7
Modern man, raised on the ideals of goodness and compassion to all beings, aware of the sanctity of life, naïvely assumes that he’s frightened of blood and the sight of it will make him queasy. Yet he is deluding himself. It is only when you find yourself in a situation where death and blood are as natural as life itself that you realize that anyone can cope with the sight of blood – and if you can’t, then something is wrong with you. What’s more, the sight of fresh blood awakens man’s primordial instincts, boosting his chances of surviving in extreme circumstances. For it is no coincidence that the nations of antiquity, accustomed to fighting in close combat, survived and thrived and even created great civilizations in conditions which would be fatal for most people today. When man is faced with a situation where there is only one law, one instinct, ‘Kill or be killed, if you want to survive,’ he takes a leap backwards into the psychology of his ancestors, and all talk of the sanctity of life seems like a dim memory of something beautiful but unreal. Obeying an ancient instinct, he tries to survive by killing his own kind. The only difference is that the warrior – a sacred class – will kill only warriors, whereas a coward will try to wipe out everyone, anything that breathes, life itself, because the worm of a tremendous fear is gnawing at his heart, making him wantonly cruel. Once you have cultivated a calm, philosophical approach to death, you start to view blood and corpses as mundane, humdrum even. And when that happens, the only thing that can save you is a deep, sincere faith in God – and it doesn’t matter which God, or even whether it is God at all you believe in, so long as your belief is sincere and is not a belief in Evil, otherwise you’ll become a slave to instinct. It is instinct that helps you survive, but faith is what keeps you from turning into a beast, what helps you stay human. If you give yourself up to instinct without faith, you’ll soon turn into an animal, while if you nurture only faith without instinct, you’ll end up a crazed fanatic. Our ancient ancestors began praying to stones and trees not from boredom, and not because they were terrified of unexplained natural forces, as we were taught in our Soviet schools, but to preserve their distinction from the animals which served them as food.
Although when you see human bodies ripped apart, corpses mashed by the treads of tanks, when you see dogs and cats feeding on the remains of people who only yesterday were just as alive as you… When you know that tomorrow a stray dog might come down the street gripping your severed arm in its jaws – after all, you’ve already seen dogs carrying other people’s arms… When you’re washing your shoe and suddenly realize with a shudder you’re rinsing away human blood… When you have to nudge somebody’s severed head aside with your foot to avoid stepping on it… then it becomes horribly hard, almost impossible to remain a human being, to preserve your faith in God. It is terribly difficult to get used to the horrific smell of corpses that lingers in the air. No, not the stench of decaying bodies, for it is winter. Rather, the unique, indescribable smell of corpses. That smell will haunt you for the rest of your life. You will dream of it far more often than all your other dreams of the war. And each time it will jolt you from your sleep and you’ll wake up in a cold sweat with a foreboding of something dreadful. Something beyond the bounds of what is human. Speaking of dogs brings to mind the story of one of the Chechen fighters, a friend of mine, a poet and artist who lay wounded for several days in the ruins of the Petroleum Institute until he was found by his comrades.
‘Well, I was unable to move, and there were feral dogs circling and waiting. Waiting for me to stop stirring… And the most horrible thing wasn’t that I might get gangrene in my wound, it wasn’t Death breathing near me. It was the repulsive stench of dogs that had tasted human flesh. And what you fear more than anything is not death… No, you are terrified of falling unconscious. Because you know that if you fall unconscious you’ll be killed. You won’t die in battle. You’ll die through being eaten alive by dogs. When I tried shooting at them, they ran off a bit, but they wouldn’t leave, they knew I had no way out. I was their catch. I know that for Muslims there’s no greater sin than suicide… But I decided to save the last round in my gun. For myself. I believe God would have forgiven me my sin. What kept me from doing it was hope. The hope of being buried in the earth, rather than in the stomachs of dogs.’
It is the knowledge that faith alone can save you from turning into a fiend that forces you to believe, and the more horrific the picture, the fiercer your faith. Of course, you could always use drugs and alcohol to numb yourself into a state of oblivion where only one feeling is left: hatred of the enemy. That’s what many of the Russian soldiers did. According to one Russian officer, every single soldier was issued Sydnocarb[10] pills. But that would simply have turned you into a vicious and cowardly beast. You’d have been a zombie, unable to take your own decisions.
So, abstaining from synthetic stimulants, you wander like a ghost through the ruins of your capital city, begging God to save your mind. You witness the ferocious close combat between Chechen fighters and the Russian special forces storming a building. And you realize that during this moment, this lethal encounter, no fighter can ever remember what his trainers in hand-to-hand combat taught him. They won’t remember in whose name and for what reason they are fighting; they’ll have no thoughts of their soldierly duty; they remember neither God nor the Devil, and it is not the best fighter who survives but the one with the greatest desire to live, the one whose life force is the strongest. Those whose genetic memory has endowed them with more defiance of death are the ones who will survive. And the abundance of blood and corpses everywhere only intensifies your desire to avoid becoming dead meat yourself.
There was one other path out of this helclass="underline" to flee the combat zone, which was easy enough for the Chechens to do; those that stayed were all fighting of their own free will. Indeed, some Russians and Chechens did flee, and it would be heartless to condemn them for it, but that was not the way of the warrior. And so, in this city, the finest warriors of this once-united great country came together in lethal battle. A battle from which no one could emerge as victors or vanquished; merely as survivors or corpses. A battle where to survive meant victory: victory not over the adversary, but over death. And which side would eventually gain control of these ruins may have mattered to the politicians and the Russian generals, but it didn’t to the combatants. There were sites which would change hands four or five times in a day. No one here was fighting for the Russian Constitution any more than they were fighting for the city. The Russians were fighting for the right to stay alive, while the Chechens were fighting for all the former generations who had fallen in combat against this Empire; they were fighting for all those who had been unable to retaliate during the period from 1944 to 1959;[11] they were battling with Death for Life itself. And the battle was brutal and majestic; it was a hymn to human courage and valour.
10
Sydnocarb is a stimulant drug adopted by the Russian military during the 1980s. Its use is intended to boost soldiers’ levels of energy and aggression for six to eight hours. It comes with side effects in the form of increased excitability and hallucinations. Users will see the enemy everywhere, with all the consequences that entails.
11
In 1944 Stalin deported the entire Chechen people to Central Asia and Siberia on a false charge of collaboration with the Nazis, despite the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic not coming under German occupation. More than half the nation died in exile from cold and hunger. The exile lasted until 1959.