Arriving in Kazan in November 1995, Gary and I decided to make the war our topic. Not only was Kazan as geographically close to Chechnya as we’d get, but it was the capital of the Tatarstan republic, which—like Chechnya—had a majority Muslim population. And though the war wasn’t specifically about religious differences, the fact that Chechens were Muslim did figure into the conflict.
As soon as we arrived, I began making calls to Russian army offices, hoping to find a returning soldier to interview. Not surprisingly, I was stymied: no one would talk to me, and when I left messages, no one returned my calls. Gary and I even showed up at one office in person, but we were shooed away without help or comment.
Frustrated, we turned to local journalists for help. One young reporter from Izvestia Tatarstana (News of Tatarstan) flipped endlessly through her Rolodex, making calls—and being rebuffed—on our behalf. She then recommended another journalist, Vladimir Muzychenko, who worked across the hall at Vechernyaya Kazan (Evening Kazan). We dropped by his office to find a stocky man in mended wool pants and a stained sweatshirt, his desk piled high with papers. “Call me Bob,” he barked, as he stuck out a beefy hand. “What do you need? I’ll take care of it.”
He began working the phone, shouting rapid-fire questions into the receiver, but even he couldn’t find anyone willing to meet with us. Then, he pulled a piece of paper from the teetering stack on his desk.
“This is a list of families of soldiers killed in Chechnya,” he said, then jabbed his finger at a name. “Here, go talk to this woman. She can introduce you to other soldiers who served with her son.” This seemed like a terrible idea, asking a grieving mother to introduce us to her dead son’s comrades, and it got worse when he told us the woman didn’t have a phone. “Just go to her apartment,” he said. “Here, take my card. You’ll be fine.”
With profound reluctance, Gary and I caught a taxi to a nondescript apartment block on the outskirts of the city. It took a while to find the right place, and then a stout, tired-looking woman answered the door. She eyed us warily, but when I handed her Vladimir’s card, she invited us in. As we walked into the living room, I noticed a framed photo of a good-looking young soldier, a black stripe superimposed across one shoulder.
The woman, Natalya, told us that this was her son Zhenya, who’d been killed in Chechnya ten months earlier. Her husband—Zhenya’s stepfather, Vladimir—was home as well, and the two of them told us the story.
Born in 1975, Zhenya was a friendly, chubby-cheeked boy with big brown eyes and dark, curly hair. “He looked like a little gypsy boy,” Natalya told us. “He always loved to be the center of attention, to be on stage.” During his school years, he performed in plays and talent shows, and he taught himself how to play guitar, piano, and drums. Eventually, he began writing his own music. His younger brother, Denis, idolized him.
After high school, Zhenya enrolled in Kazan’s Chemical-Technical Institute, where he started a band. He met and fell in love with a fellow student, Natasha K., and within months they were engaged. Surrounded by friends, his trusty guitar always within reach, the outgoing young musician was the life of the party. Then, in January 1994, 18-year-old Zhenya was drafted. The laws of conscription hadn’t changed since the Soviet era, and young men who were drafted typically served two years of service, usually in a location far from their hometowns.
Zhenya was sent to Volgograd, which, considering Russia’s vastness, was a relatively close posting—just 30 hours away by train. “We were so happy to have him close by,” his mother told me. “We couldn’t believe how lucky we were that he hadn’t been sent off to Arkhangelsk or some other faraway northern place.”
After serving almost a year in Volgograd, Zhenya came home on leave in October 1994. He was a proud, clean-cut soldier now, eager to see his family and fiancée. He didn’t tell Natasha K. he was coming, but instead showed up in his army uniform at the Institute, where she still was a student. Like in a scene from a film, he came and swept her off her feet, to the delight of students and teachers.
Two nights after his return, Zhenya and his buddies gathered at the Institute for a party. His mother showed us a video taken that evening, showing a slightly drunk, very happy Zhenya cutting up with friends and playing the piano. About halfway through the video, he turns from the piano to look directly at the camera, which zooms in on his young, handsome face; as we watched, it was difficult to believe that the man in the flickering image no longer existed anywhere but in memory.
On November 7—a month before the war began—Zhenya’s family and friends took him to the Kazan railway station for the train back to Volgograd. “Zhenya promised to try to get back for New Year’s,” his mother told me. “He thought he’d be able to get leave somehow. And even if he couldn’t, his army discharge was scheduled for May, which didn’t seem that far off.” She sent him off with a hug and a smile, a fact that now haunted her.
“I never dreamed when we went to the station that day that that would be the last time I ever saw my son,” she said as tears streamed down her face. “We saw him off that day just as though we’d be seeing him in a few weeks.”
Zhenya was sent to Chechnya the first week of December, though in a letter home, he lied so his mother wouldn’t worry. “Hello from Volgograd!” he wrote:
Everything here is fine so far, I’m alive and well, and miss you. They’ve begun to give us a little bit of compensation, and now on December 12, the “100 days” starts—100 days until discharge…
After being home on leave, I am really sick of the army. The monotony really gets on my nerves… We’re now doing technical and weapon preparation for training in shooting, and after the New Year we may go on a training mission, I’m not sure for how long…
On December 11, three days after Zhenya posted this letter, Russian troops launched their assault on Grozny. For two days, the Russian government pretended nothing was happening, but on December 13, President Yeltsin officially acknowledged the fighting. Natalya still didn’t know her son was in Chechnya, but she feared that was where he’d end up. “Calm, peaceful life ended for us on December 13,” she told me. “We watched the television news every night, trying to get some information about what was going on there. I just had a bad feeling after the fighting began.”
Two weeks later, the mother of another soldier called Natalya with the frightening news that her son, who’d been serving with Zhenya in Volgograd, had been wounded while fighting in Chechnya. He was recuperating in an army hospital outside Moscow, and she was traveling there to see him. “She promised to call and let me know if she found Zhenya in the hospital too,” Natalya told me.
But Zhenya wasn’t in Moscow; he was still in the mountains outside Grozny. In late December, he wrote a letter to Natasha K. revealing his location and describing the horrors of combat:
I have been in the mountains 12 kilometers from Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, for three weeks already… I’m not going to write to my parents, as I can only imagine what would happen if they knew.
I’ve been through four battles, and the scene is terrible. We’ve had 16 wounded and 4 killed. One officer had his leg blown off… We wear our bulletproof jackets and keep our machine guns close even when we sleep, because at any moment there could be “jazz”—an attack…