Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (8 page)

Dinara’s parents were schoolteachers in Dagestan, a republic in the North Caucasus next to Chechnya. Her parents, and most people they knew, were out of work. She had come to Moscow to study but had failed all her entrance exams. She couldn’t go back and tell them. She couldn’t move forward and get a good job. So she hung out in bars and waited for people like me. She would do this for a while, then she would stop.

In her hometown things had started to get very religious. Her parents were secular Soviets, but the younger ones were all enthralled by the Wahhabi preachers who had come to the Caucasus from Saudi Arabia. Dinara couldn’t stand the Wahhabis. But her younger sister was hooked. She had started to wear a head scarf and talked incessantly about jihad, about freeing the Caucasus from Moscow’s yoke, about a caliphate stretching from Afghanistan to Turkey. Dinara was worried they would make her into a suicide bomber, a “Black Widow.” All her sister’s friends wanted to become Black Widows, to come to Moscow and blow themselves up.

Two sisters. One a prostitute. The other on jihad.

•  •  •

It was the Black Widows who had given me my first break in television. On October 23, 2002, between forty and fifty Chechen men and women drove in a blacked-out van through the evening Moscow traffic and out to a suburb once home to the world’s largest ball-bearing factory. Having pulled balaclavas or scarves over their heads and belts of dynamite across their bodies, the terrorists walked briskly into the main entrance of a concrete, brutalist theater known as Palace of Culture Number 10.

The theater that evening was showing a performance of
Nord Ost
, a musical set in Stalin’s Russia. It was Russia’s first musical, a sign that Russian entertainment was becoming as good as the West’s, and the show was sold out. The terrorists came onto the stage during a love aria. They fired into the air. At first many in the audience thought the terrorists were part of the play. When they realized they weren’t, there were screams and a charge for the doors. The doors were blocked off already by Black Widows with explosives wired between their bodies and the doors. The men on the stage ordered the audience back into their seats; anyone who moved would be executed. The Moscow theater siege had begun; it would last four nights. By the time I arrived the next morning, as a fixer to a tabloid journalist (later I would assist on a documentary), the theater was surrounded by soldiers, medics, TV cameras, cops, and crowds of the curious. Hacks high-fived; police sucked on cigarettes with teenage girls playing hooky from school. Baked potato and hot dog vendors had come from across town and were having a field day. “Get your sausages here,” they called to the crowd. A hundred yards between jolliness and terror, between hot dog stalls and hostages. At first I couldn’t understand: Why is everyone acting like they’re in a comedy, when this is a tragedy? Weren’t we all meant to sit in silence? Bite our nails? Pray?

Back in the theater the orchestra pit was being used as a toilet; the people in the front row were sweating from the stench. Rows of seats were rattling as the hostages shook with fear. “When we die, how will I recognize you in paradise?” a seven-year-old girl asked her mother.

The hostages were losing hope. The terrorists demanded the President pull all federal forces out of the North Caucasus. The Kremlin had said there was no way it would negotiate: the President’s credibility was based on quelling the rebellion in Chechnya. In the late 1990s, when he was still prime minister, he had been transformed from gray nobody to warrior by the Second Chechen War, suddenly appearing in camouflage sharing toasts with soldiers on the front. The war had been launched after a series of apartment buildings had been bombed in mainland Russia, killing 293 people in their homes. Nowhere, nowhere at all, had seemed safe. The perpetrators were announced on TV to be Chechen terrorists—though many still suspect they were working with the Kremlin’s connivance to give the gray nobody who was meant to become president a reason to start a war. Many in the Russian public, cynical after living among Soviet lies so long, often assume the Kremlin’s reality is scripted. There were indeed some grounds for skepticism: the Russian security services had been caught planting a bomb in an apartment block (they claimed it was a training accident); the speaker of the Duma had publicly announced one of the explosions before it had taken place.

While they held the
Nord Ost
theater the Chechen terrorists welcomed TV crews inside to give interviews live for Russian TV. The men spoke in heavily accented Russian, the southern accents usually used in Russian comedies.

“We’ve come to die here for Allah. We’ll take hundreds of unbelievers with us,” they announced.

One of the Black Widows spoke on camera. Through her head scarf you could see the most elegant, almond eyes. She said she was from a secular family and had joined a sect when her father, husband, and cousin were killed during the war with Russia.

“If we die it’s not the end,” she told the television audience, quite calmly. “There are many more of us.”

It was my job to stay outside and wait to see if anything happened while my bosses went back to their hotel. It drizzled. The cold rain tasted salty. I drank warm beer, listening for an explosion or gunfire. There wouldn’t be any. At 5:00 a.m. on the fourth night of the siege, special forces slipped a fizzing, mystery anesthetic blended with an aerosol spray gas into the ventilation system of the theater. A gray mist rose through the auditorium. The Black Widows were knocked out instantly, slouching over and sliding onto the floor. The hostages and hostage-takers all snored. Barely a shot was fired as special forces, safe from the fumes in gas masks, entered. All the Chechens were quickly killed. The soldiers celebrated the perfect operation. The darkness around me was lit up with the spotlights of news crews reporting a miracle of military brilliance.

The medics moved in to resuscitate the audience. They hadn’t been warned about the gas. There weren’t enough stretchers or medics. No one knew what the gas was, so they couldn’t give the right antidotes. The sleeping hostages, fighting for breath, were carried out, placed face up on the steps of the theater, choking on their tongues, on their own vomit. I, and a thousand TV cameras, saw the still-sleeping hostages dragged through cold puddles to city buses standing nearby, thrown inside any which way and on top of each other. The buses pulled past me, the hostages slumped and sagging across the seats and on the wooden floor, like wasted bums on the last night bus. Some 129 hostages died: in the seats of the auditorium, on the steps of the theater, in buses.

The news crews reported a self-inflicted catastrophe.

The
Nord Ost
theater siege, this terror-reality show—in which the whole country saw its own sicknesses in close-up, broadcast on live TV; saw its smirking cops, its lost politicians desperate for guidance not knowing how to behave; saw Black Widows, somehow pitiable despite their actions, elevated to prime-time TV stars; saw victories turn to disasters within one news flash—was when television in Russia changed. No longer would there be anything uncontrolled, unvetted, un-thought-through. The conflict in the Caucasus disappeared from TV, only to be mentioned when the President announced the war there was over, that billions were being invested, that everything was just fine, that Chechnya had been rebuilt, that tourism was booming, that 98 percent of Chechens voted for the President in elections, and that the terrorists had been forced out to refuges in the hills and forests. When someone from the Caucasus appears on television now, it’s usually as entertainment, the butt of jokes like the Irish are for the English.

But despite all the good news from the Caucasus, Black Widows still make it up to Moscow with rhythmic regularity. Over time their profile has changed: they are less likely to be the wives or daughters of those killed in the war in Chechnya. Instead they are from middle-class families in Makhachkala or Nalchik: the Salafi and Wahhabi preachers are doing their work. My journey to TNT in the mornings is on the subway. My line stops by the coach station, where long-haul coaches finish their fifty-hour journey from the Caucasus. On the morning of March 29, 2010, two Black Widows arrived there, descended into the subway, and blew themselves up a few stops into town, killing forty and injuring a hundred. This was done before 9:00 a.m. By the time I got on the subway a few hours later, the blood and glass and flesh entwined with metal had been cleaned away, and when I arrived at Byzantium and ascended the elevator to TNT, the whole thing, if not forgotten, was then out of mind.

There are no Black Widows in this neon-colored land.

•  •  •

When I went down to the Caucasus four years after
Nord Ost
, it was to work on a documentary about a local celebrity.

I landed in the capital of Balkaria, Nalchik, toward evening. Balkaria is right next to Chechnya, the other side from Dagestan. The suburbs were dark; streetlights are still a problem. Driving into town, the only brightly lit building was the brand new central mosque, paid for personally by the Kremlin-backed local leader, Arsen Kanokov. It’s a nouveau riche mosque with mirrored glass, faux-marble towers, and gold-plated crescents: new money and new religion in one prayer. Locals call it the KGB mosque, an attempt by the government to co-opt Islam. The young prefer renegade Salafi preachers. In 2005 Nalchik had been attacked by 217 Islamic militants, who had stormed the TV tower and government offices. It had taken the army days to defeat them, and there were one hundred deaths, including fourteen civilians.

“We were shocked when we found out the militants weren’t Chechens but local lads from the university where I teach,” a history professor, Anzor, told me when we had dinner that evening. He was doing a bit of moonlighting as my fixer. “I don’t know what my students think about, it’s like they speak another language to me. My generation were all Soviet. But my students, they don’t feel Russian. There’s nothing to bind them to Moscow.”

The waitress brought more tough, smoked mutton. We were having dinner in the Sosruko restaurant, the town’s most famous, named after a local mythical hero, a sort of Hercules. The restaurant, twenty meters high and concrete, is in the shape of the head of a medieval knight, with helmet and huge moustache, perched on a hill above the town and lit up in neon green, the only building well lit aside from the new mosque.

“When my pupils go to Moscow they have people on the street tell them to go home. But yet we’re part of the Russian state. Not immigrants. So what does that mean: ‘go home’? Meanwhile there’s no work here for the young,” continued Anzor, “and only the Wahhabis spend time with them.”

The next morning I could finally see Nalchik clearly. The center was neat, with perfect beds of bright flowers in front of government buildings in Soviet elephantine neoclassicism. Mount Elbrus loomed over Nalchik like a bully threatening violence at any moment. The celebrity I had come to meet was one Jambik Hatohov, at the time the biggest boy in the world. Seven years old, he weighed over a hundred kilos. Tabloid hacks and television crews would fly in from across the world to take his picture.

I drove out of town to his mother’s apartment in a suburb of Soviet matchbox blocks standing crooked on uneven dirt roads (the local FSB following, to make sure I wasn’t meeting jihadists on the sly). The staircase was dark, the green paint peeling. The mother, Nelya, opened the door for me. Inside the apartment had been refurbished in the IKEA style, paid for by Jambik’s media appearances. Jambik was in the bath when I arrived. I could hear him splashing and squealing and snorting. I went in to say hello. He was so overweight his penis was covered by flab, and his toes and eyes barely peaked out. He grunted rather than breathed. There was water all over the floor, and he was sliding up and down in a bath he could hardly fit in, splashing water everywhere. He charged me when I came in, and I was slammed against the door.

“He never had a father,” said Nelya. “He needs a man in his life.”

We went into town. It was the “day of the city,” the state-sponsored party to instill local pride. There were fairground rides and sporting events. Jambik was known by everyone; he was a star. “It’s our Sosruko, our little warrior!” locals would cry as we passed through the festival. Everyone gave him food: shashlik, smoked mutton, Snickers, pizza, Coke. They let us on rides for free. Jambik ate all the time, grunting. When Nelya tried to stop him he would scream like a burglar alarm and hit her with the full weight of his hundred-and-something kilos.

We stopped to watch a wrestling competition. There were fighters from several North Caucasus republics (Dagestan, Balkaria, Ingushetia), who represented themselves rather than “Russia.” There were Olympic champions; the North Caucasus produces the greatest wrestlers in the world, and it’s always a problem for the local wrestlers to feel they win their golds for “Russia.” But for many young males the choice is between jihad and wrestling. Nelya hoped Jambik would grow up to become a wrestler, though the local trainers all told her he was too slow. Nelya thought he might make it in sumo.

After a while I noticed Jambik’s speech was slow and slurred.

“How’s he doing at school?” I asked Nelya.

“Oh, he’s such a star they let him pass into the year above without taking any exams,” said Nelya.

We flew Jambik to Moscow, where he appeared on Russia’s number one talk show and pushed a Jeep for the cameras. He auditioned at Russia’s top children’s TV sketch show.

Meanwhile concerned doctors met with Nelya: Jambik was not a warrior, they explained, but a very sick child who needed help or he would die. She needed to put him on a diet, change their lifestyle. Nelya didn’t want to know: he was her bloated, golden goose and their ticket to another life. I felt for her; I had seen what happened when she tried to deny Jambik food.

“God has willed him to be this way,” she insisted.

When we parted Jambik hugged me so hard I could barely breathe. Later I heard that he had received an offer to study sumo in Japan. That had always been Nelya’s dream for him. But the sumo never did work out for Jambik. Soon the family was back in Nalchik. A couple of years later an even bigger boy was born, in Mexico, and some of Jambik’s star allure was lost. At the age of eleven he weighed 146 kilos.