The English translation of the syllables, especially in the context of the lone old man singing, in no way does them justice: There is no God but The God, and Muhammad is the Prophet of The God.
And I was not the only one transfixed by the moment. In ones and twos, then in fives and tens, scores of people drifted toward the open space where the old man stood, picking up and then harmonizing with the refrain and chanting a multitonal background of purest sound as the dirge leader sang out his hymn to victims of fifty years before and to all Chechens who had ever lived and ever died.
The dirge leader began to stamp his feet, and the rhythm was picked up and passed around the circle now forty feet across and at least a dozen people deep. Then someone began to clap, and the sharp explosion of cold skin on skin soon created a percussive counterpoint to the ethereal chanting. On and on it went—a more splendid, strange, and sad song than I had ever heard. Both Stanley and myself were transfixed and almost reduced to tears by the sheer intensity of the spectacle, and we abandoned our professional tasks at some point and simply stood in the middle of the dirge circle, listening, learning, longing.
Finally, after an hour or more, we extracted ourselves from the dirge circle—and encountered a moment of panic. Both Stanley and I had inadvertently left what amounted to thousands of dollars in electronic equipment on the outskirts of the circle when we entered—and then promptly forgot about. But there was no need for concern. Some anonymous soul had removed our precious bags by about ten feet, placing them on a sheltered ledge near the pedestal, lest they be crushed by the crowd.
Nation of thieves, indeed.
Evening was coming on and there was still one more stop to make—the newly dedicated Memorial to the Chechen Genocide.
Located in a small park that was itself an ancient cemetery destroyed by Stalin’s henchmen after the eviction of the Chechens in 1944. The monument to the estimated two hundred and fifty thousand victims who died in boxcars or of broken hearts in the wastelands of Central Asia was simple and moving. It consisted solely of a pair of hands, reaching upward to heaven, imploring God for aid that no man wished to give. A wall flanking the hands was engraved with the names of destroyed villages and settlements, with the number of missing and known dead from each engraved next to each place name. Next to that was a larger bas-relief with an inscription, written in the Latin-based script for “new” Chechen, that translated to “Never Forget and Never Forgive—Never Again!” In front of the hands stood a stone representation of the Quran, replete with carved ripples in the stone pages and even a green “cloth” page marker, also made of carved stone, on the beautiful early surah, or Quranic verse, known as An Nas, or “Mankind.”
An elderly man stood in front of the stone Quran, and after he had completed his prayers, I approached him and asked him who he was and where he was from.
“Khuzurev, Vakha,” he replied, from the town of Shatoi in the mountains to the south of the capital, and he was old enough to remember everything, everything, he said.
“I was ten years old that day,” he said with a wistful smile.
The night of February 23, 1944, was cold, even for the people of the mountain town. As a result, Khuzurev had brought the sheep back to their pen early. But there was a commotion in the village. All the men had been “invited” to attend meetings at the local Sovyet, or council hall building, celebrating Soviet Army Day and the rollback of the Nazis.
“My father, Muhammad, who was back in the village on leave from the front, joined the others, but with some misgiving,” Vakha Khuzurev recalled. “It was the last time I saw him and most of the men his age group. I do not know if they killed him that night, or if he died en route to Central Asia, or if he was sent back to the front and killed, or if he survived either the war or the deportation but never managed to find his family.”
As soon as the grown men had gathered at the Sovyet, American-made Studebaker military trucks pulled up. They were filled with security personnel who quickly surrounded the building and forced the men to board the transports.
“But some resisted,” Vakha recalled. “Some fought back. Even though they were unarmed. Perhaps my father was one of them; I do not know. It was too dark to see.”
As young Vakha watched in terror, the ringleaders of the resistance—or perhaps just men who were more easily seized because they did not resist at all—were herded out back of the Sovyet building. There they were forced to dig a pit in the frozen ground. Shots rang out. Men moaned and fell. There were more shots and more moans. Then silence.
“Then the soldiers brought out buckets of lime, and poured them into the pit.” Khuzurev recalled. “I remember the sharp odor quite distinctly; it wafted from the courtyard toward our sheep pen where I was hiding, overpowering the odor of manure.”
The nightmare had just begun. The soldiers then went about Shatoi making a house-to-house search, telling each family that they had one hour to pack, allowed only one bag.
“After that one hour, the soldiers returned and forced us aboard the American trucks. Then they drove us downmountain to Grozny and the railway where thousands of others, all in our same pathetic situation, were waiting to be loaded like cattle aboard boxcars.
“We were shipped east, that much we knew. By the time we arrived in central Kazakhstan, about a quarter of the people packed into our box car were already dead of cold, starvation, or the diseases spread by the corpses left among us. A brother and sister died. Others died later of no apparent cause. We called it the ‘yearning disease.’”
The rest of Vakha’s story could have been told by virtually every other Chechen of his age. The family, or what remained of it, was sent to a collective farm not far from the capital of Kazakhstan, Alma Ata. Other Chechen families were there, too. Over the next year, they slowly but surely recovered from their collective shock and psychosis and began making collective decisions. One was to institute a program of rebuilding the nation by having widowed women remarry as second, third, or fourth wives of selected men who had survived the ordeal. There was precedence for this: When Chechen manhood was decimated during the course of the fifty-year Murid wars of the mid-nineteenth century, Imam Shamil encouraged multiple marriage for men of character (as opposed to merely men of means) in order to increase the braver blood lines in the community, and make up for generational loss. This practice was sanctioned by the Quran: ‘Take what your right hand can sustain,’ spake God through the Prophet Muhammad after the early Muslim army had been routed at the Battle of Badr. Muslim losses were such that something had to be done to accommodate the sudden large number of widows and half-orphaned children of seventh-century Arabia then, and among the Chechens in their Central Asia Exile in the late 1940s.