But the official, squatting behind a cardboard box and stamping the papers of black-marketeer Chechens out of Russia, was uninterested in my arrival, visa or not. When he had stamped out the last merchant, he just kicked the box aside and walked away. I had just entered Chechnya, a place famous for its disregard for the law.
I almost felt at home.
The Chechens were almost always associated with the concept of crime in the realms of the old Soviet Union. I had heard of this before, but barreling down the potholed, ice-coated highway from the airport to Grozny in a brand-new Jeep Cherokee with no license plates, the criminal connection took on new piquancy.
“Do you want a nuclear device? Women?” asked our driver, Emran, who was vaguely associated with the tourism agency that had hired the plane that had brought us to town.
“What about this car?” I playfully suggested, obliquely referring to a line of business the Chechens reputedly had a hammerlock on: supplying ex-Soviet motorists with used Mercedeses and other fancy, formerly forbidden cars, allegedly acquired in Poland or the former East Germany.
“For $13,500, cash, its yours,” said Emran.
Har har har! We all laughed.
It was pretty funny, being offered a stolen car the moment you walked through customs, such as customs were in Chechnya.
“Yes, we are a nation of thieves, and we are a nation of fools,” Emran continued, the smile slowly disappearing from his lips. “We never ask ourselves how is it possible that we are getting away with the larceny we are accused of conducting. How is it that you foreign visitors can come and go as you please? How is it that our president, a former security official in the USSR, is able to fly in his own airplane, with no regard to the official airspace and international flight regulations that pertain in Russia? Tell me, how?
“Look around you! Everything is going to hell. And this used to be a rich country—rich! Yes, we have new cars, but we have no roads. Yes, we are free to travel to Dubai to conduct suitcase trade with no duty, but we have no jobs! Tell me, what will become of us? When will Moscow say ‘enough’ and flatten us all? Soon! And let me tell you this, too—it will not be the leaders of this country who will suffer, but us, the people who blindly supported them. No, my new friends, bad days are coming, dark days indeed.”
I never saw Emran again, and have no idea what happened to him when the poop he predicted actually hit the proverbial fan. But in April 1995, when in Grozny, I sought out his travel agency: it was a heap of smashed bricks.
At the time, however, it was all a big joke. All the Western press seemed to be writing the same thing: The Chechens were the most “feared Mafia group in Russia,” whose specialties included fencing, framing, money-changing, car theft, white slavery, bank fraud, blackmail, uranium smuggling, and, of course, murder and assassination.
Not that the Chechens did not leave themselves open to the tough-guy charge. On the contrary, almost all Chechens I met during that first journey seemed to delight in their national notoriety as genetic criminals. They seemed to equate it with freedom—possibly the freedom that comes of scorn. Senior officials in the government proudly assured me that one could buy anything “from a stiletto to a Stinger missile” in the local weapons bazaar. While I was unable to locate anyone with the heat-seeking rockets in their active inventories, everyone said they were available on demand. Other weapons were everywhere for sale. One young merchant, swinging hand grenades by the pins on his fingers like a pair of six-shooters, offered me the bombs at around three dollars each. Kalashnikovs were selling for around two hundred dollars a piece, extra clips optional. If I wanted to pick up an eight-wheel Soviet armored personnel carrier, that would run five thousand dollars, although the merchant did not have one currently in stock.
Elsewhere in the market scruffy characters in Astrakhan papakhs carrying fat wads of dubious looking one-hundred-dollar bills worked the percentage points in the alfresco money market. Here, vast stacks of electronic goods recently brought in from Dubai stood next to piles of turnips, both selling at a brisk pace; there, an elderly couple just back from Istanbul were laying out a collection of fancy lace underwear and chocolates on a rough table, and were immediately deluged by customers. A Mercedes SEL-600 pulled up disgorging a young man with a pile of Russian-language Qurans in one plastic suitcase and porno magazines in another. Russia may have slapped a currency and communications embargo on Chechnya, but it was a matter of indifference to everyone in the market. All were enjoying the benefits of having become citizens of the largest duty-free shop in the lands of the former USSR, or the new Russia, a state to which all said they did not belong.
In addition to their alleged criminal activities, the Chechens were also known for outlandish behavior especially designed to prove their fearlessness. My favorite story concerned how the Chechens play Russian roulette: Gather six pals at a table, remove a grenade from your coat pocket, pull the pin, and set it on a plate. The last man who dives under the table wins, as it were. I have no idea if that story has any basis in fact. But it was so good I used it in a file for Business Week. Others then picked it up from me and made it truth.
Yes, indeed. What was curious about most reports published on the Chechens was that they were all so similar—and usually “sourced” back to inherited wisdom floating around Moscow’s insular diplomatic and intellectual community, which no one bothered to properly check out.
Take the stolen car business. It was an accepted fact that the Chechens ran that lucrative network, and if you doubted the allegation the evidence was riding around the streets of Grozny: scores of Mercedes 600s and Jeep Cherokees that had appeared from nowhere. Reducto Ipso Fox News Factoid: They were all stolen and smuggled into Chechnya, and thus the Chechens ran the entire stolen-car network in the lands of the former USSR.
It didn’t take a Johnnie Cochran of O. J. Simpson fame to raise a couple of salient points at the mass trial in the court of public opinion: For example, how did the alleged thieves manage to get their goods all the way from Western Europe (Germany or Austria, say, or even the Czech Republic) over a thousand miles of roads that crossed at least two and often three theoretically heavily patrolled border points without the direct collusion of local authorities, and no doubt even the tacit collusion of senior security officials in said countries, including Russia?
Then there was the business of the “air houses” that were cropping up all over Chechnya—the red brick structures, some quite large and certainly more pleasant than the standard Soviet-style five-story instant apartment slums that blight the Russian landscape from the Baltic Sea to the Bering Strait, were so-called because the money to build them had apparently descended on the owners tax-free from the ether (i.e., Mafia money.)
Perhaps there was an element of truth to this—but the argument was always expressed in the context of the Chechens having no right to build or renovate their homes in a style they saw fit and livable. To read some of the reporting on this aspect of Chechnya, one is left with the impression that the authors had a priori decided that the Chechens were guilty of the crime of trying to live like human beings. In all fairness to the Chechens, their critics should have applied the same yardstick about ethnic Russians trying to achieve greater creature comfort, too. What right did all the Mercedes drivers, dacha rebuilders, and new VCR owners in Moscow have to enjoy their new, post-Soviet prosperity? If one equated ostentation and crime, then everyone in Russian with money to spare and a propensity to spend it should have been sent off posthaste to a new and large gulag for economic crimes against the state, including most of the Yeltsin government.