We were stopped just short of the rusty bridge by a group of fighters led by a man who identified himself as Commander Magomed, which is how “Muhammad” is pronounced in Russian. He checked our documents, showing particular interest in mine, before squeezing himself into the jeep and ordering us to drive to “headquarters.” HQ was a shattered apartment block about a half mile away. Magomed got out and started talking in staccato Chechen with another fighter while Musa strained to eavesdrop. He did not like what he was hearing.
“They’re talking about using us as human shields,” he said softly.
Musa got out and approached the men. He threw around names of Chechen commanders he knew. Then another couple of fighters emerged from a basement, and one embraced Musa. It was difficult to determine the fulcrum moment, but something had changed. After another extended exchange of words, Musa wrapped his arm around the back of the apparent real commander in the odd gesture that served as the Chechen handshake, and we were allowed to go free. Magomed looked disappointed.
The day was still not over.
When we got to the rusty bridge leading out of the city, we got out to join the stream of refugees and walked so as not to test fate and overload the creaky structure. At the far end, however, we met with an unpleasant surprise. A large force of Russians on APCs had arrived, evidently to cut off the last remaining road out of the city before General Pulikovsky’s planned incineration. We drove up slowly as a group of five soldiers trained their guns on our vehicle. A few dozen yards away, an open-top jeep was burning. Two blackened bodies sat upright in the backseat, as if the flames would somehow die out at some point and they would just continue on their journey.
“Why are you defending these black asses?” seethed one Russian Rambo, using the ugly word chornie-zhopy to describe all Chechens, including Musa. “Don’t you have enough blacks in America?”
Just then one of his drunk or doped-up comrades became distracted by a group of two or three cows in the distance and opened fire on the animals, felling them with ease, the cows moaning and writhing on the ground for a bit before expiring. To ease the tension, I delicately suggested that I had a few bottles of Orange Fanta inside the jeep and offered them to the soldiers. They guzzled them down as if they hadn’t drunk for days and, friendlier now, let us pass.
In the end, the threatened firestorm never materialized. The ultimatum came and went, and it was clear that great divisions had opened in Moscow. Alexander Lebed, the tough-talking former general who won fame for his heroics during the Afghan war, won the upper hand, and another truce took hold. This one lasted, a peace accord was signed, and the Russians pulled out of Chechnya over the next few months.
I always wondered if the threat to level what was left of the city had been real or just bluster, whether the Russians would really go through with it. Why not, I thought, they’d subjected the city to everything else. Then I thought of the old saying that some men get a bigger kick out of knowing they could have killed someone than out of actually murdering.
The Russians would not be gone for long. They would be back again in three years to avenge their losses. By this time Chechnya had reached medieval standards of barbarism; killing, kidnappings, and the “independence” movement had taken on a decidedly radical Islamist hue. At the same time, a certain Vladimir Putin began his rise to the Russian throne.
* In 2004, Yandarbiyev was killed in a car bombing in Qatar. A Qatari court tried and found three Russian intelligence agents guilty of his murder. They were eventually extradited to Russia, where they received a hero’s welcome.
† Eight and a half years later, in 2003, I was back in St. Petersburg when a call came through on my cell phone: Taras Protsyuk had been killed in Baghdad, the very first journalist to die in the American war to oust Saddam Hussein. A US tank had fired a round at him as he stood on a balcony of the Palestine Hotel—where practically all foreign reporters were based—filming the first American troops arriving in the city. The tank round blew off his legs, and he bled to death. To this day, there is no concrete explanation as to the motive for having mowed down Taras with a tank round; speculations range from the fog of war to a mistaken impression that his tripod-mounted camera was in fact some sort of weapon, to more sinister theories that those who fired the tank round knew he was a journalist and simply did not care.
‡ Musayev was killed in 2000 during the second Russian-Chechen war.
§ Rosa was reportedly killed in Grozny over an unclear disagreement in the late 1990s.
THREE LIBERTINE SABOTAGE WOMEN
Yes, by December 1996, the last Russian soldier had left Chechnya. The impossible had become reality: David had defeated Goliath: the Russians’ historical power humiliatingly vanquished by a few thousand Chechen guerrillas. Or so it seemed at the time. What the Russians also left were large parts of a capital, Grozny, flattened, tens of thousands dead or maimed, a steadily growing radical Islamist movement (since money and ideology had poured into Chechnya during the war), and warped psyches.
But if one could look past the rubble, there was still an atmosphere of victory-high, a belief in a new start. The wretched city came to life, renamed Dzhokhar-Kala (Dzhokhar City) in memory of the war-hero late president Dudayev. There was also residual revenge: The bizarre, ZZ Top look-alike warlord Salman Raduyev (he wore an enormous red beard and triple-sized sunglasses to mask the fact that half his face had been blown off in a wartime explosion) announced “Operation Ash” and promised to blow up a dozen Russian cities. Few took him seriously, and fewer thought he had the slightest thing to do with a series of bombings in Moscow years later—Raduyev had the bravado habit of taking credit for all sorts of explosions, even ones that later turned out to be no more than natural gas leaks from leaky ovens.*
There was not only an election, there was a fair one (a major rarity in the former USSR of that time), conducted and approved by studious-looking European observers in expensive winter parkas. Former “suicide brigade” members put fresh-cut glass in a few pane-less window frames and festooned burnt-out storefronts with flashy campaign signs.
Shamyl Basayev, the terrorist, ran for the high office too. His campaign brochure trumpeted his personal accomplishments. “Shamyl made the only proper decision—he hijacked a plane,” it read. Movladi Udugov (the “Chechen Goebbels”) ran on a ticket of “Islamic Order”—though Udugov had never been considered observant until he reportedly became a middleman for cash from radical Islamist circles in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. He played up the fact that he’d taken a second wife (and personally urged me to follow his example) in accordance with the Koranic injunction to protect widows and rebuild the population base.
In the end, it was the moderate Aslan Maskhadov who racked up a landslide victory, though I considered Basayev’s 25 percent or so of the vote impressive for a self-described terrorist with no political background. Basayev accepted defeat more or less graciously and declared he would ascend into his mountains and turn to beekeeping. (The honey gig didn’t last long.)
I stayed behind in Grozny to work on a few features, and out of a desire to explore the concept of “aftermath.” My host was Musa, who had graduated from being our driver to having become our local “stringer,” who called Moscow with occasional quotes.
On the night before I prepared to leave Grozny, Musa announced it was time to celebrate. Accompanying us was Ivan, a quiet, sensible ethnic Russian reporter friend of ours and Grozny native who had stuck it out though the war and then stayed behind after most ethnic Russians had left along with the Red Army.
“Celebrate?”
I wondered what Musa meant by the word. By six p.m. the streets of Grozny were deserted.
“Where are we going?” I asked Ivan. “Nothing is even open.”
“You’ll soon find out,” replied Ivan with a smirk.
“Zhirus!” Musa grinned.
A zhiru is a divorced or widowed Chechen woman, or one considered past “marrying age,” one who is exempt from all the
traditional Chechen conventions of female chastity. But to call a woman a zhiru is not to call her a whore; it simply means that she has a social license to engage in sex.
Musa used his good arm to pull his coat over his lame one. “I’m going to my second wife,” he barked at his first one, who in her gentle but vapid way looked neither surprised nor disappointed and kept sweeping the floor with an old broom. We headed out the door and got into his sputtering Lada, driving down Avturkhanov Street into town. Leafless trees, many with mangled or missing limbs from the months of bombing the city had endured, lined the median, while on either side of the street stretched row after row of windowless, burned-out early-twentieth-century neoclassical buildings—an occasional candle flickering behind thick plastic sheeting in place of glass in the odd apartment still semihabitable. The main square—always vast but now much larger due to the “removal” by bombardment of most structures that had once defined it—boasted the remains of Dudayev’s presidential palace on the right and the pile of concrete rubble that was once the parliament building on the left.
We ended up in a neighborhood of the single-story homes that seemed to have gotten through the war more or less intact, and pulled into the courtyard of one. There was little sign it was anything more than a simple single-family dwelling. An electric generator hummed outside. Once inside, I realized it was a private restaurant-hideaway—probably the only one functioning in postwar Grozny.
We were ushered toward a corner of the one large room surrounded by plastic curtains with floral patterns. A waitress threw the draperies back. We entered and sat down, and the curtains closed again. Two bottles of vodka adorned the table, along with another of Russian champagne and a small dish of black caviar. The three of us—Musa, Ivan, and I—sat down; there were three other seats. Musa grinned like a Cheshire cat. Ivan played sheepish but quickly warmed up.
Within a few minutes the curtains were snapped open again just long enough for three women to be ushered through. In their twenties and thirties, they were stylishly but not provocatively clad in long, nearly ankle-length dresses, the hair of each adorned with the traditional Chechen female half-scarf worn loosely from the top of the head and ending in a knot at the back of the neck.
With the curtains now between them and the prying eyes beyond, the women doffed their head scarves and made it clear they had come to “relax.”
Musa’s female companion was a tall, attractive woman with reddish-brown hair by the name of Zina. She was twenty-eight years old, divorced, boisterous, and obviously headstrong. That a woman was going to drink alcohol at all was provocative enough in increasingly Islamifying Chechnya. She did not even wait for Musa to pour, grasping a shot glass and demonstratively projecting it in his direction. He obliged her.
Next to Ivan sat Fatima, a chirpy woman of about thirty with short brown hair. And placed across from me was Louisa, who gave off a warm, reserved air. I didn’t ask, but she was also probably in her late twenties or early thirties.
Musa proposed a first toast to our female companions. Zina twirled her shot glass between her red-enameled fingertips. Fatima and Louisa complied with equal alacrity.
“Lawrence, there is nothing more powerful on Allah’s earth than the beauty of a woman, and here we are blessed by three of the most beautiful women in the world. But I want you to know something else. Just because a woman is beautiful and feminine does not mean she is any less valorous or brave as the most fearless fighter or man of the gun.”
At first I did not completely understand the correlation between the toasts and our female guests. Musa elaborated.
“All three of the women seated around you played a great role in the campaign,” Musa said gravely, referring to the war.
I had met a few Chechen women among the fighters. Others had helped out as safe-house nurses or aided the fighters in other ways, cooking or keeping a lookout for the federali, or “federalists,” as the Russian troops were known. One field commander, Doki Makhayev, whose hideout house I had frequented, had several female fighters in his entourage, but most of them had battle-hardened demeanors and mannish features. (Makhayev was later killed by the Russians while trying to escape his village hidden in a truck under a crate filled with watermelons.)
These female companions, in contrast, projected a kind of war-tinged elegance. It was hard to believe they had been taking potshots with AKs or lobbing grenades.
Zina explained that she had worked as a secretary at an iron and cement factory in Grozny that was later bombed into bits of concrete and twisted metal. With her feminine bearing, who would have believed that she was a sabotage woman? Zina went on, saying it was easier for her to go unnoticed carrying a handbag that contained a homemade bomb; she claimed, in once such instance, that she left the cheap Chinese Gucci-type knockoff filled with explosives and a detonator along a rail line used for Russian equipment transports. The cheap exploding bag had done some expensive damage, she proudly announced.
Fatima and Louisa, who had worked in various Chechen businesses and government departments before the war, used their charms to “move” explosive materials around the country. This meant employing a bit of cleavage to engage notoriously corrupt Russian officers and agreeing on prices for anything from RPGs to ammunition. They would later be left in a designated location, and the rebels would then pick them up. “The commanders find doing business with a babe more palatable, for some reason,” Musa joked. I felt like I was in the middle of a scene out of the 1966 classic film The Battle for Algiers, except I imagined Algiers looked like Club Med compared to pulverized Grozny.
Musa and the three “sabotage women” raised their glasses to touolum (victory) in Chechen.
There were more toasts, a dinner of fish and chicken was served, and the bottles of vodka were quickly emptied and just as quickly replaced with fresh ones.
Zina eventually suggested that we all head back to her place. We piled back into Musa’s Lada, six of us in a car meant for four, heading into a district close to the epicenter of destruction that was once the center of Grozny. We passed a long-since-burned-out tank with its turret blown off in the median, and turned right. Zina’s building looked to be about half habitable; the front had taken artillery hits and it was possible to see into the apartments, opened like tin cans. We parked and marched up a pitch-black flight of stairs. Zina took out a key and opened a penitentiary-style metal door.
Considering the building’s battered exterior, the apartment was comfortable, with a table, sofa, and an unexpectedly elegant hanging lamp. There were only two rooms, one large living room and a little room off to the side that served as a bedroom. Zina produced a bottle of cognac and tea, and Musa said something about “going to take a rest” in the little room. Zina followed him in and closed the door. Ivan and his girlfriend kissed passionately on the couch, gearing up for their turn. Louisa looked at me and smiled.
Suddenly, loud banging on the metal door erupted. Someone was beating on it with the butt of a gun, and loud male voices ordered us to open up in the name of the law, or specifically, in the name of the newly minted morality police.
Zina was there in a flash, almost in anticipation of the bust.
It did not go the way the two baby-faced officers anticipated.
“Who the hell do you think you are, molokososi [literally, “nursing babies”]?” screamed Zina. “I fought in this war. And where were you? Do you have any idea who I am?”
The two boys looked stunned at this rare reproach of Chechen male (even adolescent) authority, but still demanded to know who we were.
“None of your fucking business!” snarled Zina. “This is my apartment, and I will do whatever the hell I want with whomever I want.” Then, as Musa, Ivan, and I looked on, Zina attacked, kicking and clawing and punching the morality squad boys, who were now thoroughly stunned. They backed away slowly, silently, glaring menacingly until Zina slammed the door in their faces, livid with having to prove anything to anyone.
The appearance
of the morality squad at her zhiru door underlined a trend in postwar Chechnya. What had started as a secular conflict had become more infused with elements of religion, and a more radicalized, militant form of imported Islam was replacing the tolerant, Sufi-based traditions in the country, and this meant that Zina, who believed she had fought for Chechen freedom, was already much less free.
All the commotion had taken an unfortunate toll, with Zina and the other two “sabotage women” loudly denouncing the audacity of the morals police punks and Ivan’s trying to settle them down. Time was now running out, it was getting late, and postmidnight was not an advisable time to wander about Grozny. We piled, all six of us, into Musa’s tiny Lada to drop off the girls. Louisa’s long dress became shorter with her sitting down on my lap. I’d never again come even remotely close to a self-described sabotage girl.
I never saw her again.
IT TOOK VERY little time for the more radical interpretations of Islam to begin to be institutionalized in Chechnya.
During the war, I witnessed the first “Sharia court” proceedings in the village of Komsomolskoye, where a well-known commander was given twenty lashes for “insubordination.” It was much more political theatre than punishment. The commander may well have been insubordinate, but the lashes were not of a particularly vigorous nature—they were staged for the TV cameras. When the “lashings” were over, the commander proudly stood up and flashed a broad smile, showing no sign of physical discomfort.
But the theatrics soon gave way to sobering new realities.
Eight Pieces of Empire Page 19