Black Earth: A journey through Russia after the fall

“Gas or electric, I could do either, and I earned a lot. But after the death of my father my brothers wanted me to continue my education. So I entered the Islamic University here in 1992. I was about to complete my sixth year in the Shari’a department when the war started. And now two wars and still no degree.”

Shvedov liked to remind Issa and me that before declaring their independence in 1991, Chechens were not the most observant Muslims. “Of all the peoples of the Caucasus,” he said, “the Chechens were the last to find Islam.” As with much of his ramblings, Shevdov’s claim was at best half right. It was true that for decades a folk Islam, not a strict adherence to the laws of the Koran, had predominated among Chechens. It was also true that Dudayev, when he seized power in Grozny, had led a movement for independence first and for religious freedom second. The first chief justice of Dudayev’s Shari’a court smoked Marlboros during interviews. But as the first war raged, more and more young Chechen fighters donned green headbands that declared “Allah akbar” in Arabic. The Russian onslaught did what Dudayev had never envisioned: It turned the rebels ever more fundamentalist. By the time the second war began, the talk was less of independence and more of jihad.

THERE WAS A THEORY on why hell visited Aldy on February 5. It had to do with the brutality of Basayev and his comrade Khattab. I had heard it in Moscow from Russian journalists and in Nazran from Ingush bureaucrats. I heard it from Issa as well. It had to do with the abuses suffered after the end of the first war by the Russians who lived in Chernorechiye, the district bordering Aldy. It was once a workers’ district, home to those who traded shifts at the nearby cement, chemical, and oil works. In Chernorechiye, the story went, the Russians enjoyed the best apartments. After the first war, once the Chechens had retaken Grozny, they exacted revenge. “That they kicked out Russians for apartments, this is absolutely true,” said the reporter Andrei Babitsky. “It happened everywhere in Grozny, but Chernorechiye had a large Russian population. And in the months before the second war, the practice there is said to have grown more and more violent, with Russians leaving their apartments through their windows.”

Chernorechiye suffered a zachistka the same day as Aldy. The theory held that the Russians who had come on the Fifth had come to avenge the Russians killed in Chernorechiye. “WE HAVE RETURNED,” read graffito painted in large letters during the zachistka in Chernorechiye, “YOUR VILLAGE NEIGHBORS.”

There was another theory, one that concerned the question of fighters. In the wake of the Aldy massacre, news stories and human rights reports downplayed the possibility that Chechen fighters had been in Aldy. But the fighters had been there. Babitsky had been there with them. On January 14, in his last radio broadcast from Grozny before disappearing, Babitsky told Radio Liberty’s Russian listeners, “In the village of Aldy, where I was also today with armed Chechens, bombs and missiles hit literally two hundred to two hundred and fifty meters from us.” The fighters had come through the village, Aset said. Some had stayed a few days, only to rest and have her treat their wounds. The nearest rebel base, everyone insisted, had been in the adjoining district, District 20, three bus stops east from Aset’s house.

Babitsky, when I asked him later what he had seen in Aldy during his hellish last weeks in Grozny, was forthcoming. “I was in Aldy nearly every day. In the middle of January I did spend two days there at my close friend’s house.” His friend, Babitsky said, was Kazbek, the commander of Aldy. “I’d thought Kazbek had surely died, but he survived the zachistka. He’d dug a hole in his cellar so deep that even though the Russians threw a grenade in, he lived.”

Aldy, however, was never a rebel stronghold. The fighters were too smart to stay for long. Chernorechiye, Babitsky and other reporters who had been going to Chechnya since the first war told me, was by far the better defensive position. Chernorechiye sat high above the road and, unlike Aldy, boasted multistory buildings. For the wounded, Aldy offered a sanctuary, a rare corner of Grozny where there were still people, good water, and, most of all, medicine. But given the number of villagers who remained in Aldy, the fighters were reluctant to use it as a position. The fighters, Babitsky said, deemed the village too important to risk the inevitable reprisal. “They thought,” he said, “Aldy was a good refuge.”

THE CARNAGE THAT DESTROYED so much of Aldy is not peculiar to our time. Indeed Aldy, unbeknownst to the Russians who arrived on February 5, had a history. A river of violence and sadness found its source there in the eighteenth century, during the reign of Catherine the Great. In 1785 one of the first battles between Chechens and Russians took place when Catherine ordered her troops to storm Aldy, the village that at the time spanned the area of modern-day Aldy and Chernorechiye.

Catherine chose the target with purpose. Long before Yermolov built the line of forts that began with Grozny, Peter the Great had built the Line, a Great Wall of Russian forts and Cossack stánitsas. By 1784 the Russians had finished their critical garrison in the North Caucasus, the fort at Vladikavkaz. But in the following year Catherine’s men suffered an unprecedented defeat on the Sunzha River – at the hands of the followers of a mysterious Chechen holy warrior.

In 1785, Prince Grigori Potemkin – Catherine’s viceroy in the Caucasus and the favorite among her lovers – learned of a potent force emerging from Aldy, a resistance movement led by a shepherd. Potemkin heard the news from his cousin Major – General Pavel Potemkin, who sent an alarming communiqué from the field: “On the opposite bank of the river Sunzha in the village of Aldy, a prophet has appeared and started to preach. He has submitted superstitious and ignorant people to his will by claiming to have had a revelation.”

(#litres_trial_promo)

Many believe that Imam Shamil, the holy warrior who led the longest resistance to the tsar, was the first great Chechen fighter. He was not. The title belongs to Sheikh Mansour. (Shamil, an Avar from Dagestan, was not even Chechen. Sheikh Mansour was.) History tells Mansour’s story variously. His genealogy, theology, even name, have never been definitively revealed. But in the Caucasus what motivates men and triggers their weapons is not reality, but a perception of reality. In the realm of perceived reality, Mansour is revered as the first in the long line of Chechen holy warriors. He was born a peasant named Ushurma in Aldy. He had the good fortune to come of age just in time for Russia’s southern onslaught.

“Muhammad paid this simple peasant a visit,” Shamkhan told me. “He revealed himself to this young man because he was the purest of believers. The time had come, the prophet told him, to lead a Ghazavat on the Russians.”

In 1783, Ushurma took the name Mansour–“conqueror” in Arabic – and later added the honorific “sheikh.” A devout believer in Sufism, a mystical strain of Islam, Mansour already had a following. Sheikh Mansour led the Naqshbandi Tariqa, or path of belief.

Eager to please the empress, his lover and lord, Prince Potemkin dispatched three thousand troops to capture Mansour. They stormed Aldy but did not find him. Frustrated, they torched the village. Mansour’s men got their revenge. They ambushed the Russians in the nearby woods and killed, the chronicles attest, more than six hundred men. Potemkin had to tell Catherine that nearly half his force had been lost. Many had drowned, trying to flee, in the Sunzha’s muddy waters. An “unfortunate occurrence,” Prince Potemkin called it in his report to Catherine.

(#litres_trial_promo) The blood feud had begun.

As Catherine’s men routed his followers, Mansour took refuge in the Ottoman fortress of Anapa. In 1791 he was captured and shipped off to St. Petersburg, where he spent his last years in the Schlüsselberg Fortress, an island prison in the Neva River near Lake Ladoga.

(#litres_trial_promo) But Mansour’s spirit never left Chechnya. In Aldy it was especially strong.

“We all know the history of this village. Sheikh Mansour lives on in each of us,” the mullah Shamkhan said, leaning forward on his staff. “We feel his strength every day. We know the struggle began here.” Shamkhan had just come from leading a service for one of the shaheed, the martyrs of the Fifth of February. At the service, dancing the zikr, a religious dance, was Magomed Dolkaev, an elegant elder with a flowing white beard who claimed Sheikh Mansour as an ancestor. No one knew the true genealogy. But as Shamkhan told me, it was not important.

A year and a half later Dolkaev was dead. He, too, had fallen victim to the new times-shot four times in the head by an unknown gunman in his home in Aldy.

ISSA, WHO SAT IN silence as I listened to Shamkhan, could no longer hold his peace. He had observed it all, taking in the mullah and his story with the weary eyes of a crocodile. When he begged permission to interrupt, I consented with a shrug to the inevitable.

Issa leaned forward, squaring his elbows on the table across from the mullah, with a question. “How come Maskhadov,” he said, referring to the military commander elected Chechnya’s president after the first war, “couldn’t build a state that could defend any citizen, no matter his faith?”

His voice had lost its usual calm and was rising. “Where were all these brave fighters when there was not one Russian soldier here? When all you had to do was bury one, or two, or three bandits so that none of this would have happened?”

Shamkhan invoked the name of Allah. He swore that he was “against any embodiment of evil,” that he could not “tolerate Wahhabism,” and was a foe of “any extremism.”

Issa did not let up.

“You say you left with the fighters. Abandoned the village during the siege. You and I speak the same language. Tell me, as the spiritual father of these people, how did we come to this? How can we live like this?”

Shamkhan struggled for a rejoinder. He stiffened his broad back and condemned the plagues that had visited Chechnya since the Soviet fall: the militarism of Dudayev, the romanticism of Maskhadov, the banditry of Basayev, the foreign Wahhabi virus of Khattab, and the venal hunger of the rest of Chechnya’s warlords. “All this we have earned,” he said, “because of our ignorance. Thanks to our lack of enlightenment, we were unable to establish any order.”

The mullah was talking to Issa but looking at me. He said he had never led anyone to any jihad. He said the fighters had wanted to take him earlier from Aldy, that they were afraid the Russians would kill him on sight. He swore to Allah that everything he had done was done not in the name of Dudayev or Maskhadov or Basayev or Khattab, but in the name of Allah and Allah alone.

As the torrent of words poured forth, I realized Shamkhan was talking too much. Then, suddenly, he dropped his guard. He declared his conscience clean. He said he had done all that had been asked of him, that he had journeyed “the path from beginning to end,” the path that was “written in blood.”

Shamkhan, I realized then, had been with Basayev and the fighters the night they broke through the siege of Grozny. “The path” was the fighters’ macabre retreat through the minefields to Alkhan-Kala.

I pressed for details.

“They needed someone to bless and bury the dead,” he said. “So I made this journey with them and with my own eyes saw how they died. If someone were to sit and tell me what they had seen along this path, I swear to Allah, I would never believe him. I would not believe people could die like that.”

The fighters had taken him from Aldy on the last day of January. Before he left, the mullah told his followers to stay in the village. “Do not abandon your homes to the Russians,” he had said. The words, as Shamkhan recalled them, weighed heavily.

The minefields killed hundreds during the fighters’ retreat. Others froze to death. He had stayed with the fighters for the entire trek, from Grozny to the snowbound mountains in the south. He had left the fighters in their mountain hideaways.

Would they fight until the end? I asked.

“What lies in their hearts,” Shamkhan said, “is to me a dark wood.”

TEN (#ulink_ecd7afb4-d817-5188-9f5c-13f6a76a4bf4)

THE CREEK WAS DARK green and cloudy. As Issa and I bathed in it, resting our hands on the sludgy rocks below, our feet and arms stirred the water the color of burned sugar. Issa was telling me tales of the glory of his youth in Grozny, but I was preoccupied. I was wondering what else lay in the mucky creek of Shali.

We walked here together, through the nettles of the overgrown orchard that was the backyard of the small house where Issa’s mother and two sisters lived. His mother was eighty; his sisters were in their fifties. Throughout the years of war, Shali, lying in the plains just south of Grozny, had been spared the wholesale destruction of the capital and nearly every other town and village in Chechnya. Issa’s mother and sisters lived here throughout the shelling, the bombings, and the military sweeps.

Inside the house it was dark and cool. There were two rooms and a kitchen. Issa did not say it, but the house was all he had in Chechnya now. Once he had a comfortable apartment in Grozny, but it was lost to the first war. He managed to save some of the furniture – a gold-rimmed mirror, a lacquered table, a velvety divan – vestiges of the Chechen elite of the Soviet era that now sat like islands in the biggest room of the house. Except for the salvaged treasures, the house was empty. The second room was filled with rolled-up carpets and chairs stacked against a wall, more remnants of a lost life.

The creek, no matter what toxins of war lay in its waters, was cooling. Like the children who jumped into it, we were naked to our underwear. Our shirts and trousers, stiffened with dirt and road dust, hung from a low cherry tree that twisted above the muddy bank. One side of the creek was lined by the overgrown yards. The other was a steep bank the children used as a diving platform. Behind them were only empty fields. The children leaped in, hands over knees, shouting as they fell through the air.

In the evening, after we dried ourselves with worn hand towels and dressed again in the same clothes, Issa’s mother, Sabiat, took me on a tour. She was so thin and her back so bent that it was remarkable she could walk, let alone cook and clean. “We have everything here,” she said, pointing to the trees that stood amid the weeds: “Apricot, pear, apple, cherry.” The heat of the afternoon brought the smell of the fruit close. Sabiat squinted at the cloudless sky. “Why?” she asked. She needed no more words; she meant the war. “Somebody must want it,” she said.

Everywhere there was greenery. Vines climbed high along the back wall. On a tall wooden fence, roses, pink and red, bloomed. The garden, Issa’s mother said, was all she needed now. Nothing more. “But the fruit of the trees,” said Issa’s younger sister, “is not as good since the war.” She was called Zulei, and her elder sister Zura.

The courtyard, the summer living room of houses across Chechnya, was clean and quiet. Here the routine of the day unfolded. In the morning the sisters washed clothes in metal basins. In the afternoon their mother fried potatoes and boiled lamb. And in the evening Shvedov lounged on a faded threadbare couch that sat in the middle of the narrow porch. Above the porch, in the corners of its slanting roof, swallows nested.

“Our mama’s life has been a hard one,” Zura said.

“Mama,” Issa commanded, “tell him about the deportation.”

There was no need, and he knew that. The deportation was not history. It informed the daily conversation in Chechnya. Issa’s mother had been twenty-two in 1944. She remembered clearly how the NKVD soldiers had herded them into the freight cars – in all, more than fourteen thousand cars were needed – and sent them off to the remote Soviet republics of Central Asia. Along with hundreds of thousands of Chechens and Ingush, Sabiat survived thirteen years in Central Asia. Exile was hard, of course, she said. But it was better, much better, than this war. “They gave us a small plot of land and a little house. We could grow a garden.”

Tired of talk, Sabiat went back to her chores. In her slippers and a flowered cotton dress, she reached for a short brush, a dozen switches tied to a stick. She was intent on sweeping the dirt from the concrete of her courtyard. She stooped low and, despite the heat, worked the brush with purpose and without pause.

“Every night and every morning our mama cleans,” Zulei said. “Only the water from the well will she let us get ourselves.”

She had survived Central Asia, the road back to Grozny in 1957, and the loss of her husband, to a car accident years ago that came on the Prophet’s birthday. “She must work or else …” said her daughter Zura.