But you can’t pull the troops out either. If you do, then the same thing would happen as did after the Khasavyurt Accords of 1996, when Russia left Chechnya to the separatists, with all the chaos and violence that ensued.
‘Now all we do is carry out sweep operations,’ says Fidel, a task force unit commander. ‘If we go through a village constantly, then it’s relatively quiet. But give it two or three months without a sweep and that’s it, best not to stick your head in at all. You want to go to Grozny? Here’s my advice to you: don’t bother. It hasn’t been swept for two months. I wouldn’t go there, I’d be afraid to. And don’t show yourself in Shali -that’s another pretty nasty place these days.’
As dusk falls we stop in Kurchaloi. It’s regarded as one of the most dangerous regions, even though it’s in a plain. But here too the war has slowed right down. The last attack around here was on 23 December, about two and a half months ago, when a BMP combat vehicle of the 33rd brigade from St Petersburg got blown to pieces. A shell had been buried on the road and exploded right under it.
‘Sometimes they set the explosives very skilfully,’ says the acting brigade commander Colonel Mikhail Pedora. ‘A soldier will be walking along and see a box lying there, or a kid’s ball, and kick it, and then a sensor triggers a blast and half his foot’s gone. They’ve got specialists in setting such surprises for us.’
‘It’s bearable now,’ he says. ‘We haven’t been fired on for a good while. And they don’t bury mines so often, but our engineers still remove about three a month. Who’s doing it? God knows. The locals, probably.’
A dead BMP stands at the edge of the helicopter pad, covered in tarpaulin. Its turret has been torn off and the underside has been blown up in a rose shape inside the hull. Jagged shards of torn metal bend upwards at the spot where the gunners’ legs would have been. Alongside it stands another vehicle that got burnt out some weeks earlier. It is also covered in tarpaulin, and it looks as though there would have been dead here too. Back then, when the fighting was in full swing, they used to leave them by the side of the runway like this and cover them with tarpaulin, only there were ten times as many.
There were two familiar posters at the brigade’s gatehouse: ‘Soldier! Think before you touch - it could be dangerous!’ and ‘Soldier! Careless talk costs lives!’
There’s no-one better at thinking up slogans and posters than the military: in Khankala there’s a poster that sees the soldiers off on their sweep operations with the words ‘Have a good journey!’
I drive on and on through Chechnya. Something is wrong. Perhaps the war really is coming to an end. Maybe my soldier’s nose for lousy places has deceived me and maybe it really is time to open a spa for holiday-makers? There are unique sulphuric springs here, and you could cure every sickness in the world in the geysers of Chechnya’s plains. As a soldier in Grozny this was how I cured the ulcers that broke out on my skin from the dirt, the cold and the nervous tension. You could only crawl up to the springs then; now they’ve built car washes beside them and the locals do a little business out of all the free hot water.
Maybe peace really is just around the comer.
*
The helicopter hovers over a small pad on a flat bald patch of the hill near Nozhai-Yurt. For a couple of seconds it hangs in the air, and then its 3000 horsepower engine lowers a ton and a half of humanitarian aid to the ground.
The fuselage starts to rattle with the heavy trembling and the engine is palpably straining. Barely stopping, the chopper hits the ground with a thump. There’s a cracking sound coming from the undercarriage and the impact sets the rotors bouncing so hard they seem liable to snap off any moment.
‘We’ve landed,’ says the pilot, throwing the door open and lowering the little steps. ‘How about that? And people wonder why they drop out of the sky. There are very few serviceable aircraft, and they all get packed to the seams. The flight payload is at its very limit and the engine is working constantly at full throttle. And each time we land, it’s the same thing - we drop down. What’s there to say? The aircraft are worn out. We make up to thirty flights a day...’
In Grozny I drop by to see some of the recon guys I met on past combat tours. The recon battalion lives separately from the rest, in a tent camp. It’s a dump compared with Khankala. The recon, special forces, and the FSB are swamped with work and have no time to feather their nests. But even here they have organized some sort of life, with tables, chairs, fridges and televisions.
The recon are drinking vodka. We are glad to see each other for the first few minutes, but everyone is waiting for me to ask questions. So I do.
‘So, how is it here?’ Their eyes grow dark and fill with pain and hatred, and reflect their continual depression. A minute later they hate everything, including me. With every word they become more crazed and the conversation turns into a heated tale of woe.
‘Just write, journalist, get all this down.’
‘Hey, why don’t you write about the casualties? In our battalion alone we had seven killed and sixteen wounded.’
‘The war is still going on and we do one mission after another. We’ve just got back from twenty-two days in the mountains.’
‘And they don’t pay us shit here. Look, multiply twenty-two days by three hundred men, that’s already 6,600 man-days of work. Just for this mission. In a month the brigade notches up 3,000 combat days. But at headquarters they have a limit of 700.1 went and found out.’
‘The hardest thing will be to go home. What are we going to do there, back in the division? Write notes? No-one needs us there, understand? I just want to serve my time, get the promised apartment and to hell with it all.’
And now I see myself in them. Once again I see that field before my eyes. And from somewhere outside town comes the familiar thump of a lone gun. The topics of conversation have not changed one bit either: hunger, cold and death. I wasn’t wrong, nothing has changed here!
The government has erected a façade of peace that is exemplified by manicured lawns and neat concrete pathways. But beneath it lurk these recon men, half crazed by missions and blood, and now they are drinking themselves into a stupor for the second year in a row. They long to break the façade and climb out of here, to get back to wives and children, to go to God knows where and start life anew, without wars and killing others, and without having to bury their own. But they can’t. They have been grafted onto the fabric of Chechnya. The dedovshchina bullying in this tent labyrinth is a well-oiled machine, and no-one follows up any of the incidents that take place in the nooks and crannies, under the tarpaulins; no-one pays any attention at all. Why? Because they will all die. And still they send huge bundles of rifle rounds to Grozny, and the constant gnashing of teeth is eased with litres of vodka, and there is a non-stop supply of torn human flesh to the hospitals. Fear and hatred still rule this land.
And it still smells of diesel and dust tinged with sadness.
I am now in Mozdok again, back on the field.
Seven years, a bit less than a third of my life. A person spends a third of his life asleep, while I spent it in war. Nothing has changed on this airstrip in these seven years and nor will it change. Another seven years will pass, then seven more, and these tents will still be here, and people will crowd round the water fountain and the helicopter rotors will spin ceaselessly.
I shut my eyes and I feel like an ant. There are hundreds of thousands of men like me who stood on this field. Hundreds of thousands of lives, so different and so similar, pass before my eyes. We were here, we lived and died, and the death notices flew to all corners of Russia. I am united with them; we are all one on this field. A piece of me died in every town that received these death notices. And a piece of this field remains forever in every pair of bottomless, war-charred eyes that had seen it.
Occasionally I recognize these eyes and I approach them. Not that often, though. In summer, when a truck passes down a stuffy Moscow street, and the smell of the diesel mingles with the dust, and
I feel a melancholy creep over me.
‘Hey, got a light, friend? Where did you fight?’
21/ The Obelisk
Pskov, north-west Russia. 1 March 2001. The cemetery.
A heavy frost grips the streets and a cold wind whips down the marble slabs and right through me, making me shiver and hunch deeper into my collar.
I light up and get ticked off by some colonel: ‘No smoking here!’
I stand in front of the memorial, looking at the names. Six adjacent black-marble obelisks: Lieutenant Colonel Yevtyukhin, Major Dostovalov, Junior Sergeant Shwetsov, Lance Corporal Lebedev, Private Travin, Captain Talanov...
Exactly one year ago eighty-four of the ninety soldiers in the 6th company of the 104th paratrooper regiment were killed near Sharo-Argun. Six guys from Pskov are buried in this cemetery. It’s not a big cemetery, a few rows of grey headstones and fences. A forest starts close behind it, about a hundred metres away.
Something is happening to me, some kind of delusion. The cemetery, the forest, winter. I’ve seen this somewhere before, but where? That’s it, it was on one of those lousy hills near the place the paratroopers were wiped out. And it was also in March, just one week later. We lost twelve men or more that time.
We too ran into Khattab in the Argun Gorge, by Sharo-Argun.
He had pulled back to Ulus-Kert and then we bumped into him on a hill with a view just like this. The same wood, the same winding road. And a cemetery, just like the one in Pskov. Lord above, how it all looks so similar!
And then suddenly, it’s all gone: this evening, the past and present, now and then. This cemetery before me is a different one. It’s very similar - grey headstones, snow- yet different. It’s a clear frosty morning and the bare trees are creaking in the wind, their twigs intertwining...
...The forest is full of roaring and tracer rounds are flying through the thin trees towards us, a mass of tracers riddling the whole air, billions of them, and there’s no hiding. I am crawling, burying my face in the snow, feverishly looking for a slightly deeper hole, and then I hide behind a tomb. Hard metal strikes the slabs and chips cement powder over us, whizzes ten centimetres above our heads and smacks into the trees, and everyone is shouting, someone’s been wounded, someone’s getting killed...
Cannon fire thunders past me, so mighty that it smothers the world - nothing else exists, no love, truth, justice, bravery. The only thing that matters is to hide from the cannon fire. I wriggle across open ground like a worm, my senses dulled to everything. I dig my face into a rut on the hillock, away from the horror.
The forest is right by us, so close that we can hear their shouts: ‘What are you hiding for, you Russian dogs! Come here, we’ll show you hand-to-hand fighting! You shout about it enough in your newspapers!’
They have advanced to within fifty metres of us and are now raining down close-range fire on three sides, shooting figures as they writhe on the ground...
*
I come to my senses. It’s all in the past, just a delusion. This is just a normal Russian cemetery, as you could find anywhere across the land - quiet, peaceful, familiar, melancholic. A flock of crows takes off over the crosses and somewhere someone is ringing a bell. No-one is shooting or killing here.
A volley of fire erupts overhead. I jump and crouch down instinctively. Immediately there is fear, heat, and one single thought: it’s not a delusion, bloody hell, I’m really there! I don’t know how this can be but I’m there, and they’re shooting!
I turn round, ready to dive behind the nearest hillock... Oh, for God’s sake. I immediately feel weak and my legs tremble -seems like I got away with it. The guard of honour reload their rifles once again and salute the fallen with another volley.
I am startled again. I know there’s no danger but I can’t help myself. It’s already in our blood, this reflexive reaction to sharp noise, like the saliva of Pavlov’s dogs. Beside me a paratrooper jumps too, and I feel his shoulder twitch. He turns and I see that his eyes are racing in panic. He meets my gaze and we both look guilty for a moment, like dogs with our tails between our legs. We smile in mutual understanding.
Some mothers approach the obelisk and lay flowers. I approach with them and place two carnations on the icy marble. The mothers are crying. The cold wind beats into my face, my eyes fill with tears and everything blurs in front of me, they freeze on my cheeks and make the skin tighten. I can’t see properly, and instead of the names of the paratroopers I see completely different ones, together with their portraits, other faces... Igor Badalov died 8 March by Sharo-Argun, Oleg Yakovlev died 15 March in Grozny, Andrei Volozhanin died 10 March in Khankala, Mukhtarov in January, Sunzha, Vaseline,
Pashka, Andy the deputy political officer, Four-Eyes the platoon commander... Many of them, a great many.
That’s how it turned out for our generation. Many of us passed through war: Afghanistan, Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia, Transdnestria, Chechnya, Yugoslavia... Almost all of us have our own hill somewhere.
These names blur away and the others reappear. I read them, stare at them, and remember.
Greetings, 6th company. Greetings, 1st guards regiment. Greetings, 426th regiment of the Cuban Cossacks, orders of Suvorov and Bogdan Khmelnitsky. Greetings, Igor, greetings, Andy.
Hi lads.
22/ Lais
At the base of the 45th reconnaissance regiment of the paratroops corps there stands a memorial obelisk. The names of the paratroopers who died in the two Chechen wars are inlaid in the black marble. One of the last names to be added was that of Alexander Lais.
When Captain Vladimir Shabalin comes here, he brings with him the only remaining picture of Alexander and a bunch of flowers. In keeping with tradition, he places a glass of vodka by the grave, covered with a piece of black bread, and then stands for a long time by the memorial, looking at those who did not return from the war.
‘Here you go, all of his info,’ Deputy Battalion Commander Major Agapov says, handing me the roll of the 2nd company. I read: ‘Lais, Alexander Viktorovich, guards private, machine-gunner. Born in the village of Neninka, 1982-2001...’
Alexander Viktorovich. Back in 2001 he was just eighteen years old. Everybody called him Sasha. Sasha Lais. He died on 7 August, one week after he arrived at the front.
‘I only saw him once,’ says Major Agapov, ‘in Khankala. I was the receiving officer then and his team was just arriving in Chechnya. I can’t say that he immediately stood out, no. He was an ordinary guy, nothing heroic about him, he was just another soldier. But for some reason he stuck in my mind, because of his name I suppose. Or maybe because he seemed like a pleasant sort of bloke. Here, you can use his photo - make sure you give it back.’
Lais went off to war from a small village in the Altai, Siberia. He had lived there for ten years. For the year before he went to the army he lived with his grandmother and grandfather. His mother and his little sister went to live in Germany with his stepfather, a descendant of deported Germans. They were sure that their son would come and join them when he finished high school in the town of Biisk. But then the second Chechen war began and Sasha made his choice. He didn’t try to wriggle out of army service, although he could have done; he was willing to do his duty.
His teacher, Natalya Kashirina, remembers how Sasha actually wanted to join the army, unlike most of his peers:
‘You know, he went into the army quite happily. Sasha was one of those people who are very aware of concepts like “duty” and “Motherland”.’
His grandparents Yelena Ivanova and Alexander Ivanovich received letters and photos from him almost every week. They kept them and would read them in the evening over tea. His grandfather knew by heart the last letter they got from Moscow, where Alexander was serving:
Hello Grandma and Grandpa. How are you both? How’s the weather? I’m fine, although the heat here is unbearable. In a week we are supposed to fly to Chechnya but send your letters to my unit, they’ll forward them to us. Everything’s pretty OK here. A coupl
e of days ago I sent you three letters at the same time, with twelve photos. Please write and let me know if you got them. And before that I sent you a roll of film in a letter. Anyway, don’t worry about me. I’ll stay in touch. When you get this letter I’ll already be in Chechnya -we’re due to go 24 July. OK, bye, your grandson.
He died two weeks later.
Excerpt from a list of commendations for Private A. V. Lais:
On 07.08.2001 the recon unit carried out a search for bunkers and arms caches in the course of reconnaissance operations near the village of Khatuni. While on the move the point man detected an enemy unit of about fifteen men heading in the direction of Kirov-Yurt to the Agishty road to set up an ambush for a supply column. At the order of Group Commander Captain V. V. Shabalin the recon went straight into battle, hitting the enemy from the flank...
I run into Captain Shabalin in the smoking area of the 2nd company.
‘Can you tell me about that firefight?’ I ask.
Vladimir frowns.
‘I don’t care to think about that.’
‘Maybe a few words?’
‘Well, on that day, 7 August 2001, the group was assigned to set up an ambush on one of the trails used by the Chechens. At this time they were pretty active in the area, and command presumed they would try to hit a column in the rear that was supposed to be delivering food and water to our unit. And that’s when we got wind of the ambush.
One Soldier's War In Chechnya Page 33