And now he was bored and restless in Moscow and itching to get back into the fray.
“So let’s go,” said Sheets, sitting in the TV editing suite at the Reuters office in the Raddison-Slavaskaya Hotel, where I was often found hanging around, twiddling thumb.
“Where?”
“Samashki, of course.”
“Uncle, I don’t have any money. None.”
“So, I fund you. Won’t cost you a dime.”
“Why?”
“Because then I get to tell the boss that you are my minder, to keep me out of trouble.”
“I’ve never kept you out of trouble.”
“They don’t know that. Not yet, anyway,” said Sheets. “Saddle up, cowboy. There’s a flight to Nazran tonight.”
12
MASSIVNI UBITZVA V SAMASHK (MASS KILLING IN SAMASHKI)
On April 6, a meeting of MVD officers, village elders, the imam and the head of the village administration took place at Post No. 13. Lieutenant General A. Antonov, deputy commander of Russian forces in Chechnya, issued an ultimatum: Hand over, by 7:00 A.M. on April 7, 264 automatic weapons, two machine guns, and one APC (which allegedly appeared on an aerial snapshot of the village) and allow MVD units freely into the village. The Chechen delegation… requested to be given three days to attempt to hand over around fifty automatics, but not more. The general refused. Having returned to the village, the leaders and elders gathered village residents and informed them about the ultimatum, but no one brought forth any weapons… that day an MVD internal troops division began advancing on the outskirts of Samashki, seeking to strengthen their positions there; but about 1.5 kilometers from the northern end of the village an APC and a tank exploded on mines, and an APC later blew up on a mine on the village outskirts…. Shooting on the outskirts of the village had begun long before the ultimatum deadline ran out. Beginning at 10:30 P.M. on the night of April 6, Russian forces heavily bombarded the area outside Samashki with artillery fire until 1:30 A.M. The village was hit with aerial bombardments for twenty-five minutes on the morning of April 7, beginning at 5 A.M. APCs heading toward the village from the north spread cannon fire on Samashki from 7 A.M. to 9 A.M.[15]
The YAK-40 gently banked to the right, giving passengers on the starboard side of the small, workhorse aircraft a good look at the majestic, shark-tooth range of the Caucasus Mountains.
This is where the Greek gods banished the Titan-turned-traitor, Prometheus, for having stolen Olympian fire as a gift for mankind, chaining him to a rock to have his liver eternally gnawed by birds. The gods had something else in store for mankind—Pandora and her box of evil tricks, including Death, Disease, Pestilence, and Plague. It was curious what was left at the bottom of the box once the punishments had escaped—Hope. The usual theory is that this virtue was left to comfort mankind, although the argument can be made that all Hope does in a useless world is to extend suffering and inevitable despair. Perhaps that complex myth had some relevancy for the complex situation in the Caucasus. But now was not the time to dwell on such literary issues. The pilot had pulled down the flaps and dropped the wheels in preparation for an evening landing at Slepsovski field, not twenty miles, as the crow flies, from Samashki. Were those flashes of artillery fire in the penumbral shadows to the east? Or merely the tinkling of early evening lights and automobile traffic in the Ingush capital of Nazran to the south?
Ingushetia. If it didn’t exist, someone would have had to make it up. The mini-state was sort of a warped, post-Soviet world version of Monaco or Andorra, or maybe a Russian Federation clone of West Virginia. But that is really reaching for some sort of comparison when none really exists. Like the origins and meaning of myths and legends of the local giants called Narts and their Titan kinsmen, this is a complex subject and best left for a more reflective day. It was time to focus on the moment. It was the evening of April 6, and Samashki was getting blitzed, and I was on the outside and not the inside.
The aircraft touched down, and taxied toward the extended shack that served as the departure terminal. There was no arrivals section, only a farm truck that pulled up to the luggage bay, and a flimsy security gate separating the airfield from the crowded parking lot. It was teeming with family members, taxi drivers, hucksters and, no doubt, two dozen spies from both sides of the conflict, taking note of who was coming and going from this obscure piece of asphalt.
Male headgear came in two flavors: the conical lamb’s wool papakhs and the comical Dudayev fedora. Virtually all women wore spun-wool shawls. Long leather coats dominated for men and women alike, the exception being a couple of western aid workers, dressed in loud purple and orange ski parkas that stuck out ridiculously in this crowd. The evening air resounded with the distant thunder of artillery, a barrage that was more intense than I had ever heard in this war before.
Sheets and I fought off the taxi and transport scalpers and jumped in the Reuters-mobile, a land cruiser driven by Uncle Larry’s loyal driver, Nodar. The huge, happy bear of a Georgian had an atrocious accent in Russian, imposing all sorts of Georgian clicks and clacks where those consonants do not exist, and casually disposing of many or most case and declension niceties of the literary tongue spoken in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Traveling with Nodar up from Tbilisi was another Georgian who worked as a cameraman. Sheets suspected he was a secret heroin junkie.
Curiously, perhaps, a good percentage of the correspondents covering the Chechen conflict on a daily basis for various international news organs (with alphabet-souplike acronyms such as AFP, APTV, and WTN) were Georgians or had spent time in that post-Soviet republic. Many, like Sheets and myself, had received their baptisms of fire as war correspondents (or participants) in Abkhazia and had a much higher tolerance for violence than many of their “Western” colleagues. They roosted much closer to the action than the Moscow-based foreigners and aid workers who monopolized accommodations in Nazran, having virtually taken over a small guest house in Slepsovski called the Sundja Hotel. That is where we went, setting up Lawrence’s satellite telephone and telex in the walled courtyard for his evening file. The satellite telephone was about as large as a small suitcase, and weighed perhaps fifty or seventy-five pounds—big, awkward, and expensive. A minute on the phone cost something like fifteen bucks American.[16]
Uncle Larry’s file essentially consisted of color copy that allowed Reuters to cheat a dateline close enough to Chechnya to merit attention on their clients’ desks. Accordingly, Lawrence pumped Nodar for a few details about the mood among refugees in the Slepsovski market, cadged a despairing quote from the hotel cook, and then wrote a story that emphasized the intensity of the distant bombing and speculated as to the target.
The night’s work done, we settled into a meal of borsht and vodka. Then the satellite telephone in the courtyard gave a buzz. It was Reuters Moscow demanding answers to a few questions. The most important concerned the veracity of an Interfax report, carried both on the Channel One state-run television news, as well as the Segodnya (“Today”) news program on the NTV channel. Both claimed that “Dudayevist fighters,” who had previously fought in Abkhazia, had shot and killed seven village elders outside Samashki. The elders, it would appear, had called on the rebels to quit the village, and survivors of the assassination attack were begging Russian Interior Ministry forces to intervene and help them evacuate the town.
16
While a wondrous device at the time, technology rapidly made the SAT-phone obsolete. The advent of the cell phone in the late 1990s (and then videophones) completely transformed the communications environment in remote areas. But in 1995, reporters were still obliged to stay within range of expensive uplinks through local television stations, such as that at Ingush TV at Nazran. That meant that television crews had to time their days to collect news in Chechnya no later than early afternoon, and then dash back to Nazran to make a shaky feed from the local TV station by midnight, lest their product no longer be “news.” The alternative was to make a mad dash back to the Slepsovski airport and beg and bribe passengers to take film to Moscow—a truly nerve-wracking experience for the purveyor of exclusive news, due to the question of whether the courier would really deliver or not. Cf. my article of February 16, 1997 in the