Black Earth: A journey through Russia after the fall

THREE (#ulink_e521e275-02db-52de-8fd9-78e34ccc9efb)

ROSTOV STRADDLES THE broad waters of the Don. I climbed off the train and immediately felt the change in latitude. Everywhere the Caucasus announced itself Dust-cloaked trains disgorged the pilgrims from across the steppes – Armenians and Georgians, Cossacks and Azeris, Ossetians and plenty of weary Russians. In the station the morning heat was spiced by the gristly shashlik and warm lavash piled high on wooden carts. The sweet smells betrayed the proximity of the mountainous lands to the south. So, too, did the OMON patrols, the stern officers who lined the exits, checking the documents of each new arrival before he or she could step into their city.

Rostov was not only the crossroads of the Caucasus in Russia but the last foothold of state power in the south. “The last Russian city,” Kolya had called it, offering less of an acclamation than a warning of what lay farther south. “Beyond Rostov,” he added, “it’s only them.” The OMON officers, sweating as they failed to keep pace with the elbowing hordes, betrayed their own fear, the anxiety that had stalked the city since the first urgings for independence stirred among the “small nations” of the south.

Rostov had long been a bulwark of Russian power. The narrow streets of its oldest neighborhoods were lined with nineteenth-century red brick merchants’ houses from a past era. The filigreed roofs and wooden porches leaned with age but struggled to retain an elegant bearing. Once best known for its tractor plant, the USSR’s largest, Rostov in recent years had gained fame as the unlikely breeding ground for one of Russia’s most notorious serial killers. The 1994 prosecution of Andrei Chikatilo, murderer of at least fifty-two, became the first celebrity murder trial in the former Soviet Union. Theories abounded on why the city of sleepy hills and idled collective farmers had produced such homicidal intemperance. Explanations swirled but as always, never settled with any certainty.

Even before the advent of “the Rostov Ripper,” the city had carried a reputation for crime – specifically, an illicit trade in just about anything. Odessa, went the old line, was the mama of Soviet crime, and Rostov the papa. Now the crime Lenin called speculation was known as biznes, and the city teemed with crowds buying and selling. The automobile market, one of the largest in Russia, stretched for miles. Moscow had its own sprawling open-air bazaars, where big-shouldered babushkas vied with Caucasian traders, but for any trader working Russia’s southern reaches, Rostov was the dream.

The crossroads lured not only pilgrims from across the mountains, but a blond, blue-eyed Englishman raised and bred, as he put it, for the financial markets of London. John Warren had lived in the city on the Don for years. Brash and pink in the cheek, he seemed an eternal English public school boy, better suited to the world of Evelyn Waugh than Maksim Gorky. Yet in an unlikely post-Soviet evolution, Warren had risen fast in the turmoil of the new market – from a Moscow apprenticeship in the empire of Marc Rich, the elusive American financier living in Switzerland, to his current position as the honorary consul of Her Majesty’s Government at the edge of the Russian steppes.

Warren had cause to be pleased with himself. He’d married a Russian beauty and fathered, a year or two back, a blond Sasha. He was fond of reiterating his conviction, gained by experience, that “Russia can work!” His service to the queen, albeit unsalaried, allowed him to affix a miniature Union Jack to the antenna of his Land Rover, an army green Defender, and to ensure, or so he hoped, his own small stake in the local economy. Warren was something of a local celebrity. He wore white shorts and dark sunglasses and careered around in the Defender, the only one in town. His fame, however, had another source: He had dared compete with the locals at their own game.

Rostov sold everything under the sun, but its first and primary product came from its soil, Russia’s famed black earth, its chernozem. The city does not fall within the administrative borders of the Chernozemie, the Black Earth region that is centered on the Volga city of Voronezh and encompasses the five provinces north and east. Yet on the outskirts of Rostov, one found the same endless fields of rich silt loam that coat the steppes for three thousand miles from Ukraine to Siberia. Black earth is the dark, clumped-together soil that gleams like a black rainbow when its crevices catch the afternoon sun. Born of a thousand years’ decomposition of ancient steppe grass, black earth holds no chalk and no dryness. Few soils are richer in nutrients, and fewer hold water better. Black earth is found elsewhere, but no nation has as much as Russia. Like a belt unbuckled across the country’s girth, it spans its central regions, coating more than 150 million acres chestnut brown. “The tsar of soils,” Vasily Dokuchaev, the nineteenth-century father of Russian earth science, called chernozem. “More valuable than oil,” Dokuchaev called the soil, “more precious than gold.”

Yet for all its promise, much of the great acreage lies fallow. Russia’s black earth, perhaps like no other of its vast natural resources, betrays the burden of the country’s abundance, the bequest that somehow seems too much to bear. Rostov, in the heart of the Russian breadbasket, seemed to carry the weight of its past, even the remote days mournfully evoked in the greatest literary work of medieval Russia. “The black earth beneath the hooves,” writes the anonymous author of the twelfth-century epic The Layof Igor’s Campaign, “was sown with bones and watered with blood: a harvest of sorrow came up over the land of Russia.”

THE CITY HAD LONG been the country’s wheat, barley, and grain capital. John Warren, however, had seen something else, sunflowers. For hours on the train the yellow fields lit the cabin. In the endless stretches of gold, the tall plants stretched toward the sun, their faces black with seeds. Kolya spoke lovingly, almost romantically, of the seeds. It was a ballad sung across the country. Russians love their semechki. Every city, town, and village, no matter how small, was sure to have the seeds on sale-in the markets, at the bus stops, on the streets, and in the passageways below. Black bread and white water remained the first loves. But in the post-Soviet era sunflower seeds became the staple one could be sure to find no matter how bleak the outpost.

Seeds, Warren had to admit, were not gold. But they held oil. Rostov sunflower oil he thought, could be shipped across the Black Sea and sold in Europe. Business had been good. Now forty-two employees helped him broker everything the black earth had to offer: grains, barley, hops, nuts. Angliisky khleborob, they called him in town, the “English peasant.” He and his family enjoyed an enormous apartment, a floor above the local governor’s. It’d been no fun, of course, to resettle the herd of eighteen who’d lived in it as a kommunalka. But the place really had a glow now. Tsarist antiques filled its elegant rooms, while gilt-framed canvases–“fabulous fakes,” Warren boasted, of nineteenth-century oils – crowded its walls. Not long ago he’d bought a cigarette boat in Istanbul and motored home–“eight sublime days” – across the Black Sea and up the Don.

That evening I’d caught a report on the news that a worthy in local business had been killed. The deceased had resided, Warren explained, directly below. The apartment, now vacated, seemed a natural target for annexation. “Not a chance,” he said. “Everyone would think I whacked him for it.”

We went for a meal on Rostov’s Left Bank, arriving at a line of tiered restaurants so gaudy with neon they resembled casinos. One was even called Vegas. En route, at the entrance of a dirt road running deep into a tall field of steppe grass, we passed a sign that read CHANCE. “Open-air bordello,” Warren explained.

He pulled the Defender into Boris’s Place and we were given the center table on the patio. Warren promptly requested a new waitress – Natasha was his favorite – and ordered deep bowls of sickly crawfish and shashlik sizzling in fat. He’d asked me to join him. English visitors were in town. They needed tending. “EBRD gents,” he said, contract consultants from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. He feared boredom looming and intended to stave it off.

No sooner had Natasha lavished us with food and drink than the lights began to flash, the music blared, and a quartet of dancing girls sidled up. They wore pastel veils, red halter tops, loose trousers of gauzy white. To the electrified beat of “Hava Nagila,” the Gypsies began to gyrate. The EBRD gents were overwhelmed. The younger of the two, newly married, tried to bury his head in his crawfish. His partner, however, a gray-haired economist recently retired and eager “to help out the poor Russians,” forgot about food. Warren whooped and clapped and stuffed hundred-ruble notes into spandex straps.

“From all of us,” he shouted.

“No, allow me!” cried the elder economist, tucking his own rubles into the elastic wiggling beside him.

Our host, Boris, stopped by. It was not his real name. Like most of the men who ran the clubs of the Left Bank, Boris was Armenian. Would we desire company? he wondered, nodding toward a table of gaunt girls in a comer. They wore black and looked bored. No, we were fine, Warren said. Before long the table of girls merged with a table of men next to us. They were a grim crew, anchored by two large pockmarked gentlemen. One wore a white suit, the other black. They both bore gold chains and bracelets. Kingpins from the local Azeri and Georgian mobs, Warren explained. “Colleagues and competitors.” Didn’t he ever worry about safety? “No,” said the honorary consul. “We’ve got a simple arrangement. I control twelve percent of the market. That’s my limit. Anything more, I’m dead.”

FOUR (#ulink_0cafea35-4544-5814-98df-ea99f4bc18bd)

THE TALE READ AS IF it had been lifted from Gogol. It was just one of hundreds, testimonials collected in a book hanging in the half-light of the dank entranceway on Lermontov Street.

My boy went missing back in January ’95, when his tank burned in Grozny. Write down his name: Aleshkin, Kostya. Went in when he was nineteen. From the Orenburg region, station Donguzskaya. They only told me in the spring that he’d gone missing. I went to Chechnya, found his commanders. They were kind, didn’t kick me out. They fed me and told me to go home, that my Kostya was not among their dead and not among their wounded. So I went to the Chechen fighters. They didn’t insult me either; they swore to their Allah that my Kostya wasn’t among their prisoners. Then someone said: “Go to Rostov; that’s where the unknown are kept in refrigerator train cars.” I only came now. I wasn’t up to it before and I had no hope. Here I met a young doctor, Borya. He took me to the train car. It was all corpses, some without heads, some without arms, others without legs. I looked through them – but my Kostya wasn’t there. I went to bed, and just as I fell asleep I saw Kostya. He said, “Mama, how could you walk past me? Come back tomorrow. I’m lying in the first row, third from the end. Only I’ve got no face. It burned off. But there’s still that birthmark under my arm. You remember.” The next day I went to the train car and found Kostya straightaway – just where he said he was.

Chekhov in his diary wrote, “Alas, what is terrible is not the skeletons, but the fact that I am no longer terrified of them.” The words raised a bitter smile on the lips of Vladimir Vladimirovich Shcherbakov. He was a military doctor, the head of Military-Medical Laboratory No. 124, known more precisely among the women who traveled to it from all corners of the country as a morgue. Rostov was not just a city of trade. It had a second life as an army town, the military headquarters for the North Caucasus. Its cafes were filled with camouflage, and its streets with UAZik jeeps. Lying, as a matter of considerable convenience, nearly halfway between Moscow and Grozny, the city also served as the main repository of the dead from Chechnya. Since 1995 Shcherbakov and his team of forensic sleuths had tried to return Russia’s dead sons to their mothers. When I walked into his morgue, more than three hundred unidentified corpses remained locked in its refrigerated recesses. Two hundred and seventy had been there since the first Chechen war.

Tall and thin, Shcherbakov coiled his long legs behind a big desk piled with red files. He wore thick glasses and a yellow sleeveless shirt with three gold stars on its epaulets. A double-headed eagle adorned a tie clip that held a short blue tie tight against his frame. The office was small, spare. Over his shoulder hung a faded poster of the Virgin Mary in repose. For years now the women of the Soldiers Mothers’ Committee had tirelessly dispatched mothers to his door. He had never tried to dissuade them. “What can I do,” he said, “but let them search?” The mothers, in turn, called him the Good Doctor.

The morgue took them all, but the dead who remained, the doctor explained, were “the most severe contingent” – those impossible to identify visually. In contrast with the U.S. Army, the Russian military sent its soldiers into war without keeping fingerprints, let alone dental histories and DNA samples. The sleuths were lucky to get ID mug shots. In a room down the hall a balding man in a white lab coat peered into a computer, his eyes only inches from the screen. The monitor was filled with smudge lines, the inked tips of a man’s fingers. The technician, Valery Rakitin, had just inked the prints from the corpse. “Wasn’t much left,” he said. The dogs had made a mess. “Only four fingers and a couple of toes.”

The soldier had died at twenty-two. His mother, a forty-four-year-old teacher from Kemerevo, a coal-mining city in Siberia, had called that morning. She had come to collect him. In another age, a decade earlier, I’d been in Kemerevo. Lera, my friend who’d hosted me with her husband, Andrei, in their kommunalka in Moscow, came from there. In those days Kemerovo was synonymous with worker unrest; the miners had been among the first to strike as Soviet power ebbed. The boy who had died in Chechnya, been abandoned to the strays, and lain for months unidentified had left a hometown cold and bleak, a blighted city shorn of Siberia’s beauty long before his birth.

On the screen, Valery compared the squiggles of a right palm with the whorls of a right forefinger. “Not perfect,” he said. But the odds were “extremely good” it was the young man from Kemerevo. He pointed to the prints. “Almost identical,” he said. “A match at a degree of one in a thousand.” I got the idea – comparing prints and weighing the frequency of like patterns – but the calculus was beyond me. A local programmer had designed the software that tallied the probabilities pertaining to every known fingerprint pattern. Probables were matched, and the composite comparison yielded a percent range for positive identification. The system was far from perfect, Valery conceded, but it gave a fair estimate. Short of genetic analysis, it was the best the state could afford.

Across the narrow room sat Valery’s wife. Svetlana had no computer on her desk, only a small white candle that stood before an icon framed in aluminum. “Valery takes care of the boys,” she said, “and I take care of the mothers.” She lit the candle. The mother from Siberia would be here soon.

NEARLY FIFTY, Shcherbakov could have retired. He was a local, born in the Don village of Aksai. He’d studied in Petersburg, then Leningrad, at the prestigious military medical academy there. Then it was the navy-Pacific Fleet destroyers, tours from Mozambique to Vietnam. His wife, Zina, worked at his side. She was his head nurse. They’d met over an operating table. Their daughter, Yelena, was in medical school, and their son, Andrei, fourteen, was heading for the military academy. Shcherbakov could have been enjoying the quiet at home. Theirs was a small house; an apple orchard lined the creek out back. But he couldn’t quit. Returning an identity to the dead was more than a duty. It had become a calling.

There was nothing dramatic, Shcherbakov said, nothing unusual or heroic in the work, nothing that deserved any sympathy. Orthodoxy, he said, did not allow it. Everyone, he was certain, was given his own cross according to his abilities and had to carry it with dignity. At times, when he could deliver a mother and a father from uncertainty, a sense of relief did come. For the parents, he said, not knowing was worse than knowing. “If they can leave here with certainty, they can go home, defeat their grief, and find peace.”

Down the hall the mother from Siberia had arrived. The fingerprints remained enlarged on the computer. She sat with her back to the burning candle and stared at the screen. “There you see it,” the technician said. He leaned back in his chair.

The mother called him Doctor-in deference to the white lab coat-but was not convinced. “I see absolutely nothing,” she said. She rubbed her eyes with a yellow handkerchief in tight, furious circles. “I see nothing,” she said again. “But if you say they’re his, I believe you. I do. I must. What else can I do?”

FIVE (#ulink_502b3b72-e0a0-5dd1-a388-be964b8edb67)

ROSTOV HAD ITS pleasures, but the hotel was not among them. The phone rang incessantly each night – always females, always the same question: “You need girl now?” – before I pulled the plug from the wall. Then they took to knocking on the door. Worse, one morning I got out of bed to discover the sheet blackened with blotches – dozens of dead cockroaches. So when after a week Shvedov flew down from Moscow, I was happy to see him.

He arrived kitted out for battle. He wore Red Army surplus: old khaki jacket and trousers, layered with pockets and liberally frayed. It was Shvedov’s idea of camouflage for journalists. He’d also brought the satellite phone I’d rented in Moscow and an old army backpack stuffed with six cartons of papirosi. Native to Russia, foul-smelling and absurdly strong, papirosi do not even pretend to be cigarettes. Stuffed with rough tobacco, they end not with a filter but with a long, hollow tube of rolled cardboard. Their drag, made famous by Jack London, is so coarse even hardened smokers – Russian, French, Vietnamese – beg off. Papirosi, however, have a singular virtue, never lost on Shvedov. They are cheap. A pack runs under five cents.

By then the world had heard of Andrei Babitsky, the Radio Liberty reporter who had dared report from the Chechen side of the war and been arrested by the Russians. Babitsky had suffered a dubious POW “swap,” when the FSB staged a videotaped handover, turning the reporter over from its officers to masked men, who were almost certainly FSB operatives. Held captive for months, Babitsky had become a cause célèbre.

(#litres_trial_promo) Nobody, however, outside a small circle of Moscow journalists, had ever heard of Shvedov. He did not write much, and he did no radio. But he was one of the best in the business. Born to a father who toiled in the upper reaches of GOSPLAN, the Soviet planning ministry, Shvedov did have a degree in journalism – Moscow State, late 1970s – and a string of credentials – BBC, NTV, Moscow News–not all of them false. Given the Kremlin’s strict ban on journalists’ traveling independently in Chechnya, the robust kidnapping market, and the only other option a government tour in a press herd, I sought out Shvedov.

(#litres_trial_promo) I came to regret it, but he was well recommended. Just as it was hard to imagine Chechnya without war, it was hard to imagine Shvedov without the war in Chechnya. Since Moscow had moved to quash Dudayev’s rebellion in 1994, he may have traveled to the region more than any journalist. Oddly, he never called the republic by its name. To him, it was always the Zone.

I had hoped things would get better farther south. I tried to talk Zhenya, the shy Cossack, all elbows and bony arms, who had driven me around Rostov, into delivering us to our next stop, Nalchik, capital of Kabardino-Balkaria. The small republic was sleepy and well within the borders of Russia, but Zhenya hedged. He had long been out of work. His income now derived from his Lada, but his face contorted at the prospect of crossing the city limits. “Down there,” he said quietly, “you never know quite where you are.”

Zhenya would go only as far as Mineralniye Vody (Mineral Waters), the first of the weary tsarist spa towns that lay a long day’s drive to the south. We left Rostov as the car market opened, well before dawn, moving southeast along the Rostov-Baku Highway. The Route 66 of the North Caucasus, the road had once carried Soviet travelers directly through Grozny to the shores of the Caspian. Now, thanks to the years of bombings, assassinations, and war, it was clogged with checkpoints.

As we drove south, the road itself seemed to take a leisurely, southerly dip. All the while, Shvedov smoked without pause and rarely let a moment pass unbroken by commentary. He drove poor Zhenya crazy. He tried the radio but caught only static. Zhenya had mastered the Russian technique, passed down through the generations, of economizing on gas. He would accelerate only to take the car out of gear and coast, repeating the procedure every time the road regained its slope. I sat in the back of the Lada, alone, watching the landscape evolve. Thin stands of willows now ran through the sunflower fields, lining the creeks that rent the earth. Every so often pastures appeared, stretches of green where mottled cows grazed, the fattest I had seen in Russia.

By afternoon we had driven eight hours and crossed into the krai, or administrative region, of Stavropol. We had also, even before we saw them, felt the mountains. As we approached Mineralniye Vody, the dark massifs of the Caucasus appeared, giant shadows like clouds against the summer sky. At first the peaks stood stiffly in a tight row. Yet as we drove on, they rose ever higher, each revealing its own grandiose contours. One peak towered-above the others: Elbrus. Too large for Zhenya’s cracked windshield to compass, it seemed a castle in the sky, insurmountable and unreal. At 18,510 feet, Elbrus, the two-headed cone of a sleeping volcano, was not only one of the pillars of the Caucasus but also the highest mountain in Europe.

We had reached a fault line. After the green fields and streams, now before us spread the dusty foothills of the mountainous bridge that linked the Black Sea to the west with the Caspian to the east. For centuries the mapmakers have marked the Caucasus as the dividing line between Europe and Asia, Christendom and Islam. Stretching more than six hundred miles, since the Soviet fall the range has separated Russia from the former Soviet states of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan to the south. The lands north of the massifs, known collectively as the North Caucasus, comprise seven ethnic homelands, some gerrymandered, some legitimate, that fall within the borders of the Russian Federation. In all, the region is a linguistic and ethnic labyrinth, where as many as fifty different peoples speak their own tongues. In the first post-Soviet decade the pot boiled, gaining fame as the Caucasian Cauldron, an impossible corner of the world fated to suffer “ethnic hatreds,” “religious divides,” and unwanted attention for its oil. Yet as our little Lada chugged on south, taking in the expanse of rock, snow, and ice, I could not help wondering if geology, not geopolitics, still governed these lands.

We drove on, trading Zhenya for Khassan, Cossack for Caucasian, to Pyatigorsk, the Town of Five Mountains, a resort, founded in 1780, where the Good and the Great took the waters. For the aristocracy of nineteenth-century Russia, it was their Baden Baden. In 1841, Lermontov, at twenty-six, died here in a famous duel. The spot in the woods nearby where he fell remained a destination for Russians. The town still offered grand vistas and poplar-lined promenades, but it no longer looked noble, much less restorative. Even on a fine summer day Pyatigorsk looked depopulated and defoliated. The warfare to the east and west had taken a toll. The tourists now stayed away.

By dusk we had reached Nalchik, the inert capital of the tiny republic of Kabardino-Balkaria. We settled into a white-columned sanatorium, an old Soviet retreat among the firs, refashioned by a Turk into a hotel, the Grand Kavkaz. Kabardino-Balkaria was best known as a source of mineral water, mountain horses, and soccer stars. But it was also a prime example of the Bolshevik manipulation of the peoples of the North Caucasus. Kabardino-Balkaria, like its neighbor Karachaevo-Cherkessia, was a Leninist creation. The genius of Lenin, Ali Kazikhanov, editor of Severny Kavkaz, explained, was to throw the Kabardins and Balkars together in one hyphenated republic in 1921, separating them from their natural allies the Cherkess and Karachai. As Kazikhanov told it, the history sounded like a Bolshevik game of checkers, with national destinies at stake. The Kabardins, by far the majority, were related to the Cherkess, while the Balkars shared a Turkic tongue with the Karachai. Each had a separate history, but Moscow entangled them, forcing rivals to share homelands. “It wasn’t just ‘divide and conquer,’” said Kazikhanov. “It was ‘divide, conquer, and tie up in trouble.’”

I remembered Lenin’s pushpins. Years earlier I’d driven into the woods outside Moscow to Gorki Leninskie, the estate where Lenin died in 1924, to see a replica of his old Kremlin office, complete with his desk, books, and paperweight – a bronze chimpanzee knitting its brow. (Yeltsin had ordered the original office removed – along with Stalin’s – as part of his extravagant renovation of the Kremlin.) One wall of Lenin’s study was covered with a map, its southern edges dotted with pins, each a different color. Lenin had kept a close eye on the ethnic and religious labyrinth of the Caucasus.

The Soviet map was drawn to maintain a false balance, the editor Kazikhanov said. Contradictions intended to preoccupy the natives. It was easy for him to explain the history of hatred between the Kabardins and Balkars. He belonged to neither group. He was a Kumyk from Dagestan. And he edited, naturally, a newspaper printed in Russian, the only language common among the peoples.

SIX (#ulink_42d1a7e9-4a98-551b-bffb-b61a50e0e599)

FOR THREE LANGUID days in Nalchik, I had to avoid the local president. A Kabardin – his prime minister was a Balkar – he had “requested” that I interview him. With no interest in being drawn into a squabble between Kabardins and Balkars, I decided to abandon both. Outside the Grand Kavkaz, I found Ismail, asleep in an ancient Audi. We struck a deal to head farther south, to travel in the shadows of the mountains to Vladikavkaz, capital of the next small republic on the road to Chechnya, North Ossetia.

With the fat end of his fist Ismail banged the tape I’d pulled from my bag into the Audi’s cassette player. And so as we drove on through the operatic scenery, two Russian helicopters now limning the foothills to our right, Eric Clapton accompanied us, singing of tears in heaven. When we reached Vladikavkaz, the sun was a giant ball of burnt orange sinking behind the peak that towered behind the town, Mount Kazbek, another giant of the Caucasus range, on the Georgian side.

(#litres_trial_promo) The streets, to my surprise, were crowded. Only the day before, a bomb had produced havoc in the central market, killing six and wounding forty-three. The remote-controlled device, a police investigator later told me, had been well made, designed to rip as much flesh as possible. We had descended a rung lower into the cauldron. Vladikavkaz, however, had grown inured to bombings. They had become seasonal. The previous spring a bomb had killed sixty-two. “Market squabbles” the locals called the explosions. With Chechnya so close, the North Ossetians affected an easygoing air, a rare commodity in the region and one they were eager to promote.