The centerpiece of all presentations at the CIA and all other venues was the Return To Samashki video, shown after a preliminary lecture about the ethnic structure of the USSR and the wars I had covered almost by accident. Almost always, the reaction was grateful, or at least gracious, and the question-and-answer period animated.
The exception to what seemed to be near universal acclaim came from an audience member at a presentation at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. I include a summation here because, despite her being factually wrong about various aspects of my presentation to the point of fantasy, there is no question that she did hit the mark on certain larger issues. Through the use of the Samashki film, I had indeed become used to shocking people by my own experience with violence. The criticism, published in the school newspaper, was entitled: Goltz Sells Terror—Are Students Buying? It said:
While listening to a reading given last week by Thomas Goltz… I happened to wonder why interesting people, or people labeled as such, are so often full of themselves.
…Goltz managed to squeeze in a couple of references to Azerbaijan and two ten-minute videos on conflicts, but half of the videos focused on him talking about the war and carrying logs, for some unknown reason. Still, Thomas Goltz explained the war as a totally different ballgame than what might have been expected…. He made members of the audience, myself included, think of being in the middle of the war in Chechnya and wondering if escape is at all possible…
“Well done, Mr. Goltz, how great. Please, please give us more information about what really happened,” the audience should have said. Neither in the videos, nor during the speech, did Goltz give the names of any wounded or killed soldiers. There were no precise battle scenes. At one stage, though, we learned that Thomas Goltz had managed to escape from a town under attack with the help of his friend, who was later labeled a traitor for reasons unknown. That information would have been enough, too. But it was never given. How could we possibly learn about the war in Chechnya, when the only information Goltz provided concerned himself? What about his friend who was excluded from the village for being a traitor?
Maybe what information the audience wanted was something Thomas Goltz was not prepared to divulge…. Certainly, they do not need to be patronized by a war correspondent and his tantamount experiences in order to learn more about Chechnya.
One student who attended the conference disagreed with that. “This guy has escaped such a great number of dangers, and that is a feat in itself. He has reasons to be proud of himself; simply coming back alive justifies his egocentrism.”
Thomas Goltz’s flight. That statement summarized the whole conference. How to go to war and come back without haunting memories… but it seemed that Thomas Goltz had never really managed to flee from Chechnya. He was now entirely part of that war. In his eyes, being a living testimony made him living evidence. Therefore, other facts besides his presence were not required. Unfortunately for the audience, that was not only not true but regrettable.
Ouch.
There was too much true there to avoid looking long and hard at the facts.
I had become some sort of academic shock-jock. I was using myself as a delivery vessel of national pain and confusion in Chechnya and the Caucasus.
It was my style, damn it!
Maybe it was time to start looking into something else, like life, instead of death.
I went back to Montana and began to mountain-bike. I tried to be nice to my estranged wife. I planted ten fruit trees on the occasion of my father’s eightieth year on this earth, wishing him more. I refused to write a word on Chechnya and tried not to think about it. It was time to heal.
Then came the summer of 1999, and there was no staying away any more.
“Where are you, man?” howled Uncle Lawrence Sheets down a long-distance line from Moscow, or Grozny, or some place in between. “This is it!”
“It” was the renewal of war. The reasons remain obscure, and the list of established facts were radically different, depending on whom one chose to trust; but a central essence remained: The unloved and unstable Chechen Republic of Ichkeria found itself involved in a foreign adventure that was generally described as an Islamic invasion of southern Russia.
This much was clear. In July of 1999, a group of fighters under the command of Shamil Basayev and Khattab sallied forth into the neighboring Russian subrepublic of Dagestan. The Chechen version of events was that the Basayev-Khattab mission was to assist several fundamentalist, Islam-inclined villages that were under siege by the Russian military. The Moscow version of the growing conflict was that the Wahhabite fundamentalist fringe in Chechnya meant to expand the scope and influence of their forces by raising the banner of jihad across the entire Muslim North Caucasus.
Cynical observers came up with darker variations on these scenarios. The most basic was that the Russian political establishment, newly under the control of KGB Colonel Vladimir Putin, and still chafing under the humiliation of the Khazavyurt Accords, was looking for blood. To draw it, Kremlin planners had managed to lure Basayev and his Muslim commandos into a trap that had been specifically set to reignite war by recasting the Chechens as unwelcome invaders, and stripping them of the familiar emotional fig leaf of their being outgunned victims.
If this was indeed the dark plan hatched by then KGB boss Putin, it succeeded masterfully. The kindest nuance on this grim piece of chess playing was that Shamil Basayev rose to the Dagestani bait, not through a lack of understanding of Putin’s deep strategy and aims, but as a diversionary, preventative action that would buy the government of Asian Maskhadov invaluable time to stockpile munitions in deep mountain bases before the real anticipated Russian assault began on Chechnya itself, and a blitz against Grozny that would reduce the shattered city to even smaller chunks of rubble than before. But first, the Russian public had to be primed—and that preparation took the form of midnight mass murder in Moscow.
In early September, earthquake-creating assassins detonated packed explosives in the basements of three working-class high-rises on the outskirts of the Russian capital. The slab-concrete walls and ceilings and floors came crashing down like a disrupted house of cards on the people sleeping inside, killing hundreds.
Chechen terrorists! screamed the Moscow media, demanding revenge.
The few dissenting voices who argued that the anonymous bombing was not the Chechen style were further encouraged to question the official take on the gruesome killings when a fourth apartment bombing was not only foiled, but seemed to suggest the perpetrators were not Chechens, but the dark Russian secret services. By chance, a sleepless resident of another working-class apartment building on the outskirts of the central Russian city of Ryazan noted two or three strangers placing sacks of sugar in the basement of the apartment building, and then slipping away in a suspicious manner. Concerned, the night owl called the local police, who rushed to the scene and evacuated the building while a bomb squad removed the timers and sacks of explosives, disguised as bags of sugar. But then the story took an odd and ominous twist. The authorities in Moscow sent in a different set of agents to remove the explosive sacks to the capital for further chemical analysis—and then announced that the entire event had been no more than an elaborate hoax, or testing of people’s “vigilance,” and that the apprehended bags of explosives were indeed only sacks of sugar.