In distant Kazakhstan, Aidrus Khazaliev was watching the developments with disbelief. That he could go home to a free Chechnya was a fantasy that he had never even dreamed of. He was retired, and intended to take his whole family to live out the rest of their days in peace.
While Khazaliev planned and schemed to sell his property and gather up his family, Dudayev set his stamp on things. His methods of government involved sweeping plans, which would rarely be fulfilled, and elaborate accusations against Russia. Moscow was indeed working to undermine him, but his constant jibes would have made a working relationship all but impossible to secure even if the Russians had been interested in a stable relationship.
In 1992, for example, he accused a Russian official of putting a price on his head.
‘It started at five million roubles, and now the price has risen to billions. In greenbacks, it is a few million,’ he said with ill-concealed relish.
In March that year, Dudayev’s opponents within Chechnya sought to storm the television station, and parliament proclaimed an emergency. The television station would prove a regular target; it was blown up later in 1992, as bomb attacks and shootings became standard fare in Chechen life.
1.The Russian army drove the Nogai nomads to their deaths in these marshes, where the Yeya river meets the Azov Sea, in 1783.
2.Three young men hold Circassian and Abkhazian flags at a ceremony by the Bosphorus in Istanbul, on 21 May 2008, commemorating the Circassian genocide.
3. Circassians from all over the Middle East gathered on the beach at the Turkish fishing village of Kefken to mark the Circassian genocide.When night fell, they lit torches and held a memorial procession.
4. A petition signed ‘The Circassian nation’, addressed to Queen Victoria and dated 9 April 1864, appealing for help against Russia: ‘… there is no act of oppression or cruelty which is beyond the pale of civilisation and humanity, and which defies description, that it has not committed,’ the letter said. It almost certainly arrived in London after the final Circassian collapse.
5. Sebahattin Diyner, a Turkish Circassian who spoke at the International Circassian Congress in May 1991, holds a portrait of his grandfather in traditional dress.
6. A Circassian grave in the village of Altikesek in the Uzunyalya region near Kayseri, central Anatolia. It is written in Ottoman Turkish so must date from the first decades of the Circassian presence on the ‘long plateau’.
7. Ali Kurt, an eighty-year-old Turk, stands in front of the hazel orchard where he and his father dug up the bones of the Circassians who died in 1864, just outside Akchakale,Turkey.
8. Fragments of bone found in cracks in the rocks below the old ruined fort in Akchakale. I threw them into the sea, towards Circassia.
9. A Soviet-era monument commemorates a 1921 decree giving ‘resorts to the workers’, which helped start the transformation of historic Circassia into Russia’s holiday coast.
10.The road up to Krasnaya Polyana, the mountain village where the last Circassians surrendered to the Russians in 1864, and the Russian army held a parade to celebrate the fact. It will host the winter Olympics in 2014, on the 150th anniversary of the genocide.
11. Khozemat Khabilayeva sits in her living room in Almaty, Kazakhstan. She and her sister were saved by their family dog, Khola, but they could not take him with them into exile.
12. Stalin, who ordered the deportation of the Chechens, the Ingush, the mountain Turks and other nations, is still admired in many parts of Russia, as this rock painting in the mountains of North Ossetia makes clear.
13.The peaks of the central Caucasus as seen from Georgia.This is the view that Freshfield and the other British mountaineers would have seen before they crossed over into the land of the mountain Turks.
14.The gorge of the Cherek valley. Freshfield’s mountaineers passed up this narrow valley and were probably the first western Europeans to visit it.
15. Upper Balkaria today. Ruined houses are visible to the right of the picture.
16. A monument to the residents of the hamlet of Sauty slaughtered by Soviet soldiers in 1942.The Misirov family alone takes up almost four columns of names. Ironically, Ali Misirov, who survived the massacre, went on to play Stalin in a post-Soviet film.
17.The memorial to Gazi-Muhammad, the first imam of Chechnya and mountain Dagestan, which stands just outside the village of Gimry. Pilgrims have tied strips of coloured fabric to it, which is slightly ironic since the imam devoted much of his time to stamping out such superstitions.
18.The view Imam Shamil would have seen from the site of his last stand in the natural fort of Gunib.
19. Imam Shamil is still honoured here, and his portrait stares out from a rock painting above the village of Gunib.
20.The author sits on the rock where General Baryatinsky sat to receive Imam Shamil’s surrender in 1859.The site has been marked with a pavilion and a small patio.
21. Megeb, an ethnically Dargin village in central Dagestan, resembles a step pyramid.
22. Russian Cossacks march in Abkhazia, 2008.
23. Hatice Sener, a 75-year-old resident of the Turkish village of Guneykoy. She still speaks Avar, the Dagestani language of the village’s founders, as do her neighbours.
24.The Dagestani influence is obvious in Guneykoy.This café has a portrait of Imam Shamil as an old man on the wall.
25. Abubakar Utsiev, the leader of the Chechen Sufis in the Kazakh village of Krasnaya Polyana, stands with his daughter on the bleak steppes.
26. Abudadar Zagayev, the only son of the sect’s founder,Vis Haji, stands with one of his two wives and their children outside their house.
27 and 28. Members of the Sufi sect in Krasnaya Polyana dance their ecstatic zikr, accompanying their chant with drums, ‘fiddles’ and handclaps.
29.Tents in a Chechen refugee camp in Ingushetia, 2004.
30. Moscow’s man in Chechnya, Akhmad Kadyrov, votes in Russian-organized elections in his home village of Tsentoroi, October 2003. He was killed less than a year later.
31. Khasan ‘Dedushka’ Bibulatov, the foul-mouthed and hilarious old man who underwent terrible torture at the hands of the Russian army in 1995.
The region’s status was unresolved with Russia. Russian officials mentioned Chechnya’s independence in negotiations, such as in March, May and September 1992, and accepted its separation from Ingushetia – the Ingush half of Checheno-Ingushetia, which had decided to stay within Russia. However, at the same time, Kremlin representatives tried to undermine Dudayev and his government.
This ambivalence left the door open for unique economic crimes. Dudayev had not abolished the Russian currency, and had pegged bread prices at a nominal one rouble. Since prices were uncontrolled outside Chechnya, a profitable trade in bread sprang up instantly. Chechens also enjoyed the lack of import controls, and bought consumer goods in the Middle East, flew them by chartered aircraft to Grozny, and sold them to residents of the nearby regions of Russia. Grozny became the clearing house for the whole Caucasus. Anything – guns, drugs, televisions, fridges – could be bought there.
Other, more elaborate scams sprang up too. In May 1992, a policeman in Moscow happened to notice a man drop a heavy sack, from which tumbled wads of roubles. The policeman stopped and searched the man and his accomplices, eventually finding more than six million roubles. He had, entirely accidentally, discovered the biggest bank robbery in Russian history. Since the banks in Chechnya were still officially part of the Russian banking system, they could issue promissory notes that would be honoured in Moscow. That meant someone with connections in Grozny could obtain unlimited amounts of cash by just pretending the money had been deposited in Chechnya.
When the fraud was discovered, the Moscow banks were in for another shock. Chechen ‘policemen’ had called after the promissory notes were honoured, and asked the banks to hand them over. The banks often had no proof that any money had been given out at all.
For well-connected Chechens, their homeland’s legal unce
rtainty was a goldmine. Khazaliev, however, saw none of this easy money. He was in fact refreshingly upfront about the impact all this political and economic manoeuvring had on his life.
‘We did not know about Dudayev, we were pensioners,’ he said with an air of finality when I asked him what he thought of the general’s cowboy government. In 1994, after he moved back to Grozny, he was busy getting the house he bought on the edge of the capital ready for his family. It was completed in September that year, and the family enjoyed a huge occasion of feasting and joy.
The Khazaliev family got to enjoy that house for almost exactly three months.
For while the building work was going on, Dudayev and Yeltsin were inching ever closer to violence. A bomb nearly killed Dudayev in the very month that Khazaliev arrived back in his homeland, and a Moscow-backed opposition made regular raids on Grozny from a base near the Russian border. In July, while Khazaliev’s house was being repaired and made ready, the Russian government said it might have to intervene if the violence – which it was itself initiating – went on.
In November, after Khazaliev had moved into his new home, the opposition – supplied with tanks by Moscow – attempted to seize Grozny but was forced back, and several of its tanks destroyed.
Yeltsin, humiliated by the defeat of his proxies, threatened to intervene to restore peace. It was a disastrous miscalculation. The Chechens, thousands of whom had been protesting against Dudayev, rallied around their leader, who refused to stand down. It was war.
‘We had to flee Grozny on 17 December,’ said Khazaliev. ‘We abandoned our house and fled to the village.’
Grozny had become terrifyingly dangerous. Russia’s troops – 40,000 strong, but mainly conscripts with little training or idea what they were doing – took weeks to reach Grozny, often stopped by crowds of civilians or by their own disgusted officers. When the Russians finally reached the city, their tanks lacked infantry support and were vulnerable to grenade attacks from apartment blocks lining the streets.
Frustrated by their inability to reach the centre, the artillery and warplanes poured explosives into the city – one observer counted forty-seven explosions within a minute, but was so appalled that he stopped counting before the sixty seconds was up – smashing apartment blocks and the water system, and killing tens of thousands of civilians. One estimate says 27,000 civilians died in the bombardment of Grozny that winter, most of them ethnic Russians who, unlike Khazaliev, had nowhere to go.
Khazaliev crept back to see his house when the fighting had quietened.
‘We went back on 13 February, and found that the soldiers had used our house. Everything was destroyed. My son had a big collection of rare records, and they were all destroyed,’ he said.
The son, Ilyas, who had sat in the room with us but stayed quiet up to now, spoke out.
‘If they had stolen the records it would have been better, they could at least have been used somewhere. But they broke everything,’ he said. Perhaps emboldened by her son’s words, Koka – Khazaliev’s wife – spoke up too.
Wearing a flowery dress and a polka-dotted dark headscarf, she had sat and looked sadder and sadder as the story went on.
‘They broke all of my dishes. The house was half-burned, so we were without gas or electricity with war all around. The bombing, we did not think we would survive. Then on 4 April, we went back to Almaty, and here we are,’ she said.
Russia’s bombing had forced them to return into the exile that Stalin had imposed on them. They had gone to a free Chechnya by train with two containers full of their property, and hearts full of hope. Less than a year later, they flew back into exile with the few things they had salvaged in a suitcase, and a leaden burden of despair they have never managed to shake off.
‘It was impossible for men to walk around the town; if you were between twelve and sixty and you appeared in the town, you would be killed or disappeared,’ said Ilyas, who had left the room and come back holding the three records that survived – one by Creedence Clearwater Revival and two by The Beatles.
‘One half of our house was all burnt, and in the other half officers had lived and it was appalling. All 600 records were broken, and they stole all the furniture,’ Ilyas added, giving way to his mother once more.
‘If they could take it away, they took it, and if they could not, they burnt it or broke it so nothing remained,’ she said, stern-faced and sad.
‘I used to pity the soldiers when I saw them, we used to take them food because we felt bad for them. But when I saw what they did to our house, it was so unpleasant, and . . .’ She ran out of words for a few seconds, before starting again. ‘War is war, I know, but to behave in that way is not right.
‘All these young men, they wrote on the walls, they stole everything. They ate what was in the house but that is not a problem. But why, why did they have to be so uncultured? Russians think of themselves as a cultured people, but they acted in this way. Please take the food, it is war. But what they did was just not nice. There was dirt everywhere, they did it on the floor and the rain and the snow spread it everywhere.’
I did not quite understand what she was saying, since she – as a Chechen woman with the sense of dignity expected of her – had spoken euphemistically. But her husband had been saving up this one great insult and, seeing that I had not understood his wife, he made things clear.
‘You are a Russian soldier, imagine, you go to someone’s house. They took what they could, they burnt everything, but why? Why did they do this? They used our house as a toilet, why was this necessary? I will never forget this, and I will tell the children what they did. Now if you go to any town, there are lists of people killed in Chechnya: Ivanov, Peskov, Siderov,’ he said, listing typical Russian surnames.
‘Every Russian will read these lists and hate Chechens. And why will they hate us? Because these Russians came to kill Chechens and were killed themselves.’
I had not planned to talk to them about their house in Grozny, about how they had dreamed and dreamed about going home to finally build a home in their own land. I had intended to ask them about the deportation, and about their early years in Kazakhstan. But as their story poured out of them, I forgot my carefully planned questions, and listened sadly to how one man’s dreams, along with those of his wife and sons, had been crushed by politicians they knew nothing about.
I was appalled by the depth of sadness with which they had recounted how their home in a free Chechnya had became a toilet for Russia’s occupying soldiers in just three months.
Despite myself though, I could not help being amazed by the appropriateness of how those Russian soldiers had acted. If divorced from the Khazalievs’ own tragedy, their tale was a metaphor for everything Russia has ever done in Chechnya: the spitefulness, the brutality, the lack of justification, and the stupidity. It has, in short, used Chechnya as a toilet.
I have talked to hundreds of Chechens – politicians, poets, warriors, businessmen, officials – about their life stories, but the story of the Khazalievs’ dream home moved me more than any other.
They were simply a Chechen family that wanted to live in freedom, but Russia – no doubt without even realizing what it had done – did not let them. In the same way, their whole nation has been denied the right to manage itself for the last 200 years.
‘In short,’ Khazaliev said, ‘in my life I have seen nothing good. I have been scared all the time. It has never been calm. In 1944, I was brought here, then I went home, and there was war and I had to leave.’
He had earlier shown me photographs of his wife’s relatives. They were descendants of a Chechen who in 1918 led another doomed attempt to win freedom. The black-and-white photographs showed straight-backed bearded men with the traditional, long dark tunics of the Chechen nation, with the row of cartridge cases across the breast.
‘Such people do not exist any more. Their word was their word. They were friendly. There is no one like that left.’
It is true that the pho
tographs belonged to another age. But it was an age with the same problems; the same depth of violence and oppression. And those problems started with the first encounter between Russians and Chechens, more than two centuries earlier, and have been continuing ever since.
19.
A Muslim Submissive to the Will of God
In 1721, Tsar Peter I, one of the strongest and most ambitious rulers Russia has ever had, learned that Persia was in chaos. Afghanistan was rebelling against the Persians and one of the many rulers in Dagestan – an ethnically mixed province partially under nominal Persian control on the northern slopes of the Caucasus mountains – thought he might do so too and appealed to St Petersburg for help. For the energetic tsar, both events were opportunities to gain a strategic hold over lands that could one day prove stepping stones to India, the greatest prize of all.
He was aiming, he said, to grab the southeastern shore of the Caspian Sea from Persian hands, because from there ‘to Balkh and Badakshan with pack camels takes only twelve days. On that road to India no one can interfere with us.’
To secure the Caspian, he had to make sure the Turks did not fill in the gap left by the crumbling Persian empire, and so, to forestall them, he sent his army south.
His soldiers streamed along the shores of the Caspian Sea, heading for the town of Derbent, which sits on the coast at the only place where an army can bypass the Caucasus mountains, as they needed to do. They took Derbent with ease, but after that the campaign was not a great success, since Russia was not yet strong enough to challenge the Persians and Turks for mastery south of the mountains. As a result, the year would hold little relevance for this book either, were it not for one event.
Let Our Fame Be Great Page 27