The Leader took a formal salute from the head of the armed forces, General Asian Maskhadov, and mounted the review stand. Behind him, three flags flew at half-mast: the Chechen and Ingush banners both employing the same color mix of green, white and red, but in different patterns, and then the maroon and black Georgian flag, raised in honor of Zviad Gamsakhurdia. His widow, Manana, stood to Dudayev’s right, supported by a small circle of mourners from Georgia. To Dudayev’s left stood a gaggle of Muslim religious leaders and dignitaries, ranging from the mufti of the Crimean Tatars and the Imam of Bukhara in Uzbekistan, to the Sheikh of Islam for all Caucasus Muslims, Allahshukur Pashazade from Azerbaijan, who waved at me and smiled.
A bugle called for silence, and the ten thousand people gathered in the square were stilled. An invisible muezzin called out the Muslim creed, or Fatiha, and as one, twenty thousands hands turned palms up to heaven while ten thousand lips whispered the prayer, before stroking their faces with their hands and saying Amen:
“Allah ul Akbar!” someone wailed into the speaker system.
“ALLAH UL AKBAR!!” returned the throng in a deafening roar. “God is the Greatest!”
“Allah ul Akbar,” said Djohar Dudayev, stepping up to a bank of microphones.
He waited for a moment of pious silence and then began to speak.
“Today is the Day of Shame, the Day of Death and Destruction, the day we can never forget and we will never forgive!” General Dudayev declared. “It is the day, fifty years ago, when the Center, under the demon Stalin, attempted to eradicate the Chechen nation. But through our faith in the Almighty we survived. God is truly Great! Through His grace we survived and thrived and returned to our ancestral lands, our holy lands!”
“Allah ul Akbar,” came a wave of pious muttering from the mass of people.
“And with His aid and assistance we will never allow the events of 1944 to be repeated again! To this end, I have created an army—and every member of every household is a soldier, for now and ever more! Allah ul Akbar!”
“Allah ul Akbar!!”
“God is Great!”
“GOD IS THE GREATEST!!”
“Al Fatiha!”
Once more, an invisible muezzin called the faithful to recite the creed. Once again, men and women, young and old, civilians and military, raised their hands to heaven and then, as one, wiped their hands over their faces.
And then the parade began.
Da! da! di-Dah da Di daaah! da! da! da-Di da da Di!
General Dudayev raised his right hand to the brim of his cap in salute, and the phalanxes of soldiers snapped to attention, wheeled, and marched by the review stand, boots slapping in time on the icy street. First came the honor guard dressed in traditional Chechen garb, replete with long kinjal knives in silver sheaths. Then came the Special Forces in blue berets and camouflage uniforms, followed by commandos in black hoods. Finally, wheeling around a distant corner came blocks and blocks of men in combat green—the Chechen national army.
Da! da! di-Dah da Di daaah! da! da! da-Di da da Di!
First came the jeeps with their TOW missile launchers. Then rows of artillery pieces, followed by a dozen multiple, antiinfantry GRAD missile-launching batteries. Then, with a rumble and an oooh and an ahhh from the crowd, a single T-72 battle tank was followed by a brace of T-54s, still impressive, even if forty years old. The real show-stopper, though, was the appearance of four older model surface-to-surface SCUD missiles, lumbering along on wagons pulled by farm trucks.
“Is he insane?” asked Stanley Greene, madly snapping pictures. “There is only one country those SCUDs can be pointed at—Russia! All four of them!”
The antique SCUD display was going to be a hard act to follow, but our host appeared to have something else up his sleeve. Then, while General Dudayev continued to hold his frozen salute, a troop of Chechen commandos burst out of a building flanking the parade ground, bowling over anyone in their path: Shamil Basayev and his Abkhazia Brigade. The commandos had been the sharp edge of the assault force that had conquered Sukhumi, and struck terror in the hearts of Eduard Shevardnadze and Georgian manhood. Here they had a chance to demonstrate their stuff in public for the home crowd, and performed an exhibition that started with a little jujitsu with knives and ended with the commandos smashing flaming bricks first with their bare hands and then with their heads.
Whatever else is said about Djohar Dudayev, I would like to add this right now: The man knew how to throw a party.
The last stop on the day’s agenda was a fashion show of the newest styles for men and women from haberdashers in Istanbul, attended by President Dudayev (now dressed in civilian togs, including his trademark fedora) and his chief advisors, including Vice President (and Chechen nationalist theoretician) Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, who wore an Islamic-style beard and traditional papakh on his head. Both applauded merrily at the models strutting down the catwalk to martial ditties, showing off the new uniforms of the Chechen armed forces, including dress togs for the landlocked country’s navy.
Yes—dress uniforms for the landlocked country’s navy.
Ah, Chechnya—a chuckle every minute, and parade day in Grozny on February 23, 1994, was one of the better hoots I had come across.
But, on reflection, the marvelous parade was deeply sobering, troubling even.
At the top of the list of worries was the question of where all the weapons on display had come from. Presumably, the answer was that the hardware had been gleaned from late Soviet-early Russian garrisons in or near Chechnya, with Dudayev using a chunk of his oil-smuggling profits to buy his arsenal from deserters large and small. This was an old story in the recently collapsed Soviet space. Show me a press report about an arsenal gone up in flames inadvertently, and I’ll show you an arsenal commander who just received a good chunk of change from local interests to destroy the nonevidence of a massive ripoff of Soviet military goods.
Still, I marveled at how Moscow could allow this tiny little piece of Rossiya to have its own armed forces. Any fool could see that this was not a joke but a challenge, the signal start of what would eventually become the bloodiest and most awful of all the conflicts that wracked the Caucasus during the 1990s, and one that unleashed forces that will take decades to tame, ranging from rude, crude racism on the side of the Russians to the new unholy alliance between Chechen nationalists and Islamic fundamentalist types financed by the fundamentalist demon of the late twentieth century, Osama bin Laden.
But that was later.
The Sufi zikr-parade and fashion show were over, but the audience was going nowhere. Despite the bitter cold, thousands of people remained on the streets. It was, after all, the fiftieth anniversary of The Day—and the first time the Chechens had held a public commemoration.
A group of two or three dozen deaf mutes formed a circle beneath a huge poster of the flag and national symbol, the alert wolf, signing to one another what I assumed to be stories from the Vysl, or Exile. Here and there in the streets, dense knots of younger women gathered around old ladies in mohair scarves, who lectured the former on the litany of suffering and loss they had undergone in Central Asia. Then, near the empty pedestal where a statue to the Unknown (Soviet) Soldier had once stood, a lone man began to sing in a deep, resonant baritone. It was a dirge, and sung in Chechen, so I could not understand the verse. But the chorus or refrain was recited in high, Quranic Arabic, La illah il Allah, wa Muhammad ar Rasul Allah.