The following morning I felt uneasy when I saw a Jeep filled with leather-clad men pull up in front of the hotel. They had come to pick me up for my interview with General Dudayev. I climbed on board. We careened around corners, raced down roads and pulled up in front of the building where General Dudayev worked. We entered the building and passed a contingent of guards in the lobby. We walked down a hallway lined with machine guns on stands and finally reached a door. One of the security men knocked and then opened the door. I looked into a large, even palatial, room.
General Dudayev sat inside. He rose to greet us. I had expected a towering giant but shook hands with someone only marginally taller than me. I sat down. General Dudayev returned to his swivel chair, positioned in front of a simple wooden desk. The general was in military dress and wore shoes so well shined that I thought I might see my reflection if I bent to inspect them more closely. His jet black hair lay neatly pomaded and parted at the side. I wondered if it was by coincidence or design that his groomed mustache resembled the wings of an airplane. I knew that he had only recently resigned from his position as a general in the Soviet air force. I suspected he still wore his old uniform. A broad-brimmed air force hat lay by the phone on his otherwise empty desk.
In his new position, General Dudayev tried to unite everyone in the Caucasus in a holy war against Russia. I thought he might be mercurial, so I had prepared easy questions designed to build trust before I asked difficult ones. In no mood for small talk, the general interrupted with an attack against Yeltsin.
“If Yeltsin continues his high-handed tactics, we’ll launch a terror campaign in Moscow. There will be bombs in the Moscow metro system and a nuclear plant near Moscow will be blown up.”
Although this could be dismissed as a blustery threat, he seemed quite serious in intent. I asked questions in a neutral tone, received more information and then understood the interview would end. Before it did, I asked the general if I could take his picture. He seemed pleased.
Later that day, I walked through the square. There seemed to be even more men with guns packed into it than the day before. I returned to the secretary’s office, but no one was there. I wandered the corridors in search of information. The crack of gunshot echoed outside. Cheers just meant more shots fired in the air. I saw a man in a fur hat and an old woman, a babushka, who wore a black dress and matching black headscarf, in one room. I went in. A Kalashnikov lay across a bare wooden desk. A man poked his head in the door and said the Russian Parliament had rejected the state of emergency imposed by President Yeltsin. Then he ran off down the hall. I turned to the man in the hat and asked, “When did this happen?”
“This is the first we’ve heard of it,” the hatted man whooped.
“Cowards, infidels, they’ve run away with their tails between their legs,” I think the babushka shouted. The old woman, a black mass, lunged for the Kalashnikov. My heart raced. I dove under the table. Safe there, I peered up to see the babushka raise the Kalashnikov straight up in the air, toward the ceiling.
“Wait, wait,” the man in the fur hat said. I expected him to grab the gun, but he grabbed the babushka’s elbow instead. He gently guided her, gun still upright, her finger still on the trigger, toward the window and pointed the barrel straight out.
“Go ahead now, go ahead,” he said.
The babushka pulled the trigger. Several shots rang out. She pulled herself away from the window and laughed. Then she roared “we won” and something about a wet chicken, which I took to mean, “Those Russians are made of jelly.”
That was how my knees felt. I slid out from under the table and stood up. I said goodbye and left. I still heard gunshot from the streets, so I lurked in the corridors for some time until I heard (near) silence again. On my way back to the hotel, I checked the sidewalk for traces of blood. As far as I could see, no one had been hit.
A huge crowd descended on the airport. So many passengers were desperate to leave after spending days trapped in Grozny. Stephen and I got lucky and obtained tickets for the first flight out. Safely in my seat, I buckled up and reclined. I shut my eyes and thought about guns. They felt almost as unreal now as they had in Ottawa when I was a child.
I remembered a story that my father told me about his early days of military training during the Second World War. Instructors took my father and other recruits to a rocky beach for a combat exercise. The instructors played the part of the enemy and told the recruits they would shoot at them from cliffs above the beach. When my father and his friends ran toward a designated safe spot, bullets ricocheted off rocks near their feet. “I was madder than blazes,” my father said. “We expected them to fire blanks, not live ammunition.” He never took a gun for granted again. Maybe someone needed to fire at me before I could feel that too.
7
VADYM
When I arrived back in Kiev, Toronto Marta called.
“How was it?” she asked.
“The Russian troops pulled back, and I don’t think anyone was hurt.”
“Chechnya’s one place I’d never want to go,” she said. I understood. I thought the same before but now that I had been to a conflict zone and seen guns, I almost felt proud.
Marta switched topics. “The parliamentary committee investigating the coup has apparently discovered interesting information,” she said. It took me a minute to forget Chechnya and focus on Ukrainian politics.
“Is Vadym on that committee?” I asked.
“He is,” Marta replied.
“I heard he’s making a documentary about who supported the coup. I wonder if it’ll be censored.”
“Not if Vadym’s good at his job,” Marta joked. “He’s also heading up a press freedom committee.” I made a mental note to ask Lesyia what she knew. She and Vadym remained close friends. Even though he was a Member of Parliament, he worked on TV documentaries, was still a journalist, one of us, and generous with information. Coup talk reminded me of the referendum on Ukrainian independence.
“I can’t believe the referendum’s in less than two weeks,” I said. “Do you think there’s any chance of a vote against independence?”
“No way,” Marta insisted. I agreed.
When the votes were counted, Ukrainians overwhelmingly confirmed Parliament’s vote for independence and elected Leonid Kravchuk the first president of Ukraine. Marta and I celebrated with friends at a local hotel. Our tables sagged under the weight of so many bottles of vodka and cognac, platters of caviar, kovbasa, cheese, pickles, varenyky, Chicken Kiev and every other celebratory dish. Rukh politicians, our waiters, journalists and various passersby linked arms in a huge circle under blue and yellow banners and balloons and sang the national anthem, “Ukraine Has Still Not Died.”
A few days later, I boarded a flight for Minsk. When we landed, I stood on the tarmac at the airport in Minsk with other journalists. We waited to find out whether the Soviet Union would survive. Yeltsin, Kravchuk and the Belarussian leader Stanislav Shushkevitch were conferring at a Belarussian lodge in Belavezhskaya Pushcha, near the Polish border. I gossiped with my colleagues, but really my head spun. We all believed rumours that they would dissolve the Soviet Union. Everything I had studied about a seamless Soviet state, one where no ethnic group had nationalist aspirations, and one common language was spoken by all, seemed a sham. When the leaders arrived back in Minsk, they confirmed what we suspected. They declared the Soviet Union dead, which meant Mikhail Gorbachev would be politically irrelevant. A new order would begin, a Commonwealth of Independent States.