MODERN RUSSIAN LIFE AGAINST THE BACKDROP OF THE WAR
Ruslan Aushev: “Nobody Guarantees Life in Chechnya Today”
Ingushetia, a small republic neighboring Chechnya, used to be part of a unified Chechen-Ingush
Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic with its capital in Grozny in Soviet times. From
the very beginning of the war, Ingushetia distinguished itself in relation to the
politics of the Federal center, defying its methods of so-called antiterrorist operations.
When the bombings of Grozny and most of the villages started in September 1999, Ingushetia
opened up all of its borders to the many thousands of refugees flooding in, by order
of its president, Ruslan Aushev. Very quickly, two hundred thousand refugees turned
up on Ingush soil. In the best case, they were settled in hastily constructed camps
and tents; in the worst case, in electric generator sheds, gas stations, garages,
deserted farms, and even cemetery sheds. One should bear in mind that Ingushetia’s
own population was scarcely more than three hundred thousand, with a corresponding
capacity to provide water, electricity, and food. Ingushetia was the only republic
to act this way, in contrast to its neighbors. The model example of pro-Kremlin behavior
of the territories surrounding Chechnya was Kabardino-Balkaria. In September 1999,
protective cordons were put out on the borders of the Republic of Kabardino-Balkaria,
at the orders of its president, Valery Kokov, who was completely under Moscow’s control.
And the tired, hungry people, out of their minds from everything they had experienced,
with infants and the elderly in their care, urgently needing medical help, were forced
to turn back. But where? There was no going back to Chechnya, so the refugees all
went to Ingushetia, which bore the brunt of the Chechen exodus. Ingushetia went on
performing this feat as best as it could. It took care of the refugees for nearly
three years, despite attacks from the Kremlin-controlled media and the unprecedented
pressure and blackmail from Moscow that President Aushev was exposed to the whole
time. This would ultimately lead to his retirement in January 2002, the special presidential
elections, a succession of difficult ordeals, and the establishment in April 2002
of FSS General Murat Zyazikov, a protégé of the Kremlin and Putin, as president. It
also resulted in the increased power of the national secret services, which by that
time had taken root in all government nooks and crannies of the country, just like
in the Soviet era.
Right now, though, it’s the end of February 2000. It’s still a long way from Aushev’s
dismissal, and we’re talking in Magas, the recently rebuilt capital of Ingushetia,
in the presidential palace. Our conversation takes place against the background of
the stream of Kremlin ravings pouring in from the press about how “the end of the
war is coming” now, after the storming of Grozny and the departure from there of the
militants, with Maskhadov and Basayev at their head. As everyone now knows, there
has still, to this very day, been no end to the war. But we didn’t know this at the
time.
“So is this the end of the war, or not?”
“Of course not. Everything’s only beginning. The military actions are continuing along
the entire perimeter. There are militants in Grozny, and also in the villages. But
where are the terrorists? The way I see things, antiterrorist operations can end only
with hostages being released and terrorists arrested, punished, or killed.”
“But haven’t some of the hostages already been freed? The military shows them on television.”
“Those were the ones who could be released from captivity without large-scale military
action. Actually, I think that without the war they would have been released even
sooner.”
“So what would you call this stage of the war?”
“I don’t know, because in general I don’t consider it any sort of stage. The bases
of terrorism haven’t been destroyed. They’re still everywhere in Chechen territory.
The guerilla warfare that has been announced continues.”
“But the Kremlin assures us that peacetime conditions are taking shape in parts of
Chechnya.”
“Where? Show me! We have more than two hundred thousand refugees in Ingushetia, just
as before! Everyone from the southern districts is here. And from Grozny too. Why
are people so eager to leave Chechnya and come here? Why is it that instead of people
returning, there are new streams of refugees? For me personally, this is the main
sign that the situation is unstable. Recall the first war. Then too, when the intensive
bombings of Samashki, Achkhoi-Martan, and Grozny were going on, thousands of people
fled to Ingushetia. But this took place only for a short time; we didn’t even put
up tents then. And as soon as the fighting ended, people moved back to their homes.
We didn’t expel them; they themselves wanted to go back, because they sensed some
kind of basic stability at the time. People believed that even if things were bad,
you could still get by. Now things are different. People have no hope for the future,
and for that reason they remain in Ingushetia. What’s more, some of them tried to
return, but ran into bombings and purges and came back to us again. The second reason
refugees don’t return to Chechnya is that there is no actual government there. Who
guarantees life in Chechnya? This is a person’s principal constitutional demand on
a government! And nobody guarantees it! Who is answerable if a militant comes and
kills you? Nobody. Or if a mercenary shows up and robs you? Nobody. That’s why people
plan on staying in Ingushetia to the end, since it has stability and government. If
someone insults or hurts you, the whole power structure comes into play—the police,
public prosecutors, courts.”
“Nevertheless, handouts of soup and free bread have ceased in refugee camps in Ingush
territory,” I said.
“Things are very difficult for us, it’s true. Though most of the refugees are still
located in Ingushetia, we aren’t receiving the means for their subsistence from the
Federal budget. And Moscow knows what’s going on: our debt for refugee support is
four hundred and fifty million rubles! Where did it come from? In order to feed the
hungry people fleeing to us, we bought groceries, baked bread, etc. on loan (and how
else could we have done this?). As a result, we’re in debt to our own bread factories,
to the cooks who prepare the meals, to the grocery suppliers. We couldn’t continue
this way. If it weren’t for the help of humanitarian organizations, I don’t know what
we’d do now. Also, I don’t think the majority of Ingush living in Chechnya before
the war will ever return there. Many Chechens and Russians will also stay here. And
we have to provide them with permanent residence! But who will pay?”
“It’s common knowledge that the Federal center sees only one way out of the refugee
crisis: forceful resettling of people back home.”
“Create the proper conditions, and if people want to move back, they will. That’s
my position. And the main words here are ‘create the proper conditions.’ However,
the overwhelming majority of officials don’t want to hear about such a policy, and
forceful methods won’t accomplish anything. I posed the following task to our Ingush
government: determine a realistic picture of which refugees in the camps want to go
where, and report it to me. If it turns out, for example, that forty thousand people
plan to stay in Ingushetia as permanent residents, that means we would need to build
new cities and villages and finance it with money for the restoration of Chechnya
after the antiterrorist operations. Or let’s say it turns out that twenty thousand
have decided to relocate to other regions of Russia. In that case, depending upon
where they want to go, that region would have to receive the means to supply them
with housing. That would only be fair.”
“What do you think—when will the war end?”
“Strong-arm tactics won’t solve the Chechen problem. We need to look for a purely
political solution. And it’s the same as it always was: making an agreement with Maskhadov.
But what do we hear? He’s not legitimate, so they initiated criminal prosecution,
and submitted his case to Interpol. That puts a nail in the coffin of the political
process, and then all we can do is fight to the end, lose soldiers, officers, and
civilians. As a result we’ll pay three times as much for the war.”
“All right, let’s say they’re at the negotiating table. What do they talk about?”
“First about a cease-fire. Then about terrorist bases, illegal military units, etc.”
“But isn’t it unlikely that Maskhadov will agree to this?”
“Why do you think so? This was Maskhadov’s position from the very beginning.”
“Whatever negotiations there are, one thing is clear: Maskhadov won’t be president
of Chechnya. The people don’t want him.”
“You’re right. But that is a question of political dialogue, secondary to the military
question. If the Chechen people don’t want Maskhadov, let them choose someone else
for themselves, and Moscow will deal with this new person. However, since the Chechens
have chosen Maskhadov for now, we need to sit at the table with him. It’s not out
of the question that after everything that’s happened, Maskhadov himself might make
some kind of decision. But let him do that with dignity.”
“Could peace negotiations take place with anyone else, besides Maskhadov?”
“No. Not while he’s president of the republic.”
“Of a republic that for all intents and purposes doesn’t exist?”
“Whether there is actually a republic or not, he is the president, a legal entity.
Whether he’s good, bad, or weak, the most important person for negotiations is Maskhadov.
Let’s not replicate our Russian nuthouse, with its contempt for law. Imagine that
you go to a factory, and it’s in ruins, no one’s getting paid, everyone’s stealing.
Who would you talk to?”
“The manager.”
“There you go! Maskhadov has the state seal, the flag, and everything else. What other
power do you hope to find in Chechnya? Of course you could bring in some other Chechen
from Moscow and put him behind the desk, but he wouldn’t be legitimate.”
“There’s a lot of talk about March 26, 2000, the Russian presidential elections, as
the turning point of a new time period. What will this date mean for Chechnya?”
“Absolutely nothing. No more than the 27th, or the 28th, or April 1. It will get warm
and sunny, which means the military activity will double or triple.”
“That’s your theory?”
“No, it’s a lesson from 1996. At that time, there were no more than three thousand
militants in all of Chechnya. Eight hundred Federal troops went to Grozny and resolved
the whole problem. Before the present war, if you listen to the military, there were
twenty-five to twenty-six thousand militants in gangs. If five thousand of them have
been destroyed (though my statistics tell me it’s less), where have the other twenty
thousand gotten to?”
“They’ve scattered.”
“That’s right. They’re waiting for their hour to strike.”
“But you can’t fight empty-handed. Where do they get their ammunition?”
“They are assisted.”
“By whom? Everything is blockaded. That’s what they said on TV.”
“Go ahead and listen to what they say on TV, but the reality is that it’s not completely
blockaded. They can get everything they need. They have weapons and ammunition.”
“What do you think about the Feds’ unprecedented cruelty to the civilian population?”
“The hatred on both sides in this war is simply ferocious, staggering. The soldiers
fiercely hate the Chechens, and do whatever they want given the opportunity. The Chechens
hate the Federal soldiers just as much. I can’t imagine how they will ever talk with
one another.”
“But they need to live next to one another, right?”
“I’m convinced that that’s a question for tomorrow. As long as they’re fighting, the
hatred will only increase. There’s only one way to turn the tide now, and that’s to
end the killing and stop talking about Chechens on TV as if they’re all bandits. No
more insulting the people as a whole! And no more tricking your own people, either.
If antiterrorist operations haven’t succeeded in the course of a month, if the objectives
haven’t been fulfilled, then that’s that! You can’t just continue conducting antiterrorist
operations for seven months.”
“You are part of the country’s political establishment. Do you know anyone in the
Russian political elite who exercises sound judgment on the Chechen question?”
“Only Yavlinsky
40 talks at all sensibly about it. Everyone else is in a nationalistic frenzy. This
includes the people who say ‘bomb them.’ As far as Ingushetia goes, we won’t let Chechens
starve. But I still think the main thing is to persuade the government that no military
solution is possible in Chechnya.”
Everything that Aushev predicted then came true, with one exception: he is no longer
president. And in May 2002, after Moscow failed to deal with the refugee problem,
and the barrier in the form of Aushev was removed once and for all with the establishment
of Zyazikov as the new president in Ingushetia, it began to simply resettle the refugees
back in Chechnya by force, to the ruins, where they are subject to purges, kidnappings,
and illegal executions.
A Pogrom
“They forced us to crawl naked across the floor from room to room . . .”
“They walked on our beds with their boots on . . . ”
“They called us monkeys, black monsters . . . ”
“They spat in our faces . . . ”
“They beat us over the head with the book The Fate of the Chechen-Ingush People . . . ”
“They ripped our hair out . . . ”
“And what did you do?”
“Me personally? I am Truffaldino
41 from Bergamo. That’s my role now. And in general I’m ‘the Beast.’ Beslan Gaitukayev,
group monitor. I’m from Grozny.”
“And did you crawl on the floor too?”
“Yes. They shouted at me: ‘Backwards! Crawl to the room!’ And I did . . . Then: ‘Enough!
Go back to the hall.’ And so I did . . . ”
On March 28, 2001, all the students from the national Chechen theater studio Nakhi,
which was formed by the Moscow State University of Culture and Art to train a nucleus
for a future Grozny theater troupe, missed class for the first time ever. The studio
consisted of six girls, nineteen guys, the artistic director, Professor Mimalt Solt-sayev,
People’s Artist of Russia, and academic supervisor, Professor Alikhan Didigov, Distinguished
Artist of the Kabardino-Balkarian and Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republics.
This was not a strike. At 5:30 A.M., a detachment of strong, armed, masked men with
dogs, wielding sledgehammers for breaking down doors and locks, burst into the fifth
floor of the dormitory where the students all lived together with their teachers in
the Moscow suburb of Khimki, without knocking or ringing. As adroitly as if they were
storming a plane captured by terrorists, the gang quickly spread out among the rooms,
and in just seconds they had a submachine gun or a pistol at the temple of everyone
sleeping.
The next act followed without an intermission. They set about dragging the half-sleeping
student actors from their beds by the hair, beating them up, kicking them, and howling
all sorts of unprintable obscenities.
Beslan-Truffaldino came to his senses first, but that only infuriated the captors
even more. Lying on the floor in just his underwear, the group monitor merely asked,
“Could I get dressed?” He received, first, a sound smack in the mouth, and second,
a flowery rebuff, with some choice curses, which could be translated as ‘Should I
bring you some tea too?’ After which a strapping fellow in camouflage swung open the
balcony door.
For over three hours, the students, spread out along the floor in nothing but underwear,
“cooled off” in the early spring morning draft, while the Chechen pogrom went on.
“They insulted us, called us mujahideen who should be killed. They said that Chechens
tended sheep their whole lives, and they were going to send us back to a pastoral
life. They howled that since we were Chechens, that meant we were guilty of everything,”
recalled Shuddi Zairayev, an elegant youth with the manners of a romantic hero. He
is Silvio from “Truffaldino.”
What is shocking is that there is no trace of amazement in his story. Only a statement
of fact. Their emotions have been spent back in Chechnya. Students for the Nakhi studio
have been chosen from refugee camps in Grozny, and unique people live there, people
who are more accustomed to genocide than to breakfast.
The youngest in the studio is Timur Lalayev. He just turned seventeen. He’s very thin,
smiling, agile, and he laughs a lot.
On March 28, they sicced dogs on him. Timur speaks sparingly of his own ordeal. He
says of others:
“Shuddi got it worse than anyone else. They asked us, ‘Is anyone here from the Staropromyslovsky
district?’ Shuddi answered, ‘I am.” And that’s when it began! ‘We stopped by Staropromyslovsky
in 1995. So many of our guys died there.’ ”
The residence listed on Shuddi-Silvio’s passport really is a street in the Staropromyslovsky
district of Grozny. They beat him up to their heart’s content. Then they told him
they’d take him into the forest, shoot him, and bury him in a pit.
“What were you thinking about then? That they were just trying to scare you?”
“No. I decided that it was the end for me. They weren’t joking with the others either.
They ripped out clumps of Timur Batayev and Ortsa Zukhairayev’s hair.”
On March 28 in Khimki, the Moscow Regional Department for Organized Crime Control
(RDOCC)
42 waged this cruel operation. It was not their first such exploit, either. This time
the detachment was united with the similarly minded Moscow District Special Emergency
Detachments.
43 The pretext for the punitive actions was to check on an anonymous call to the police
about a possible hiding place for TNT. But the actual goal was to have fun. And the
real grounds for this measure was the students’ nationality.
“Did you understand exactly what they wanted?”
“No, absolutely not. They beat us, smashed everything around. And that was it.”
In the course of the purge it became clear that most of the masked men had just returned
from military assignments to Chechnya. Naturally, they hadn’t undergone any rehabilitation
after battle. And this is the result: they were trigger happy, mentally on edge, full
of pent-up emotions and demanding an excursion for a purge, the way a drug addict
craves a needle.
“We realized that they just had to go off at someone,” says Anzor Khadashev, from
Grozny.
“In Chechnya they’re the bosses. They came here, and they want to be the bosses here
too. We’re the best material for that,” continues Anzor. “And to be serious, they’re
simply nuts. Why did they take my family pictures? What do they need them for? Why
did they take a phone card from another of our students? And they also took the student
money collected for food. We eat like most students, on pooled resources. I notice
that they’re afraid of everything. When we were being picked up off the floor to be
taken to the Regional Department of Organized Crime Control for questioning, I saw
that as soon as you look them in the eye, they shout, ‘Don’t look! Want to remember
me? Turn around!’ They’re afraid even when they’re in masks. Is this any way to live
in your own home?”
Tamerlan Didigov is the son of Alikhan Didigov and a graduate of Moscow State Law
Academy. He lives together with his father right here, in the dormitory, in room 37.
On the morning of the pogrom the Didigov father and son got it worse than anyone.
Maybe it was because Tamerlan wasn’t sleeping at the moment the men in camouflage
broke in. He had already gotten up so he could unhurriedly dress for the state exam.
Tamerlan was supposed to take his civil rights test that morning. And as soon as they
tried to knock him down to the floor, he simply said, “Look at my papers! What kind
of militant am I? I have a civil rights exam now!” Who could imagine that this would
make the bandits so angry? “Oh, you’re studying civil rights too, you monkey! You
should be in the mountains. Go there!” Then they started to beat his father, a fifty-five-year-old
professor, until he lost consciousness, kicking him and hitting him with their rifle
butts. They spat in his face, and stomped on his back. They tore off his clothes and
twisted his fingers. When Tamerlan pleaded for them to have mercy on his father, they
put handcuffs on him, and started to twist his wrists around with a submachine gun.
“We had bundles of issues of the newspaper
The State News. My father is friends with State Legislature deputy Aslanbek Aslakhanov.
44 The State News is issued with Aslakhanov’s help, and also with the assistance and support of the
Federation Council and the State Legislature. The paper’s credo is the ideology of
the pro-Putin Unity Party and faction. Aslakhanov sometimes gives us issues of
The State News, and we pass them out among our friends. So when the masked men saw these bundles,
they yelled: ‘What’s this?! You’re spreading anti-Russian propaganda here!’ Really
uneducated people—they don’t know, understand, or read anything.”
When Professor Didigov lost consciousness from his beating, they stuck a pistol under
his pillow right in front of Tamerlan’s eyes. Then they asked, ‘Where’s your father’s
coat?’ The son showed them, and then they put the silencer from the pistol into the
coat pocket.
They threw the shoes from the balcony. They ripped up all the posters with pictures
of Deputy Aslakhanov, took all the documents of the Nakhi studio, and nine hundred
rubles. And also the professor’s wife’s perfume. They swept everything that they found
into their pockets: socks, pens, small change from on top of the refrigerator, instant
coffee, boxing gloves . . . Because they were used to doing that in Chechnya. They’d
go into a house and take whatever they wanted.
That’s how things went until noon. Then the soldiers started to get ready to leave.
They lined all the Chechen students up in single file and started to lead them downstairs,
room by room, to the cars. There wasn’t enough room for everybody there, of course.
So they were beaten and humiliated again. The interrogations at the RDOCC lasted until
evening. However, the students had the impression that they didn’t really have anything
to ask them about. The series of questions went something like this: Are your parents
fighting? Where is the hexogen? Have you ever seen any militants? How do you feel
about the army? . . .
The law enforcement officials—government employees by their status, acting in the
name of the Law and the Constitution—conducted a genuine national pogrom in Khimki.
And nobody stopped them—no public prosecutors rushed to uphold the law.
This means that the men in epaulettes are not just igniting international discord—a
crime that automatically entails criminal punishment. They are initiating monoethnicity
in the country, that is, its future breakup into national compartments: separatism.
The very same kind that President Putin, whose employ the RDOCC officials are in,
is supposedly struggling with.
In conclusion, something about the artistic intelligentsia. It’s very meek, as usual.
During the Khimki pogrom, the theatrical community reacted so apathetically that it
was as if an army of influential actors and directors holding liberal views didn’t
live in Moscow.
Only the students’ professors came to their assistance.
“I’ve worked at the Institute of Culture for twenty-five years. I teach Russian. Right
now I have some guys from the Chechen studio in my class. They’re very hard-working
and enormously motivated to learn. What happened to them simply made me sick.” The
voice of Svetlana Nikolayevna Dymova, an instructor at the Moscow State University
of Culture and Art, is trembling. “The first thing I said to them was, ‘You know,
they were bandits; they could come after me too. Don’t despair. We professors very
much want you to study with us!’ I realize that no one will find the bandits, no one
will bring them to justice. The scariest thing they said then was, ‘We won’t let you
study in Russia!’ ”
The finale of the pogrom turned out to be in much the same style as the rest of it.
In the evening the entire male contingent of the Nakhi studio was simply released
to go wherever they wanted, without being charged with anything. The students said
some of the RDOCC officers even tried to apologize, assuring them that it was the
men from the Special Emergency Detachments who were “bad”: “they’re like torpedoes—they
shoot first, think later.”
“We forgave them,” said Timur Lalayev. “Because they’re sick.”
Half a year later, Andron Konchalovsky came to the exam at Nakhi. He invited students
for roles in his new film. They debuted and were noticed.
The investigator of the RDOCC, who was especially ferocious with the Chechen students
on March 28, 2001, took to drink, was fired, and now works as a stock boy in a Khimki
department store. When he’s drunk and sees Chechens, he yells, “Hey! Remember me?”
And he tells his drinking buddies how he used to beat them back then. “You see, they
moved up in the world,” he adds.
And the Chechens pass by silently.
Five Hundred Rubles for Your Wife: The Chechnya Special Operation Ruins the Country
On June 14, 2001 there was a meeting in the Ingush village of Orjonikidzevskaya on
the Chechen-Ingush border. The participants were refugees from Chechnya living in
Ingushetia as well as those citizens of our country whose passports have that line,
so unpleasant today, about residence in the belligerent republic. This acts like a
red flag before a bull on any Russian policeman and forbids them to work legally or
have medical insurance or a place for their children in school. The nervous crowd
of about two thousand adopted the following appeal to world society: “Conduct an examination
and analysis of the situation in the Chechen Republic on the basis of international
law, declare the rights of Chechen citizens to self-defense in the event of lawless
conduct of servicemen and in the absence of legal defense from the Russian leadership.”
And further: “Call on U.S. President Bush, as the head of a government that plays
one of the key roles in world politics, to appeal to the Russian leadership (President
Putin) . . . ” (the rest is the same as in the first text).
And also: “Call on the heads of the ‘Big Seven’ in the forthcoming summit to influence
President Putin . . . ” (also continuing as in the first text).
In translation from official to normal language, this appeal to the American president
and the chief world leaders would read: “Help us survive! Appease the army and Putin!
Be a third arbiter! We don’t know how to fight military lawlessness! Tell us whether
we still have any rights! Or should we accept that we’re nobody?” It’s a howl of despair
by people who have been driven into a corner.
However, the appeal of the Orjonikidzevskaya meeting provoked the worst possible reaction
from Russian society. For the umpteenth time, the Chechens were charged with anti-Russian
behavior, separatism, and the desire to slander Putin in the eyes of the world.
Why do we turn a deaf ear? Is it because the war has completely ceased being personal
and has turned into several talking-head generals on the TV screen?
There are familiar faces in the crowd at the meeting. Here is a stern-looking woman
with cold eyes, a typical wartime Chechen. She is from the mountain village Makhkety
in Vedeno district. Her situation is tragic: her fourteen-year-old son was “flushed
down the toilet.”
45 Just plain “flushed,” in the literal sense, by the direct hit of a shell into a village
outhouse when the kid was doing his business. This woman’s home is almost at the edge
of the village, so the Feds could see from their posts who was going where around
the yard. They understood why the boy was going down the path to the far corner of
the yard, and they fired a shot. Just for fun, but at the same time, fulfilling the
direct order of their president.
And off to the side is a father whose unmarried grown-up daughter went through the
filtration camp in Urus-Martan, where . . . But in this case it’s better to be silent.
Just one detail about her incarceration: she was forced to crawl up and down steps
on all fours, like a dog, holding a pail of excrement in her teeth.
Neither the mother from Makhkety nor the father from Urus-Martan is in the mood to
play political games. They don’t give a damn about separatism—they’re faced with their
own sorrow. They’re enemies until their dying day with both Maskhadov and Putin. And
if they cry out for help at the meeting, appealing to world leaders, you’d better
believe them.
June 5, 2001, in Grozny, at Theater Square (there used to be theaters here). There
is such a thing here—once there were theaters. People came to a protest meeting. They
were holding signs in their hands: “Give me back my mother!” These are from children
whose mothers, arrested in a purge, have disappeared to no one knows where. And also:
“Give us back our children’s corpses!” That’s from mothers whose children have disappeared
without a trace in the purges. A couple of armored vehicles puff along the road past
the meeting. Middle-aged men, probably mercenaries, not soldiers, are on top of the
car. They are cheerful and vigorous, with strong, healthy teeth. They’re wearing masks
and bandannas, with automatic weapons and grenade launchers pointed at the crowd.
They’re convulsed with laughter, leaning against the armor in ecstasy, and that’s
why their rows of powerful fangs can be seen through the holes in their masks. They
point fingers in cut-off gloves, mostly at those with the “Give me back my mother!”
signs. And to top it off, they demonstrate with rude gestures what they plan to do
to both the protestors’ moms’ and their sons’ corpses.
Nearby is an officer, the superior of the group. He behaves the same way.
Of course all of this is details—rude gestures, flushed down the toilet. But it is
from just these details that we find out what life is about. As if it weren’t bad
enough that your mother or child has been taken away and their bodies haven’t been
returned—they also have to mock your pain! Who can stop this? Putin? The minister
of defense? The attorney general? No. These gentlemen aren’t trained to think about
details. Only the West is the people’s big advocate. Therefore they appeal to the
West for the sake of survival.
I’m ashamed to look into the eyes of an exhausted Chechen named Shomsu, whom I’ve
known for a few weeks now. I can’t help him in any way. Since January 8, Shomsu has
been looking everywhere for his nephew Umar Aslakhajiev and his friends Nur-Mohammed
Bambatgiriev and Turpal-Ali Naibov. All three were driving around the village of Kurchaloi
on that day. A purge started there early in the morning. And at ten, they too were
purged, along with their dark green Zhiguli, and that was the end. There hasn’t been
any news about them to this day. For the past half year, Shomsu has combed all of
Chechnya, many times, far and wide. And now he doesn’t know what else to do. I don’t
know either, and don’t understand the basic things: where is the Zhiguli, for example?
What is it guilty of, even if there were some basis to assume the guilt of its owners?
And who exactly expropriated it? And having stolen it, why didn’t they answer for
the crime? And why is it that to this day the arrested men have not been charged with
anything or released? How much time does the government need to write up the indictments,
half a century? The way it happened in the past with “illegally repressed” people?
And why are the big shots in our country loudly discussing, at the initiative of the
generals, the possibility of introducing public executions for the militant leaders,
if executions without trial for ordinary Chechens are already taking place?
There are tons of questions, but not a single answer. And if an answer actually is
given, it’s as if they think we’re idiots. Here’s how it usually happens in Chechnya:
a relative of someone who has disappeared goes to the necessary military official.
The officers around him usually prompt you helpfully: “He’s the one you need.” And
“he” says:
“I am Sasha.”
“What? Just Sasha?”
“Yes, just Sasha.”
This “Sasha” doesn’t reveal his last name, title, or position. He feeds you with promises
for a couple of months: just wait a bit, I’ll find them tomorrow, or at least their
grave.
“And while I’m working on it,” hints “Sasha,” “I just saw a very nice suit for two
hundred dollars at the fair in Khasavyurt.”
“Yes, yes,” the family of the kidnapped person catches the hint. “A suit, of course,
a suit . . . We’ll go to Khasavyurt on Saturday.”
On Sunday, “Sasha” already has a new outfit. But he asks for a banya too, for his
various bodily needs. You’re adults, you know what this involves. And it’s arranged.
And “Sasha” announces, as a sign of gratitude, that the three men and the car who
are being searched for are at the 33d Ministry of the Interior forces brigade base.
Soon this turns out to be a big lie: neither the three unfortunates nor the Zhiguli
are at the 33rd. And “Sasha” himself disappears, having squeezed everything that he
needed out of the suffering families. “Sasha” was already planning to leave Chechnya;
he was approaching the end of his military assignment and wanted to get a new outfit.
Who will stop these “Sashas”? Their supreme commander-in-chief Putin? No, he’s shown
no such desire—he’d rather just hand out awards.
What else can you try? Another call to the West for help?
But Shomsu continues. He shows me official answers to his inquiries about the missing
men. And this is another type of activity of the officers searching for those who
have disappeared in the purges—statements, with signatures of supposedly responsible
parties underneath. But in fact, they’re false. The officers in Chechnya, like the
undercover intelligence agents, have three or four IDs with different last names.
And there’s no one you can hold responsible.
The right granted to the soldiers to hide their actual last names, “so that militants
won’t take revenge on their families,” has gradually become one of the major causes
of the crimes and monstrosities in Chechnya.
But how can Shomsu and others like him find their way through this maze of deceit?
How can they get on the track of the law? It’s impossible to do it. Shomsu has papers
signed by Police Colonel Oleg Melnik (whose name probably isn’t really Melnik at all),
Lieutenant Colonel Yury Solovei (who might not be Solovei), and also Colonel Smolyaninov.
The last, on the one hand, is Nikolai Aleksandrovich, but on the other hand, answers
more readily to the nickname “Mikhalych.” Besides this group, there’s also a “Yurich,”
a man who calls himself the deputy of the head of the Kurchaloi FSS regional department.
His multiweek participation in the matter of the search for Aslakhajiev, Bambatgiriev,
and Naibov consisted of actively leading the family by the nose, such as by advising
them to stay out of it and to give up, because the Main Intelligence Agency has something
to do with it. And why would the Main Intelligence Agency be involved if Shomsu’s
nephew were just an ordinary person, a peasant?
Having thus advised them, Yurich takes off for his native Belgorod. Or maybe not for
Belgorod. And maybe he’s not Yurich either. Maybe he’s the one who killed the people
Shomsu is looking for and is now covering his tracks.
This vicious cycle of widespread lies has been maintained by people who call themselves
officers. After this unrestrained lawlessness, they leave for their homes, all over
the country. Chechnya as a mode of thinking, feeling and acting, spreads everywhere
like gangrenous cells and turns into a nationwide tragedy, infecting all strata of
society.
Here’s another example. Two years after the beginning of the second Chechen war, which
has become, among other things, an arena for unruly marauding, it is clear that Chechens
everywhere have been robbed blind, and that the robbers have turned on their own.
Zhenya Zhuravlev is a soldier in the motorized rifle company of the third special
assignment brigade of the Ministry of the Interior forces. His unit, 3724, was deployed
at the village of Dachnoe, near Vladikavkaz. From there, he was sent to Chechnya,
where he stayed for eight months on some mountain without ever going down. He couldn’t
send or receive letters. Zhenya’s mother, Valentina Ivanovna Zhuravleva, a widow and
kindergarten teacher in Lugovaya village of the Tugulymsky region in Sverdlovsk, waited
in vain for some news from him and cried her eyes out as she sent him registered letters.
Finally an answer came. Zhenya, whose term of service had already ended in April,
pleaded with her to come and take him away from Vladikavkaz. The village collected
some money, and Valentina Ivanovna, along with Zhenya’s aunt, a retired railway worker
named Vassa Nikandrovna Zubareva, turned up at Dachnoe.
At first the officers didn’t present Zhenya at all—they were clearly hiding something.
Then the soldiers whispered that Zhenya had only been brought from Chechnya yesterday,
and straight to the hospital. They secretly took his mother to the ward in the evening.
Zhenya was lying there with his legs festering up to the knees. He said he hadn’t
washed himself for a few months on the mountain, and he always wore high boots. This
was the result. His mother went to the officers and pleaded with them to give her
back her son to be treated somehow in the village. They said, let’s take his “war”
money, for participating in the antiterrorist operations, and divide it up fifty-fifty,
and you’ll get your son.
Zhenya categorically forbade Valentina Ivanovna to divide up his money, and so he
wasn’t able to go home. He spent a long time in Dachnoe, and Valentina Ivanovna was
nearby, together with other mothers to whom the officers had not returned their sons,
demanding to split the money in exchange for demobilization. All of these unfortunate
victims of the second Chechen war sent Vassa Nikandrovna, the aunt, to Moscow, and
she went to one official after another. And only then did things move forward. The
soldiers were allowed to go home. But the officers weren’t jailed.
Here is the story of one young Muscovite, who begged me to keep his name secret, fearing
revenge. On his day off, at midnight, he was driving with friends to a dance club.
Some policemen with their sleeves rolled up above the elbows and bandannas on their
shaven heads stopped the car and said, “We’re taking the girl.” The “girl” was the
wife of one of the passengers; she was going dancing with her husband for the first
time since giving birth to their first child. “We’re taking her, and we won’t give
her back,” shouted the law enforcers. The husband’s friends held him back and tried
to persuade the cops: “She’ll need to feed the baby soon.” “What do we care?” The
only thing the young mother had done wrong was to leave her passport at home. Since
she didn’t have her passport, they couldn’t see whether she was a lawful resident
of Moscow. They agreed to let the husband pay five hundred rubles for his wife, and
then they could move on.
It turned out that the patrolmen had been on an assignment to Chechnya not long ago.
After leaving the zone, they had continued their military tactics in peacetime life.
“It’s a good thing the patrolmen didn’t shoot, since they are ‘Chechens,’” everyone
said when they were told this story. They said so seriously, not surprised by anything.
The “Chechnya” special operation has infected the whole country, which is becoming
more and more beastly and idiotic. The value of human life was already very low in
Russia, and now it has slipped to almost nothing. We have all reached the depths,
like the unrescued Kursk. And there’s no order for rescue.
Chechnya’s Unique Islam
Unwanted Mullahs
When you wander around Chechnya for a while during the current war and listen to the
stories people tell about what they’ve experienced, you notice with surprise that
there’s almost no place for mullahs in these mournful tales. Only now and then does
anyone make the following quick comment: “I went to the mosque, and the mullah helped
me gather ransom money for the Feds.” February 2002 is the only time I can remember
in these three war years when the clergy of the distant Shatoi mountain region wrote
a petition screaming out with pain and outrage, addressed to a former mullah there,
now serving as the Chechen mufti. This mullah had been given an office next to that
of the pro-Moscow head of the republic, Akhmad-Khaji Kadyrov (also a former mufti),
and, after becoming a bureaucrat, quickly forgot about the people’s suffering. The
petition described extraordinary circumstances: the murder and incineration in January
2002 of six Shatoi residents, including a pregnant woman and an elderly director of
a village school whom everyone respected, by ten soldiers of an elite subdivision
of the Russian Federation General Staff, and the equally extraordinary indifference
of the muftis to these tragic events. The mullahs wrote that they were ashamed of
this indifference.
And here’s a completely different example. Many people go to see the old, very wise
local mullah in the tiny, well-kept village of Isti-Su (not far from Gudermes), military
situation permitting, of course. They go to him for advice, and simply to talk. Surprisingly,
this popular Chechen mullah turns out to be a German. More precisely, he is a former
German prisoner of war, who had fought for the Nazis in World War II. After he was
captured, he wound up doing forced labor restoring Grozny, married a Chechen, converted
to Islam, and raised half-German, half-Chechen children, who during Gorbachev’s perestroika
were able to emigrate safely to their father’s homeland. He himself, at that time,
was an unofficial spiritual leader of a certain part of the Chechen population. Although
they fully recognized that he was not “one of them,” it didn’t make any difference
anymore; he couldn’t abandon his people to poverty and suffering. He is living out
his complicated, contradictory life in Chechnya, which has been drowning in bloody
wars since Gorbachev’s departure. And near him there are dozens of mullahs of pure
Chechen origin, who are unwanted and have nothing to do, because no one goes to them.
Everything that is happening today with Chechen Islam is a consequence of both Chechen
history as a whole and the current political experiments on Chechnya.
But first, some historical information. Chechen Islam is very young. Specialists disagree
on the exact dates of the Islamization of the Vainakh
46 tribes. Most likely, Islam became the official religion in the first half of the
eighteenth century. Also, it remains an intricate mix of Muslim traditions and ancient
adats—the rules of Chechen life of the pre-Islamic period—which tend to preach family,
neighborly, and communal values.
The Chechens are Sufis, and they unite many Sufi virds (brotherhoods, or in the exact
translation from the Arabic “vird,” a short prayer). The vird in Chechnya is like
a community of murids (students) of a certain shaikh (an ustaz, or teacher), where
the murid learns everything from the ustaz, who in turn has taken all his spiritual
knowledge from his own teacher. According to the Sufi interpretation, the “I” is nothing.
The “I” should be subservient to the whole as determined by the teacher. Zikrs are
Sufi collective prayers or incantations (running in a circle in a communal group),
which are supposed to free the “I” of a zikrist from fear and evil desires. Typical
Sufi poses include crouching with crossed legs and holding the right wrist in the
left hand—this also allows for control over one’s body.
Chechnya has its own virds. They are strengthened first and foremost by close family
bonds within each vird. The most influential vird in Chechnya is the Kuntakhajin.
The particular moral unity of this brotherhood played a major role, for example, during
the last presidential election campaign in April 2002 in Ingushetia, where many Chechen
Kuntakhajins moved during Maskhadov’s presidency between the two wars, away from the
Saudi-influenced Wahhabi domination. The Kuntakhajins even had their own presidential
candidate in Ingushetia. Kunta-Khaji, the founder of the vird, is one of 356 Muslim
saints. His followers believe that he is still alive, that he is a defender of the
people, and that he comes to them at their times of greatest danger. For example,
in the present Chechen war, many people talk of Kunta-Khaji appearing before them
in the form of a white-bearded elder at the moment of their miraculous rescue from
seemingly inevitable death.
The Chinmirzoev vird is also very strong. Its founder, Chin-Mirza, united the poorest
peasant families in East Chechnya after the Caucasian war of the nineteenth century.
He preached peasant labor ideals and everyday asceticism, rejecting war and robbery.
The Viskhajin vird was founded by a man named Vis-Khaji during World War II among
Chechens who had been deported to Kazakhstan. He united around himself women who were
widowed with children.
The Deniarsanov vird, founded by Deni Arsanov in the 1920s, was highly respected in
Chechnya for preserving holy secrets and prophesying the fate of the nation. Many
educated people of the Soviet period who found themselves in positions of leadership
came from this vird. Currently, it is in a prolonged, bloody conflict of revenge with
the influential field commander Ruslan Gelayev, in connection with the treacherous
2000 murder in the Kurchaloi district center of twenty Deniarsanovians by a company
of twenty of Gelayev’s soldiers. Therefore, the vird participates very little in external
political life.
Virds are much more influential in Chechnya than mullahs and official muftis. They’re
closer and more understandable to the Chechens as structures of a family type, and
are more traditional than jamaats (communities).
It’s possible that things wouldn’t have worked out this way, but for the help of the
Communists. Soviet power sent young Chechen Islam into the underground. After the
return of the people who had been deported from 1944 to 1957, they were forbidden
to erect mosques, unlike other north Caucasian peoples. This brought things to a point
where in Chechnya, there was almost no clergy to be controlled by the KGB, and this
was actually a plus. Viable, free Muslim religious communities emerged. In every village,
if there was a mullah, he was exclusively their own, a self-made man who answered
to the village and was appointed by it. And if there was no mullah, that was fine;
the elders were respected much more and a brotherhood existed in the vird. Therefore,
Chechens reacted to the subsequent establishment of a muftiate either indifferently
(“we’ll keep living the way we always have”) or with anger (“they’re tied to the KGB”).
As a result, a completely unique Islam emerged in Chechnya by the end of the Soviet
era. This Islam was free, with many conflicting Sufist virds and individual interpretations
of Islam, where all individuals were their own bosses, even in matters of faith.
Perestroika began and Doku Zavgayev became the first Chechen to be appointed first
secretary of the Chechen-Ingush republic party committee (earlier they had always
been Russian). Then, a Clerical Department of Muslims of Chechnya-Ingushetia was finally
created (a muftiate, a council of ulems). At the end of the 1980s, hundreds of mosques
were built, and two Islamic schools were opened, in Kurchaloi and Nazrani (now the
capital of Ingushetia, which separated from Chechnya). Thousands of Chechens and Ingush
made pilgrimages to sacred Islamic sites for the first time. But for all that, the
Chechens lived the way they were used to living.
Then the wars began. On the one hand, the number of believing Muslims increased, youth
began to visit the mosques, and many turned to prayer. But on the other hand, the
problems of Chechen Islam only became more serious. First, so-called “Kadyrovism”
(after Akhmad-Khaji Kadyrov) brought discord to their community. Second, Chechnya
was penetrated by “Saudi Wahhabism” (a religious current of Sunni Islam, whose followers
affirm that theirs is the “pure” Islam, and all the others are not, thus rejecting
Sufism). A religious schism was taking place within families. Fathers were cursing
their sons for following Wahhabism. And sons disowned their fathers for their unclean,
non-Wahhabi Islam, which had been unthinkable before.
Kadyrovism
Akhmad-Khaji Kadyrov has traveled a twisted path in life. He is now a completely secular
figure, the administrative head of the Chechen Republic, having been appointed to
this position in July 2000 by President Putin, who also gave him the title of Colonel
of the Russian Army. But before this, he was a mullah with a shady financial past.
He organized the first Chechen pilgrimage to Mecca, and in doing so stole money from
his people. The king of Saudi Arabia footed the bill for this first pilgrimage, but
Kadyrov never returned the money he had collected to anyone, which people have recalled
once in a while to this day. Later he was a field commander during the first Chechen
war, one of the people closest to Dzhokhar Dudayev. And in 1995, he became the mufti
of Chechnya with the title of “field mufti,” because he was named to this post not
by the Chechen spiritual leaders, but by a group of field commanders of the first
Chechen war who at the time were looking for a clergyman capable of announcing a holy
war against Russia. Everybody but Kadyrov refused.
Chechens know that Kadyrov will never endanger his own financial interests. Even now,
he participates in an illegal oil business. I’ve never met a Chechen who would say,
“I respect Kadyrov.” It is surprising and frightening that this head of a republic
has zero authority. Everyone says something like “He’s a traitor, he’ll end badly.”
They’re referring to how Kadyrov ran from Maskhadov to Putin at the beginning of the
second Chechen war. What’s most striking is that both opponents of the Kremlin and
pro-Russian Chechens, members of the former opposition to Dudayev, Ichkeria,
47 and Maskhadov, speak of Kadyrov in this way. In 2001 and 2002, Kadyrov has again
done nothing to gain the respect of his people. He became infamous in Chechnya, since
he did not in any way oppose the purges. In connection with this, most say that he
betrayed his people, and this is of course much worse than to have betrayed Maskhadov
and independent Ichkeria.
My meeting with Kadyrov in his office in April 2002 was disturbing. He just glowered
unkindly at me, and talked a great deal about himself, about how he was Maskhadov’s
spiritual mentor, and how he shaped him as a person and as the leader of a nation
responsible for the fate of his people. He described himself as categorically opposed
to any peaceful negotiations with his former comrades in arms, and said that he hoped
to restore NKVD night methods of destroying people in Chechnya.
Here’s an excerpt from our conversation:
“The main problem at this stage of the war is the purges, an inadequate and unjustifiable
application of power against the civilian population—marauding, torture, and the selling
of arrested people and corpses. When people disappear and no one says where they are,
and then relatives find the bodies, it spawns at least ten new militants. For this
reason the number of militants never decreases. It was fifteen hundred then, and it’s
fifteen hundred now. President Putin came out strongly on my side on this topic.”
“How do you plan to fight these purges, which are spawning new militants?”
“I am hoping for a firm stand by Putin. I said to him, why doesn’t a single general
answer for what’s been going on during the purges? And the president demanded that
they be stopped! Although of course this is not the first order from the president
about Chechnya that has not been obeyed.”
“How can you, as head of the republic, help the people?”
“I tell the president about everything. The people continue to suffer. We need honest
officials, and these are hard to find. I mean administrative workers of towns and
villages. They are afraid to come out openly against the bandits, because they have
no backing. I raised this question with Commander Moltensky and the president. We
are trying, but it’s not simple. It’s easier for you—you just ask questions.”
“Still, what do you have the power to do? What can you personally do to oppose military
despotism in Chechnya?”
“I have no authority against the military. I have asked Putin for such rights.”
“Do you think someone should be ruling Chechnya single-handedly?”
“Yes, so that one person would answer for everything, including the power structures.
A dictator is needed here, in the literal sense of the word.”
“Suppose you were that dictator. And there was a purge in Argun. What would you do?”
“If I were the dictator of Chechnya, I wouldn’t conduct purges. To find a bandit,
I would quietly gather information and appear at his door at two or three at night,
shake his hand, and say hello. After such a visit, this bandit would disappear. With
three or four other such operations, everyone would be clear on everything. That’s
just what happened when the NKVD was operating. One knock at the door, and the person
would never be heard from again. People knew this and were afraid of it. That’s how
things were then, otherwise there would have been no order.”
The Chechen’s new wave of increasing disrespect for their muftis, who were not particularly
influential before, is connected precisely with the name and activities of Kadyrov,
who is never called anything but a “traitor.” The Chechens are also quite cold toward
the mufti Shamayev, whom Kadyrov dragged into this post. As a rule, they express their
opinion of Shamayev very simply: “This one sold out too, and he doesn’t speak up for
his people to Putin and the generals.”
The Chechens value those who are genuinely wise and courageous. If such a man happens
to be a mullah, great, but if not, that’s fine too. It is more important to belong
to a vird. The Chechens also struggle, using teip (clan) and vird forces, with religious
extremism in their ranks, with the Wahhabis (who are called “the bearded ones” here).
The Wahhabis are very unpopular. It would be a mistake to suggest that they have any
serious influence or play any kind of role in Chechnya. Their role and influence actually
boil down to weapons, which they do possess. They are feared, just like the Feds,
who also only have force to count on. But as history has shown, all conquests eventually
end.
Executions of Reporters
Musa Muradov is a member of the Chechen elite, the editor in chief of the Grozny Worker, the only independent Chechen newspaper. He is a superbly educated, fearless man who
has been through both the first and second wars. If you were to tally up his services
to the Chechen people, Musa would already have earned a monument in his lifetime.
But in the beginning of fall 2001, Musa, instead of a monument, received an anonymous
letter stating that he, as well as the entire male contingent of the paper (Abuezid
Kushaliev, Alkhazur Mutsurayev, and Lema Turpalov) were required to repent for their
collaboration with “occupation forces” and for receiving “monetary handouts” from
“the Jew Soros,” signed by the “Supreme Shariat Court and the General Command”—Shura,
the militants’ religious and military organ—about which they say, “It is Basayev alone,
no one else.” If they didn’t repent, they would be executed. The sentence would be
carried out by “the emirs and district judges.”
This means that wherever Musa appeared, he’d be killed.
Musa threw everything aside and took his family to Moscow. When we met there, he asked
me, “What do you think I should do next?” We were both aware that the threats were
for real.
The Grozny Worker never interrupted its publication for long, not during the days of Maskhadov or in
wartime. And it never wanted to be under someone’s control. Several times, the participants
in the Chechen conflict (both the Feds and Maskhadov) offered their “sponsorship,”
but Muradov refused them. Given the circumstances—war, secret service games—Musa found
a much better way for the paper to survive. He didn’t take money from either side
(although this would have been the simplest way out). Instead, he applied for a grant
from the Soros Fund, going through the complex selection system, and managed to receive
the means for publishing the paper from someone who did not make any political demands
of him.
I’m not too crazy about Soros or his politics, but if his fund allows reporters to
be independent in wartime conditions, then it’s good as far as I’m concerned.
Since the summer, the militants’ headquarters—no matter how much they try to deny
it—has been virtual, and their “Resistance” becomes reality only when the war demands
it. You can “communicate” with this “Resistance” using Caucasus Center, a site on
the Internet. This site is how the world generally finds out what Aslan Maskhadov
thinks about what is going on in his country. Often these thoughts seem too unsound
and propagandistic, confirming that Caucasus Center is simply Yastrzhembsky the other
way around.
That’s where I turned for an explanation of the threats received by the Grozny Worker. I quickly received an answer from the site by its editor in chief Yusuf Ibrahim,
who announced that “we still don’t have any information,” although “in such cases
we usually find out the Shariat Court’s decisions quickly. We think that this misinformation
was initiated by the Secret Service, and that Musa Muradov’s life is in danger. He
could be killed by Russian secret servicemen, so they can then shout out to the world
that mujahideen kill reporters.”
Movladi Udugov,
48 the “father” of Caucasus Center, who fled from Chechnya a long time ago but pretends
to maintain constant contact with Shura and its commanders, could not shed any light
on this either.
I began to insist: tell me who is now the head of the Supreme Shariat Court, capable
of confirming or denying the Muradov ruling? Who is the district emir (Musa is from
a Grozny district village; earlier, Field Commander Arbi Barayev
49 was the emir there) that would carry out the sentence, if it really exists?
The answer was a long, deep silence. That’s exactly what I thought: there is no head
of the Supreme Shariat Court, and there’s no district emir either, except for Barayev,
who has died. Aslan Maskhadov didn’t voice his opinion of the “sentence” either. I
tried to look for him, and so did Muradov, a reporter to whom Maskhadov is extremely
indebted, by the way, since it was only through his efforts that the world knew what
Maskhadov thought of this or that issue over the course of many months.
Then I turned to the other side, to the FSS. After all, the FSS has the responsibility
of leading the so-called antiterrorist operation. What’s more, it’s officially the
FSS’s task to defend citizens’ constitutional rights, of which the most important
is life.
The FSS gets away with some indistinct mumbling: “This was done by militants.” And
they don’t say anything more about “the case of Muradov and the Grozny Worker reporters” than Caucasus Center and virtual Maskhadov.
Silence does not bode well. That’s what the war has taught us. Muradov and the Grozny Worker are a thorn in the side of everyone in the conflict: since Muradov doesn’t serve
anyone, he’s an enemy. And the letter? It’s a sign, a signal: “We’ll let you live
only if you will be under someone’s control, and if you remain your own man, you’ll
die.” That’s the sentence that was really passed on Muradov and the other three reporters
in a country that continues to establish a type of democracy in which absolutely no
one wants independent reporters, and it’s easier to destroy them and blame competing
secret services than to accept their existence.
Who wanted to remove Musa and his three colleagues? The answer is obvious: those who
want to continue the war. And it’s not important whether their name is Ivan Petrov
of the FSS or Shamil Basayev of Shura; they are carrying out a joint special operation.
This is a double betrayal. It fully corresponds with the type of politics that is
being established in Russian society in connection with the current president’s previous
profession. If in Yeltsin’s times we lived from one of his diseases to the next, we
now live from one special operation to the next. As soon as a campaign to destroy
Viktor Popkov, an independent reporter and human rights advocate who was fatally wounded
in Chechnya, was completed, another campaign was launched to destroy Muradov. Neither
side of the Chechen conflict can act on its own, without the support of the other
side, its supposed opponent.
In conclusion, a few words about Chechen civil society. Where are the ordinary Chechens,
who would profit a great deal from the work of Musa Muradov and his colleagues, uniquely
important people for this society? Have they flooded all the Moscow papers, the Putin
administration, the FSS, the Ministry of the Interior, the attorney general, Basayev,
Maskhadov, and Caucasus Center with letters of protest and indignation?
Not at all. And this isn’t the first time, by the way, that the Chechens have sat
it out, including those who have benefited constantly from the Grozny Worker’s help. The very people for whose benefit Muradov was working.
The secret services’ destructive operation was successful. Half a year after the events
I’ve described, the Grozny Worker has ceased to exist. Musa doesn’t like Moscow, but he can’t leave it. The threats
come in an endless torrent, and there is no one to defend him. The male reporters
of the editorial staff have scattered for their lives in various directions, with
their families.
Occasionally, and with great difficulty, Chechen female reporters, who have taken
the burden of the war onto their shoulders, issue this newspaper. Are these Chechen
women simply not afraid of anything? This is what many people ask, including the soldiers
robbing, mocking, and raping them. Yes, the Chechen women aren’t afraid of anything—because
they’re afraid of everything.
Russia’s Secret Heroes
The essence of the ruling regime of a country is how it designates heroes. Who are
the “Chechen” heroes? And what do we want in Chechnya? What are we doing there? What
is our goal? Who are we rewarding for what? And what are we trying to encourge?
There
The tea got cold long ago. We’re drinking it in a café at Magas Airport in Ingushetia.
I’m ashamed to look Colonel Mohammed Yandiev, an officer of the Ingush Ministry of
the Interior, in the eye. It’s the third year in a row that I’m ashamed.
As a result of a criminal blunder of the Moscow bureaucracy during the storming of
Grozny in December 1999, someone had to risk his life to save eighty-nine elderly
people from a Grozny retirement home that was abandoned under the bombing. No one
wanted to brave the firing for their sake. Colonel Yandiev was the only one of the
hundreds of Russian colonels and generals gathered on this small area near Grozny
to say “yes.” And with six of his officers whom he had personally asked about this,
he crawled for three days—this was the only possible way—along the streets of Grozny
to the neighborhood of Katayama, to Borodin Street, where the lonely, hungry elderly
were dying in the care of a government that had forgotten its duty to them.
Yandiev rescued all these old people from Grozny. The losses turned out to be minimal.
Only one old woman died along the way; her heart couldn’t take it. But the colonel
was able to save all of the others from bullets and shells flying from both sides
of the crazed battle, as if each of them were his own mother or father.
“To this day, they send me letters on holidays. I don’t even remember their names.
But they remember me. And they write,” Yandiev says, very quietly. And I have to drag
these words from him, otherwise he would have been silent. “They thank me, and that’s
the best kind of gratitude,” Yandiev insists, continuing to stir the sugar he already
stirred long ago in the cold tea. “I don’t need anything else.”
But I need for there to be something else. I am a citizen, and for this reason I want
to know why the colonel still has not received the title of Hero of Russia that he
was nominated for early in 2000 for his deed, for the true courage he showed in saving
eighty-nine citizens of his country. What do you need to do in Russia, the way things
are now, to not only be a hero, but to be officially acknowledged as one?
Here
The path to answers to these questions turned out to be quite treacherous. The babbling
of the high-ranking officers responsible for moving the applications higher and higher
in the capital of our Motherland, toward the president’s signature, boiled down to
two arguments against Colonel Yandiev’s candidacy as a Hero.
First of all, he is “one of them.” In translation from their Moscow bureaucratic language,
that means that Yandiev is an Ingush, and Ingush in the army aren’t trusted much,
like Chechens. Yandiev, I was told, is “practically a Chechen,” and “who knows just
what was going on in Grozny then—he might have made arrangements with militants.”
And what if he did? For the sake of eighty-nine lives?
But there’s a second reason too, and this argument doesn’t only concern Vainakhs.
It turns out that we are only supposed to give the title of Hero if the person “killed
a bandit.”
“And if they saved someone’s life?”
“That’s not quite what we’re looking for.”
“So do you give it for rescues or not?”
“Who would admit that they don’t?”
Alas, I gave my word that I would withhold the names of those who agreed to give inside
information on this matter. These people, though they have big stars on their epaulettes
and orders on their chests, are merely gofers in the grand scheme of things, obeying
a higher authority. They know which documents the president won’t sign. And Putin won’t sign for rescues. Just a detail, you think? By no means. We’ve all observed how the word “mercy” has
been swept out of the government vocabulary. The government relies on cruelty in relation
to its citizens. Destruction is encouraged. The logic of murder is a logic that is understood by the government and propagated by it. The way things
are, you need to kill to become a Hero.
This is Putin’s modern ideology. When capitalists can’t get it done, comrades take
over again. We know very well that they never forget to line their own pockets. That’s
how things stand: at the end of the seventh year of the war, and in the third year
of the second campaign, Chechnya has been turned into a genuine cash cow. Here, military
careers are speedily forged, long lists of awards are compiled, and ranks and titles
are handed out ahead of time. And all you have to do is kill a Chechen and submit
the corpse.
So here I am, sitting across from Mohammed Yandiev. A normal hero in an abnormal country.
He hasn’t robbed anyone, hasn’t raped anyone, and hasn’t stuffed any stolen women’s
lingerie inside his camouflage jacket. He has simply saved lives. And therefore he’s
not a general. And his Hero application is rotting in Moscow vaults.
A Perplexed Afterword
I called the Information Department of the Russian presidential administration. The
head is Igor Porshnev, but it’s generally better known as the department of Sergei
Yastrzhembsky, an assistant of Putin’s who is responsible for “information support
for the antiterrorism operation.” I had two very simple questions. The first was,
How many soldiers have received state awards for their participation in the second
Chechen war? And the second was, How many of them earned the Hero of Russia title?
The Information Department sent me to the Putin administration’s Department of Government
Awards, whose head is Nina Alekseevna Sivova.
“That information is classified,” the assistants firmly stated, categorically refusing
me any chance to talk with the bosses of their departments. “It’s not subject to disclosure.”
“But that’s absurd!” I objected.
Finally, in Yastrzhembsky’s department, which is responsible for the formation of
a “proper image of the war,” they took pity and at least agreed to “examine an official
inquiry on this subject,” albeit without guaranteeing a positive answer (of two numbers!)
or a date by which they’d examine it (and indeed, an answer never came!).
A conversation with Nina Sivova from the Award Department soon took place. And she
affirmed: “This information is in fact confidential, for official use only.”
Maybe some people remember this term from Soviet times. Wherever you looked, everything
was “for official use only.”
“Why are the Hero of Russia and other awards confidential?” I tried to find out from
Nina Alekseevna.
“For the protection of those who receive these awards,” came yet another cryptic response.
“But I’m not even asking for their last names.”
“Call back . . . ”
“Tomorrow, again?”
“Yes, tomorrow. Maybe . . . ”
Or maybe not. A country in which the number of heroes is information for official
use only of those bureaucrats who handed out the awards, and where real heroes don’t
receive the Hero title, is hopeless. It will lose all wars. Because it never encourages
the right people.
Killed by His Own
“One gunshot wound straight through the head and neck,” wrote Major Igor Matyukhov,
expert of the 632d military court medical laboratory of the North Caucasus Military
District, in an official report of yet another autopsy he performed. He added: “Massive
loss of blood. Rupture of the left carotid artery.” This is a description of the cause
of death resulting from “one gunshot wound” that took place on February 5, 2001,
at Khankala. Court medical expert Matyukhov also indicated where the “trauma” that
proved to be fatal for the soldier Danila Vypov took place: “deployment of a separate
subdivision, Military Unit 20004.”
Khankala is the holiest of holies for the generals waging war in the North Caucasus.
It is the head military base, where the main headquarters of the group is posted,
and it is guarded in several circles and along all its perimeters by barbed wire,
nets of checkpoints, minefields, and so on. You might ask: what kinds of mines are
there, inside?
Officers of unit 20004 (the Ministry of the Interior Kamyshin regiment) told the family
of Danila, who didn’t live to twenty, something completely different: that their son
and brother was blown up on a mine, his body ripped to shreds, and he needed to be
buried in a soldered coffin.
And when Danila’s older brothers demanded further explanation, and one of them went
to the military morgue at Rostov-on-the-Don, he clearly saw an entrance hole from
a bullet above Danila’s upper lip. It couldn’t have been from a mine fragment. And
there was no body ripped to shreds. On February 20, Danila’s brothers, who were living
in Saint Petersburg, wrote the appropriate inquiries to the chief military prosecutor,
the Saint Petersburg garrison military prosecutor, the Saint Petersburg Military District
Command, and the Chechen military prosecutor posted in Khankala. They also told officials
of the human rights organization Saint Petersburg Soldiers’ Mothers about everything.
And what happened? Nothing! Silence. Danila’s body was brought to Saint Petersburg.
The generals prohibited an independent civil court medical examination, on which Danila’s
family placed their hopes for an explanation of the circumstances surrounding his
death. They did this so that no one could ever say that Danila was shot by “his own.”
On February 22, when Private Vypov’s dead body was brought from the Rostov-on-the-Don
military morgue to the one in Saint Petersburg, I flew by helicopter from the 119th
paratroop regiment in the Vedeno district to the Khankala military base. On the floor
of the helicopter lay the body of yet another young soldier killed in the Chechen
war, wrapped in a camouflage shroud. He was fatally wounded this morning in the regiment
territory, and died a few minutes before the helicopter took off.
The soldier was born in 1982, in Chelyabinsk. Our paths crossed completely by chance.
And it was also by chance that I could see with my own eyes how an FSS officer, together
with the chief of staff of the 119th regiment, shouted at his soldiers, who were bringing
yet another body killed by “gunshot wounds,” to take the bullets out of their automatic
weapons for examination. It always happens that way, when soldiers are suspected of
shooting their own comrade.
I was the only one surprised by this procedure, although there were about twenty officers
standing near me. They seemed used to all this.
Sometimes it happens with the Americans, whom we Russians curse for all we’re worth,
that during their military exercises, a shell falls straight from their plane onto
the territory of their military base. But the whole world shouts about this, and the
generals mourn, and when the U.S. president finds out about the tragedy, he honors
the memory of the killed soldiers and officers with a moment of silence at the first
public opportunity and orders an investigation.
It works differently with us. Soldiers are killed. Bullets shot by their comrades
are taken out of their bodies. What for? So that no one else can see the bullets.
Then the military command hides both the bullets and the body from the relatives,
wishing to bury the soldier secretly, along with the reasons for his death. If people
find out some details later anyway, then it’s purely by accident. In any case, if
the truth seeps out somewhere, nothing follows. Neither headline TV news, nor newspaper
reports, nor investigations. The families are guaranteed a total lack of information.
Society couldn’t care less. The president acts as if nothing had happened—he’s not
the American president, after all—he goes skiing in some nice Siberian village. The
members of the Duma don’t even think of raising their fat behinds out of their cushy
Parliament chairs in memory of yet another soldier killed by his own fellows in Chechnya.
The government doesn’t take off their hats, but simply continues to divide the budget
money among themselves, not the least bit concerned that just one of its monthly infusions
into Chechnya for conducting “war operations” is fully sufficient to restore the ruins
there. The General Staff doctors its weekly data about losses in the North Caucasus
in the usual fashion. Yastrzhembsky travels to the West and talks about the militants’
atrocities . . . A dead end. The nation has completely forgotten how to blush and
experience any kind of discomfort before mothers whose sons have returned from Chechnya
in zinc coffins. They’ve forgotten that such a country is very easy to defeat.
What else can I say? That Russia became Danila Vypov’s second homeland when he was
a child? The boy was born and grew up in Uzbekistan, but his family relocated to their
historical motherland because of the impossibility for Russians to live any longer
in the town of Shirin of the Syrdarin district. Danila grew into a young man in Volgograd,
and was taken to defend his new motherland. And you already know the rest.
It’s Hard to Get Cartridges in Mozhaisk
Unit 63354 Private Alyosha Klenin joined the army in fall 1999. He was one of the
untested soldiers who were the first to go into battle in October, to Dagestan and
Chechnya.
Alyosha was able to write a few pages home from there, and was then “forgotten” by
his trustworthy commanders on a lonely mountain road next to a broken armored vehicle,
with an absolutely predictable result. No one has seen the soldier Klenin since February
2000; he disappeared without a trace.
I have death certificate number 1151 in the name of Aleksei Vladimirovich Klenin.
The date of issuance is September 10, 2001, nineteen months after Alyosha’s grandfather
Vladimir Alekseevich Shurupov, a resident of the Moscow suburban town of Mozhaisk,
began his torturous path through the national bureaucratic hell. All he wanted was
an answer to a simple question: Where was his grandson? The one he sent, alive and
well, to the system that is called the army?
These nineteen months contained everything that you could imagine in the Fatherland.
Tons of letters and complaints to all military and public prosecutor offices, including
general and military offices, and to all conceivable government organizations, right
up to the presidential administration.
The answer was mocking idiocy. It turned out that no one in the whole world noticed the soldier’s disappearance except for his grandfather.
For several months, the military unit regularly received allowances and uniforms for
him, the private’s name remained in the lists, and everything went on as though he
were still in the column for the morning and evening roll calls.
Only after his grandfather’s appeals, reinforced by inspections of the main military
prosecutor’s office and the presidential administration, did the nation’s military
bureaucratic machine, albeit with reluctant screeching, begin to move forward.
The burial of the remains sent to Vladimir Alekseevich Shurupov took place on September
11, on the day of the bombings in America. The corpse wasn’t the one that had already
been shown to him once at the 124th military court medical laboratory in Rostov-on-the-Don,
for identification. Then there had been one bullet hole in the skull; now the grandfather
found two.
“So what did you decide to do? Demand another medical examination?”
“No,” he answered. “What’s the use. I can’t do it, I don’t want to. I buried him as
if it were Alyosha.”
And he cried, quietly, silently, hopelessly.
I often meet loved ones of those who have died in the present Caucasus war—Chechens,
Russians, Ukrainians, soldiers, officers, children, and adults. It’s a whole orphaned
army. They all have identical eyes, like Vladimir Alekseevich’s right now—killed not
just by grief over a loved one who will never return home, but also by an absolute
disbelief that their nation cares about its citizens.
The grandfather continues: “I thought that everything would be done solemnly in the
military fashion. The military committee would send a band, an honor guard company
to fire a salute over the fresh grave. Nothing like that happened. They explained
to me that cartridges and a band were allowed only for officers. Not for privates.”
A Death in the Epoch of War Banditry; or, the Case of Colonel Budanov
All nations that have waged wars stumble painfully over the problem of war crimes
and war criminals. What do you call these people who have been sent by their country
to kill and who have exceeded their authority? Criminals or heroes? And does war justify
everything?
Russia has its own Calley.50 His name is Yury Budanov. He’s a colonel, commander of the 160th tank regiment of
the Ministry of Defense, who holds two Orders for Bravery from the first and second
Chechen wars, a representative of the Russian military elite. In the opinion of most,
he’s a fighter and martyr, persecuted for his “patriotic beliefs.” From the point
of view of a minority in the nation, he’s a murderer, marauder, kidnapper, and rapist.
The trial of Colonel Budanov shook the whole country. It turned out to be a graphic
demonstration of the worst sides of our society, which is radically split by the second
Chechen war. It’s plagued by the unbelievable cynicism and lies of the Putin bureaucracy,
the complete dependence of the court system on the Kremlin, and most important of
all, the striking neo-Soviet renaissance.
Colonel Budanov started fighting shortly after the beginning of the second Chechen
war in September 1999. His regiment was thrown into the heaviest fighting, the storming
of Grozny and Komsomolskoe. During the fierce siege of the village Duba-Yurt, Budanov
lost many of his officers. And in February 2000, when the regiment was redeployed
“for a break” to the edge of the village Tangi-Chu in the Urus-Martan district, the
commander, who had taken these losses very hard, was sent home on leave to his family
in the Baikal region. However, he didn’t stay there for long. His wife found him to
be a changed man, unbearable and even dangerous. He nearly threw his oldest son from
the balcony, thinking that he had caused a bloody scratch on his little sister’s hand.
Only his wife hanging onto him from behind prevented infanticide. Cutting short his
leave, Budanov returned to Chechnya, telling his surprised comrades in arms that “things
were going badly” at home.
March 26, 2000 (the day of Putin’s election victory) was also the second birthday
of the colonel’s favorite daughter, and the commander invited the officers to celebrate
it. Toward evening everyone was rather drunk and eager to let off some steam. First
they decided to shoot at Tangi-Chu with heavy cannons, but the on-duty officer of
the regiment, the commander of the reconnaissance company, Senior Lieutenant Roman
Bagreev, refused to follow a criminal order. For that he was badly beaten up by Budanov,
who, after knocking down the senior lieutenant, kicked his face with his boots. Budanov’s
chief of staff Lieutenant Colonel Ivan Fyodorov also joined in the beating. Then,
at Budanov’s command, they put Bagreev in a pit dug on the regiment base for arrested
Chechens with his hands and feet bound and sprinkled lime on him from above, after
which Fyodorov also urinated on him.
Around midnight, Budanov decided to go to Tangi-Chu. Later, during the interrogation,
he said that he went there “to check information he had on the possible whereabouts
of people who were members of illegal armed units,” and made up a completely cock-and-bull
story about his good friend Major Razmakhnin, supposedly killed by a “female sniper,”
whose picture he kept in his breast pocket. Elsa Kungayeva of Tangi-Chu was supposedly
the one in the picture. So he went there to “arrest” her, to “pass her along to law
enforcement officials.” But no one has seen this picture—neither investigators, nor
anyone in the trial later on. It isn’t in his file.
So why did the drunken Budanov go to the village at night? “For a broad.” That’s how
it’s put, simply. He took military infantry car number 391 and orderlies Grigorev,
Egorov, and Li-en-chou. The four of them drove right up to the Kungayevs’ home. The
day before, an informant had pointed it out to Budanov as a home with a beautiful
woman in it. This informant had kidnapped people for ransom (he has now been convicted
of that). The soldiers grabbed the eighteen-year-old Elsa, the eldest daughter of
the Kungayevs, and wrapped her in a blanket right there in front of her four younger
brothers and sisters. She screamed, but they loaded her into the landing compartment
of the military infantry car, and took her to the regiment. There, they unloaded the
blanket—Elsa’s long hair was dragging along the ground—took her to Budanov’s trailer,
the mobile home where the colonel lived, and put her on the floor. Budanov ordered
them to guard the trailer until he said otherwise. Other soldiers saw all this from
the windows of their neighboring tents. Later, during the investigation, one of them,
Viktor Koltsov, said the following: “On the night of March 26, 2000, I was standing
guard. When we changed shifts and I stopped by my tent, I saw Makarshanov, the stoker
of the chief of staff. He said that ‘the commander brought a girl again.’” It wasn’t
the first time, then?
Then the execution took place. Here is the objective description of it by the military
prosecutors who wrote the indictment: “The girl began to scream, bite, and try to
break loose . . . Budanov began to beat Kungayeva, punching and kicking her face and
other parts of her body many times . . . After dragging her to the far corner of the
trailer, he pushed her onto a bunk and started to strangle her with his right hand.
She put up resistance, and as a result of the struggle, he tore up her clothes. These
intentional actions by Budanov resulted in a broken bone under Kungayeva’s tongue.
She calmed down in about ten minutes; he checked her pulse, and there wasn’t any .
. . Budanov called Grigorev, Egorov, and Li-en-chou. They came in and saw the naked
woman they had brought over in the far corner. Her face was blue. The bedspread they
had wrapped the girl in when they took her from her home was lying on the floor. Her
clothing lay in a pile on this bedspread. Budanov ordered them to take the body to
the forest, in the area of the tank battalion, and secretly bury it . . . ”
The soldiers Igor Grigorev, Artem Li-en-chou, and Aleksandr Egorov of the 160th regiment
were the main witnesses in the Budanov case. They were orderlies of the colonel who
served him, tidied his trailer, and accompanied him. On March 27, at dawn, they fulfilled
this command too. They buried poor Elsa’s body, which had been ripped to shreds, carefully
covering the grave with sod. In summer 2000, the military prosecutor would make the
decision to acquit these three soldiers as participants in a murder and kidnapping
in exchange for evidence against themselves and therefore “in favor of ” Budanov on
the crucial question: “Was there a rape?” This case is muddled and in part illogical.
The officers serving in Chechnya, from the highest to the lowest, supported Budanov
en masse, but with the following reservation, which I heard several times in Chechnya:
“That he killed her, we understand . . . She was a Chechen, which means a militant
. . . But why would he ‘dirty himself,’ rape her?” Budanov understood these attitudes
very well. Throughout the entire inquiry, Budanov, wishing to “save face,” would categorically
deny that it was he who dishonored the girl before he killed her. However, here’s
where things get difficult. In the criminal case, the report of the very first medical
exam done after the opening of the secret grave showed all the signs of rape, either
immediately before or right after the girl’s death. Therefore, it wasn’t clear what
would be “better” for the officer’s image: to be a rapist or a necrophiliac.
Thus both Budanov and the investigators needed evidence that could make two parallel
lines meet. And then, one of the soldiers, Egorov, told the investigator that it was
he who raped the Chechen before burying her, committing the outrage with “the handle
of a sapper shovel” that he used later to dig the pit for the body. He was given amnesty
for this. And it went on this way for two years. But by May 2002, several nuances
of the political process (Putin’s friends in the international antiterrorist alliance
started pressuring him about the unrestrained, lawless officers in Chechnya), as well
as previous serious mistakes Putin’s circle made trying to clear Budanov suddenly
came out into the open. This happened when a very talented twenty-eight-year-old Moscow
lawyer named Stanislav Markelov, who tried the first cases in Russia on terrorism
and political extremism, joined the proceedings. As a result, the military circuit
court of the North Caucasus military district, presided over by the judge Viktor Kostin,
switched sides completely, and decided to probe into details that it had not allowed
itself to look into before. And then Egorov, who had returned home to the Irkutsk
region long ago, couldn’t stand it any longer. He was a man, not a machine, and he
tormented himself over his lie, and everything he had seen in Chechnya as an eighteen-or
nineteen-year-old. In June 2002, he publicly stated that he did not rape the girl
with the sapper shovel, and that he had given that evidence under pressure. And if
that is the case, then the rapist is an elite officer of the Russian army, crowned
with glory and the most prestigious awards of his country.
However, back to March 27, 2000. The most surprising aspect of the Budanov case is
that they even decided to arrest him. There are many such stories in the second Chechen
war, but very few arrested officers. And Budanov would have come out smelling like
a rose if it hadn’t been for the absence from Chechnya on March 27 of his immediate
supervisor, General Vladimir Shamanov, one of the toughest, cruelest commanders of
the second Chechen war, who led the “Western” group of armies. According to army
regulations, only a higher commander can give (or deny, if he chooses) permission
for one of his officers to be arrested or for a military prosecutor to work on his
base. On March 27, Shamanov, Budanov’s friend and comrade in arms, was on leave, and
his duties were being performed by Valery Gerasimov, a man who had managed to behave
in a manner befitting an officer even under the circumstances of the second Chechen
war. When the events from the previous night were reported to him, the general himself
went to the regiment, let the officials from the prosecutor’s office enter the base,
and allowed Budanov to be arrested. Budanov tried to put up an armed resistance, but
then shot himself in the foot and gave in. One of the investigators, Captain Aleksei
Simukhin, who accompanied the arrested Budanov on his flight to the main military
headquarters in Khankala, said that during the flight, the colonel kept asking him
what he should do and say.
On March 28, Elsa Kungayeva’s body was dug up, washed, and given back to her family.
Budanov was already in jail. Soon a team of psychiatric experts pronounced him mentally
competent and therefore subject to criminal investigation.
Then the whitewashing started. That’s how the Kremlin wanted it. They realized that
the “dictatorship of law” went too far in this case, and that if they didn’t stop
it, society would find out the truth about the war.
They decided to take the old, tried and true path of Soviet times. A second psychiatric
examination was assigned for the colonel in the Serbsky Institute of Forensic Psychiatry
in Moscow, infamous for its activity—fulfilling KGB orders—during the time of the
struggle with dissidents. The chair of the Budanov commission was Tamara Pavlovna
Pechernikova, a psychiatry professor with fifty-two years of experience. She was the
one who signed the schizophrenic sentences for the most famous Soviet dissidents from
the 1960s to the 1980s. These included people like Natalya Gorbanevskaya, the founder
and first editor of the samizdat bulletin of human rights advocates Chronicle of Current Events, who wound up in a psychiatric prison for forced treatment from 1969 to 1972 following
Pechernikova’s diagnosis. She emigrated in 1975. Vyacheslav Igrunov was pronounced
“mentally unsound” by Pechernikova and spent many years in forced treatment for distributing
The Gulag Archipelago. He’s been a deputy of the Duma for many years now, an associate of Grigory Yavlinsky’s
Apple Party, and director of the International Institute for Humanitarian Political
Research. In addition, Pechernikova is fondly remembered by Vladimir Bukovsky, one
of the most well-known Soviet dissidents, a political prisoner, journalist, writer,
with a doctorate in biology. From 1963 to 1976, he found himself intermittently confined
in prisons, camps, and special psychiatric hospitals for publishing documents with
facts about “the activities of Pechernikova”—her misuse of psychiatry for political
purposes—in the West. He was exchanged in 1976 for Luis Corvalán, the leader of the
Chilean communists, and now lives in Great Britain. Pechernikova also testified for
the prosecution (the KGB) in the trial against Aleksandr Ginzburg, a journalist and
a member of the Moscow-Helsinki group, publisher of the samizdat poetry anthology
Sintaksis, and the first director of the Public Foundation for the Support of Political Prisoners
in the USSR and Their Families, set up by Solzhenitsyn with an honorarium from the
publication of The Gulag Archipelago. He was given four terms for dissident activity, and in 1979 was exiled from the USSR
in exchange for Soviet spies. He died in July 2002, in France.
And so today, as in the past, the commission under Pechernikova’s leadership pronounced
Budanov not responsible for his actions. And only for the moment of his perpetration
of the crimes, which means he couldn’t be punished for them. However, he was declared
fully competent before and after it, which means that he has the right to return to
military service. Of course, this was the only way to clear Budanov, and the government
(the president, his administration, and the Ministry of Defense took interest in the
trial) made full use of it.
However, this called forth a wave of public outrage, at least in Moscow and the European
capitals. It became obvious that the repressive Soviet KGB psychiatric system had
been retained and successfully adapted for democratic service. How could this be?
Questions rained down on Putin. France and the German Bundestag were especially insistent.
Was Pechernikova’s appearance in the case of Budanov really by chance so many years
after the fall of the communist system?
Then, the court in Rostov-on-the-Don, which seemed about to conclude with a not guilty
verdict, suddenly fully altered the course of the choreographed trial in July 2002,
at the Kremlin’s orders. It canceled the reading of the sentence, expressed doubts
about the veracity of Pechernikova’s psychiatric report, ordered another, and left
Budanov in custody.
The fact that Budanov is still not free is the most important event of our times.
First, it is important for the army itself, which has clearly turned into a politically
repressive institution in Chechnya. The army was waiting to see whether a precedent
would be set in the trial at Rostov-on-the-Don. That is, “Could we do what Budanov
did?” At the end of May 2002 (right when the report acquitting the colonel was made
public), there was another series of kidnappings of young women followed by murder
in the zone of the antiterrorist operation. At dawn of May 22 in Argun, for example,
Svetlana Mudarova, a twenty-six-year-old teacher of the lower grades whom the soldiers
found good-looking, was taken from her home at 125 Shalinskaya Street. Like Elsa Kungayeva,
Budanov’s victim, she was stuffed into an armored vehicle in her robe and slippers.
For two days, the soldiers did everything they could to hide the place where they
were holding the kidnapped teacher. On May 31, her disfigured corpse was thrown into
the ruins of an Argun house.
Second, it is also crucial for the people of Chechnya, who eagerly await the outcome
of the Budanov case. If the colonel wins, and not justice, it means that there is
no hope that Chechnya will ever become a territory where Russian laws operate. It
will remain a land under the heel of bandits.