This was no mere bum rap; it was a racist smear job, and one in which much of the Western media played along like ill-willed and mean-spirited buffoons.
The most egregious example of this tendency to mix conventional wisdom, cliché, and gallows humor of the prewar days was the case of the Ostayev brothers, Ruslan and Aslanbek, whose murders in early 1993 first shocked and then amused London society. The pair had shown up in England in mid-1992 as the special representatives of President Dudayev. Some say their mission was to establish contacts with Her Majesty’s government; others say that the brothers were in the U.K. in order to underwrite the first issuing of a Chechen national currency; still others suggest that their real mission was to get to know international arms merchants and initiate negotiations for several specific systems for which the Dudayev government anticipated future need. It is possible that the brothers were involved in all three of these projects simultaneously.
Whatever the case, the Ostayevs lived like kings. They purchased a large flat in a desirable area of town, left lavish tips at restaurants, and entertained several expensive prostitutes at the same time.
Sordid? Maybe. Uniquely evil? No.
One need not approve of the Ostayev lifestyle to recognize it for what it was: The brothers were only living like virtually all other “New Russian” businessmen on a roll. Their crime, or stupidity, was having the bad sense to hire an Armenian émigré as their translator, who then killed them and, with the help of a colleague from California, chopped up the Ostayevs. They got caught trying to haul the mincemeat to the trash can.
The two murderers were convicted of their confessed crime. The Armenian American subsequently committed suicide in prison, while the translator became so terrified of Chechen revenge that he asked for solitary confinement. This saved him, but not his family. Some six months after his trial, conviction, and imprisonment, a couple of swarthy gentlemen came knocking at the house of the translator’s sister-in-law. Apparently they thought the woman who answered was his British wife. The name fit, anyway.
Bang-bang-bang!
And the concept of the blood vendetta was added to the list of deeds the Chechen Mafia indulged in on general principle, now playing on the international stage.
We met in the rattletrap elevator of the presidential building where I had gone to register with the Department of Information and News Reporting of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, and I was immediately impressed with his English and quick wit.
His name was Eduard Khatchoukaev, and his calling card announced him as being the “Chief of the Department of Foreign Investment of the Chechen Republic”—that is, the point man assigned the task of attracting and evaluating foreign investors to a country with no foreign relations.
“You Western correspondents are idiots,” snarled Eduard when I sort of chuckled at the discrepancy between title and task. “You show up in the lands of the former Soviet Union and try to impose your own terms of reference on us, when you do not even know the terms of reference in which we, former Soviets, think. You throw around terms like “democrat,” “conservative,” “reformer,” and “hardliner” when they have either no meaning here or a completely different meaning than you understand. How can I have a real conversation with you? You ask me to explain highly specialized issues, and you take down notes and impressions in black and white. It is like asking me to explain what a Sony television is to my great grandfather. He may have been an intelligent man in his day, but he did not even know what electricity is. I explain the television to him. He nods and tries to imagine what I am depicting—and then goes home and tells his friends about a magic box, in front of which is a mirror, reflecting a kaleidoscope of colorful pictures. That is how you understand us.”
It was, in many ways, the most enlightening conversation I have ever had in the lands of the former Soviet Union. Here was a batch of “Western” correspondents, myself among them, attempting to understand and then report on—in a thousand words or less—the bizarre but real phenomenon of the audaciously separatist, self-styled Chechnya Republic of Ichkeria within the context not only of the collapsed Soviet Union but also the chaotic and brand-new Russian Federation.
I wanted to press the point—at least to the extent that my meager brain could comprehend—but a gurgling noise outside interrupted further discourse.
“Sorry,” said Eduard. “I have to attend the ceremony.”
“You mean the Gamsakhurdia funeral,” I corrected him. “But isn’t that tomorrow?”
“Idiots, all idiots,” sighed Eduard Khatchoukaev. “The funeral is indeed tomorrow. Today is the Day of Chechen Genocide.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The fiftieth anniversary of the Day Of Exile,” Khatchoukaev sighed. “The day when Stalin tried to kill us all.”
The elevator was stuck, so we descended from the fifth floor of the presidential building by the stairs—and discovered mayhem in the ice-covered streets.
HUNGA HUNGA HUNGA! came the noise, somewhere between the rumble of an overloaded truck creaking uphill and the first wave of a nuclear bomb exploding.
HUNGA HUNGA HUNGA! came the sound, nearer now, maybe human.
Then, turning the corner, I found the source: a wall of men, catapulting themselves down the street in a sort of Sufi dirge-cum-pogo-stick frenzy, and right at me. It required all the nerve I had to hold my ground before the human wave rolled over me. The wall of marching, jumping, and moaning men were led by a biblical-looking character sporting a skullcap and a white beard down to his navel. He screamed and howled and moaned while waving a stick above the penitents, demanding even more devotion. I could not understand a word.
HUNGA HUNGA HUNGA! the mass of men grunted, now standing in formation and waiting for the call to charge, HUNGA HUNGA HUNGA!
A helicopter whirred through the air, and from a distance came the sound of marching feet. Invisible speakers crackled to life and a martial ditty filled the air:
Da! da! di-Dah da Daaah! da! da! di-Dah da Di dah… !
The graybeards howled. Women wept. Kids, clinging to the frozen, leafless branches of ornamental trees, sobbed, losing their grip on the sapless twigs. Then the first line of crisply uniformed troops wheeled around a corner—and accompanied with a roar from the assembled crowd, more and more and more.
Our host, Soviet-era SAC General Djohar Dudayev, had just put his army on display. And now, with some two thousand men standing slapdash at attention and five or ten times that number in the audience, it was time for his grand entrance.
The last time I had seen Dudayev, at Turgut Özal’s funeral in Istanbul, he had been wearing a conservative business suit and his trademark fedora. But now, in the role of generalissimo, he came riding in atop a jeep, dressed in military purdah: leather trench coat with heavy epaulets, war bonnet with brim, and jackboots and kid-leather gloves. However nasty it sounds to say it, he looked like nothing so much as a bad copy of Charlie Chaplin’s Little Dictator, toothbrush mustache included.