Arbi distracted himself from his Koran broadcast to explain that earlier, he had not been religious at all, not even during the first war. It was during the second war, he said, after seven members of his extended family, including two brothers, were killed in one week of Russian bombings, that he fully embraced Islam. He said his goal now was to become an Islamic martyr.
“What kind of Islam,” I asked. “Like in what country. Saudi Arabia? Iran? Iraq? Kuwait?”
“Real Sharia hasn’t been accomplished anywhere,” Arbi replied.
Ruslan took several hours to loosen up, but once he did, he agreed to talk. Arbi, obviously the more radical of the two, left the room.
Ruslan told me of the miserable winters fighting in the mountains and said more insurgents were dying of tuberculosis than from combat, of eating tree bark to stay alive. He admitted he had been only nominally religious until he was put through an indoctrination camp in the town of Serzhen-Yurt, where “Arabs taught us” how we should live, how to be a real Muslim. “But I’ll tell you a secret. It will never be possible to make a truly Islamic state out of Chechnya,” he said. “We have our own Sufi traditions. There are different types of fighters. Some are sincere; some are just using the banner of Islam as a cover for their criminal activities.”
I found this a stunning statement from a supposed resistance fighter.
“The truth is, I don’t much care whether I live or die anymore. My life means nothing to me. So I fight for my own reasons. Of course I want the Russians out. Of course I fight in the name of Allah. But mainly I fight from a sense of rage at all the injustice.” He paced the tiny rectangle of a room nervously and incessantly, back and forth.
Ruslan and Arbi openly stated that they had drifted into the ranks of the insurgency for personal reasons—revenge and rage.
Isa finally returned. He asked if I wanted to use the toilet, which was a hole in the ground a good distance from the building. First he went out to scout and then told me to move quickly outside, shadowing me right up to the outhouse door, where he then stood guard.
In the morning, another “contact” arrived to pick us up for the ride to Grozny. The exercise at the front door was the same. The car crammed up close to the entranceway, and I slid in again, unshaven, grubby in a cheap Chinese parka and a simple cap. There was a driver by the name of Said—who evoked the first inkling of confidence I had encountered since arriving. He was of even demeanor, smiled, and held a Kalashnikov rifle. Nominally at least, he was a member of the pro-Russian administration in Grozny. Isa obviously had some sort of deal with him.
“We’ll be safe once we get to Grozny,” he said. “If we get there,” I thought to myself.
“Listen carefully. If we encounter a checkpoint, stay quiet. The Russians manning them are as nervous as we are, and they want to stay alive. They don’t want to get mowed down either,” Isa instructed. “So they keep a low profile. It’s an unwritten agreement.”
Said had documents that identified his position in the Moscow-backed Chechen justice ministry. This, transporting me, was a side business. “I’ve got government documents and a registered weapon; there shouldn’t be any problems—they are bound to let us through right away. But if they question you, you tell them that we are on our way to the government HQ in Grozny and that we are doing a story on the new system of regional constables being established in the republic.”
We took another circuitous route out of Ingushetia, across rolling hills dotted with small farms. Although the Ingush are extremely close to the Chechens ethnically and linguistically, there was now considerable bad blood between them.
Tens of thousands of Chechens had taken shelter in Ingushetia—some in a maze of refugee tent camps, squalid places plopped in the middle of unused fields, endless stretches of muddy lots where a modicum of order had emerged for aid-distribution activities.
Thousands more were “private sector” refugees—those who had taken up residence inside Ingush homes. The Chechens accused their Ingush hosts of profiteering from the war business by using them for the most arduous menial tasks and paying them nothing—instead of giving them rations and shelter in exchange for farm labor.
Isa looked out over the landscape, which was covered in low-hanging fog, and announced it was time to move. Traveling for six hours over a territory that should be navigable in one, we finally reached our destination in the northeast of Grozny, which had more one-story homes and was less damaged than much of the rest of the still-gutted city.
We screeched to a halt. Isa triumphantly got out of the car, borrowed the Kalashnikov from Said, and, laughing uncontrollably, unleashed at least ten rounds into the air in an act of ridiculous defiance before sprinting into the safe house. We were standing in broad daylight, no more than a kilometer from the main Russian-installed Chechen government complex.
Said’s wife was making dinner. We tuned in to Moscow-backed Chechen TV. First came “cartoons” of a uniquely Chechen variety. Cuddly animals were instructing Chechen children not to play in abandoned and damaged cars (the streets were littered with them), not to pick up things that looked like grenades or unexploded cluster bomb munitions, and not to play with trip wires across the roads that might set off booby-trap bombs. Next up was an hour-long broadcast called Missing. There was no commentary, just announcement after announcement detailing how this or that person had disappeared in the middle of the night, often taken away by armed men driving armored personnel carriers. Sometimes there was a photograph of the victim, other times not. The predinner prime-time programming gave an ample sense of the unimaginable traumatization of Chechen society.
We spent the next two days darting around Grozny, me keeping as low a profile as possible while talking to as many people as possible. Isa never produced his vaunted “emir.” Then he said something “undesirable” had come up and that it was too dangerous to stay in the city.
We sped out of Grozny. Isa popped in a cassette tape. The musician was Timur Mutsarayev, a shadowy fighter based in the mountains. He had become a kind of national bard for the insurgents.
During the first Chechen war, there had been a similar bard, Imam Pasha. But Imam Pasha sang of independence, Chechen pride, and the beauty of the Chechen mountains. Imam Pasha rarely touched upon Islamist themes in his songs, and I once attended an alcohol-soaked birthday party where he had been invited to perform. No radical Islamist would have played to a boozed-out crowd.
Mutsarayev was illustrative of the shift toward radicalism produced by the brutal wars. Isa sang along to the gritty guitar ballads, with lyrics like “twelve thousand mujahideen marching all the way into Jerusalem.”
We passed one checkpoint on the way back to the border where I was to be dropped off, but the Russians waved us through with only a cursory check of Said’s government-issued documents.
Isa turned to me and calmly said: “You know what, Lawrence? I have one dream in life. I dream of lugging a huge bomb to one of these checkpoints, detonating it, and killing as many Russians as possible.”
As we got closer to the border, Isa confessed to me that he earlier harbored suspicions that I was a Russian agent with the FSB. “But we now know you’re not.
“I also have to tell you something else. We had to leave Grozny early because some ‘bad people’ had gotten wind that a foreigner was in town. They were ready to pay $25,000 to ‘buy’ you.”
“Thank you for not selling me, Isa,” I said, wondering if it was just bravado talk, or a real case of the by now war-eroded Chechen tradition of adat, or deference and protection of guests.*
* Ironically, Isa himself disappeared a few months later. I received numerous calls from his relatives as to when I had seen him last. It eventually emerged that he himself had been “bought” or kidnapped for the same sum he was allegedly offered for me: $25,000. The ransom was paid and he was released, but his whereabouts today are unclear.
The Soviet Union was an atheist country. Officially, that is. With the triumph of the Bols
heviks, Orthodox Christianity was either crushed or co-opted. Many cathedrals turned into toolsheds or grain silos. But for those who continued to imbibe the “opiate of the masses,” the window was still left a crack open, even if the priests who presided over their flocks were often informers. In 1990, when newly unsealed KGB archives showed just how deeply the church had been corrupted, even dissidents and archivists who dug into the piles of documents were stunned at the scale of the miscegenation. Islam was no different. Mosques were shuttered, and the few that were allowed to reopen were usually staffed with the “Mullahs of Marx”—there to keep an eye on the faithful, or in other words, keep the “faith” to a minimum.
With the demise of the empire, countless cathedrals reopened. Millions were spent on constructing mosques, sprouting up like mushrooms in those areas of the former empire where Islam held sway. Even Judaism made a remarkable revival, despite the departure of over half of the former USSR’s Jews to Israel (and the United States).
The 1998 reburial of Czar Nikolai II and his family, assassinated, soaked in acid, and thrown into a Siberian pit eighty years earlier, showed just how morally conflicted those in power were over this unfortunate history of deception and dishonor. The Russian Orthodox Church, evidently not wanting to admit the scale of its complicity in substituting Marx for Moses, even cast denial on DNA evidence that these were the real remains of Russia’s last czar, Nikolai II and his family.
A NAMELESS BUNCH OF BONES
None were a complete set and all were missing something—a clavicle here, a rib there, chunks of pelvic bone there.
Each of the nine semiskeletons, charred by burning and soaking in sulfuric acid, lay under glass covers with metal handles, looking like so many steam tables at a buffet.
It was July 17, 1998, exactly eighty years to the day since the last of the Romanovs were lined up against a basement wall and executed by firing squad. For those not killed by the hail of Bolshevik bullets, bayonets awaited use.
The room is silent. City coroner Nikolai Nivolin identifies each bag of bones for me. In the center is the last czar, Nikolai II. Next to him is Czarina Alexandra (“Alix” until her marriage to Nikolai and conversion to Orthodoxy following her German Lutheran upbringing). Then there are the children—Olga, Marie, and Tatiana. The remains of son Alexei, the hemophiliac whom the czarina credited the mystic Rasputin with curing, had not yet been found. Neither had those of daughter Anastasia, whose absence had fostered a cottage industry of charlatans over the twentieth century who claimed to be either the princess or one of her descendants, often in the most unlikely of places. (Several years later, both bodies would be found in a nearby mass grave; routine DNA testing then put the claims of self-convinced pretenders to the Russian regency to permanent rest.) Finally, and perhaps saddest of all, we are shown the remains of the really unlucky ones: the family physician, Dr. Eugene Botkin; the maid, Anna Stepanova Demidova; the family cook, Ivan Kharitonov; and lastly, a servant, Alexei Trupp, loyal to the last breath.
But the 99.99 percent certainty established by multiple teams of forensic experts that these disinterred bones are those of the Romanovs is not enough for the Russian Orthodox Church hierarchy. Their motivations seem obvious enough. They had publicly kept quiet about the regicides for eighty years. The church hierarchy, many of whom served under Communist rule (and collaborated with the Soviet regime), felt an obvious complicity in the murders of the Romanovs. Days before the reburial, His Holiness Patriarch Alexius II launches into a public tirade, saying there is no “proof” that these are the remains of the czar and his family. The church’s official position is that once the bodies are shipped out to the former imperial capital of St. Petersburg, they would be blessed not as those of the last czar of Russia and his family, but as a bunch of nameless bones. The country’s patriarch would not be there to confer the reinterment in the Romanov family crypt.
And the politicians? They are bickering too, hesitant, as if the scorched bones of the Romanovs might jump out of their glass cases and impale them.
Many of these are former Communist officials, and though the blame for the regicides can hardly be transposed onto them generations later, neither had the country or its leadership come to terms with what happened that dark day eighty years ago. While a cult of the murdered innocents and certain nostalgia for the imperial family have always existed in Russia, there are still many unreconstructed hard-liners who consider Czar Nikolai II to have been a bloodthirsty, incompetent tyrant and a blunderer into lost-cause wars. What is more, it is thought that his family was nothing better than a bunch of greedy gem- and gold-obsessed miscreants, hooked on the ravings of the likes of Rasputin.
The scene before my eyes in Yekaterinburg, in those days before the czar’s bones were reinterred, resembled a sort of morbid circus.
The local governor in Yekaterinburg has hastily convened a press conference, emphasizing that he has always and steadfastly argued that the remains should be put to rest right here. The pugnacious mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, perhaps smelling tourist dollars, has made his own heavy-handed pitch for them to be buried in Moscow. Finally, there is Boris Yeltsin, the unpredictable, sometimes playful, sometimes self-destructive president of the reborn Russian Federation. Over the course of weeks, the Kremlin makes contradictory statements about whether or not he will attend the reinterment. Yeltsin will come, he’ll send a representative. He will, he won’t, he will, he won’t.
DR. NIKOLAI NIVOLIN, chief coroner of the city of Yekaterinburg, is a man of relatively few words. He is a scientist through and through, and the ecclesiastical and political bickering over the remains of the last czar clearly tests his nerves. Nivolin has spent eight years on this work. Yes, he is a scientific man, and yes, this is a forensic exercise. But for him it is also undoubtedly an emotional one. In fact, he cannot hide the livid scorn with which he regards the tawdry debates about the authenticity of the bones.
“How dare people with no competence in these matters call the results of our investigation into question!” he sputters.
Across town, in a simple cafeteria-style watering hole near the center of Yekaterinburg, I meet up with Alexander Avdonin, the ethnographer who has spent half his sixty-odd years first pondering, plotting, and then secretly excavating the czar’s remains. The small bespectacled man slumps back in his chair as if he’d just completed a long journey through the muggy central Russian July heat. His eyes are weary, and he is drinking a cold beer to mask his impatience and boredom with my questions. Many of my inquiries seem sophomoric to him, and his bored facial expressions let me know that. I try to apologize by saying that I have been spending most of my time in the Caucasus Mountains, covering contemporary killings in places like Chechnya and Abkhazia, rather than investigating slightly older murders, such as took place here in 1918. With this he relaxes. Two of his historian companions pull up chairs, and I listen while they rehash technical details dealing with the work Avdonin has undertaken so far, and theoretical questions about the whereabouts of Anastasia and Alexei. Avdonin says he is more than confident in the information he has that will eventually lead to the uncovering of those remains as well. (Years later, they were recovered.)
IN 1976, FIFTY-EIGHT years after the Romanov regicides, Avdonin was approached by an unlikely partner in the hunt for Russia’s royal bones. Gueli Ryabov was not only a well-known Soviet film producer, but a Communist Party member as well. More to the point, he was a man with access to secret archives about the extermination of the imperial family. A sense of intrigue that transforms itself into an obsession soon bonds the two—find the bones! They know the basics: The Romanov bodies were burned and doused with sulfuric acid and thrown into a temporary pit before being moved to another hole some distance away, a mass grave that was then covered with earth and railroad ties. But what if the burning and sulfuric acid destroyed all of the evidence? What if there are buildings on the site? And what if the Soviet government has at some stage secretly reexcavated the site and removed th
e remains in order to leave absolutely no trace that could ever serve as a shrine?
But Ryabov has stumbled onto what he believes is the key to unearthing the remains: a lengthy, highly detailed account of the burial given to him by the son of Yakov Yurovsky, the Bolshevik functionary who served as the chief executioner of the imperial family. Written in 1922, it would not be published until 1993, three-quarters of a century after the murders. The following is a slightly redacted version to give a sense of time and early-Soviet-era grammar and style:
On 16 July 1918, about 2 o’clock in the afternoon, comrade Filipp came to the house and presented me with the resolution from the Executive Committee to execute Nikolai.… He further stated that during the night, a comrade would arrive with the password “chimneysweep,” to whom the corpses must be given, which he would bury and liquidate the job.…
Yurovsky then goes on in excruciating detail about how he vetted the executioners; how some had qualms about shooting the girls; how others wanted to use their bayonets to finish the job, but how the blades would not penetrate the blouses because diamonds had been sewn inside; how some soldiers tried to steal the gems once discovered; how he had to get the stones out of the soldiers’ pockets; how their transport got stuck in a swamp on the way to a mine shaft to dump the bodies, until finally a second mine shaft is selected:
Exhausted. Without sleep. Began to get agitated: Any minute we expected the Czechoslovaks to seize Ekaterinburg … [so] I decided to make use of the swamp. And burn some of the corpses. Unharnessed the horses. Unloaded the corpses. Opened the barrels. Placed one corpse to test how it would burn. The corpse charred relatively quickly. Then I ordered the burning of Alexei. At this time [the men] were digging a pit in the swamp where the cross ties were layered. [It was] about 2½ arshins deep, three arshins square. It was just before morning [and] burning the rest of the corpses was not possible because the peasants had begun coming out for work, and for that reason we had to bury the corpses in the pit. Laying the corpses in the pit, [we] doused them with sulphuric acid, and with this ended the funeral for Nikolai and his family and all the rest.… The initial burial spot, as pointed out earlier, was 16 versts from Ekaterinburg, and 2 versts from Koptyaki, the latter place being located approximately 8–8? versts from Ekaterinburg, and 1? versts approximately from the railroad line.
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