Eight Pieces of Empire (40 page)

One of my most serious questions involved a gaping hole in the lower brick outer wall of the school. It had obviously been created by some sort of high-caliber weapon fired from outside the school.

Later, I interviewed a teacher who had been held hostage inside. She had been hiding behind a locker-sized safe in the gymnasium when she said the Russian Special Forces fired a rocket or other high-powered weapon, opening that gaping hole in the side of the school. Many other hostages recalled the same account.

This, they maintained, allowed some of the captives to escape but also set off the furious battle that would end in the school’s being turned into an inferno, taking more than three hundred lives with it.

By the end of the day, what clearly was a gaping hole had been walked through by so many people that only a pile of bricks was left, evidence destroyed.

Mass funerals were planned for Monday, September 6. Nearby, entire farm fields had to be quickly converted into cemeteries. A crowd gathered just outside of the school, many hoisting coffins.

Reporters rushed behind the coffin carriers, but I felt a kind of sickness and sense of selfish voyeurism that I had never quite experienced in so many years of reporting on senseless violence and killing.

SO I DECIDED
not to go to the Beslan funerals. I’d had enough in so many years of covering carnage, and Beslan was beyond the pale. I told myself not to go. I swore I would not go. I could be of no help to anyone there; I’d only get in the way, a vulture pecking away at the sacred right to grieve. My office manager, Boris, swore that he would not be one of the “vultures” at the mass funeral either.

In the end, however, my news instincts won the day; we proceeded,
somehow automatically, following the procession to the muddy former farm field, a wailing ground, women and men screaming uncontrollably as coffins were lowered into the ground. Ashamed, I did my story and left, at least somewhat relieved that a few of the mourners actually felt a need to tell their stories to me without being asked, describing the lives that had belonged to their relatives. Maybe I hadn’t gone completely in vain.

I’LL BROACH A
subject that I intentionally avoided during the writing of most of this book, not having wanted to distract from the stories I was relating. Covering war and scores of human tragedies, which is what I did for nearly twenty years, is a bit like exposing oneself to radiation. In carefully measured doses, it often poses few well-established health risks, as for those who continue to work limited shifts in the most contaminated areas of Chernobyl—although journalists can also suffer devastating psychological effects from even a single traumatic event, just as soldiers and emergency workers can.

Unlimited exposure over very long periods, however, is unwise for the mind and soul, and I’ve seen the deadly effects on many a fellow reporter, from relationship problems to irritability to self-medication and various forms of depression, including a higher than normal rate of suicide among those who specialize in covering such stories. In many cases, denial precedes acknowledgment, often in the form of justification that any ill effects we suffer are minuscule compared with those of the victims we write about. All of this exacerbates the symptoms. It can also take over a decade for symptoms to suddenly appear, even if the traumatic experiences were limited in duration or involved only single events.

There are also special risks in covering essentially one interconnected area, as I did, for highly extended periods—in my opinion, because of the personal relationships and emotional bonds that develop with the people and their respective countries that one writes about over such a long period of time and the difficulty of combining these bonds with the
journalistic need to stay somewhat removed from the situation. Many correspondents who end up spending more than their fair share in a single war-affected region pay an especially high price in this regard.

I CAME TO
no quick conclusions on that September day in Beslan, but I did increasingly start to question the nature of my work. It was a combination of factors—my adult life mostly spent on writing about people killing each other out of the most primitive motivations; the fact that I knew many of the victims either personally or through their extended families; the sense of denial that I could report on all of it without any effect on my psyche or those close to me; and in the case of Beslan, the fact that most of the dead were children, deprived of the natural, celebratory rites of passage in this life, just as thousands of children in Chechnya had been by the war there.

*
For an excellent full investigative account of the Beslan School Massacre, please read Chris Chivers’s outstanding article in the June 2006 edition of
Esquire
.

I
n 2006 I took
a trip to St. Petersburg. I dialed the same number, 233-4832, and Nina Nikolaevna answered what I imagined in my head was that same indestructible East German–made rotary phone. She insisted I head off on the Metro to her communal, where she was still living and where I had stayed during that summer of 1989. It was around dusk, and I walked along in one of the classic mists that often envelop the city in a sometimes annoying but always elegant haze.

Talalikhina Lane had been spiffed up with new shops and repainted buildings. I stopped to watch the worshippers trickling into St. Vladimir’s Cathedral, which looked exactly as it had almost two decades earlier. The cheap beer stand was long gone, along with the drunks and their skirmishes with the churchgoers. As a sign of the times, an upscale wine store had opened in a building across the street. I remembered it as a place where a state worker used to sit outside from time to time, selling single eggs for few kopecks each. The wine store was now selling a bottle of 2005 Dom Perignon priced at more than three hundred dollars.

I ascended the stairs to Nina Nikolaevna’s. Despite the exterior repairs, the stairwell was as dark as ever, its iron railings and broken tiles a throwback to pre–Bolshevik Revolution days. The old mechanical bell had been replaced by plastic doorbell buttons. When pressed, they made sound reproductions of birdcalls.

She was still there after all these years, a few more silver teeth, a slightly larger limp, but smiling and seemingly strong. No less commanding than before, she quickly assembled a pair of ill-fitting
topochki
(slippers) and ordered me to doff my shoes and come in.

She looked surprisingly well for a woman of eighty-one who had some sixty-two years ago barely avoided starving to death. Most of the former inhabitants of the communal were gone, she said, explaining that
either this one had died or that one had moved away to some unknown destination. All of them except the Widow, who emerged from her two-room spread and greeted me warmly.

Ever the matriarch of the communal, Nina Nikolaevna ordered me to sit down. An old TV blared out the evening staple of the Russian state-run news program, the content dominated by the daily activities of President Vladimir Putin. Inevitably, as a woman who had initially lamented the empire’s demise, she generally supported Putin, despite his authoritarian reputation. The reasons for this were not difficult to understand.

Like many Russians, Nina Nikolaevna was not a political person. Her material life had improved considerably.
It had become predictable again
. She and her husband received their pensions on time, and at about $250 a month total, with no rent to pay, the money was enough to get by on. The city authorities had repaired her leaky ceiling and replaced the dusty orb hanging from the hallway ceiling with progressive-looking, if antiseptic, fluorescent lights. Every week she handed a state social worker a list of needed groceries. The worker delivered the groceries to her communal room for a nominal fee, the equivalent of about $1.50.

“These may be little things to you, but they make it a lot easier for us. Under Yeltsin our pensions were never paid on time and no one could have been bothered to patch up the ceiling,” she said.

Nina Nikolaevna argued that Putin had instilled some sense of order with his heavy-handed ways.

“Now people respect Russia in the world again,” she said with a confident smile. Her husband, Igor, quiet as ever, nodded in affirmation. Perhaps Putin had not been able to resurrect the empire, but according to Nina, Russia was once again a country to be taken seriously, according to the newspaper accounts she was reading.

She did have one main qualm with Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin:

“His main problem is that he is not tough enough,”
she told me.

It was the kind of feeling backed up by other Russians, particularly older ones, who had lived through the chaos and economic meltdown of the 1990s. The transition was still shaky; corruption still rife; but petrodollars
were just starting to flow into the economy. Tellingly, surveys of all kinds show that although few would prefer a return to communism, contemporary attitudes to, for instance, former dictator Joseph Stalin are mixed. In 2003 a majority regarded Stalin’s bloody reign more positively than negatively, and in 2010 another survey showed that while approximately half of Russians expressed “indifference” to Stalin, a substantial minority still revered him as a great leader.

I was not about to get into a pointless polemic with an octogenarian woman who had lived through multitudes more than I, and whom I had come to see, perhaps for the last time.

We sat around the same battered wooden dinner table in that lone communal room with the sheet hiding the bed in the corner, and, together with her trademark soup and mashed potatoes, we downed a bottle of Moldovan wine.

I asked why she and her husband, Igor, who again sat at the table but said little as I conversed with his wife, continued to live in the communal. History was repeating itself; just as rich barons owned the stately building before the Bolsheviks carved it up, now rich businessmen were buying up communals and reincarnating their regality. Often there was a tenant or two holding out for more money, so real estate movers and shakers gradually bought the individual rooms from them, in which turn the residents could buy a comfortable, private flat in the farther-flung but quiet bedroom district of St. Petersburg—devoid of all the distractions of the communal.

Nina Nikolaevna laughed.

“Yes, we could have moved many times. But at our age? We’ve been here for forty years. They offered us apartments far away, but here we can walk out and see the Winter Palace.” (The former czarist residence, which now houses the Hermitage Museum.) “They’ll sort it out when we die anyway, so what’s the rush,” she said, laughing again.

WE FINISHED DINNER
and said our good-byes. I called Nina Nikolaevna several times over the next three years or so, rechecking the details of her eventful life, which she reiterated in razor-sharp recollections.

Nina Nikolaevna, born on September 11, 1925, finally suffered a stroke, and died on December 10, 2010, at the age of eighty-six.

A BOOK ABOUT
the implosion of the Soviet Empire doesn’t really have an ending; for the fragmentation from that supernova continues to this day and will continue for years and probably decades.

Immense changes have taken place over the years this book covers. Few of these changes fit into clean categories or embrace the neat story lines that lend themselves to the traditional nonfiction literary “arc”; and while all involve more fragmentation—personal, social, or otherwise—each has its distinct features.

The visitor to many of the states of the former empire—from now-oil-rich Kazakhstan to Moscow or St. Petersburg—would be hard pressed to recognize them from what they looked like, at least on the surface, in the anarchic 1990s. Enormous supermarkets and every conceivable type of creature comfort are available just about everywhere. A middle class, in many cases fueled by oil wealth, has emerged in many former Soviet republics. In Georgia, the years of electrical blackouts are history, and the capital, Tbilisi, has been transformed into an orderly place, decorated with new buildings and beautification projects. Poverty, however, remains a serious problem in Georgia, as in many former Soviet republics, especially in rural areas.

And the former empire is dotted with unresolved conflicts. Witness the slow buildup to a war between Russia and Georgia over the tiny region of South Ossetia—a smoldering conflict few paid any attention to until it exploded on an August night in 2008—a deeply complex combination of geopolitics (namely, Russia’s efforts to reestablish itself as a power to be reckoned with in the world coupled with its desire to carve out a zone of influence in the former Soviet space, especially in coveted Georgia), ethnic discord, and a lack of careful contemplation on the Georgians’ part as to the consequences of getting involved in a full-blown war with their giant northern neighbor. To simplify the demographic problem of a population split between twenty-five thousand or so Ossetians
and a roughly equal number of Georgians, most ethnic Georgians were forced to leave South Ossetia, their homes burned and then bulldozed. Following the short war, Russia nearly alone recognized South Ossetia and Abkhazia as “independent countries,” and established military bases in both, in violation of an internationally backed agreement that ended the short war. And Georgia still has yet to fully acknowledge that it faces real disputes with ethnic minorities like the Abkhaz or the Ossetians, as small as their numbers may be.