Eight Pieces of Empire (25 page)

I never saw or filmed that. Instead, as we approached the market, a familiar face emerged from the twisted metal of the market stalls.

There he was again.

“What brings you here?” asked Shamyl Basayev sarcastically. No answer was needed or expected.

I asked him if the Russians could retake Grozny.

His expression instantly changed, becoming stern. “Of course they can retake it. But it will cost them ten thousand dead and three months.”

While Basayev jumped in a jeep with some of his armed comrades, Sergiy and I continued on foot. The Chechens had established their ambush positions; the Russian units were waiting for reinforcements that would never arrive. It was time to go.

We had walked for several miles when we passed a half-destroyed fire station. Chechen fighters swarmed about. They were skittish, dirty, and aggressive after almost a week or so of urban warfare and demanded that we follow.

We were led into the remains of a courtyard, where a wiry, thinly bearded man demanded our documents.

I immediately recognized him as Abu Musayev, the Chechens’ feared counterintelligence chief and the man who was reported to have authorized the execution of my friend Farkhad Kerimov, the Azerbaijani cameraman, in May 1995. According to witnesses, Farkhad was approached by some Chechen fighters in the rebel-held south, who offered him a ride. Rather than an escort to Grozny, they marched him to a field, pronounced him a spy, and pumped his chest with twenty-two bullets. The accusation was paranoid hogwash.

Now Sergiy and I were standing in front of the man who likely ordered Farkhad killed on the basis of his war psychosis.

“We’ve been far too liberal in letting you journalists wander around our republic,” Abu Musayev, oozing suspicion about our presence, remarked. He kept leafing through our passports and ID cards as if looking for some secret symbols.

“We know that you relay our positions to the enemy,” he said.

I blurted something along the lines of “Why would we want to do that?”

It was pointless. Sergiy and I were at his unhinged whims. Unlike a fighter bomber raking our car with deadly rocket fire, or our happening to be in a building hit by a random bomb, this situation was specific and very personal. The “Hanging Judge” master of Chechen security was about to decide our fate.

Musayev was known for something else—some investigative journalists alleged he was also involved in giving orders to kill Fred Cuny, a legendary humanitarian activist from Texas. Cuny disappeared at almost the same time as I had been near the site of the massacre in Samashki in 1995. Theories abounded among the Chechens that he could have been a CIA spy—or that they may even have been deliberately fed such disinformation by the Russians. Cuny disappeared in those early days of April 1995 and was never seen again—just a month before Farkhad’s disappearance and execution.

After pondering on that subject for what seemed to me an eternity, Musayev sort of smirked, looked around the burned-out firehouse, and handed us our documents back, obviously disappointed that he had no place to hold us or hide us—we’d only be a liability.
^‡

“Get out of here,” he said.

The day, however, was not over.

A Russian hard-line air force general, Konstantin Pulikovsky, had issued an ultimatum that he would bomb the city into oblivion if the Chechen fighters did not surrender. This set off a panic among the remaining, now-tiny number of Grozny residents. They scrambled to get out through the only exit—a rarely used road out over a ramshackle steel-plate bridge in the southeast of the city.

The morning of the day of the ultimatum for the Chechens to surrender, the day the city was to be incinerated, I awoke and Sergiy and I set off for the center of Grozny again, crossing the treacherous bridge in a car while wave after wave of refugees streamed out on foot.

With us again was my driver Musa, the Chechen with one lame arm. Before we crossed the rusty bridge, he stopped, gravely withdrew a piece of paper he had stashed in his vest, and began to recite verses from the Koran. He was not particularly observant (he drank alcohol copiously and smoked like a diesel locomotive). It was the first time I had ever seen him appeal to the Almighty.

Musa knew the back roads, which meandered around the city’s refineries, exceptionally well. The only problem was that most of them were deserted and dusty and thus perfect places for laying homemade mines. A decade before IEDs (improvised explosive devices) became a household word of terror among US military personnel serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Chechen resistance to Russian occupation had started fashioning early forms of the deadly item in Grozny from glass jars of gasoline set with detonators. We both laughed nervously, and Musa uttered the standard mantra heard throughout the war.

“Inshallah,”
he breathed. “[We’ll only die] if God wills it,” he said.

The Lord allowed that we drive the gauntlet in safety, and we returned to Basayev’s makeshift HQ in the market, where we had seen him the day before. With Russian shells raining down, there was almost no one around. We shot some footage of a couple of young fighters trying to get a captured Russian tank running and then drove down the street where my former landlady Rosa lived. I knocked on the door. She’d gone, like most others.
^§
Just as we started to pull away, one of her neighbors, a tiny, birdlike Cossack woman we called Aunt Nina, ran out into the street. Aunt Nina was well known for her feisty tirades against both Chechen fighters and the Russian troops who had destroyed her Soviet-style satisfactory life. Already in her seventies and with no place to go, she had vowed to stay and guard her tiny house in Grozny no matter what. Now, with the still-intact parts of the once 400,000-strong city under threat of being leveled, she begged us to take her out. We piled her and one suitcase into the back of our jeep and headed back out of the city.

We were stopped just short of the rusty bridge by a group of fighters led by a man who identified himself as Commander Magomed, which is how “Muhammad” is pronounced in Russian. He checked our documents, showing particular interest in mine, before squeezing himself into the jeep and ordering us to drive to “headquarters.” HQ was a shattered apartment block about a half mile away. Magomed got out and started talking in staccato Chechen with another fighter while Musa strained to eavesdrop. He did not like what he was hearing.

“They’re talking about using us as human shields,” he said softly.

Musa got out and approached the men. He threw around names of Chechen commanders he knew. Then another couple of fighters emerged from a basement, and one embraced Musa. It was difficult to determine the fulcrum moment, but something had changed. After another extended exchange of words, Musa wrapped his arm around the back of the apparent real commander in the odd gesture that served as the Chechen handshake, and we were allowed to go free. Magomed looked disappointed.

The day was still not over.

When we got to the rusty bridge leading out of the city, we got out to join the stream of refugees and walked so as not to test fate and overload the creaky structure. At the far end, however, we met with an unpleasant surprise. A large force of Russians on APCs had arrived, evidently to cut off the last remaining road out of the city before General Pulikovsky’s planned incineration. We drove up slowly as a group of five soldiers trained their guns on our vehicle. A few dozen yards away, an open-top jeep was burning. Two blackened bodies sat upright in the backseat, as if the flames would somehow die out at some point and they would just continue on their journey.

“Why are you defending these black asses?” seethed one Russian Rambo, using the ugly word
chornie-zhopy
to describe all Chechens, including Musa. “Don’t you have enough blacks in America?”

Just then one of his drunk or doped-up comrades became distracted by a group of two or three cows in the distance and opened fire on the animals, felling them with ease, the cows moaning and writhing on the ground for a bit before expiring. To ease the tension, I delicately suggested that I had a few bottles of Orange Fanta inside the jeep and offered them to the soldiers. They guzzled them down as if they hadn’t drunk for days and, friendlier now, let us pass.

In the end, the threatened firestorm never materialized. The ultimatum came and went, and it was clear that great divisions had opened in Moscow. Alexander Lebed, the tough-talking former general who won fame for his heroics during the Afghan war, won the upper hand, and another truce took hold. This one lasted, a peace accord was signed, and the Russians pulled out of Chechnya over the next few months.

I always wondered if the threat to level what was left of the city had been real or just bluster, whether the Russians would really go through with it. Why not, I thought, they’d subjected the city to everything else. Then I thought of the old saying that some men get a bigger kick out of knowing they could have killed someone than out of actually murdering.

The Russians would not be gone for long. They would be back again
in three years to avenge their losses. By this time Chechnya had reached medieval standards of barbarism; killing, kidnappings, and the “independence” movement had taken on a decidedly radical Islamist hue. At the same time, a certain Vladimir Putin began his rise to the Russian throne.

*
In 2004, Yandarbiyev was killed in a car bombing in Qatar. A Qatari court tried and found three Russian intelligence agents guilty of his murder. They were eventually extradited to Russia, where they received a hero’s welcome.

†
Eight and a half years later, in 2003, I was back in St. Petersburg when a call came through on my cell phone: Taras Protsyuk had been killed in Baghdad, the very first journalist to die in the American war to oust Saddam Hussein. A US tank had fired a round at him as he stood on a balcony of the Palestine Hotel—where practically all foreign reporters were based—filming the first American troops arriving in the city. The tank round blew off his legs, and he bled to death. To this day, there is no concrete explanation as to the motive for having mowed down Taras with a tank round; speculations range from the fog of war to a mistaken impression that his tripod-mounted camera was in fact some sort of weapon, to more sinister theories that those who fired the tank round knew he was a journalist and simply did not care.

‡
Musayev was killed in 2000 during the second Russian-Chechen war.

§
Rosa was reportedly killed in Grozny over an unclear disagreement in the late 1990s.

THREE LIBERTINE SABOTAGE WOMEN

Y
es, by December 1996
, the last Russian soldier had left Chechnya. The impossible had become reality: David had defeated Goliath: the Russians’ historical power humiliatingly vanquished by a few thousand Chechen guerrillas. Or so it seemed at the time. What the Russians also left were large parts of a capital, Grozny, flattened, tens of thousands dead or maimed, a steadily growing radical Islamist movement (since money and ideology had poured into Chechnya during the war), and warped psyches.

But if one could look past the rubble, there was still an atmosphere of victory-high, a belief in a new start. The wretched city came to life, renamed Dzhokhar-Kala (Dzhokhar City) in memory of the war-hero late president Dudayev. There was also residual revenge: The bizarre, ZZ Top look-alike warlord Salman Raduyev (he wore an enormous red beard and triple-sized sunglasses to mask the fact that half his face had been blown off in a wartime explosion) announced “Operation Ash” and promised to blow up a dozen Russian cities. Few took him seriously, and fewer thought he had the slightest thing to do with a series of bombings in Moscow years later—Raduyev had the bravado habit of taking credit for all sorts of explosions, even ones that later turned out to be no more than natural gas leaks from leaky ovens.
^*

There was not only an election, there was a fair one (a major rarity in the former USSR of that time), conducted and approved by studious-looking European observers in expensive winter parkas. Former “suicide brigade” members put fresh-cut glass in a few pane-less window frames and festooned burnt-out storefronts with flashy campaign signs.

Shamyl Basayev, the terrorist, ran for the high office too. His campaign brochure trumpeted his personal accomplishments. “Shamyl made the only proper decision—he hijacked a plane,” it read. Movladi Udugov (the “Chechen Goebbels”) ran on a ticket of “Islamic Order”—though Udugov had never been considered observant until he reportedly became a middleman for cash from radical Islamist circles in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. He played up the fact that he’d taken a second wife (and personally urged me to follow his example) in accordance with the Koranic injunction to protect widows and rebuild the population base.

In the end, it was the moderate Aslan Maskhadov who racked up a landslide victory, though I considered Basayev’s 25 percent or so of the vote impressive for a self-described terrorist with no political background. Basayev accepted defeat more or less graciously and declared he would ascend into his mountains and turn to beekeeping. (The honey gig didn’t last long.)

I stayed behind in Grozny to work on a few features, and out of a desire to explore the concept of “aftermath.” My host was Musa, who had graduated from being our driver to having become our local “stringer,” who called Moscow with occasional quotes.

On the night before I prepared to leave Grozny, Musa announced it was time to celebrate. Accompanying us was Ivan, a quiet, sensible ethnic Russian reporter friend of ours and Grozny native who had stuck it out though the war and then stayed behind after most ethnic Russians had left along with the Red Army.

“Celebrate?”

I wondered what Musa meant by the word. By six p.m. the streets of Grozny were deserted.