Voices, voices.
“Let’s go.”
It is Vladimir the driver. Whatever he has done to the engine, we are now back on the road, rolling down the gouged track at dusk, and closing in on Little Hope with every kilometer gained, if indeed we were going in the right direction.
Consultations with a trucker, a local farmer, a kid riding a bicycle down the highway in the middle of nowhere, now at night, now 40 degrees below. A correction here, a slight overshot there, forcing a return to that still smaller, unmarked road to the right after the bridge. No more gutted tracks, just snow-covered local roads winding through another wood-smoke-stinking town without a light in sight, save for the occasional dim glow of a candle through a roadside windowpane. Climbing now, crawling uphill, the stars and half moon reveal trees on either side of the winter road. Natural national forest, or the row-upon-row work of a Soviet-style youth brigade, like the one Hussein once led in these parts? Star and moon reflections dance on the frost-wrapped boughs of dwarf pine and are a long glide down toward another nameless, smoke-infused village of wood-fired houses with no lights, despite the electrical poles lining the road.
It is past midnight by my watch, and we have been on the road since six that morning. I am about to tell Vladimir to pull over so we can sleep in the car when the headlights pick up some guy stumbling across our snow-encrusted path. He is either drunk or slipping on ice or both.
“Which way is Nadayzhdovka?” asks Vladimir.
“Zdes,” replies the baffled midnight rambler. “Right here.”
The house is at the end of the right-hand turn at the top of the icy road rising through town. Vladimir has to reverse out of several deep potholes, gunning the motor and working the wheel like a rudder, and then start climbing again.
Maybe he has heard the engine at high throttle gunning uphill, the grunt and groan of an after-midnight motor negotiating the rutted road, closing on his place of exile, making its way to his door? Has he loaded a gun in anticipation of trouble and sent the kids to the cellar? I don’t know. The moon has set, and it is dark, very dark, when Vladimir pulls the car in front of the very last house on that upper-right-hand lane, off the icy, potholed uphill climb through the middle of a village called Little Hope. There are no cameras blazing. There are no cameras at all. It is much, much better that we have arrived in the middle of the night and that there is no record of the moment, aside from personal memory. Some things are better when left like that.
There is a pause—and on that hiatus in the cold Kazakh night hangs the future of my one and only dear and precious but recently most miserable life.
“I knew you would come.”
It is my friend Hussein, and I am three feet off the ground, held aloft in a two-armed, non-Chechen style, full embrace.
He was the first Chechen to live in the town of Little Hope, sent in as an agricultural brigade leader of the Young Communist organization called Komsomol.
“We were pariahs,” said Hussein, explaining away seventy years of Soviet-style contradiction with minimal verbiage. “We were forced to excel—and we excelled. The Communist system may have attempted to destroy us, but the Communist system also gave us the chance to destroy it. We did so. We crept inside the party structure and took what we wanted and left what we didn’t. We came close to taking over the Soviet system. And then the democratic system that replaced communism gave us the opportunity to destroy ourselves, and we did so, too.”
What began to emerge was a portrait of Hussein quite different from the romantic guerilla commander I had known in Samashki. No, not a different or contradictory portrait, but rather something far more nuanced than that black-and-white portrait of the bold and decisive man I had needed to embody the “Chechen spirit.” Here was family man Hussein, young Communist Hussein, Soviet Army Special Forces Deep-Penetration Specialist Hussein, and director of the local collective dairy farm Hussein. Here was ostracized Chechen Hussein, who had, in effect, taken control of a Russian town in post-Soviet Kazakhstan and filled it with his own people to become lord of the manor Hussein, before stripping house and hearth of human, animal, and mechanical capital, throwing it all away for the kaleidoscope promise of some post-Soviet style nationalistic dream, only to see that dream explode into nightmare.
“Look at this mess,” said Hussein as we toured the broken-down diary facility where he had once been boss. “There used to be a really nice cafeteria over there, and a decent after-work bar right here where we are standing. And now? Wandering steers, collapsing buildings, no gas or electricity in five years, and every girl with tits wandering off to the capital to fuck visiting American oilmen for money.”
Three Kazakh kids rode up on a single horse, a blizzard whirling between them and the remnant herd of cattle in the background of my camera frame.
Yes, not only was Hussein allowing me to film these other aspects of his life, but he was encouraging me to do so.
Weird shots, weird moments: an IMZ/Ural sidecar motorcycle, unsuccessfully tow-started by attaching a rope to the tail of a horse, in hopes of bumping it to life in first gear; Musa’s son, the doe-eyed Sultan, dragging up the calf to be slaughtered in my honor, then slitting its throat with a pious epithet; Hussein and his second son, Ruslan, inspecting the components of a machine gun stored in a shed for easy use; Hussein and I in the homemade vanya, or Russian sauna, and his whipping me with a traditional oak branch and handing me a jar of bee pollen to absorb into my heat-opened pores, while suggesting that he invite in the Russian neighbor’s big-breasted and possibly lascivious wife to give me the obligatory sauna massage.
The days passed in discussion—discussion about what went right and what went wrong and what to do. There were local history lessons, the details of which I cannot remember, because the subject matter itself, like the words of Russian-language auto mechanics, was sufficiently outside my ken that I have not so much forgotten what Hussein was speaking about so passionately, as that I never understood it well enough to remember. Details of the near Sino-Soviet war in the early 1970s that nearly brought the two Communist superpowers to self-conflagration over, it seems, precisely the chunk of northeastern Kazakhstan where Little Hope was located; Hussein and local Chechens and Kazakhs were tempted to become a fifth column against Moscow, and back the Chinese.
“It was a good thing we did not,” he explained, and then his explanation was lost in nuance and obscure references that I just did not understand.
The conversations and talk lurched here and there and got corporate and confessional, including discussions of Soviet-style agriculture policy versus that in the U.S.A., when and where we determined that the macro-farms and ranches in the American West were just as damaging to the perceived ideal of small-family, land-holding farmers (as Hussein defined himself) as a latifundia in Argentina on the one hand, and a Kolkoz collective farm in the communist-socialist world on the other. Or human relationships.