Eight Pieces of Empire (28 page)

I asked them about their thoughts on religion, and the fact that all fighters were now considered Islamist fanatics by the Russians and many in the West.

Arbi distracted himself from his Koran broadcast to explain that earlier, he had not been religious at all, not even during the first war. It was during the second war, he said, after seven members of his extended family, including two brothers, were killed in one week of Russian bombings, that he fully embraced Islam. He said his goal now was to become an Islamic martyr.

“What kind of Islam,” I asked. “Like in what country. Saudi Arabia? Iran? Iraq? Kuwait?”

“Real Sharia hasn’t been accomplished anywhere,” Arbi replied.

Ruslan took several hours to loosen up, but once he did, he agreed to talk. Arbi, obviously the more radical of the two, left the room.

Ruslan told me of the miserable winters fighting in the mountains and said more insurgents were dying of tuberculosis than from combat, of eating tree bark to stay alive. He admitted he had been only nominally religious until he was put through an indoctrination camp in the town of Serzhen-Yurt, where “Arabs taught us” how we should live, how to be a real Muslim. “But I’ll tell you a secret. It will never be possible to make a truly Islamic state out of Chechnya,” he said. “We have our own Sufi traditions. There are different types of fighters. Some are sincere; some are just using the banner of Islam as a cover for their criminal activities.”

I found this a stunning statement from a supposed resistance fighter.

“The truth is, I don’t much care whether I live or die anymore. My life means nothing to me. So I fight for my own reasons. Of course I want the Russians out. Of course I fight in the name of Allah. But mainly I fight from a sense of rage at all the injustice.” He paced the tiny rectangle of a room nervously and incessantly, back and forth.

Ruslan and Arbi openly stated that they had drifted into the ranks of the insurgency for personal reasons—revenge and rage.

Isa finally returned. He asked if I wanted to use the toilet, which was a hole in the ground a good distance from the building. First he went out to scout and then told me to move quickly outside, shadowing me right up to the outhouse door, where he then stood guard.

In the morning, another “contact” arrived to pick us up for the ride to Grozny. The exercise at the front door was the same. The car crammed up close to the entranceway, and I slid in again, unshaven, grubby in a cheap Chinese parka and a simple cap. There was a driver by the name of Said—who evoked the first inkling of confidence I had encountered since arriving. He was of even demeanor, smiled, and held a Kalashnikov rifle. Nominally at least, he was a member of the pro-Russian administration in Grozny. Isa obviously had some sort of deal with him.

“We’ll be safe once we get to Grozny,” he said. “If we get there,” I thought to myself.

“Listen carefully. If we encounter a checkpoint, stay quiet. The Russians manning them are as nervous as we are, and they want to stay
alive. They don’t want to get mowed down either,” Isa instructed. “So they keep a low profile. It’s an unwritten agreement.”

Said had documents that identified his position in the Moscow-backed Chechen justice ministry. This, transporting me, was a side business. “I’ve got government documents and a registered weapon; there shouldn’t be any problems—they are bound to let us through right away. But if they question you, you tell them that we are on our way to the government HQ in Grozny and that we are doing a story on the new system of regional constables being established in the republic.”

We took another circuitous route out of Ingushetia, across rolling hills dotted with small farms. Although the Ingush are extremely close to the Chechens ethnically and linguistically, there was now considerable bad blood between them.

Tens of thousands of Chechens had taken shelter in Ingushetia—some in a maze of refugee tent camps, squalid places plopped in the middle of unused fields, endless stretches of muddy lots where a modicum of order had emerged for aid-distribution activities.

Thousands more were “private sector” refugees—those who had taken up residence inside Ingush homes. The Chechens accused their Ingush hosts of profiteering from the war business by using them for the most arduous menial tasks and paying them nothing—instead of giving them rations and shelter in exchange for farm labor.

Isa looked out over the landscape, which was covered in low-hanging fog, and announced it was time to move. Traveling for six hours over a territory that should be navigable in one, we finally reached our destination in the northeast of Grozny, which had more one-story homes and was less damaged than much of the rest of the still-gutted city.

We screeched to a halt. Isa triumphantly got out of the car, borrowed the Kalashnikov from Said, and, laughing uncontrollably, unleashed at least ten rounds into the air in an act of ridiculous defiance before sprinting into the safe house. We were standing in broad daylight, no more than a kilometer from the main Russian-installed Chechen government complex.

Said’s wife was making dinner. We tuned in to Moscow-backed Chechen TV. First came “cartoons” of a uniquely Chechen variety. Cuddly animals were instructing Chechen children not to play in abandoned and damaged cars (the streets were littered with them), not to pick up things that looked like grenades or unexploded cluster bomb munitions, and not to play with trip wires across the roads that might set off booby-trap bombs. Next up was an hour-long broadcast called
Missing
. There was no commentary, just announcement after announcement detailing how this or that person had disappeared in the middle of the night, often taken away by armed men driving armored personnel carriers. Sometimes there was a photograph of the victim, other times not. The predinner prime-time programming gave an ample sense of the unimaginable traumatization of Chechen society.

We spent the next two days darting around Grozny, me keeping as low a profile as possible while talking to as many people as possible. Isa never produced his vaunted “emir.” Then he said something “undesirable” had come up and that it was too dangerous to stay in the city.

We sped out of Grozny. Isa popped in a cassette tape. The musician was Timur Mutsarayev, a shadowy fighter based in the mountains. He had become a kind of national bard for the insurgents.

During the first Chechen war, there had been a similar bard, Imam Pasha. But Imam Pasha sang of independence, Chechen pride, and the beauty of the Chechen mountains. Imam Pasha rarely touched upon Islamist themes in his songs, and I once attended an alcohol-soaked birthday party where he had been invited to perform. No radical Islamist would have played to a boozed-out crowd.

Mutsarayev was illustrative of the shift toward radicalism produced by the brutal wars. Isa sang along to the gritty guitar ballads, with lyrics like “twelve thousand mujahideen marching all the way into Jerusalem.”

We passed one checkpoint on the way back to the border where I was to be dropped off, but the Russians waved us through with only a cursory check of Said’s government-issued documents.

Isa turned to me and calmly said: “You know what, Lawrence? I
have one dream in life. I dream of lugging a huge bomb to one of these checkpoints, detonating it, and killing as many Russians as possible.”

As we got closer to the border, Isa confessed to me that he earlier harbored suspicions that I was a Russian agent with the FSB. “But we now know you’re not.

“I also have to tell you something else. We had to leave Grozny early because some ‘bad people’ had gotten wind that a foreigner was in town. They were ready to pay $25,000 to ‘buy’ you.”

“Thank you for not selling me, Isa,” I said, wondering if it was just bravado talk, or a real case of the by now war-eroded Chechen tradition of
adat
, or deference and protection of guests.
^*

*
Ironically, Isa himself disappeared a few months later. I received numerous calls from his relatives as to when I had seen him last. It eventually emerged that he himself had been “bought” or kidnapped for the same sum he was allegedly offered for me: $25,000. The ransom was paid and he was released, but his whereabouts today are unclear.

T
he Soviet Union was
an atheist country. Officially, that is. With the triumph of the Bolsheviks, Orthodox Christianity was either crushed or co-opted. Many cathedrals turned into toolsheds or grain silos. But for those who continued to imbibe the “opiate of the masses,” the window was still left a crack open, even if the priests who presided over their flocks were often informers. In 1990, when newly unsealed KGB archives showed just how deeply the church had been corrupted, even dissidents and archivists who dug into the piles of documents were stunned at the scale of the miscegenation. Islam was no different. Mosques were shuttered, and the few that were allowed to reopen were usually staffed with the “Mullahs of Marx”—there to keep an eye on the faithful, or in other words, keep the “faith” to a minimum.

With the demise of the empire, countless cathedrals reopened. Millions were spent on constructing mosques, sprouting up like mushrooms in those areas of the former empire where Islam held sway. Even Judaism made a remarkable revival, despite the departure of over half of the former USSR’s Jews to Israel (and the United States).

The 1998 reburial of Czar Nikolai II and his family, assassinated, soaked in acid, and thrown into a Siberian pit eighty years earlier, showed just how morally conflicted those in power were over this unfortunate history of deception and dishonor. The Russian Orthodox Church, evidently not wanting to admit the scale of its complicity in substituting Marx for Moses, even cast denial on DNA evidence that these were the real remains of Russia’s last czar, Nikolai II and his family.

A NAMELESS BUNCH OF BONES

N
one were a complete
set and all were missing something—a clavicle here, a rib there, chunks of pelvic bone there.

Each of the nine semiskeletons, charred by burning and soaking in sulfuric acid, lay under glass covers with metal handles, looking like so many steam tables at a buffet.

It was July 17, 1998, exactly eighty years to the day since the last of the Romanovs were lined up against a basement wall and executed by firing squad. For those not killed by the hail of Bolshevik bullets, bayonets awaited use.

The room is silent. City coroner Nikolai Nivolin identifies each bag of bones for me. In the center is the last czar, Nikolai II. Next to him is Czarina Alexandra (“Alix” until her marriage to Nikolai and conversion to Orthodoxy following her German Lutheran upbringing). Then there are the children—Olga, Marie, and Tatiana. The remains of son Alexei, the hemophiliac whom the czarina credited the mystic Rasputin with curing, had not yet been found. Neither had those of daughter Anastasia, whose absence had fostered a cottage industry of charlatans over the twentieth century who claimed to be either the princess or one of her descendants, often in the most unlikely of places. (Several years later, both bodies would be found in a nearby mass grave; routine DNA testing then put the claims of self-convinced pretenders to the Russian regency to permanent rest.) Finally, and perhaps saddest of all, we are shown the remains of the really unlucky ones: the family physician, Dr. Eugene
Botkin; the maid, Anna Stepanova Demidova; the family cook, Ivan Kharitonov; and lastly, a servant, Alexei Trupp, loyal to the last breath.

But the 99.99 percent certainty established by multiple teams of forensic experts that these disinterred bones are those of the Romanovs is not enough for the Russian Orthodox Church hierarchy. Their motivations seem obvious enough. They had publicly kept quiet about the regicides for eighty years. The church hierarchy, many of whom served under Communist rule (and collaborated with the Soviet regime), felt an obvious complicity in the murders of the Romanovs. Days before the reburial, His Holiness Patriarch Alexius II launches into a public tirade, saying there is no “proof” that these are the remains of the czar and his family. The church’s official position is that once the bodies are shipped out to the former imperial capital of St. Petersburg, they would be blessed not as those of the last czar of Russia and his family, but as a bunch of nameless bones. The country’s patriarch would not be there to confer the reinterment in the Romanov family crypt.

And the politicians? They are bickering too, hesitant, as if the scorched bones of the Romanovs might jump out of their glass cases and impale them.

Many of these are former Communist officials, and though the blame for the regicides can hardly be transposed onto them generations later, neither had the country or its leadership come to terms with what happened that dark day eighty years ago. While a cult of the murdered innocents and certain nostalgia for the imperial family have always existed in Russia, there are still many unreconstructed hard-liners who consider Czar Nikolai II to have been a bloodthirsty, incompetent tyrant and a blunderer into lost-cause wars. What is more, it is thought that his family was nothing better than a bunch of greedy gem- and gold-obsessed miscreants, hooked on the ravings of the likes of Rasputin.