And amid all this ostensibly peaceful life, right in the city centre, where I’d just arrived, a unit consisting of Chechens and Russians was conducting a ‘targeted special operation’. Alarmed, ashen-faced mothers were carrying out their own counter-operation, leading their menfolk – sons, brothers, husbands, who had been buying or selling goods – away from the market and standing in for them. Many of the kiosks and shops closed as though a wand had been waved. They did so in response to the appearance of the ‘anti-terrorists’, who would regularly fleece the traders. Of course, fleeing the market was unlikely to save any man who was already marked out for arrest. Realizing this, the men tried in vain to resist their women’s efforts. But how can you reason with a woman who’s made up her mind? And at any rate, they could at least escape undue harassment and the risk of arrest from someone taking a dislike to your face. There was one more rule for how to keep safe during a ‘cleansing op’, which the old men would often teach the defiant youth, particularly on public transport: ‘Never look those dogs in the eye. If you stare at them, you’ll only provoke them.’ It is well known that staring into the eyes of dogs will provoke them to attack, and perhaps these elderly men were right to call the soldiers ‘dogs’. Meanwhile, the ‘targeted special operation’ continued. The soldiers sealed off a small area and swarmed over the damaged former House of Fashion store, while their comrades stood at the cordon. As a rule, they all wore balaclavas. One of them stared a long time into my eyes. I forgot about the rule not to look them in the eye and I gazed hard at him like a rabbit staring at a boa. Several long minutes passed. There was no doubt about it: this was one of my friends and he had recognized me. And he must have been trying to decide what to do next: should he turn me in or say nothing. ‘Do we know each other?’ I asked, to provoke a response – I was getting tired of waiting for him to decide what to do – but he walked away without a word. So he hadn’t lost all his humanity.
During the brief day that I spent in Grozny I made a frightening discovery. What brings a city alive is not the simple arithmetic of how many souls live and go to work there. A city is brought to life by the existence of a rough equilibrium between happiness and misery, sorrow and joy, pain and delight, fear and confidence. Disrupting this harmony in either direction – for excessive happiness and excessive misery are equally lethal for the soul and heart – will end up killing the city. Just six months ago we were happy in our burning city. We were alive, free and fighting for the city. But we were miserable to an equal degree. We were freezing and dying, every day we were losing comrades and we were cut off from our usual living conditions. We were afraid too: of being killed or maimed, of freezing to death or falling sick, but our fear was transitory and emotional and it passed as soon as the threat had gone. Here, fear was something quite different. It was constantly present. Everyone was afraid. People were afraid of the night. It was at night that most of the civilians would disappear. The officials were afraid of the Russian secret services and the resistance. The soldiers and secret services were afraid of the guerrilla attacks and the land mines. Some of the ministers would spend the entire week working and sleeping in their offices and coffee rooms in the government compounds (as people discovered later), then at the weekend they’d travel to their families somewhere in Russia. The only people who felt they were hunters rather than victims were the guerrillas. I ran into some guerrillas of my acquaintance on that day. You could find fear everywhere, there was plenty of it. And that was why the city was not alive. It never returned to life after being burnt to death.
As I left Grozny the next morning, I noticed that my mental state was worse than on the night of the breakout, when we were leaving the city to the barbarians. Back then we had left the city alive. Mortally wounded, torn to pieces, dying, yet alive. Of course the city even now was not entirely dead, but nor was it living. It felt somehow suspended in timelessness. Despite this sadness, I didn’t get the feeling that the people of Grozny, the ordinary people, had been broken or subjugated. You could tell the general mood of the people by watching the women. They sensed with their hearts the state of their men and they mirrored it. They could intuitively feel when their men were broken in spirit, when they were buckling. That’s why I placed more trust in the attitude of the women to any given event (meaning women in general, not as individuals) than I did in the propaganda and the official press. There was one particular stray dog, a very affectionate white bitch, that acted as a clear demonstration of the people’s attitude; the Chechen women trading at the market used to feed her scraps. The women had named this dog ‘Putin’, to which she’d respond happily, wagging her tail.
20
The military camp and the autumn forest. It sounds like a painting by an artist with an unhealthy imagination. How could a camp filled with men armed to the teeth and dressed in camouflage pop up amid the magical beauty of the autumn forest? The dull lustre of tempered steel weaponry and clothing the colour of toads do not harmonize with the sad honking of the cranes flying in formation, the buzzing of the wasps and autumn’s purest gold. It is a violation of the natural order. Surrounded by such beauty, when every living thing is at peace, you feel more like living than fighting. But man is not just another living creature: he is lord of all creation, he is homo sapiens, to whom God, or nature if you’re an atheist, has granted vast power and authority over the rest of the living. The peacefulness in nature does not apply to him, and that’s why we set up a military camp in the autumn forest. And this is not the fantasy of an abstract artist: it is reality. But we’re not here from a desire to kill and be killed. The cruel and powerful enemy has forced this fight upon us, and we have accepted it. The enemy has one goaclass="underline" to destroy us as an ethnic entity. No, not through the physical murder of every member of the nation, but through the destruction of a specific category and age range of its male population, through psychological oppression and through physical extermination, through a linguistic and cultural genocide. And our goal is to stop the enemy from achieving his goal. That’s why we, intelligent beings, have dressed in camouflage and set up camp in the autumn forest. And we are disturbing the primeval sounds and rustlings of the forest with the click-clack of rifles being cocked and with human speech. We have gathered for a fight with other intelligent beings who’ve come to this ancient land and declared themselves our enemies. And our hatred for each other is so immense that this hatred alone ought to be enough to make us see, if we really are intelligent beings, that we cannot live together as one people in a single country, nor as friendly nations, or at least our generation cannot. Men who, at the start of the 1990s, had been romantics absorbed in the war games they played at summer camp, were reborn just a few years later as professionals of war, trying to kill each other in cold hatred. One side was seeking dominion over the other; the other side was refusing to acknowledge anyone’s dominion. The enemy did not want a friendly nation; they wanted a nation that was submissive. And so from time to time you came together in mortal combat with the foe. It didn’t matter that you lost. Losing the battle, you won the war. You didn’t become one of them; you saved yourselves from assimilation. And there’s nothing the enemy wants less than for you to keep your Chechen spirit alive. For it is your Chechen spirit that allows you, time after time, to meet in battle with an opponent you know to be powerful. And the enemy knows that he will keep on losing for as long as your Chechen spirit is alive. That is why he’s launched a wide-ranging war against your culture, your language, your way of thinking. After all, those are the things that make up your national spirit. But once again the enemy is doomed to lose.