7 October 1999
They are a charming, ordinary couple, who should be enjoying the best years of their life. A fiancé and his betrothed. He gently brushes something from her hair, she softly strokes his hand. They're no different from a thousand others: Romeo and Juliet, Natasha and Seryozha, Arslan and . . .
"No, please don't put her name in your paper. They might arrest her as well, because she's connected with me."
Arslan is a Chechen who found love in the Moscow of 1999. Today this is much the same as being a Jew in Germany sometime after 1933 or in German-occupied Minsk or Kiev after 1941. His Muscovite fiancée in Yeltsin's declining year in power has to hide Arslan from the Moscow police, just as simple Russian women once concealed their Jewish neighbours from the Gestapo. Encouraged from above, a pogrom against anyone from the Caucasus is under way in Moscow. But sooner or later you have to leave the apartment, even when they are hunting down people. For instance, to renew your residence permit.
Arslan Gatiev, 28, was born in the Daghestan village of Osman-Yurt. Nothing helped in this case. Not the fact that he had come to Moscow long ago and, as a teenager, was given a quite official passport18 at police station No in; nor that he answered his call-up papers and, after serving two years in the army, has been working in Moscow for the last eight years.19
On 16 September Arslan and his fiancée collected together all the papers required for the re-registration imposed by Mayor Luzhkov three days earlier on those without permanent right of residence, and went to the police station at 10 Samarkand Street. There they reported to the local policeman, a certain Nechaev. They spent the entire working day standing in the queue, because there were hundreds of others who wanted to keep on the right side of the law enforcement agencies.
17 September, the same story. On 18 September it was finally their turn and Nechaev met the young lovers. After looking at their papers he said: "You're a Chechen, you must go to Room 4. I'll take you there myself . . ." His fiancée asked if she could accompany them. "There's no place for you there," joked the policeman.
Another policeman was also in the room, inspecting docaments at the same time. "You can expect to see him again in two or three months," he added. She was panic-stricken.
Meanwhile Arslan was already on his way to "the centre", the Vykhino police station on Sormovskaya Street. "I've brought in a Chechen," said Nechaev, following Arslan into the room where the plain-clothes men were sitting.
They came to life. Arslan was made to sit on a chair that was evidently waiting for people like him. The scenario was carefully thought out. The entire room remains behind the person on the chair. Some time passes, and the sounds of preparation are heard – one of them plays with a pair of handcuffs, the policemen laugh a little – then, suddenly, someone jerks the end of Arslan's coat: "Why are you slumping like that? Sit up! Hands on your knees!"
At that moment two witnesses are brought into the room. Alcoholics, detained for some formal infringement of the laws. The policemen make Arslan stand and they turn out his pockets. Heroin: 0.03 grams. Article 228:I. Case No 0504. Temporary detention centre.
"But why heroin?" Arslan demanded, "I won't sign a thing!"
"All right, don't sign," came the reply. "We have a slogan now: 'Chechnya for the Chechens.' Go back to your own country."
"But I was born in Daghestan!"
"So?"
There were only Chechens and Ingush in the cell at the detention centre. They had each been picked up in the same way. All were charged under Article 228 after coming of their own free will to re-register. Then they were escorted here, to be fixed up with a dose of heroin. Those in the cell felt genuinely sorry for one lad: there was not enough heroin left to plant on him, so they put an explosive charge in his pocket and now he stood accused of terrorism.
What next?
A constant turnover. More were brought in, others were taken away. They all remained in prison, none were granted bail. First, the plain-clothes men beat people until they offered a "sincere confession" and "declined the services of a lawyer". Then those same policemen and interrogators reassured them: "Don't worry, it'll only be for six months; while we're at war with Chechnya, we must put you all in prison."
It was Arslan's misfortune to rebel against this smoothly run system for reclassifying all Chechens as criminals. He would not sign anything. He demanded to see a lawyer.
Meanwhile his fiancée was doing exactly the same. She demanded to see both the Head of Investigations at the Vykhino police department and the district prosecutor and she asked for an explanation. As she discovered, no one even pretended to look through the case file of these "Chechen heroin addicts". If someone was Chechen his place was in prison. But she would not accept the system and day after day waited outside their offices. In the end they saw her.
The defenders of law and order became very indignant when they found out that Arslan's fiancée had agreed bail for her future husband. At midday on 23 September Arslan was pushed out of his cell without a single document and ordered to walk straight ahead: "Your lawyer is waiting round the corner and he has all your papers." A baffled Arslan tried to understand what was going on and stopped in front of the entrance to the police station. The next thing he knew, a six-foot bystander had grabbed him and tied his hands. A minute later he was back in the cell. After some time he was given a deposition to sign. It said that he had "attacked" someone and "used obscene language". In other words, that six-foot giant was his victim.
"Tomorrow you'll be in court on a charge of delinquency."
Arslan spent the night of 23 September in the same cell, but now the charge was different. His cellmates explained that this was "politeness training". The prisoner is worn down by repeated accusations of "crimes" fabricated by the police and is never released in between.
The next morning the case was heard. After Judge Vladimir Shumskoi of the Kuzminki district court had read through the formal complaint compiled by Arslan with the help of his lawyer, he said: "This is much too serious a matter. I'll fine you 20 roubles and I don't want to hear anything more about your affairs . . ." Arslan was released in the court-room after he formally agreed not to leave Moscow and was ordered to wait for a summons to appear in court again.
Today Arslan and his fiancée sit before me at our newspaper offices and ask: "What can we do now?"
His fiancée keeps running her hands over his pockets. She sewed them up so that no one can slip anything into them when they have to go out on the street again, for instance after leaving our offices.
"What do you think?" I ask them. "What are the police up to?"
"They told me themselves," replies Arslan, "the Chechens are being labelled a nation of criminals."20
What is the thinking behind this? Putin can now tell the country that the proportion of Chechens involved in crime has been rising sharply, but their activities are being just as rapidly exposed and frustrated by the police and security services. We'll expose and imprison them and everyone will start living much better. Then we'll elect those who promised that this would happen.
It is the madness of racial discrimination.
The theory of the criminal nation was particularly fashionable in Nazi Germany. Then they targeted the Jews and Gypsies. Filtration and concentration camps were opened for them everywhere, and they were also confined to ghettos. There seems little to choose between that and what is now going on in Moscow with our mute (or in some cases vociferous) participation. Shall we be forced to admit to our children and grandchildren that we aided this fascism, and did nothing to prevent it happening?
One other parallel. The tragic terrorist bombings in Moscow, Volgodonsk, and Buinaksk, are far too rapidly coming to resemble another distant event: the burning of the Reichstag.
"When we're together it's not so frightening," say Arslan and his fiancée, and they go back out into the city that they once had thought their own.
MOSCOW