Eight Pieces of Empire (27 page)

This was even more unusual for a Russian in wartime Chechnya. I asked if she didn’t feel somehow different, being one of the few young Russians left in pulverized Grozny. “No,” she said. “People are people.” But there was something uneasy in her eyes, a fatigue and a knowledge that she did not completely fit in anywhere.

One of the less noticed effects of the empire’s collapse was the creation of all sorts of left-behind types who defied easy categorization. Galina was Russian, but not fully accepted in the rest of Russia as Russian. It was that Chechen accent, a
certain gesture
, a certain look. “They treat us completely differently,” she sighed. “As if we are not Russian enough.”

I saw Galina a few more times during trips to Chechnya. After the war ended, she sent a couple of letters with Grozny postmarks—the war destroyed the entire phone system, and Internet connections didn’t exist.

I marveled that she was still staying behind. Grozny was getting more dangerous by the day. Under the separatists, kidnappings for ransom replaced Russian bombardments as the main danger; an entire industry of private jails cropped up, run by warlords. Grisly extortion demands—in one case accompanied by a film showing a foreign hostage with his finger being chopped off—were common. In one famous case, the heads of four British telecommunications workers held hostage for several months were placed neatly along the main highway running through Chechnya, placed upright like freshly cut jack-o’-lanterns, warnings that refusals to meet ransom payments would be costly.

In the spring of 1997, Galina unexpectedly called me from the nearby Russian city of Pyatigorsk. She had finally decided to try to transfer and finish her studies there. “Finally you got some sense in your head,” I told her. With only six months to go, Grozny was getting so treacherous that her grandparents were going far away to live with distant relatives.

But there were two glitches. One was that admirable but dangerous defiant streak. The other was her Chechen accent, despite being Russian.

University authorities were supposed to help get Russians from Chechnya transferred to other institutions for free. “But I wasn’t Russian enough for them,” she told me again.

“They asked for six hundred dollars tuition.” I said something about helping her with the cost. She violently rejected the suggestion. “Who do they think they are, Harvard or something? I’ve only got a few months to go. I’ll make it, don’t worry about me.” Determined, back she went to her shattered Grozny.

Galina never called or wrote again. I hoped she had graduated and moved on. About a year later, I started to get a strange feeling. Finally, I called a number Galina had given me in the town of Buddyonovsk, where her mother lived, since there were no land or cell lines in Grozny yet.

“Lawrence, Galina disappeared in early May, a year ago,” said the unknown voice at the other end.

Her mother recounted the all-too-familiar details: Witnesses said she had left the university building in midafternoon and headed for a minibus taxi stand. Two or three young men called to her from a car nearby; Galina seemed to know them. She got inside. The car sped away. Galina was never seen again.

She would have graduated in less than a week and was planning to leave Chechnya forever within days, her mother told me.

I promised to try to find out more. I called our Reuters man in Grozny, Musa, who had good connections with individuals in the Chechen government at the time. He had also known Galina from her aid work. He listened gravely, but clinically, as if it were a story he had heard too many times. “I’ll get on it right away,” he promised in a low voice.

Musa spoke with an overworked prosecutor who claimed to be working on the case. He told Musa that according to his information, Galina was alive. But there was no ransom demand, no phone calls, nothing.

I relayed the information to Galina’s mother by telephone. She remained patient, but with each phone call her resignation deepened.

I made repeated calls to Musa. He went to the prosecutor’s office several times. “They say they are working on the case.” It was clear Musa had no more ideas. I kept Galina’s mother informed, but she was no stranger to the dice roll that postwar life in Grozny posed. With each telephone call from me, none of them offering much reassurance, she responded with increasing and predictable resignation.

Almost another year passed. No information, no ransom demands. When it was clear that Galina was not ever coming home, I asked Musa exactly what he thought might have happened. Kidnapping was a business in Chechnya, after all. Why would the culprits not at least demand a ransom? Galina had even worked for an international organization, typical targets for extortion.

Musa paused. “Don’t you understand? Human life has no value here right now.”

Then he said: “Pretty girl like that, they could have just kidnapped her, used her, and thrown her out by the side of the road,” he said somberly, and with the knowledge that even his inquiries were putting him in danger.

“Lawrence, I could keep asking, but I have a wife and children.”

Almost ten years later, I called Galina’s mother again, just to ask how she was getting on. Her voice had not changed, as if the disappearance had occurred yesterday. It was the shattered but collected voice of a mother whose lone child—a child of the empire, accepted neither as fully Chechen nor Russian—had disappeared into the thin air of anarchy and violence.

THREE BOYS SEEKING MARTYRDOM

I
t would be several
years—2002—before I returned to Chechnya. By 1999, the place became such a no-man’s-land of grisly crime, chaos, and kidnappings that very few outsiders, journalists included, dared visit. Reuters still had Musa reporting the occasional line from Grozny, but the situation was so treacherous—even for him—that he sent his entire family away from Grozny and into their home village at the foot of the Chechen mountains, where things were quieter and there was less trouble. I mulled a trip in early 2000 and rang Musa to tell him I was planning to drop by.

Musa was livid. “Lawrence, I’ll kick your ass if you come down here and kidnap you just to teach you a goddamn lesson. You’d be sold ten minutes after you set foot in this place,” he warned. “Just last week, one of my neighbors was kidnapped the day after she got here. She was nobody—just came to visit relatives and was Chechen herself.”

THE TALK OF
Chechen “independence” had by now faded away. The elected president Maskhadov was far too weak to rein in the gangs that had taken over under the banner of radical Islam. Shamyl Basayev, who had originally claimed to have abandoned his warrior ways and political ambitions to go into beekeeping, now fully embraced the so-called Wahhabi, or radical Islamist, movement, as did the “Islamist” Movladi Udugov—despite Udugov’s reputed love of booze-soaked parties. Islamic “camps”
opened, often staffed by Saudis and Pakistanis, to educate the Chechens in the ways of “true” Islam and wean them away from their traditional Sufi beliefs.

Slowly but surely, the largely secular Chechen independence movement became infused with jihad (“holy war”) and the creation of an Islamic caliphate across the whole of southern Russia, from the Caspian Sea to the Black Sea. The vanguard of this jihad, of course, was to be the Chechens under Basayev and his ilk.

The moment of truth came in August 1999 when a band of rebels led by Basayev invaded the neighboring Russian republic of Dagestan, proclaiming it the start of the campaign to create the “caliphate.” With the exception of a few local Islamists, the Dagestanis (composed of some forty ethnic groups) did not support the unwelcome guests, who retreated to Chechnya after a few weeks of Russian bombing.

Then came a series of unsolved, mysterious apartment bombings in Moscow and another Russian city that killed almost three hundred people. The Chechens denied responsibility, and many suspected FSB (the Federal Security Service, the main successor to the KGB) involvement, but together with the invasion of Dagestan, the bombings were enough for Moscow to justify another war in Chechnya.

The Russians did not make the same mistake they had in the first war—instead of using infantry and sending underfed, confused conscripts to be cut to shreds, they bombed what was left of Grozny after the first Chechen war by air, block by block, with long-distance artillery and aviation. Musa stayed around for as long as he could. One day he sent Reuters a video of an eyeball in its socket lying on the driver’s seat of a car that had been caught up in the bombing.

“This is really nightmarish,” he told me, in an understatement that for Musa represented, even in his battle-hardened mind, deeply disturbed emotions.

In Chechnya War II, the Russians were also more cunning in another way—they banned reporters from the war zone altogether. Most news organizations forbade their reporters to go in anyway, given the security
risks. The few brave ones who did make it in were often detained or deported.

Within weeks, the Russians, with their new policy of bombing even more intensely and engaging troops even less, pummeled the Chechen fighters into the mountains and took over Grozny.

Within a few months of the (second) Russian takeover of the city, journalists were relegated to weathering dog-and-pony shows organized by the Russian army. Highly scripted, they usually were full of glitches and unexpected events. I went on one. One day a Russian “handler” took me to a kiosk selling Coke and smokes in central Grozny. An irate woman so scorched the handler with anti-Russian epithets that he scurried away hurriedly, me in tow. “No point in this,” he said.

The alternative was to take “unofficial” trips with dodgy Chechen characters who charged immense sums to smuggle us over the administrative border into completely uncharted waters; it was like journalistic Russian roulette, avoiding checkpoints, traveling in disguise, and always hiding from Russian troops or anyone else who could pose a danger.

I embarked on several such clandestine trips in 2002 and 2003 and made my last one with a character named Isa. The usual form was cloak-and-dagger stuff, hushed discussions about how much I needed to pay for my “tour” amid sworn oaths (if they meant anything at all) that I would not leave any information about how to find me while I was away in Grozny.

We met as arranged on the border of the Russian republics of North Ossetia and Ingushetia, which itself borders Chechnya. All I knew was that I was to find a car whose license plate number I was given. It approached and I got in, and the driver took a circuitous route down back roads to avoid roadblocks.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Someplace safe,” came Isa’s vague and unreassuring reply.

Isa was a small slender twenty-eight-year-old with a droopy eye who wore a solid green baseball cap and had the habit of constantly checking over his shoulder.

“It’s too dangerous to take you to Chechnya today—it would be dark by the time we got there,” he informed me. “We’ll spend the night here in Ingushetia and head off in the morning.”

We pulled up to a two-story building, the car passenger door coming so close to the building door that I could barely squeeze out and slip inside. Isa looked around nervously.

“Make sure no one sees you get out of the car,” he whispered.

It was soon clear that we were in a building converted for use as a temporary center for refugees from Chechnya. Isa introduced his mother, Aina, who happened to be the director of the facility. It obviously doubled as a safe house for Chechen insurgents during the winter months, when life in mountain hideouts became unbearable.

We crept down a corridor and ducked into a room with a wood-burning stove and a cheap, steaming old kettle warming itself on a coiled wire heater. Isa switched from Russian into Chechen and gave Aina what sounded like a detailed set of instructions. Then he told me he had “business” to attend to. I was led into another tiny room with two cots and a mattress thrown on the floor. “Do not leave the room under any circumstances, do not to speak English, do not use your cell phone,” he said sternly. “If you need to urinate, you will just have to wait until it gets darker. Too dangerous to go outside in the daylight.” The thought crossed my mind that I had volunteered to be ransom bait.

Within a few minutes Arbi, a twenty-six-year-old fighter, walked in. He recognized me immediately, saying he remembered me visiting the house of Doki Makhayev, the Chechen field commander who was killed by the Russians after being found hidden under a load of watermelons. That had been years earlier, during the first war. I remembered Arbi as well, but he had changed. Then he had been a jovial lookout for the insurgents; now he was gaunt and had sunken, empty eyes. He was a shell of his former self.

A second, younger man named Ruslan sat on another cot. He was muscular and square jawed. We engaged in some small talk in Russian, and it soon became clear that neither of them fully trusted me. Many
hard-core fighters thought journalists sneaking into Chechnya were FSB spies.

I turned on a miniature shortwave radio. Arbi asked if he could look at it. Slouched on a cot, he tuned in to a Koran reading on a Saudi shortwave station and drifted off listening to it, as if in a kind of trance.

Ruslan, meanwhile, paced the tiny room. He pressed his hands on his sides, as if something hurt. “It’s my kidneys,” he said. Ruslan explained he had spent several weeks in a Russian “filtration camp”—notorious places into which young Chechen men were routinely rounded up, interrogated, or tortured in an effort to net possible fighters. Ruslan said he’d been hung up by his hands and beaten repeatedly in the kidneys.

Both of the boys asked what I was up to. I told them I was mostly interested in getting to Grozny to interview an “emir” to whom Isa had pledged allegiance. Since the Chechen insurgents had essentially lost control over any significant territory to the Russians, the remaining fighters had split into groups of thirty to fifty or so, each overseen by a supposedly secret “emir” who coordinated what was left of the active fighting—mostly hit-and-run attacks on Russian troops or small sabotage operations, like the laying of primitive mines.