This letter is going with the first delivery out of here, and I don’t know if it will get to you or not, since we’ve been surrounded for two days. The worst of all is when they start to shoot, they even shoot innocent people… The Chechens have hired Turkish fighters, who are professionals at this. We shot at them the night before last, there’s about 40 of them hidden behind a ravine… They usually attack at night, which is convenient for them as they know the mountains well.
Two days later, on December 31, 1994, chaos erupted in the mountains. Soldiers were given vodka to celebrate Defense Minister Pavel Grachev’s birthday, and a savage battle soon broke out between the Russian and Chechen forces. The details are murky, but sometime that night, Zhenya met a brutal death: the headless body of the young soldier had to be identified by the tattoos on his hands and an existing scar on his chest.
From the moment she’d heard from the other soldier’s mother, Natalya had been calling army services several times a day to ask if Zhenya was on the lists of those wounded, captured, or killed in Chechnya. Every day for more than two weeks, she was told he was not. Then, on the afternoon of January 13, she got a call at work.
“Come to the Military Commissar’s office,” said a voice. “We have news for you.” It was what they’d been dreading. “Your son’s body will arrive by train at four thirty tomorrow morning,” an official informed them. “Go home and prepare to receive his coffin.” In shock, the couple did as they were told, going home and covering the mirrors according to Russian Orthodox tradition. Realizing she didn’t have a formal photo of Zhenya in his army uniform, Natalya arranged for a photography shop to superimpose a photo of her son’s face onto the body of another soldier. This was the photo now displayed in their living room.
The following morning, the coffin bearing Zhenya’s body arrived at the train station. “I waited at home for my husband and his friends to bring it back here,” said Natalya. “The whole time, I kept thinking, ‘Maybe there’s been a mistake. Maybe they’ll get there and find out he’s still alive.’ But of course, it wasn’t a mistake.”
Every other day in summer, and once a week when it became cold, Natalya went to the cemetery. On our last afternoon in Kazan, Gary and I went with her. We rode the bus for three stops, then made the long walk across a grassy slope toward the cemetery, where Zhenya’s grave was marked off by a wrought-iron fence decorated with lyres. The granite tombstone bore an engraved image of Zhenya’s face, his guitar, and two roses. We watched as Natalya straightened the flowers she’d left earlier in the week, muttering to herself, “How could I have known, when we went to the train station a year ago…?”
Although Natalya had at first welcomed us only reluctantly, by the end of our visit, she seemed proud we were doing a story about her son. She wanted people to know what a good person he’d been, and how utterly senseless the war in Chechnya was. “For this stupidity my son died,” she said, practically spitting out the words. “It’s all the worse that his death was for nothing at all. For nothing.”
Ten years later, David and I arrived in Kazan on a blindingly sunny Saturday afternoon. Before setting out to find Natalya, we decided to take a stroll around the city.
Standing at the confluence of the Volga and Kazanka rivers, some 500 miles from Moscow, Kazan is a fascinating blend of East and West—a riot of churches and mosques, markets and parks, Tatar restaurants and Russian cafés. With just over a million people, it’s Russia’s eighth-largest city, and it has a cosmopolitan, eclectic vibe that belies a bloody history of fighting among Mongols, Tatars, Bulgars, and Russians.
Kazan’s most striking architectural feature is its massive white kremlin, a sixteenth-century walled fortress perched atop a steep, grassy hill. With its stately towers, gates, and cathedrals, the kremlin is spectacular from any angle, and the main gate boasts a stirring statue of Tatar poet Musa Dzhalil struggling to break free from barbed wire. Gary and I had walked around the kremlin in 1995, but when David and I arrived in 2005, I was surprised to discover a new structure there.
Towering above the kremlin walls were the turquoise domes and minarets of the Kul Sharif Mosque, one of the largest in all of Europe. The scale is eye-popping, with minarets rising 180 feet into the sky and a gleaming 128-foot-tall cupola. The vast prayer hall can accommodate 1,500 people for prayers, while another 9,000 can fit into the adjacent square. Tourists flocked to the mosque, where they gazed in wonder at its ornate tile work, massive chandeliers, marble floors, and stained-glass windows.
It was odd to see a mosque inside a classic Russian kremlin, but the location was historic: Kul Sharif was built on the same spot as an earlier mosque that was destroyed in 1552, when Ivan the Terrible’s armies stormed across the region slaughtering Muslims in an attempt to spread Russian Orthodoxy. Four and a half centuries after the massacre, the Russian and Tatar governments combined forces—with financial help from oil companies and private donors—to re-create the largest and most beautiful of the mosques that had been destroyed.
I couldn’t help but wonder how it was that Muslim Tatars now had such good relations with Russians, while Chechens and Russians were still at each other’s throats. Both groups were predominantly Sunni, and both had historically suffered slaughter and pillage at Russian hands. But here in Kazan—which, ironically enough, means “cauldron” in Tatar—Russians and Tatars mingled easily. Curious, David and I decided to conduct a thoroughly unscientific survey, asking a few random people in the city’s quaint downtown district what they thought.
We spent a couple of hours stopping people, and one answer we heard repeatedly was that relations were good because there were many more mixed marriages here. About half the Tatars we stopped told us they were married to Russians, and vice versa. “How can you hate Tatars when your own children are half Tatar?” one Russian woman asked with a shrug.
This didn’t really solve the mystery, though. After all, there have always been Russians in Chechnya too, but mixed marriages there are more rare. Yet in Kazan, the question seemed like such a non-issue that people didn’t even know how to answer. One 18-year-old Russian named Mark, out walking with his Tatar buddy Artur, said, “It’s just always been this way. We don’t even think about it.” I couldn’t help but recall 19-year-old Zhenya and marvel at the fact that if these two teenagers had been born further south, they might have ended up aiming guns at each other rather than strolling around town together.
We happened to stop a historian named Delyara, who gave us a brief discourse on Tatar history. “There have been many governments here over the centuries,” she said. “The Bulgars, the Golden Horde, the Kazan Khanate. Under the Kazan Khanate, no churches were ever destroyed. So we have a history of tolerance here.” But then she told us there was a simpler reason why Chechnya was more volatile.
“People from the Caucasus are different,” she said. “Our blood doesn’t run as hot as theirs.”
This was a sentiment we heard repeatedly. One middle-aged Russian woman told us that Chechens were “very emotional people, very fiery.” And a 20-year-old Tatar woman echoed this, saying, “They’re hot-blooded, they want to be free. Tatars are not like them. We’re calm people.”
In Russia in 2005, generalizations about Chechens abounded, many far more disparaging than “hot-blooded.” Dark-haired, olive-skinned men were routinely stopped and harassed by police, and many Russians openly expressed prejudice against Chechens, often in crude and insulting terms, in a cycle of hatred and mistrust that seemed unlikely to break anytime soon.