Black Earth: A journey through Russia after the fall

Almost immediately the Chechens felt the difference from the first war. This time they fled. At one point more than three hundred thousand abandoned the republic. While most went to Ingushetia, some went south – on foot across the mountains to Georgia. In October 1999 in Duisi, a village at the mouth of the Pankisi Gorge across the border in Georgia, I found hundreds of Chechen refugees crowded in an abandoned hospital.

(#litres_trial_promo) For days they had walked in deep snow, beneath Russian bombers. At times the road was no more than a narrow path, much of it mined. They were the lucky ones, they said. Dozens more had died along the way. During World War II Leningrad residents trapped by the Nazi siege escaped on an ice road across Lake Ladoga to the north of the city. The Soviets later named it the Road of Life. The road from Grozny into the Pankisi Gorge, the Chechen refugees said, had been a Road of Death.

The refugees had no trouble recognizing the Kremlin’s new tactics. “In the first war,” said Roza, a nine-year-old girl from Urus-Martan, “we’d sit in the cellar and count the bombs.” But in the new war, she said, “there are so many you can’t even count them.” The hospital, long abandoned, had no heat. Plastic sheets hung over the empty window-frames. Khassan, a village elder from Samashki, spoke of a new level of brutality. “I never imagined I’d feel nostalgia for Yeltsin,” he said. “I never imagined war could be worse than what we saw before. But this is not war. It is murder on a state level; it is mass murder.”

Despite the generals’ assurances, few in Moscow doubted that the Russians would have to storm Grozny. This time, however, Kremlin officials were sure the city would fall easily. After all, little of its infrastructure remained, and given the mass flight of refugees, this time around there would be few civilians to shelter the rebels. By November 1999 Russian forces had invested the city, hoping to sever the supply lines to the last Chechen fighters within it. The siege had begun.

By December 1999 the so-called chastniye sektora (private districts), the stretches of little single-story houses that had spread around Grozny in the years since Gorbachev, had been scorched. The tall apartment buildings along the long avenues were now shells, dark eye sockets in the city’s skull. The center, leveled once in the first war, had fallen silent. Civilians, both Chechen and Russian, still lived in Grozny. No one knew how many remained – some said as many as twenty thousand – but they were invisible. Day and night they crowded together in dank cellars beneath the ruins.

The siege lasted 102 days. On January 31, after two weeks of the second war’s bloodiest fighting, Minutka Square, the intersection long considered the key to the city, fell. There was in the end no great battle for Grozny. Both sides exaggerated the numbers they had killed and wounded. However, the Chechen fighters, even the generals in Moscow had to admit, made a strong stand. Some had retreated earlier to their traditional refuge, the mountains south of Grozny. In the final days of January 2000, the last rebel contingent in the city, some three thousand men in all, started to decamp. They moved at night, in two columns through a corridor on the city’s southwestern side.

By February 1 the fighters, now several hundred fewer in number, had reached the village of Alkhan-Kala, eleven miles southwest of Aldy. Fighters who survived the trek later told me how they crossed frozen pastures covered with mines. Knowing the fields were mined, they moved forward one after another, in a suicide walk. “We shall see each other in paradise,” they screamed as they stepped out into the field. “Allah akbar!” others cried. As they walked, explosions, feet triggering mines, lit the darkness. “The only way to cross the field,” said a young Chechen who was there that night, “was to walk across the bodies.” The exodus cost the fighters several top commanders. Basayev lost his right foot to a mine. Among the dead was Lecha Dudayev, the mayor of Grozny and nephew of the late former leader Dudayev.

Every village the retreating fighters passed through became the object of fierce Russian bombing: Shaami-Yurt, Katyr-Yurt, Gekhi-Chu. Aldy had suffered surprisingly little damage – before February. Bombs and shells had fallen on the village, hitting scattered houses and the train station. But it had not figured in any clashes between the Russian forces and the rebels. Only later did I piece it together. On their bloody retreat from the besieged capital to Alkhan-Kala, one column of fighters had come straight through Aldy.

GRIM AS IT WAS, Gudermes became home. In Moscow the town was considered under Russian control. In reality, the Russians’ hold here was as illusive as in any other corner of Chechnya. The officers kept to their barracks, a Soviet-style housing project laced with several cordons of fortifications. Even still, their sleep was routinely interrupted by grenades, remote-controlled bombs, and Kalashnikov fire. In the local bazaar stocked by Dagestani merchants, Russian soldiers shopped warily, moving only in packs. Moscow’s Chechen proxies, however, the natives recruited in the latest pacification effort, may have had the most to fear. Akhmed Kadirov, once the grand mufti of the republic, now Putin’s choice to rule it, lived in Gudermes, but no one ever saw him. They only heard him – each morning and evening, coming and going in a Russian helicopter. “The invisible mufti,” the Chechens called him mockingly.

Issa’s apartment had all the warmth of an IRA safe house. He liked to keep the windows papered over, visitors at a minimum, and his Makarov pistol handy. The apartment was a gift from Nikolai Koshman, a feckless Russian apparatchik who had risen in the Railways Ministry and had served as a deputy in the brief puppet regime Moscow had tried to foist on Chechnya during the first war.

(#litres_trial_promo) In the new campaign, before settling on the former mufti Kadirov, Putin had recalled Koshman to duty, naming him his viceroy in the republic.

By his own estimation, Issa was equal parts Chechen and Soviet. Every morning he slapped on French cologne and prayed to Allah. Each night he prayed again. Yet when time and resources permitted, he drank. His usual drink, as beer and wine ran scarce in Chechnya, was spirt, denatured ethyl alcohol. As a reward for his taking on Dudayev, Moscow in 1995 had given him a sinecure, a position atop the Foreign Relations Department in Russia’s puppet regime of Doku Zavgayev, a Soviet bureaucrat and Chechen loyalist. At one point Issa headed the negotiations for seven hundred million dollars’ worth of contracts for the reconstruction of Grozny. Mabetex, the Swiss-based construction firm that had brought the Yeltsin family a flood of bad press, had a five-million-dollar slice of them. Issa was proud of his snapshots, pictures of himself in Grozny with Pacolli, the Kosovar Albanian who ran Mabetex. The Turkish firm Enka had been the lead partner. But it had all been run through Borodin. Nothing of course had come of it. “Only more war,” Issa said. “And more reason to hate the Russians and distrust your fellow Chechens.”

Early in Putin’s War, Moscow had again turned to Issa. The Russians made him an aide to Koshman, with the promise of his old job back at Grozneft. By then he had made the rebels’ blacklist, an honor bestowed on him by Movladi Udugov, Dudayev’s onetime minister of ideology who had long since gone underground and now ran Basayev’s and Khattab’s multilingual Web site, Kavkaz.org. The rebels, Issa explained, had sentenced their enemies to death under Shari’a. With pride he proffered the list of names. Yeltsin topped it, but there, just a few lines below Putin, was Issa. He had few socially acceptable things to say about Udugov, Basayev, and Khattab. However, after six months of Putin’s War, and hopeless attempts to work with his generals – Vladimir Shamanov, Ivan Babichev, Viktor Kazantsev, and Gennadi Troshev – he had even fewer nice things to say about the Russians.

Early one morning before the heat of the sun started to fill the apartment, we rose and, without tea, climbed into the UAZik. We drove slowly through Gudermes on its rutted roads. Scattering stray dogs, we creaked past the half-guarded officers’ headquarters, beside the string of forlorn stalls that now pretended to be the local bazaar, and through the first checkpoints of the morning. We left town and headed west, following the old asphalt through brown fields, until at the eastern edge of Grozny, we came to Khankala, the Russian military headquarters in Chechnya. Journalists who had covered the war in Vietnam said Khankala reminded them of Da Nang. The base seemed like a small town. Everywhere tents and helicopters stretched as far as you could see.

We continued on, coming again to the ruins of Minutka Square, then on into the center of Grozny. The streets were as empty as before. In the concrete remains nothing stirred. Not cats, not dogs. Every so often, among the burned shells of the apartment houses, flecks of color flashed. Clothes dried on a line strung between two walls that a shell had opened to the street. The city’s water supply was tainted with disease. There was no plumbing and no electricity, no shops and no transport, but someone did, after all, live here. Chechens, men, women, and their children, were coming home.

At a barren corner, near where the old Presidential Palace once stood, young girls sold candy, gum, and glass jars filled with home-distilled kerosene. They stood by their wares but didn’t smile or wave. They had no customers. The only people moving among them were soldiers. They did not walk. They traveled on top of their tanks, trucks, and APCs. Only at the checkpoints did the soldiers, bare-chested in the hot sun, stand.

Issa hated taking lip from young Russians with Kalashnikovs. But they were becoming harder to avoid. “You take the same route twice in one day,” he said. “If there’s no checkpoint the first time, it’s there the next time you go by.” Amid the ruins the checkpoints often marked what had once been city blocks. The Russians stopped each car, scoured the occupants’ papers and searched the trunk. They feared the suicide bombers who had taken to blowing up their checkpoints and barracks with regularity. The tactic of turning your body into a bomb may have come from the Middle East, but the Chechens made a significant advancement in the technique. Long before Palestinian women and girls joined the bombers’ ranks, Chechen women had done so. Issa was never happy at the checkpoints. But the worst, he would later say, had been the last one we’d negotiated that morning, the final checkpoint before Aldy.

NINE (#ulink_27bd0c2f-3517-5dfe-99c5-b0c86e8d8e0a)

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.