Black Earth: A journey through Russia after the fall

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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.