Let Our Fame Be Great (34 page)

But the ruined villages are not only remembered by blue glowing dots on a map. Their remains are still there on the hillsides, rising up in terrace after terrace of finely crafted walls. Across the rushing river Cherek from the present-day village of Upper Balkaria, and reached by a rusting suspension bridge, is what is left of Kunyum, Khutai's home hamlet. It rose up from the river bank like a maze. Each level interlocked with those above and below, but in no recognizable pattern, and I was reduced to scrambling up collapsing walls to ascend higher. There was no sign that anyone else had been there recently, and the only witness to my visit was a curious horse who watched me out of sight.

At the top of the village stood a tower. Square and tapering, it was of the kind that is far more common over the mountains in Georgia where the Svans long delighted in building defensive towers to use as bases for attacking their neighbours. I sat at its foot and wondered for a while whether this tower was the one built by Akhtougan to defend himself and his kidnapped bride against his irate father-in-law's army. But I was wrong, for Akhtougan's tower was in the Baksan valley at
the foot of Mount Elbrus sixty kilometres or so to the west. Perhaps another family feud, this one lost from history, had provoked this mammoth construction.

The ruins of Sauty were below me, while tracks led into the hills where once Glashevo and other hamlets had held communities of herders. The square, blue-green patches of cabbage fields dotted the valley floor – cabbages grow particularly well at this altitude – and fruit trees spilled delicious plump plums and apples onto the roads.

Over to my right – to the south – the river flowed from deep in the mountains where the pass into Georgia crossed by the British climbers in the nineteenth century had represented safety for the Red Army soldiers desperately fleeing the Germans.

At my back were the steep slopes of the mountains. It was easy to see how the residents of this hamlet, who had been warned of the approach of the Red Army soldiers on the other side of the river in sufficient time, had managed to escape their assailants and flee into the hills. Less than a hundred metres away, a ravine dived into the mountainside, and beyond that were the high pastures and safety.

Downhill to my left, where the valley turned north towards Russia, stood the neat square houses built by the Soviets. They looked modern and more hygienic than the stone-built burrows I was sitting among, but I knew which I would rather be living in if the valley was attacked once more.

Back on the valley floor, I set off in search of survivors of the November 1942 massacre, aware that few of them would be able to tell me new information since they would be very old now, and would have been very young during the events. A son of Mariyam – the woman who lost her fingers and whose baby flew through the air after being hit by a bullet – was said to live here, but I could not find him, and ended up talking to another Mariyam whom I was directed to by mistake.

Mariyam Endreyeva, now eighty-two years old, had lived in a remote hamlet when the massacre took place, and remembered seeing refugees as morning broke.

‘People came running to us and told us what had happened, and we ran with them into the hills. We were panicking, we were all panicking.
We were in the hills for ten days, while this was all going on. The children that survived came to us, they were still alive, no one knows how they survived. We lived in caves,' she told me and a small audience of family members who had gathered to hear her story.

She lay on her back in a bed drawn up in the house's living room, her bare right foot poking out from under the blanket. She spoke in Balkar, and as she spoke I had plenty of time to watch a fly which was walking steadily all the way from her big toe to her little toe, bridging the gaps in between with little jumps. When it reached the end, it dawdled for a while, then started back again.

Once Endreyeva started talking, she would not stop, and moved seamlessly into the story of the deportation and how the soldiers had sat at the end of the trucks stopping them from getting a clear view of their homes as they drove away.

As she talked, the gaps she left for translation into Russian became less frequent, and I was free to listen to the free flow of the Balkar language.

It seemed amazing that she could have lived eighty-two years in Russia and not have learned Russian, but as I listened to her talk it became increasingly clear why. The impact of Moscow on her life had been wholly negative – a fact betrayed by the Russian words that had crept into her native tongue over the years: ‘soldier'; ‘army'; ‘komendatura'; ‘registration'; ‘special settler'. These were the words of repression and hate, not the words of education and enlightenment.

Her family directed me further down the street to another survivor. Abdurakhman Misirov, now aged seventy-two, a straight-backed noble-looking man, told me his own tale with minimal prompting. Like most of the survivors, he had been too busy hiding to note down details of the massacre, but he confirmed how the villagers had never believed the official story that the Germans had killed their neighbours.

‘The shooting started at night, we could hear it, so close, and we hid ourselves in a haystack. There were thirty or forty of us in there. Some injured people came there too. We were there for seven days, without food, without water even. That was when they burned the village. We were scared we would burn too, so we ran away at night,' he said.

‘We knew who had done this, we knew it was the Red Army men, and we had not expected it. How could we have expected it? If we had expected it, we would have run into the mountains. They were in Soviet uniforms, so we knew who they were. Even before the deportation, these officials were saying it was the Germans who did this, but we knew they were lying all along.'

He did not invite me in, and I could tell he was not comfortable talking about what had happened, perhaps because he knew that at least 112 people with his surname had not been as lucky as him and had died at the hands of those Soviet soldiers.

But before I went he told me I should look up the tale of a relative of his: Ali Misirov, who gave evidence to the commission investigating the crime, and whose incredible story was thereby saved for posterity.

Ali Misirov's account is probably the most lucid of all those given by the eyewitnesses in
The Cherek Tragedy
. It stands on its own and does not intersect with those of any other survivors, unlike many of the others quoted earlier. Born in 1918, Misirov was serving at the front in 1942, but was seriously wounded by shrapnel, and sent home on leave after his treatment. At home in Sauty, he was made secretary of the local division of the Communist Party, as one of the few literate and military-age men around. This did not apparently imply any sympathy for the communists, however, since he watched impassively as Khutai and his men bombarded the Red Army's garrison with the anti-aircraft gun they had seized from the retreating Soviets, and then saw how the troops left the valley over the high pass towards Ossetia. The soldiers, he said, had been detaining local men, which was why the bandits had decided to bombard them in the first place.

‘Directly after the soldiers left, the villagers found in the basement the bodies of seven or eight of their neighbours who had disappeared earlier,' he recalled, setting the scene for what would happen later.

As a communist, he was clearly concerned that he would be killed by the advancing Germans and himself planned to leave the valley on the morning of 28 November, but was forestalled by the arrival of Nakin and his men. They started to shoot around two o'clock that morning.

‘Everyone who was in the house began to run all over the place, and I, just in my underpants, jumped into the potato clamp. After a little time I looked out. The soldiers were gathering people and shooting them in groups of five or ten. Everyone. Women, children, no difference. Alibek Misirov, and he was a complete cripple, was shot without a thought. Children running away were shot in the back,' he said.

‘At first I thought that the Germans had come, but then I clearly heard the Russian language, being spoken well.'

He said he had never lost consciousness at the front, but hiding in the potato store he had no idea how much time passed as he drifted into a daze. After a period – ‘maybe three days, maybe five' – he came out of his hole, and walked outside. He saw a soldier, but the soldier took fright at the sight of this half-naked man wandering around in the snow and himself ran away. Misirov called the soldier back, telling him to take him to the staff building. There Misirov managed to convince them he was in the army and not a bandit, and their doctor agreed to treat him. Misirov collapsed. He lay unconscious when Nakin's troops pulled out, and was spared by the Romanian troops who briefly occupied the valley.

‘All my people were killed – my wife, my son, my sister with her two children – but I did not bury them – I was ill, I did not have the strength to stand. They say that whole bodies were only found rarely, in the main there were just burnt bits, which were buried in bags, in pillowcases, or just wrapped up in cloth,' he said.

His account stops there, and the reader is left to wonder whether he returned to the army. Presumably, he did so, although he had died before I visited the mountains so I had no chance to ask him myself. Perhaps he was arrested as a bandit and sent to Siberia. We know he survived the war, so maybe he was deported directly from the front. Or he may have been one of those soldiers who were demobilized and condemned as traitors only when they had finished fighting their country's enemies. Either way, he would have had decades to rave at the horrible irony of being exposed to the massacre only because he had been injured fighting for his country.

But the greatest irony was yet to come.

In 1990, the controversial Soviet film director Alexei German, who had outraged Soviet officials with his portrayal of Red Army soldiers in a film called
Checkpoint
and who was known for his absolute perfectionism when it came to casting and props, needed an actor to play Stalin in his film
Khrustalyov, My Car
. He sent envoys to the Caucasus to find an old man who looked like the dictator.

Sure enough, they found Misirov. The man's resemblance to Stalin was uncanny, and he – who was seventy-nine when the film was released in 1998, just five years older than Stalin was when he died – played the dictator as Stalin lay shaking and spitting on his death bed.

I would like to think Misirov enjoyed acting the role of the man whose troops killed his family and destroyed his nation, since his part consisted of little more than choking, vomiting and wallowing in his own faeces. The film itself, though it veers into very self-indulgent territory, presents a horrible picture of Stalin's Moscow as a place of arbitrary arrest, random and unexplained violence, rape, cruelty and nightmarish weirdness.

It must have been a bewildering journey for Misirov to have started his adult life hiding in a potato store listening to his whole family being murdered by Stalin's forces, then to reach the end of his life impersonating the great ruler while a nurse removed his soiled pyjamas. This new Russia was surely a land of freedom.

But, as ever, the situation was more complicated than that. It might now be possible to make films showing Stalin as a frail and pitiful old man, but that did not mean the majority of Russians disapproved of what the dictator had done. As I write this, one of Russia's subservient state television channels – which never take a step without Kremlin approval – has just announced that its viewers voted Stalin the third greatest Russian of all time. Stalin had been in first place in the poll, and even threatened to win it, until a producer appealed for people to vote for someone else to avoid embarrassment.

And, despite the state commission and the definitive account of the events in the Cherek valley published in
The Cherek Tragedy
, their version had not found universal acceptance. Only 1,000 copies were ever printed and it has vanished from bookshops. My copy was given
to me by a kind family in Upper Balkaria, and has a child's doodles inside the front and back covers, and several pages ripped out.

In the absence of this account of the truth, the myth of German involvement in the massacre has resurfaced.

Valery Dzidzoyev, an academic in the nearby city of Vladikavkaz, wrote an article in 2005 called ‘In Search of Historical Truth' analysing whether Muslim nations in the North Caucasus had really betrayed their homeland during the Second World War. In it, he blamed the massacres in the Cherek valley on German soldiers from the Edelweiss Division, and did not mention the Red Army at all. The article was published by a research body run by the government of Kabardino-Balkaria, in clear breach of promises made in 1992 to publicize the truth of what had happened.

And this was not the only promise it has broken. After the government officially announced in 1992 that what had happened in the Cherek valley had been an act of genocide, it pledged to investigate the legality of the 1943 investigation into the killings, to check if any of the guilty parties were commemorated in street names or in monuments and to make recommendations to correct that, to erect a memorial complex in Balkaria itself, to ask the central government to give compensation to the victims or their relatives, and to ask the prosecutors to re-examine all criminal cases connected to the events.

These promises seem to have been forgotten. General Kozlov, who ordered his subordinates to wipe the villages of Upper Balkaria from the face of the earth, still has a street in Nalchik named after him. Apart from the two women who trudged through the courts, none of the survivors of the massacre, or the victims' relatives, who spoke to me had received compensation, and they did not expect to get any. There have been no further investigations into the killings.