I and Nicholas I, from 1816 to 1827, Yermolov served as viceroy of the Caucasus, the prime mover of the effort to pacify the mountaineers. In the post-Soviet decade, as the Chechens again acted on their yearning for sovereignty, the old bigotry rose anew in Moscow and across Russia. So, too, as Yeltsin’s failed campaign gave way to Putin’s new and improved offensive, did the tsarist military strategy. Yermolov was the progenitor of the Russian notion that there was only one way to defeat the Chechens: burn all their villages to the ground. Early in the second Chechen war one of Putin’s field marshals struck an uncanny echo of Yermolov’s conviction. “Our strategy is simple,” General Gennadi Troshev said. “If they shoot at us from a house, we destroy the house. If they shoot from all over a village, we destroy the village.”

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Yermolov boasted an illustrious résumé even before he reached the Caucasus. A giant of a man–“the head of a tiger on the torso of a Hercules” is how Pushkin portrayed him after an audience in 1829–Yermolov had won the Cross of St. George for heroism in battle when he was sixteen.

(#litres_trial_promo) At the fall of Paris in 1814 he had led both the Russian and Prussian Guards. With the deaths of Kutuzov and Bagration, Yermolov became the most revered officer in the imperial corps.

(#litres_trial_promo) His cruelty was famed. “I desire that the terror of my name should guard our frontiers,” he is said to have declared, “that my word should be for the natives a law more inevitable than death. Condescension in the eyes of Asiatics is a sign of weakness, and out of pure humanity I am inexorably severe. One execution saves hundreds of Russians from destruction, and thousands of Mussulmans from treason.”

(#litres_trial_promo) By his career’s end he had become a legend. “Nothing has any influence on Yermolov,” wrote the head of Nicholas’s secret police, “except his own vanity.”

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In short order, Yermolov set out to subdue the south. He built a line of fortresses along the Sunzha River. Forward bases in enemy territory, they bore names declaring his intentions: Groznaya (Menacing) was founded in 1818, the same year as Vladikavkaz, followed by Burnaya (Stormy) and Vnezapnaya (Sudden). He wrote Alexander I, Napoleon’s most unyielding foe:

When the fortresses are ready, I shall offer the scoundrels dwelling between the Terek and the Soundja [Sunzha] and calling themselves “peaceable,” rules of life, and certain obligations, that will make clear to them that they are subjects of your Majesty, and not allies, as they have hitherto dreamed. If they submit, as they ought, I will apportion them according to their numbers the necessary amount of land … if not, I shall propose to them to retire and join the other robbers from whom they differ only in name, and in this case the whole of the land will be at our disposal.

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It was psyops, tsarist style. Fortress Groznaya presaged not only the terror to come but the Russians’ misguided strategy as well. Yermolov succeeded only in uniting the Chechens and their neighbors to the east, the Dagestanis, in a rebellion led by Imam Shamil, the fabled nineteenth-century Muslim warrior. Shamil’s holy war, the Ghazavat, lasted more than twenty-five years. As early as 1820 one wise contemporary of Yermolov’s foretold his failure. “It is just as hard to subjugate the Chechens and other peoples of this region as to level the Caucasian range,” wrote General Mikhail Orlov, who did not fight in the campaign. “This is not something to achieve with bayonets but rather with time and enlightenment, in such short supply in our country. The fighting may bring great personal benefits to Yermolov, but none whatsoever to Russia.”

(#litres_trial_promo) In 1859, surrounded by imperial troops, Shamil gave up. But as the Russians knew well, the surrender was tactical. His Ghazavat would live on.

WE ARRIVED IN GUDERMES, Chechnya’s second – largest city, as the sun set, moments before the shoot-on-sight curfew fell. Chechnya is only slightly larger than the state of Connecticut, covering some six thousand square miles. Once it took a couple of hours to drive from Nazran to Gudermes, the town that rose only a few concrete floors off the dry ground to the north and east of Grozny. Now thanks to the vagaries of the checkpoints and the Russian convoys on the road – the endless caravans of tanks, trucks, and kerchiefed soldiers clinging atop armored personnel carriers (APCs)–it took us the whole day. Gudermes had little to offer. But the Russians, in an attempt to lend a semblance of governance to their military adventure had made it the republic’s temporary capital. Grozny was in no shape to host the officers and bureaucrats visiting from Moscow.

Issa, exhausted, went to his bedroom to undress. He rolled a small rug across the uneven floor and, stripped down to his sleeveless T-shirt and undershorts, bent to his knees to pray. Shvedov meanwhile was overjoyed. “Not a bad day’s work,” he said, declaring it over, as one shoe removed the other. He pulled off a sweat-soaked shirt, lay across an old sofa, and reached for another papirosa cigarette. As he smoked, the sweat continued to drip from his bald head.

It had been a long day. We’d started out early in the morning, crossed into Chechnya, driven across its dry northern plains and into the remains of Grozny. I had seen Kabul in the summer of 1996, just before the Taliban took the Afghan capital. Leveled so many times, Kabul had no cityscape. Little, save the remnants of the old Soviet apartment blocks, distinguished it from the Stone Age. Grozny, however, looked worse, much worse. When the USSR collapsed, the Chechen capital had been a modern city of Soviet architecture and European aspirations. It had been a city with promenades and parks, where the sweet smell of jasmine mingled with the smell of grilling lamb at sidewalk stands, where mammoth industrial works – one of the USSR’s largest petroleum refineries, a chemical factory, a cement plant – belched black plumes day and night, ever reminding the residents of their service to the empire. The square blocks downtown had once boasted the landmarks of Soviet power – Party buildings of stone that lengthened the reach of the ministries in Moscow. Grozny had once been a destination for the ambitious from across the North Caucasus, a center of education (with a university, technical institutes, sixty schools) and culture (with a national library, fine arts museum, museum of national culture, puppet theater, drama theater, and concert hall).

There had also been people. Grozny before the first war was home to nearly half a million residents. Between Lenin Square and Lenin Park, university students had gathered in the long summer evenings at the square named in honor of the druzhba narodov (“friendship of peoples”). Nearby stood a famous statue that pretended to testify to the ethnic solidarity. Three Bolsheviks – a Chechen, an Ingush, and a Russian – were sculpted in stone, shoulder to shoulder. The years of war, however, had laid the myth bare. The heads of the happy trio had been blown off by a rocket-propelled grenade.

(#litres_trial_promo) Now everything was different. Nothing functioned, and little remained. Grozny was a city of ruins.

We entered the long Staropromyslovsky district. Block after block had been bombed and burned out. Of the few buildings that still stood, many were sliced open. Walls and roofs had fallen, revealing the abandoned remains of homes inside: sinks, burned cabinets, old stoves. Furniture, belongings, anything of value had disappeared long ago. We drove on, accelerating between the checkpoints, now approaching the city center. Each turn revealed only more concrete carcasses, more black metal twisted and torched, more gaping holes that held only darkness. “This,” announced Issa, though the images required no captions, “is the wreckage of Putin’s War.”

FOR THE CHECHENS the winter of 1999–2000 may have been the harshest ever. While the West greeted the new millennium with apprehension, fearful that computers and fiber optics might usher in the Apocalypse, Armageddon had already arrived for the Chechens. The fortunate ones had survived one horrible war, the campaign that began on New Year’s Eve 1994 and ended for all practical purposes on August 6, 1996, the day the Chechen fighters swarmed back and retook Grozny. The first war left as many as one hundred thousand dead. Launched to quell a nationalist movement for independence, it dragged on thanks largely to Yeltsin’s vanity, the shambolic state of his armed forces, and the resolve of the Chechen rebels. In the summer of 1996 Yeltsin won reelection, and “the Chechen question” was put on hold. On August 31, 1996, Yeltsin’s envoy, General Aleksandr Lebed, cut a deal with Aslan Maskhadov, the shy military leader of the insurgency.

(#litres_trial_promo) The pact, signed in the Dagestani town of Khasavyurt, brought a cease-fire but put off the critical issue of the region’s status for five years. The deal haunted both sides. “Khasavyurt,” in the coded lexicon of Moscow politics, lingered as a metaphor for Russia’s weakness.

David had beaten Goliath but not killed him. The rewards were few. For Chechens the interregnum brought an ugly period of isolation, dominated by banditry, kidnapping, and arbitrary attempts at Shari’a. In January 1997 Maskhadov was elected the first Chechen president, but even he had no illusions the republic had attained sovereignty or peace.

(#litres_trial_promo) In Moscow, Chechnya was pushed to the back burner, its troubles relegated to the expanding realm of the country’s political taboos, another embarrassment best left unspoken and forgotten.

Then, one warm morning in August 1999, the back burner caught fire. The two most famous fighters of the first war, Shamil Basayev and the Saudi-born mercenary known as Khattab (his single nom de guerre), opened a new front. The Kremlin had made Basayev Russia’s most wanted man after he had led a daring, and homicidal, raid on a hospital in the southern Russian town of Budyonnovsk in the summer of 1995. Basayev had led the rebels’ return to Grozny on August 6, 1996, but struggled after the war. For a time he tried governing, serving briefly as prime minister under Maskhadov. By his own admission, Basayev as a politician was a disaster. His talent lay in warfare. Khattab, meanwhile, had become the most odious rebel to the Russians. An Islamic militant with a sinister giggle and long, curly hair, on Russian television he was branded the Black Arab. Khattab had joined the Chechen fight in 1995, having fought the Soviets in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, by his own admission, Khattab had consorted with Osama bin Laden. But the rebel commander’s ties to bin Laden were obscure at best.

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Basayev and Khattab led a convoy of fighters across the mountains of southeastern Chechnya, east into neighboring Dagestan, the mostly Muslim republic, firmly within the Russian Federation, on the Caspian Sea.

(#litres_trial_promo) A caviar-rich republic the size of the Austria, Dagestan is a complex mélange of obscure ethnic groups – more than thirty in all – long ruled by Soviet-bred officials loyal to Moscow. The rebels, several hundred by the best estimates, marched in broad daylight, two by two, well armed with grenade launchers, wearing new camouflage uniforms. When they seized a handful of Dagestani villages across the border, in Moscow the move was seen as an attempt to fulfill an old vow to unite Chechnya with Dagestan in an Islamic state that would reach the Caspian.

The remote stretch of Dagestan had long been a center for the Wahhabi movement. Sergei Stepashin, the Russian prime minister at the time of the incursion, had even once visited the villages under Wahhabi “occupation.” In August 1998 Stepashin, then Yeltsin’s interior minister, had gone to Dagestan to hear grievances from the village elders. He left convinced that “the Wahhabis are peaceful people, we can work with them.” The day after Basayev and Khattab entered Dagestan, Stepashin again flew to Dagestan. This time as prime minister he spoke in stern tones. He said he’d come to take charge, but his face was ash gray. The next day, August 9, 1999, Yeltsin sacked him.

Stepashin had personified loyalty, long considered the president’s favorite attribute. However, this was not just another of Yeltsin’s seasonal cabinet cleanings. Stepashin’s shortcoming, said Oleg Sysuev, a Kremlin aide at the time, was that “he had a heart.” Yeltsin needed more than fidelity; he needed strength. He turned to Putin, who had been his FSB director for only a year, and named him prime minister. In eighteen months Yeltsin had sacked five prime ministers. This time, however, he added a shocker. He spoke on television of Putin as his successor. At the time the former KGB officer was unknown. Polls put his popularity ratings at less than 2 percent. The dynamics, however, of the political vacuum had been proved. “Yeltsin could put anyone in the prime minister’s job,” said Aleksandr Oslon, Russia’s best pollster, “and his numbers would rise.”

Putin’s numbers were aided by more than his new seat of power. The August march into Dagestan, fixed on Russian television screens as a slap in the Kremlin’s face, gave him a perfect opportunity to avenge the mistakes of the past. But Putin wanted more: to permit Russia, insulted and injured after the crash of 1998 and burdened by Yeltsin’s calcified rule, to imagine itself again a velikaya derzhava, a great power. Moscow dispatched helicopter gunships to pound the mud villages the rebels had seized. Basayev and Khattab, however, and nearly all their men, it seemed, had already fled. The new prime minister promised a short operation – he would mercilessly cleanse Dagestan, but under no condition reignite the embers in Chechnya.

During his brief tenure as FSB chief Putin had hung a portrait of Peter the Great in his Lubyanka office. In his first months as prime minister, his aides liked to assure foreign reporters that Peter, the tsar who opened Russia to the West, was Putin’s model. Yet Peter had also begun his career with an onslaught against the heathens in the south, conquering the port of Azov in 1696 from the Ottoman Turks, gaining access, after a failed attempt the previous year, to the Black Sea.

For years, in Russian politics the month of August seemed to carry a curse. Both the coup of 1991 and the crash of 1998 came in August. But August 1999 hit Yeltsin particularly hard. His physical and mental health had moved from a topic of concern to ridicule among the Moscow elite. Worse still, scandals brewed on several fronts, conspiring to ruin his fishing vacation. There was the Mabetex mess, a tangled affair that reeked of money laundering on a massive scale and of egregious – even by Russian standards – bribery. The Mabetex story, gaining ground since the spring, had already ensnared Pavel Borodin, the president’s drinking partner and chief of one of the state’s largest internal empires, the Kremlin Property Department. In August the scandal threatened to drag in Yeltsin’s two daughters, their spouses, and a host of family consiglieri. Borodin was alleged to have accepted bribes from a Kosovar Albanian, Behgjet Pacolli, for multibillion-dollar contracts to refurbish the Kremlin.

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August also brought a second scandal, the Bank of New York affair. The story, which first appeared in the New York Times on August 19, 1999, alleged that Russian crime bosses, in cahoots with Moscow officials, had washed “as much as ten billion dollars” through the U.S. banking system.

(#litres_trial_promo) The BoNY scandal unfolded as Russian forces bombed and shelled the Wahhabi villages in Dagestan. Then, on August 25, the Corriere della Sera ran a detailed exposé of the Mabetex case that linked, for the first time, the Yeltsin family to the misdeeds.

Six days later the bombing season began. Days after the rebels had retreated from Dagestan, a series of bombings rocked Russia. On August 31, as Mia and I sat in an Indian café two blocks away, a bomb exploded in one of Luzhkov’s proudest creations, the Manezh, a subterranean shopping mall next to the Kremlin. Placed beside a video arcade, the device wounded forty-one. Two later died from their burns. On September 4, 1999, an apartment building housing Russian officers and their families in the Dagestani town of Buinaksk exploded in the middle of the night. Sixty-two died. Back in Moscow, one after another on September 9 and 13, massive chemical bombs leveled two whole apartment blocks. Three days later a fourth building blew, this time in the south, in the town of Volgodonsk. By then nearly 300 people had been killed in their sleep. Yeltsin denounced the “barbaric acts of terror.”

No one came forward to claim responsibility. But the prime suspects naturally were the Chechens. Few facts surfaced, but, as always, theories in Moscow swirled. Rossiiskaya gazeta, the daily newspaper of the Russian state, saw a host of possible culprits: Chechen rebels, who “want[ed] to create a great state in the Caucasus,” global oil barons, “who want[ed] to redraw the map of a rich region in their favor,” and Russophobes, who wanted Moscow to “sink into local conflicts and retire from the world stage.” Viktor Ilyukhin, the chairman of the Duma Security Committee and an unreconstructed Communist prone to fulminating without facts, saw the bombings as a Kremlin campaign to bring down Mayor Luzhkov. Moskovskii komsomolets, Russia’s best-read tabloid and the newspaper closest to Luzhkov, accused his archfoe Berezovsky of masterminding the invasion into Dagestan. The paper even aired an accusation that many – members of the military included – feared true: that the FSB had set the bombs. No evidence, however, surfaced that the blasts were the work of Chechen extremists.

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Questions lingered. There was the choice of targets – working-class districts – and the timing – just when things seemed quiet – and the fact that the Chechens had never set off a bomb in Moscow during the first war. Most disconcerting of all was a strange episode in Ryazan, a city 130 miles southeast of Moscow. On the night of September 22, 1999, just six days after the Volgodonsk bombing, residents of a twelve-story apartment house at 14/16 Novosyelov Street called the police. A bus driver had seen two men carrying something into the basement and feared it was a bomb. The police discovered three sacks bound by wires and a detonator set to go off before dawn. They evacuated the building and called the bomb squad. The next day Putin declared that “vigilance” had thwarted a “terrorist threat.” On September 24, 1999, however, in the glare of the television lights, the new head of the FSB, Nikolai Patrushev, a man Putin had brought from Petersburg, apologized. The security service, he said, had put the sacks there itself. It was only “a training exercise,” Patrushev said awkwardly. The sacks, he insisted, were filled with sugar.

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The bombings, coupled with the invasion of Dagestan, united the nation – against the Chechens. By September’s close Putin’s War had begun. Russian troops, this time a force of nearly a hundred thousand, were back in Chechnya. This war, the new prime minister vowed, would be different. Moscow would restore order in the lawless region that had enjoyed de facto, if not de jure, independence since driving the Russian forces out after the 1994–96 war. The first campaign had been a humiliation riddled with political indecision and military incompetence. The second round, as one of its architects, General Troshev, promised early, would be “a merciless battle, with Moscow refusing to abstain from any of our weapons, for every square foot of the Chechen republic.”

Led by the new strongman in the Kremlin, Russian troops moved with purpose across the northern plains of Chechnya. On television Russians watched with pride, and muted amazement, as Chechen village after Chechen town fell without a shot. When Gudermes fell without a fight, Moscow imagined the war was won. “Only mop-up work remains to be done,” announced Putin’s unctuous spokesman for the war, Sergei Yastrzhembsky. A spin doctor who had served both Yeltsin and his rival Luzhkov, Yastrzhembsky held daily briefings to assure reporters the new campaign was an “antiterrorist operation” not a war. “It will be over within days,” he promised as New Year’s 1999 neared. In the first war Russia’s fledgling private media had tested their independence. This time, however, the state drew a new line: To report from the Chechen side was to support the enemy. The local media largely complied, glossing over reports of civilian massacres and Chechen resistance.

In Moscow the politicians and generals now tried to downplay the fate of Grozny. In the first war the city had become known among the troops as a meat grinder. The rebels had mastered the art of urban guerrilla warfare, using underground passages and fortified buildings to entrap Russian tank columns and destroy them. “Grozny is not critical,” insisted General Valery Manilov, the logorrheic spokesman for the high command. “We will not storm Grozny” became his mantra at weekly briefings, as reporters wondered how the Russians could win the war without entering the capital.

The answer was simple – and brutal. Early in Putin’s War, Aleksandr Zhilin, a former MiG pilot and one of the keenest military journalists in Moscow, mapped the new strategy for me. “You take up positions as far away from your target as possible,” Zhilin said, “and shell the hell out of them. You use jets, attack helicopters, artillery – whatever has lead and metal and flies. You hit them day and night without pause. You send in men only once you’ve leveled everything.” The onslaught was calculated to lose as few Russian soldiers as possible, while killing as many Chechens, armed or not, as possible. “Costly in terms of hardware,” Zhilin called the plan, “but effective.”