By that time, the Chechen plain had been almost completely liberated of enemy forces, but many terrorist groups had survived in the mountains. They had regrouped into small units and continued to attack our military convoys and put any representative of the law to death. They terrorised civilians, too, but more often found them to be sources of support in the fight against the Russian Army and state power. Many families had lost someone during the war and blamed the army for their losses, which is why they gave provisions to terrorists, harboured them secretly or hid arms and ammunition. To us, the Chechen mentality was incomprehensible – it seemed absurd for them to help foreigners from Africa or the former Yugoslavia but to want nothing to do with us, their neighbours, with whom, for better or worse, they had a shared history. They saw the terrorists as heroes, as people who had sacrificed themselves for the good of the Nation – Muslim Robin Hoods.
Obviously we soldiers knew that both Chechen campaigns had been tainted by political and economic interests. As Captain Nosov had often told us, practically branding it into our minds: ‘Always remember that the feared Shamil Basayev, like many other Chechen Islamic terrorist leaders, was trained by our own secret services – we Russians were the ones who taught him to defend himself.’ We had learned from experience how the terrorists were linked to the corrupt officials working in our Command, but no one ever dared to bring up those stories; no one ever released the findings from the investigations conducted by the FSB. If we found out that there was a mole it was because of his comrades, who had reported him or in some cases simply eliminated him, since accidents happen in war every day anyway. These affairs, even if they didn’t reach the ears of the media, circulated widely among soldiers and officers. They were shared in whispers, during pauses between one battle and the next. Often the whispers were about an officer from Command dying in an accident: ‘He fell from a moving tank,’ they would say, which meant that he had been beaten to death by his own men. These stories were always concluded with a statement full of scorn and malice, spat out with cigarette smoke: ‘He liked shawarma[19] too much…’
It was very difficult to communicate with the local people. Up in the mountains they were especially aggressive; even routine operations in their villages risked ending in bloodshed. We would capture the terrorists who hadn’t been able to escape before our arrival and execute them right in the streets. At that point the entire village would give voice to a single sentiment – the women hurled shouts and curses of all kinds on us, old and young alike sent us promises of Apocalypse… We had to be very careful, because sometimes bullets would come from the mob, where the instigators, who expected nothing less than for us to raise arms against the civilians, would hide. Then the commanders would oblige us to quickly withdraw, to avoid being caught in a fire fight with women and elderly people present. We would shoot a few bullets into the air to scare people and then be on our way.
Often, on the way back from those operations, our columns would be attacked. If we were lucky the attack would be limited to a few machine gun blasts at the men on the carriers. In the worst cases, when our attackers were better equipped, they would torch the carriers with RPGs or scatter homemade mines made from large-calibre cannon rounds along the road.
Some strange and sad things happened too.
One time, as we were returning from a mountain village, an old man planted himself in the middle of the road in order to stop our cars. He pointed a hunting rifle at us: a real antique, all rusty. The old man was desperate; he was crying and shouting something incomprehensible.
According to military regulations, a column of armoured vehicles could not stop for any reason outside the scope of the operation. Even if we went past a person who had been wounded, we had to go on, either evading him or going around him – the important thing was never to stop the cars. It was also prohibited to slow the speed of the convoy, which had to proceed at a minimum of ten kilometres per hour; if we slowed down we could all become easy targets for potential aggressors.
So when we saw that old man, the boys signalled for him to move. But he kept standing in the middle of the road, as if his feet were glued to the ground, making his choked cries and waving his gun, which he kept pointed at us. The column slowed its pace, and one of the men sitting on the first carrier shot a burst of rounds in the air to scare him, but it didn’t work – he refused to move and kept threatening us with his pathetic rifle. I was on the third car in the convoy, and I watched as the old man’s figure grew bigger and bigger.
When the first carrier approached him, the driver manoeuvred, trying to avoid him, to pass by him. But the old man gritted his teeth and placed his rifle to his shoulder, aiming at one of the boys sitting on the car, as if he were going to shoot him. At that instant a series of rounds went off – everyone sitting on that carrier opened fire on the old man, who with one insane act had suddenly turned into an aggressor. I saw scraps of his suit go flying, along with pieces of flesh as the bullets pierced his body. In a second they reduced him to tatters. He fell to the ground next to his rifle.
The column didn’t pause; the cars resumed their course. When my carrier passed the corpse, I saw that on his jacket the old man had a row of medals from the Second World War. As a young man he had fought to defend the Great Soviet Nation against the Nazism of the Third Reich, and here’s how the Nation repaid him for his sacrifices, years later.
This is how, in the complete chaos of post-Soviet history, the power of the Russian Federation was restored in the mountain areas of Chechnya. And we couldn’t do anything to oppose it – our personal stories were worth nothing in that great river of time and fate that mixed wars and men, innocent people and criminals. But the current has always stayed the same. It hasn’t changed in the least…
In late May we received an order that was very unusuaclass="underline" to search a mosque in a mountain village. Apparently, after a mission had been carried out by our artillery, several weapons and the bodies of some wanted terrorists had been found in the ruins of a mosque. The army never set foot in places of worship, but now, suddenly, the operational units were changing their strategy and ordering us to search them. None of us, however, believed the stories anymore.
‘And so, all of a sudden they discover terrorists hiding in mosques,’ Shoe commented sarcastically.
‘It’s obvious,’ Zenith chimed in. ‘The Russian secret service has decided to sacrifice one of their “bridges” with the Islamic world, breaking some old pact that called for the protection of the mosques… And it’s up to us to do the dirty work!’
Before then, none of us would ever have dared to search a sacred site. The Russian military was capable of committing many injustices and of proving itself even crueller than the devil, but they would never dream of sending soldiers to go and fire their weapons in a place of worship.
It wasn’t a question of respect, but a kind of superstition. We believed that profaning what other people venerated, such as the house of their god, would bring us nothing but misfortune. In the course of the war, many of us had become believers. To get through the more difficult moments, we often turned to God; He was a haven for our souls, the only place not regulated by military code. We all thought of our mothers, who went to church every Sunday to light candles by the orthodox icons for their soldier sons; certainly Chechen mothers prayed in the mosques for their children’s survival. Either way, we had always respected those places. Even simple people, or people with little education, can understand the importance of hope, but this is a feeling experienced only by those who fight war – although of course not by those who wage it… As always, however, the only voice our Command wasn’t willing to listen to was ours.
19
A common dish from the Caucasus, similar to kebab – this was a way of referring to traitors.