Black Earth: A journey through Russia after the fall

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.