27 July 2000
The Courtyard
Klavdia Anufriyeva, 73, is blind and lives in apartment 85 at house No 46 on International Street. She has not washed for a long time, and her hair is uncombed. Today is a happy day for her, she tells me: there were two pieces of bread for lunch.
"But where do they take you to wash?"
The old woman does not want to say that she is not taken anywhere to wash. And the toilet is out among the anti-personnel mines. Going there several times a day is like playing Russian roulette.
"Why don't your relatives come and get you? Where are they?"
Klavdia tries from memory to repeat the Moscow telephone number of her one and only son who, it turns out, is in charge of the fire brigade at Mytishchi near the capital: "But you must say that everything is fine."
"I'll tell him what I saw."
"Not under any circumstances! He'll be upset. And he's a very important man, always at work and that's why he can't come to get me."
Klavdia Anufriyeva's fate is typical of Grozny today. Tens of thousands remain here because no one has come to take them away or even invited them to leave. Our old woman is living on what is a most typical courtyard in contemporary Grozny. (Just round the corner is Minutka, the city's famous central square. These days it's like a firing range.) In the courtyard they let down a bucket on a rope through an inspection cover into a hole where everything liquid gathers in such a heat wave, and they use what they find there as water.
In the middle of their courtyard is an enormous pit. It appeared several days back when unknown people dug up a body there. Now the children swarm at the edge of the open grave. For them it's like a sandpit. They make pies there and their parents are not shocked.
Unexpectedly Klavdia turns harshly: "O do shut up, Volodya! I'm fed up with your whining."
Vladimir Smola, a tiny dried-out figure on stiff reedy legs, stands on top of a pile of rubble. Above him the sky and under him, his mother. Seven months ago that heap of bricks was apartment 24, his apartment. "Don't shoot!" he yells. "I'm 51, I want to live!" He looks up into the sky above Grozny and just as we might wave away persistent flies from a pot of jam he tries to bat aside the military helicopters flying overhead. Back and forth energetically, left to right. . .
Mad? Yes, Vladimir no longer remembers that helicopters are not flies. He used to be an electrician. He gradually went out of his mind, beginning on 15 January 2000 when the third staircase on which he lived was directly hit. He survived, but his mother and two of her old women friends were buried in the rubble. Since then Volodya has lived on this common grave.
At first he searched everywhere for an excavator to dig them out. Then he went mad.
"Don't get the wrong idea, before this war our Volodya was quite normal." Maryam Barzayeva from 55 Lenin Street, is talking. "Let's go and pay our respects to Auntie Amina, Auntie Katya and Auntie Rosa."
We set off and behind us runs a crowd of the local children. They listen to this talk about graves and dead people and do not show any reaction at all, as if it were normal that the corpses of three old women lie only a short distance away and no one has dug them out; with the temperature around 50°C the smell is predictable. The children whisper to one another: "Go and call Yura."
Here he is. Yury Kozerodov. Swollen from hunger, his age is uncertain and if he did not carry his passport opened in front of him (as everyone who wants to stay alive here has learned to do) you could not tell his sex. In order not to go mad at the beginning of the siege of Grozny Yura thought up the fairy tale that he was guarding the city's MacDonald's.
"Where is it then," I ask, "the MacDonald's?" It's hard to imagine that this ploughed-up corner of the earth has room for a fancy fast-food outlet.
"Over there," Yury points at a door. He didn't even go down in the basement but remained guarding the door he had chosen. It is still intact, but leads nowhere. Yura, though, is now just another crazy person in the courtyard.
"Yura was quite normal before the war. He was a very good man. But it was hell here," explains Zinaida Mingabiyeva. She was once an "Honoured Stockbreeder" in the USSR and lives in the same courtyard. Zina is convinced that her mind, at least, has not been affected at all by the war, but three times she repeats exactly the same story: what records of milking production she achieved at the collective farm and how many times they sent her abroad to learn from the experience of milkmaids in the GDR, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. "I grew to hate eating meat then. Now I don't remember when I last ate some meat. How I want to eat, all the time."
I turn to Yury Kozerodov. "Yura, do you have any relations?"
"Near Tikhoretsk, but they call me a 'Russian Chechen' and don't want to take me in."
"And you, Volodya?"
"Near Smolensk, but they won't take me either."
"What about you Zina?"
"I'm even less welcome."
That's just one courtyard in Grozny. I picked it at random, by chance. It was to ensure that this courtyard lived in peace that they began the "anti-terrorist operation".
The Factory
Before the [1994–6] war there were 34 large industrial enterprises in Grozny. Some of them were working very well and employed thousands of people. What's happened to all that activity today? Where are the workers?
"I want to make steel, like I've been doing for the last 25 years. Tell that to Moscow. I'm no bandit. There's nothing I want apart from to make steel again, and then go home, tired after a day's work."
Said Magomedov heads the trade union committee at the machine-building plant, Red Hammer, one of those 34 enterprises I mentioned, none of which is now operational. Red Hammer was a State-owned enterprise, so it still exists only because the workers have taken the initiative and are determined to preserve it whatever happens.
Today Said is on duty at the plant. With him are two cheerful old men, Medi Saidayev and Selimon Tokaev, respectively a turner and a milling-machine operator. Each has worked for more than 50 years at Red Hammer.
"Lady!" asks 70-year-old Medi flirtatiously, tipping his pale blue skull-cap at a jaunty angle, "what is an honest Chechen to do? There's no one in charge, apart from the thieves, that is. So we're on guard here. Ourselves."
Said shows me the duty rota. Since 3 April this year, 80 of the 5,000 formerly employed here take it in turns each day to protect the plant from looters. Until last summer its eleven workshops were turning out heavy equipment for the oil industry. On Stakhanovites' Street in the Lenin district where Red Hammer is located, the fighters came on I November and the workers dispersed to their basements. Then, for several months, the military bombarded the workshops with predictable results.
"Has anyone in authority talked about the prospects for getting the plant working again?" I ask.
"No, of course not. No one shows the slightest interest." Said becomes exasperated. "The plant belongs to Moscow, but they've not shown their noses round here. We demanded to know, 'Tell us, is it yes or no?' Hopeless. No reaction. Up there they're only concerned about who gets into power and controls the money for rebuilding the country. But we want to have a clear idea what's happening in the near future. So far it's our impression that the authorities don't realise that without jobs there's no way of saving Chechnya. The plant must work and that will be the best cure for banditry."
Said likes to speak his mind and find out the truth. But is there anyone today who still believes that what has happened here has done anything to stop the bandits? Strolling through Grozny quickly convinces you of the contrary: everything is being done to make the bandits feel at home and make life unbearable for everyone else.
Said strides along like a real worker, proud, strong, at ease – just the way workers were shown in Soviet films about the proletariat. Each morning he walks round the remains of the eleven workshops. But before anything else he visits his own steel-making shop at the heart of the plant.
"Look at this and remember it all your life." If Said knew how to cry he'd probably howl. "There was kilometre after kilometre of industrial estate here, packed with equipment. Dynasties of workers who won medals and decorations; it was all alive. Now, there's nothing. We're digging out the ruins by hand and making an inventory of all that's survived."
"What for? Did someone ask you to do that?"
"No. We know it should be done."
And this is also typical of Grozny today. Nothing now is being rebuilt in the city. Absolutely nothing. It is a silent ruin. All that talk in Moscow about restoration work and rebuilding is no more than an extravagant PR exercise, put on for the rest of the country. No one here has seen it. "Work is proceeding," the TV assures us, but there is no work. Or only to the extent that a TV report requires, in order to convince the "necessary people" in Moscow that "everything is in hand".
Do you remember at Easter they showed us the generals standing in front of the Orthodox church in Grozny, which "had been restored in record time"? If you could only see that church today. All the "repair work" stopped as soon as the cameras turned away And if, driving past the endless ruins of the city, you were not told, "There's that church the generals promised to rebuild," then you would not even realise it was a church building. And do you remember those stirring images on 9 May when a Victory Day parade was organised in the Grozny sports stadium? The rest of the country was told: "The stadium has been restored." The stands were full of invited spectators. Hoorah!
Now here they are, those same stands. And here we are with Mohammed Khambiev, a former construction-site foreman who, like everyone else, has to beg in the city to survive.
"We were all herded in here the day before and they said, 'If you work, you'll be paid. Start with the stands,' they ordered us. Then we put some paint on the main building. The TV cameras came and they filmed. The day after the parade everything went into reverse. The builders came to the stadium, expecting the work to continue, but no one was interested any more. The military didn't show up. Work stopped. With only a few days notice we had been asked to work round the clock and afterwards they didn't pay us one rouble."
It's hard to conceive today that the stadium was recently repaired. It looks more like it was plundered. After the parade, those inhabitants of Grozny who are trying to rebuild their homes before winter, without any assistance from outside, came in and took what they could for building materials. Foreman Mohammed is one of them. There are nuts, hinges, bolts and other fixtures in his bucket. First he screwed them in and now he has ripped them out. Do as you have been done by.
The Hospital
Nothing can compare, however, with the powerful PR surrounding City Hospital No 9 in Grozny. Every leading official of the health service has given numerous press conferences about the hospital's restoration after the storming of Grozny and the provision of the very latest in medical equipment.
Hospital No 9 is the only accident and emergency hospital in Grozny. You come here to be saved or to die. All emergencies end up here, from appendicitis to a stab-wound in the chest. Most of its patients, though, are people wounded by mines. Not a day passes without an amputation, because the main scourge of the city are the anti-personnel mines that were scattered everywhere and today turn up in places where they were not to be found yesterday. During June there were 41 amputations, not counting the patients who did not survive. Ilyas Talkhadov in Ward 3 was blown up on a route he had safely used the day before, driving to collect hay from the "60th October Revolution Anniversary" collective farm. The six neighbours travelling with him were torn apart. Both Ilyas' legs are broken and his hip joints were smashed to pieces. The only hope for him is Hospital No 9. However, there is nothing here today apart from healing hands and souls. Nothing that could distinguish a hospital of the early twenty-first century from a rural dispensary of one hundred years ago. The only modern equipment is an X-ray machine that works one day in two because the electric current is unreliable and the machine itself is old.
A diesel engine roars fiercely outside the office window. The military donated it so that the hospital could occasionally have some electric light. Abdul Ismailov, deputy chief surgeon of the hospital, explains why the engine has just started: the relatives of a patient have finally found some fuel and the doctors have begun to operate.
Another way of operating is described by Salman Yandarov, a middle-aged and highly qualified specialist. Today he is the chief traumatologist and orthopaedic surgeon of the Chechen Republic, having recently returned, after appeals from his colleagues, from St Petersburg where he had everything: a professorship, students, respect and a very good position in a famous clinic (not to mention a salary).
'This is my native country, so I gave up everything. But what can I offer people who are blown up by mines every day? The hospital is not functioning, it simply exists," he says. "For instance they often bring in someone who has lost both legs and needs urgent amputation if they're not to die. I carry in the battery from my car, connect it to the X-ray machine and take an X-ray. Only then do we operate. When the relatives don't have any money to buy diesel I again go and get my battery, rig it up to my car-lamp and operate. It's shameful . . ."
"But they've surely been bringing you some equipment from Moscow?"
"Yes," replies the doctor, who has the hands of a pianist and the manners of a gentleman. "They donated three operating tables. I can tell you, they are so out of date that no self-respecting hospital in Russia would accept them today."
To begin with I thought how senseless everything happening here was. If you look at it from the State's point of view, why scatter a vast number of mines around the city and receive in return an astronomic growth in the number of disabled people, who require tons of medicine, artificial limbs and so on? And then scatter more mines. And again ferry in medicine, etc. Now it's clear what the State is up to. Its concern for the situation is purely virtual; the only reality is the scattering of mines. No matter how much we want to believe the reverse, or attribute everything to our chronic disorder or thieving, the reality is that the inhabitants of Grozny have been sentenced to this fate. Evidently, the ultimate aim is to ensure that as many people in the city as possible are either left without legs – or dead. Perhaps this is a new stage in the "anti-terrorist operation", an unhurried punitive mission directed against one ethnic community, which now requires hardly any more ammunition, just the patience to wait for the inevitable outcome.
It all fits together. Why bother to rebuild if there is no fundamental need to rebuild? Why feed people if there is no fundamental reason for them to be fed? The only working excavators in the city I was able to find were those digging out deeper trenches around the army posts.
GROZNY–MOSCOW