Say goodbye to your planes and your tanks
nothing will be left but their shit and socks.
Planes roar and tanks smoke—
combat father, father combat.
From north mountains to south seas
we’ll take and break the enemies.
Combat father, father combat
from north mountains to south seas.
the Red Army’s the best.
In thirty seconds our missiles can hit
anywhere on the planet.
We’ll show all those pieces of shit:
Glory to Russia, our homeland!
‘Red Army’ by the pro-nationalist punk group Krasnaya Plesen[18]
Surely only the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky know who is right,
but we know the important things aren’t in the papers,
we’ll never hear the truth on the radio…
The name of the town doesn’t matter
but out of all those people who went there,
none of them ever came back.
So we have no reason to cry, to have sad thoughts,
now only the heart can save us, because reason fell short.
But the heart needs sky and roots, it can’t live in nothing,
and as once said a boy who was there by chance,
‘From this moment on we’ll be different…’
From Boris Grebenshikov’s ‘Captain Voronin’
On my shoes the dust of hundreds of streets,
on my shoes the ash of hundreds of wars,
my hands have turned to dirt…
I’m coming home.
From ‘I’m Coming Home’ by Russian singer-songwriter O. Balan
At the end of my second year of military service the saboteur unit transferred to the mountains. Along with some of the Ministry of Internal Affairs’ special units (called the OMON), we went through the villages to conduct what in our operation order was called ‘clean-up of residential areas’. Obviously this had nothing to do with maintaining sanitation in the mountain territories; it was a very specific and sensitive phase of the counter-terrorist operation intended to ‘reestablish respect for the laws of the Russian Federation’.
We went through the areas controlled by federal forces in order to ‘ensure the presence of the necessary conditions to enable the recuperation of the Chechen community’. It was May, and it was very hot.
By that time, the Chechen plain had been almost completely liberated of enemy forces, but many terrorist groups had survived in the mountains. They had regrouped into small units and continued to attack our military convoys and put any representative of the law to death. They terrorised civilians, too, but more often found them to be sources of support in the fight against the Russian Army and state power. Many families had lost someone during the war and blamed the army for their losses, which is why they gave provisions to terrorists, harboured them secretly or hid arms and ammunition. To us, the Chechen mentality was incomprehensible – it seemed absurd for them to help foreigners from Africa or the former Yugoslavia but to want nothing to do with us, their neighbours, with whom, for better or worse, they had a shared history. They saw the terrorists as heroes, as people who had sacrificed themselves for the good of the Nation – Muslim Robin Hoods.
Obviously we soldiers knew that both Chechen campaigns had been tainted by political and economic interests. As Captain Nosov had often told us, practically branding it into our minds: ‘Always remember that the feared Shamil Basayev, like many other Chechen Islamic terrorist leaders, was trained by our own secret services – we Russians were the ones who taught him to defend himself.’ We had learned from experience how the terrorists were linked to the corrupt officials working in our Command, but no one ever dared to bring up those stories; no one ever released the findings from the investigations conducted by the FSB. If we found out that there was a mole it was because of his comrades, who had reported him or in some cases simply eliminated him, since accidents happen in war every day anyway. These affairs, even if they didn’t reach the ears of the media, circulated widely among soldiers and officers. They were shared in whispers, during pauses between one battle and the next. Often the whispers were about an officer from Command dying in an accident: ‘He fell from a moving tank,’ they would say, which meant that he had been beaten to death by his own men. These stories were always concluded with a statement full of scorn and malice, spat out with cigarette smoke: ‘He liked shawarma[19] too much…’
It was very difficult to communicate with the local people. Up in the mountains they were especially aggressive; even routine operations in their villages risked ending in bloodshed. We would capture the terrorists who hadn’t been able to escape before our arrival and execute them right in the streets. At that point the entire village would give voice to a single sentiment – the women hurled shouts and curses of all kinds on us, old and young alike sent us promises of Apocalypse… We had to be very careful, because sometimes bullets would come from the mob, where the instigators, who expected nothing less than for us to raise arms against the civilians, would hide. Then the commanders would oblige us to quickly withdraw, to avoid being caught in a fire fight with women and elderly people present. We would shoot a few bullets into the air to scare people and then be on our way.
Often, on the way back from those operations, our columns would be attacked. If we were lucky the attack would be limited to a few machine gun blasts at the men on the carriers. In the worst cases, when our attackers were better equipped, they would torch the carriers with RPGs or scatter homemade mines made from large-calibre cannon rounds along the road.
Some strange and sad things happened too.
One time, as we were returning from a mountain village, an old man planted himself in the middle of the road in order to stop our cars. He pointed a hunting rifle at us: a real antique, all rusty. The old man was desperate; he was crying and shouting something incomprehensible.
According to military regulations, a column of armoured vehicles could not stop for any reason outside the scope of the operation. Even if we went past a person who had been wounded, we had to go on, either evading him or going around him – the important thing was never to stop the cars. It was also prohibited to slow the speed of the convoy, which had to proceed at a minimum of ten kilometres per hour; if we slowed down we could all become easy targets for potential aggressors.
So when we saw that old man, the boys signalled for him to move. But he kept standing in the middle of the road, as if his feet were glued to the ground, making his choked cries and waving his gun, which he kept pointed at us. The column slowed its pace, and one of the men sitting on the first carrier shot a burst of rounds in the air to scare him, but it didn’t work – he refused to move and kept threatening us with his pathetic rifle. I was on the third car in the convoy, and I watched as the old man’s figure grew bigger and bigger.
When the first carrier approached him, the driver manoeuvred, trying to avoid him, to pass by him. But the old man gritted his teeth and placed his rifle to his shoulder, aiming at one of the boys sitting on the car, as if he were going to shoot him. At that instant a series of rounds went off – everyone sitting on that carrier opened fire on the old man, who with one insane act had suddenly turned into an aggressor. I saw scraps of his suit go flying, along with pieces of flesh as the bullets pierced his body. In a second they reduced him to tatters. He fell to the ground next to his rifle.
The column didn’t pause; the cars resumed their course. When my carrier passed the corpse, I saw that on his jacket the old man had a row of medals from the Second World War. As a young man he had fought to defend the Great Soviet Nation against the Nazism of the Third Reich, and here’s how the Nation repaid him for his sacrifices, years later.
This is how, in the complete chaos of post-Soviet history, the power of the Russian Federation was restored in the mountain areas of Chechnya. And we couldn’t do anything to oppose it – our personal stories we
re worth nothing in that great river of time and fate that mixed wars and men, innocent people and criminals. But the current has always stayed the same. It hasn’t changed in the least…
*
In late May we received an order that was very unusual: to search a mosque in a mountain village. Apparently, after a mission had been carried out by our artillery, several weapons and the bodies of some wanted terrorists had been found in the ruins of a mosque. The army never set foot in places of worship, but now, suddenly, the operational units were changing their strategy and ordering us to search them. None of us, however, believed the stories anymore.
‘And so, all of a sudden they discover terrorists hiding in mosques,’ Shoe commented sarcastically.
‘It’s obvious,’ Zenith chimed in. ‘The Russian secret service has decided to sacrifice one of their “bridges” with the Islamic world, breaking some old pact that called for the protection of the mosques… And it’s up to us to do the dirty work!’
Before then, none of us would ever have dared to search a sacred site. The Russian military was capable of committing many injustices and of proving itself even crueller than the devil, but they would never dream of sending soldiers to go and fire their weapons in a place of worship.
It wasn’t a question of respect, but a kind of superstition. We believed that profaning what other people venerated, such as the house of their god, would bring us nothing but misfortune. In the course of the war, many of us had become believers. To get through the more difficult moments, we often turned to God; He was a haven for our souls, the only place not regulated by military code. We all thought of our mothers, who went to church every Sunday to light candles by the orthodox icons for their soldier sons; certainly Chechen mothers prayed in the mosques for their children’s survival. Either way, we had always respected those places. Even simple people, or people with little education, can understand the importance of hope, but this is a feeling experienced only by those who fight war – although of course not by those who wage it… As always, however, the only voice our Command wasn’t willing to listen to was ours.
And so we left our base on a mission with five armoured vehicles: one for us, one for the infantry explorers, and the other three for the OMON special teams; all together, there were forty-two of us, including drivers. We also had two dogs, German Shepherds trained to sniff out drugs and find explosives.
It was unbelievably hot, and the wheels of the cars on the dirt roads flung up a clay-like dust that stuck to our faces, mingling with our beards and our hair. That was why we saboteurs all wore sunglasses, shorts and no shirts, our bulletproof vests against our bare chests. As always, we knew we were the envy of the other units because of our freedom in dress, even if amidst the pandemonium of a counter-terrorist operation like the one that awaited us, there was really nothing to envy of anyone.
Going up the mountains, we came to the little town where we were supposed to conduct our search. There was a wonderful peace; old men sat on the benches chatting, children ran through the streets, women were doing housework in their yards… It seemed impossible that there was anything threatening there. When faced with situations like this I felt uneasy; we were there to ruin the lives of people who had nothing to do with the war, or with the dirty business in which we were immersed.
My group and I hopped off the cars and marched ten metres in front of the vehicles, which advanced slowly, at walking pace. We walked in the middle of the street with our weapons in hand, prepared for the worst. As soon as they spotted us, the women grabbed the children and all the civilians ran inside. They were used to military operations; they knew they had to leave their gates and front doors open, come out into the yard, keep their hands in full view and have their papers ready. We went down the road without stopping to do any checks, but we glanced at the yards anyway. When they left a house quickly to avoid a search many terrorists would leave something behind – a clip or a grenade might fall out of their jacket – so it was necessary to look carefully at everything on the ground and search for any clue that might reveal the presence of an enemy. The terrorists had learned to comb every corner, to find out where the deeply worn foot paths led. Often civilians hid terrorists in underground pits they had dug; sometimes the entrance to a hiding spot was concealed by a kennel or a tool shed. Regulations stated that it was also necessary to inspect people’s hands, to check for traces of gunpowder, calluses or unusual burns, to see if they had ever shot a gun or done so recently.
On this occasion, though, we didn’t have time to look for these things. We were headed for the mosque, a large building in the centre of town, surrounded by a white stone wall. There was a high green gate at the entrance, with yellow writing in Arabic at the top. According to the operational orders, we had to conduct a raid, which meant that one of our cars was supposed to break down the gate, bursting through at full speed, and once inside the building we were supposed to inspect every room, first with polite requests and then, if the people didn’t understand or didn’t want to understand, with a nice fusillade. Usually a raid lasts a few seconds – the enemy shouldn’t have enough time to react. If he has the chance to organise himself and start shooting, it’s common for soldiers to say ‘the ping-pong game has begun’ – and it’s a game that’s hard to win.
Our car approached the boundary wall, and we saboteurs jumped up on it with ease. The white stones were nice and wide, and after running a few metres along it, we leapt down to the other side, into the courtyard of the mosque. Everything was calm. There were well-manicured trees, freshly varnished benches and whitewashed walls with mosaics depicting religious scenes; the human figures were disproportionate, as if they’d been drawn by a child’s hand. From the spout of the fountain in the middle of the yard water dripped, a sign that someone had taken a drink not long before. There was no one around the mosque, but the doors were open.
Our captain signalled to us to position ourselves along the wall under the windows. Then he took a stone and threw it at the gate, by the road; that was the sign to alert our men. The infantry explorers’ carrier charged full speed ahead, levelling the gate and knocking down part of the wall. Behind them ran the explorers and the OMON.
At that same moment we smashed in the windows. Moscow and I were the first to enter, and in a few seconds we were all inside.
The building was even bigger than it had seemed from outside, with high ceilings and decorated rooms. On the walls hung photos of holy places, other mosques and portraits of Islamic clerics. On the floor there were some valuable rugs yet there were fake plastic flowers in the corners. Arranged among the flowers were photos of armed men; evidently these were the dead terrorists, stuck amidst that plastic green that symbolised their eternal life in Islamic heaven.
When we reached the hallway, we ran into a group of men, who were simply dressed, with long beards.
‘Lie down, on the floor,’ Moscow said, curtly. ‘Arms open wide.’
They obeyed the order without opposition. We could hear the first interrogations beginning in the courtyard; it was the OMON trying to get as much information as possible.
We inspected the rest of the rooms without finding anything of interest. There was the same stuff everywhere: rugs, fake flowers and potted plants, photos and a few books in Arabic.
Nosov came out into the hallway and took an old imam aside.
‘Where is the kitchen?’ he asked him politely.
The old man lifted an arm, indicating a small structure on the other side of the courtyard.
‘Kolima, Moscow,’ the captain said to us, ‘come with me.’
We took a young man with us who must have been a mullah. He was wearing a tunic and he was well fed, too, with a nice round belly and jowls like a bulldog. Nosov took him by the elbow and, in a friendly voice, like a curious tourist, he asked for information about the mosque’s activities, the people who attended it, and many other questions that had little to do with our operation. The man tried to respond calmly, but he wa
s nervous. He spoke very slowly in Russian, attempting to pronounce the words in the most correct way possible – he must have been educated.
We went into the kitchen. There were foodstuffs piled along the walls: bags of cereal and sugar, tins, plastic plates and cups, and some small camp stoves. On the table there were several pots, oil lamps, and bags full of American, Turkish, Swiss and German medicines.
Nosov examined the pots, grazing them with his fingertips; he almost seemed to be measuring them. He waited a little, as if he knew that sooner or later the man would begin to talk. But he was silent, with a slight, innocent smile stamped on his face.
Nosov looked the mullah straight in the eye and, in that tone we all knew well, the one he used when he didn’t feel like playing anymore, he asked:
‘Where are your wounded?’
The man suddenly went pale, and his hands began to tremble. Trying to keep calm, he raised his hands to the sky, as if he were asking for divine forgiveness, and addressed the captain in a humble voice:
‘What wounded, commander? Perhaps I do not understand the meaning of your words. We are only servants of God. We help the people of the village…’
Nosov smiled with the politeness of an English nobleman, went up to him, and without removing his gloves – he was wearing the tactical Kevlar ones, which are stiff and heavy – gave him a hard slap in the face. The man let out a cry and then crumpled to the floor, sliding down the wall as if his muscles could no longer support the weight of his body. His nose immediately swelled up and started to bleed; his eyes filled with tears.
Nosov pulled out his gun from under his vest and pointed it at the man’s head.
‘I need your wounded, now. If you prefer, I can find them myself, but by that point everyone will be dead: old, young, women, cats, dogs…’
The man started to whimper, hugging his knees to his chest. Breathing hard, big reddish bubbles came out of his mouth, saliva mixed with blood.
Nosov took a lamp from the table, broke it apart and poured the kerosene over the man, who started to squeal like a pig at the sight of an executioner’s knife, while trying desperately to unwind his kerosene-soaked turban. His dirty hair poked out from the strips of cloth.
Free Fall Page 27