Someone is approaching the wagon, panting his way towards us with the stench of onions on his breath. It looks like some sneaky character has also decided to take advantage of the melee. Arkasha lashes out blindly in the dark with his boot and the man yelps and falls.
‘Let’s get out of here!’ I hiss and we bound and stumble our way back. The wooden chest with the butter is unbelievably heavy; it painfully thumps my ankle bones and slips from my fingers, but we’re not leaving it behind. It’s impossibly awkward to run with all this stuff - apart from the chest we have tins bouncing around in our pockets, and I have to hold the package inside my tunic with my spare hand to stop it falling out.
We reach the warehouses and find a small ditch that we dug earlier and lined with ground sheets. We dump the chest in it with our tins and packages and cover it all with more ground sheets that we’ve brought with us. Finally we scatter chunks of brick and lay a sheet of metal over the top. Then we hurry back up to the roof.
The shooting has almost stopped. We race across the roof towards the gatehouse, jump down to ground level by the meatpacking shop and wander leisurely back to our tents. I jab Arkasha with my elbow and he bumps me back with his shoulder. We grin at one another.
The next morning they fall in the whole battalion on the parade ground. The commander tells us how last night, while the battalion was repelling an attack, some swine broke into the transport park’s store wagon and stole food from his comrades. There is to be a search of all personal property and vehicles while we remain on the square.
‘Like hell it was from our own comrades,’ says Arkasha. ‘Our comrades would never have seen this butter. We should regard ourselves as battalion delegates for sampling food products intended for us. Later we’ll tell the guys how delicious the food is that we are supposed to get.’
They keep us standing there while the supply officer personally shakes down every tent and armoured car, throwing everything out onto the ground as he overturns bunk beds and knocks over cooking stoves.
His lower lip is swollen and he is in a foul temper. He’s the one Arkasha kicked, right in the face. We were damned lucky that he didn’t grab his leg and pull off his boot. They’d have beaten us half to death for this, but now it’s impossible to identify us.
We gawp impudently at the contorted face of the supply officer and smile among ourselves. The stolen goods are well hidden in the ditch and there is no evidence.
The search continues for six hours and we grow thirsty as the sun beats down. I read somewhere that the Germans used to force concentration camp inmates to stand in the sun half the day for fun, much like this.
But we’re in good spirits nonetheless. Covered in ground sheets in that ditch by the warehouses a chest full of butter awaits us, and we’d happily stand on the square a whole week for that.
‘OK lads, I invite you all for tea,’ says Arkasha. ‘I promise each of you a butter sandwich that weighs a kilo. Pincha even gets a double portion.’
‘Wow,’ says Pincha. ‘But where’s the butter from?’
‘Let’s just say there’s no more left where it came from,’ grins Arkasha, winking at Lyokha and me.
Eventually they dismiss us. As was to be expected, the supply officer didn’t find a thing. Nor did he expect to - any fool knows that no-one would keep stolen stuff in his tent. He just wanted to get his own back for the split lip.
For the rest of the day we wander idly around the factory but stay away from the hole. That night we are all put on guard duty again. Towards morning we leave our positions and make our way to the warehouses. Arkasha shines his torch in the ditch as Lyokha and I retrieve the booty.
Our raid has yielded eighteen cans of various foodstuffs, bags of sugar, four sets of dry rations, a hefty chunk of pork fat that must weigh about three kilos - the package that was in my tunic - two loaves of bread, six blocks of cigarettes and in the chest... a generator! It’s the exact same one we looted near Shatoi, a beautiful plastic-cased Yamaha, complete with that crack in the housing. It stands in the ditch covered with ground sheets as if this were its rightful home.
‘It’s butter, it’s butter!’ Arkasha says, angrily mimicking Lyokha. ‘Can’t you tell the difference between butter and engine oil?’
‘Actually I can’t, I’ve been pretty much unable to tell the difference between any smells recently. My nose is probably bunged up with soot. And anyway, it was in a case and doesn’t smell too much of anything.’
He’s right, the supply officer has kept the generator in good condition - clean and dry and not one new dent in it.
‘Never mind, we can sell it,’ I say. ‘The Chechens would give their arm for something like that and still think it was a bargain. For them a generator is like manna from heaven, and this one will power up twenty homes. Have you seen how they mount a Lada engine on a stand and turn it into a dynamo? This is a factory-made generator and a diesel one at that.’ ‘Risky,’ says Arkasha. ‘We can’t get it past the fence and it won’t go through the gap. We’ll leave it here for the moment -maybe we’ll think of something.’
Until dawn we carry some of the stolen goods to our tent and stash the rest in a personnel carrier driven by a pal of ours. We put two tins at a time in our armpits and walk through the yard with bored expressions, yawning as if we were just out for a stroll and a breath of air. We carry the pork fat and cigarettes inside our tunics.
Later we divide the spoils equally. We give Pincha an extra tin of condensed milk to make up for the lost butter. It's his birthday in a week and he stashes the tin away, almost swooning with happiness - it’s the best present he’s ever had. He says he won’t open it before five a.m. on Friday, the time he came into this world. He’s lying of course; he’ll wolf it down tonight, unable to wait.
That evening we have a feast and no-one goes to the vehicle park for the usual gruel. Pincha eats his fill of pilfered canned meat and noisily stinks the tent out all night.
The Kombat has caught two recruits from the anti-tank platoon up to no good. It turns out they had passed some boxes of cartridges through the fence to the Chechen kids, then drunk a bottle of vodka and fallen asleep by the gap.
Half an hour later the Kombat chanced upon them and gave them a beating, and then kept them overnight in a large pit in the ground. Today their punishment is to be continued and they fall us in again on the parade ground. We know too well what will happen now.
At the edge of the square they’ve dug an improvised torture rack into the ground, a thick water pipe that has been bent into the shape of a gibbet. At the Kombat’s orders, the platoon made it during the night by placing the pipe against two concrete piles and using an armoured car to bend it in the middle. Two ropes now dangle from it.
The anti-tank gunners are led out, hands bound behind their backs with telephone cable and dressed in ragged greatcoats and long johns. Their faces are already swollen and purple from the beating and there are huge black bruises where their eyes should be, oozing pus and tears from the corners. Their split lips can no longer close and pink foam bubbles from their mouths, dripping onto their dirty, bare feet. It's a depressing sight. After all, these are not tramps but soldiers, ordinary soldiers; half of the army is like these two.
They stand the soldiers on the square. The two raise their heads and look through the gaps in the swelling at the ropes swinging in the wind.
The Kombat grabs one by the throat with his left hand and hits him hard in the nose. The soldier’s head snaps back to his shoulder blades with a cracking noise. Blood spurts. The commander kicks the second one in the groin and he falls to the ground without a sound. The beating begins.
‘Who did you sell the bullets to?’ screams the Kombat, grabbing the soldiers by the hair and holding up their swollen faces, which quiver like jelly beneath the blows. He traps their heads between his knees in turn and lashes them with blows from top to bottom.
‘Well, who? The Chechens? Have you killed a single fighter yet, you piece of shit, have yo
u earned the right to sell them bullets? Well? Have you even seen one? Have you ever had to write a letter of condolence to a dead soldier’s mother? Look over there, those are soldiers, eighteen-year-old lads who have already seen death, looked it in the face, while you scum sell the Chechens bullets. Why should you live and guzzle vodka while these puppies died instead of you in the mountains, eh? I’ll shoot the fucking pair of you!’
We don’t watch the beating. We have been beaten ourselves and it has long ceased to be of any interest. Nor do we feel particularly sorry for the gunners. They shouldn’t have got caught.
The Kombat is right, they have seen too little of the war to sell bullets - only we are entitled to do that. We know death, we’ve heard it whistling over our heads and seen how it mangles bodies, and we have the right to bring it upon others. And these two haven’t. What’s more, the new recruits are strangers in our battalion, not yet soldiers, not one of us. But most of all we are upset that we can no longer use the gap in the fence.
‘Cretins,’ spits Arkasha. ‘They put the gap out of bounds; they got themselves caught and ruined it for all of us. So much for selling the generator.’
He is more bothered than any of us. Now he’ll have to go to the local market to satisfy his passion for trading. We don’t like it at the market - it’s too dangerous. You never know if you’ll come back alive. You can only buy stuff from the Chechens at the side of the road, when one of you jumps down from the armoured car and approaches them while the platoon trains their rifles on them and the gunner readies his heavy-calibre machine-gun.
The market is enemy territory. Too many people, too little room to move. They shoot our guys in the back of the head there, take their weapons and dump their bodies in the road. You can only walk around freely if you take the pin out of a grenade and hold it up in your fist. It was a whole lot more pleasant to trade through the fence on our own ground. We were the ones who could shoot people in the back of the head if need be.
‘Yeah,’ says Lyokha. ‘Shame about the gap. And the generator.’
The Kombat works himself into an even greater rage. There’s something not right with his head after the mountains and he is on the verge of beating these two to death.
He lays into the wheezing bodies with his feet and the soldiers squirm like maggots, trying to protect their bellies and kidneys, a vain hope with their hands tied behind their backs. The blows rain down one after another.
The Kombat kicks one of them in the throat and the soldier gags, unable to breathe. His feet kick convulsively and he fights to gulp in some air, eyes now bulging through the swelling.
The rest of the officers sit in the shade of a canvas awning near the gatehouse, watching the punishment as they take a hair of the dog from a bottle of vodka on a table in front of them. Their faces are also swollen, but from three days of continual drinking.
Our political education officer, Lisitsyn, gets up from the table and joins the Kombat. For a while they flail at the gunners with their boots in silence - the only sound is their puffing from the exertion.
We understood long ago that any beating is better than a hole in the head. There have been too many deaths for us to care much about trivia like ruptured kidneys or a broken jaw. But all the same, they are thrashing these two way too hard. We all thieved! And every one of us could have wound up in their place.
Thieving is both the foundation of the war and its reason for continuing. The soldiers sell cartridges; the drivers sell diesel oil; the cooks sell tinned meat. Battalion commanders steal the soldiers’ food by the crate - that’s our tinned meat on the table that they snack on now between shots of vodka. Regimental commanders truck away vehicle-loads of gear, while the generals steal the actual vehicles themselves.
There was one well-known case when someone sold the Chechens brand-new armoured cars, fresh from the production line and still in the factory grease. Military vehicles that were sold back in the first war and written off as lost in battle are still being driven round Chechnya.
Quartermasters dispatch whole columns of vehicles to Mozdok packed with stolen goods: carpets, televisions, building materials, furniture. Wooden houses are dismantled and shipped out piece by piece; cargo planes are filled to bursting with stolen clutter that leaves no room for the wounded. Who cares about two or three boxes of cartridges in this war where everything is stolen, sold and bought from beginning to end?
And we’ve all been sold too, guts and all, me, Arkasha, Pincha, the Kombat and these two guys he is beating now, sold and written off as battle losses. Our lives were traded long ago to pay for luxurious houses for generals that are springing up in the elite suburbs of Moscow.
The blows eventually cease. Those two jackals step back from the gunners, who lie gasping face down on the asphalt, spitting out blood and struggling to roll over. Then the armaments officer steps forward and helps Lisitsyn lift one up, raise his arms and tie his wrists in the noose. They tighten the rope until his feet dangle a few centimetres above the ground, suspending him like a sack, and string up the second guy the same way. They do it themselves as they know that none of us will obey an order to do it.
‘Fall out,’ shouts the Kombat, and the battalion disperses to its tents.
‘Bastards,’ says Arkasha. It’s not clear who he means: the gunners, or the Kombat and Lisitsyn.
‘Pricks,’ whispers Fixa.
The soldiers hang there all day and half the night. They are opposite our tents and through the doorway we can see them swaying on the rack. Their shoulders are pressed up to their ears, their heads slumped forward onto their chests. At first they tried to raise their bodies up on the rope, change their position and get a little more comfortable. But now they are either asleep or unconscious and they don’t move. A pool of urine glistens beneath one of them.
There is a hubbub inside the command post as our commanders down more vodka. At two in the morning they consume another load and all tumble out onto the square to administer a further round of beatings to the dangling gunners, who are lit up in the moonlight.
The officers place two Tapik (TA-57) field telephones under the men and wire them up by the toes. The units contain a small generator, and to make a call you wind a handle which produces a charge and sends a signal down the line.
‘So, do you still feel like selling bullets?’ Lisitsyn asks and winds the handle of the first phone.
The soldier on the rope starts to jerk and cry in pain as cramps seize him.
‘What are you yelling for, you piece of shit?’ Lisitsyn screams and kicks him in the shins. He then rewinds the Tapik and the soldier howls. Again Lisitsyn lashes at his shins. And so on for maybe half an hour or more.
The officers of our battalion have turned into an organized gang that exists separately from the soldiers. They truly are like jackals, and so that’s what we contract soldiers call them. We in turn are called ‘contras’, or sometimes ‘vouchers’, as we are there to be spent. And the two camps hate each other for good reason.
They hate us because we drink, sell cartridges and shoot them in the back in battle, because every last one of us yearns to get discharged from this lousy army. And since we want nothing more from it than the money it pays us for each tour of duty, we don’t give a damn about the officers and will screw them over at every opportunity. They also hate us for their own poverty, their underfed children and their eternal sense of hopelessness. And they hate the conscripts because they die like flies and the officers have to write letters informing the mothers.
What else can you expect of the officers if they themselves grew up in barracks? They too used to get beaten as cadets, and they still get beaten at their units. Every other colonel of ours is capable of little more than screaming and punching, reducing a lieutenant, captain or major to a moaning, dishevelled wretch in front of junior ranks. Nor do the generals bother to mete out penalties to the colonels any more; they simply hit them.
Ours is an army of workers and peasants, reduced to desper
ation by constant under-funding, half-crazed with hunger and a lack of accommodation, flogged and beaten by all, regardless of the consequences, regardless of badges of rank, stripped of all rights. This is not an army but a herd drawn from the dregs of the criminal masses, lawless apart from the dictates of the jackals that run it.
Why should you care about soldiers when you can’t even provide for your own children? Competent, conscientious officers don’t stay long and the only ones left are those with nowhere else to live, who cling onto empty assurances that they will be allocated an apartment someday. Or those who cannot string two words together and know only how to smash in the teeth of some young kid. They make their way up the career ladder not because they are the best, but because there is no-one else. Accustomed from the very bottom rung to beating and being beaten, they beat and are beaten right to the top, teaching others to follow suit. We learned the ropes long ago; the ways of the gutter are the universal language in this army.
Lisitsyn gets bored of winding the Tapik. He puts a flak jacket on one of the gunners and shoots him in the chest with his pistol. The round doesn’t pierce the jacket but the impact rocks the body on the rope. The soldier contorts and gasps, his lungs so close to collapse that he is unable to draw breath. Lisitsyn is about to fire again but the Kombat averts his arm, worried that in his state of drunkenness he will miss and hit the wretch in the belly or the head.
We don’t sleep during all of this. It’s impossible to doze off to these screams. Not that they bother us; they simply keep us awake.
I sit up in my sleeping bag and have a smoke. It was much the same in Mozdok. Someone would get a beating on the runway and I would sleep with a blanket over my head to keep out the light and muffle the cries and I’d think, great, it wasn’t me today. Four years have passed since then and nothing has changed in this army. You could wait another four years and forty more after that and it would still be the same.
One Soldier's War In Chechnya Page 28