Since the days of Peter the Great, the leadership of the Russian Army had been wont to bombard its enemies with the corpses of its finest sons, and now in Chechnya it held true to this tactic. The generals inundated the city with the corpses of its soldiers and the carcasses of burnt-out vehicles. While thousands of Russian soldiers and officers were dying in Grozny, a song by Oleg Gazmanov[12] called ‘Officers’ was playing on the radio day and night (I have hated his songs ever since); it included the words, ‘Officers, officers, your hearts are in the crosshairs, for Russia and for freedom, to the bitter end.’ This song rang out like a sardonic Satanic requiem for the thousands of dead soldiers pulverized by the tracks of their own tanks, torn limb from limb, devoured by feral dogs. Meanwhile, the city began to resemble the set of an apocalyptic horror film.
8
It was staggering to see the attitude of the Russian command towards the corpses of their own soldiers. These were young men who had fulfilled their duty to the homeland honourably, and they were hardly to blame if their country had been taken over by a band of traitors and misanthropes. The Chechens appealed to the Russians many times proposing a few days’ truce for the sole purpose of clearing the soldiers’ corpses from the streets of the city. The Russian generals, though, in their infinite wisdom, decided that this was a ploy by Dudayev to buy time to reposition and they rejected the offer. Yet the dead, whatever their nationality or faith, no matter what they were fighting for, by virtue of their death had fully exonerated themselves before the living. A man who has beheld God’s great mystery ahead of you cannot be guilty before you. Only a coward who doesn’t have it in him to face his fate in open combat could dishonour an enemy corpse. Yet the Russian authorities dishonoured the corpses of their own soldiers.[13] Rest in peace, boys! You fell on the battlefield and you are free of blame. This battle has reconciled its fallen fighters with the world and with one another. In pagan times, the Chechens had an ancient custom: whenever there fell in battle sixty-three of the enemy (a number that was sacred to the Nakh),[14] the last enemy corpse would be stood on its head. This was a signal to the enemy: ‘Sixty-three of your warriors have been slain. Perhaps it’s time for us to pause and bury the dead?’ The ancient Nakh tribes believed that leaving sixty-three dead warriors unburied on the battlefield would invoke the wrath of the heavens upon the earth. By standing the sixty-third corpse upside down, they hoped to trick the heavens and at the same time send a sign to the enemy. So, from the viewpoint of ancient Nakh philosophy, Russia should have been struck by the sacred number of sixty-three major calamities for this abomination. Russia should have invoked the wrath of the heavens.
Even in this dead world, swathed in winter’s shroud, where the only living creatures were the combatants and the dogs grown fat on human flesh, life could still be discerned. Life lurked timid, deep below the earth but stubbornly clinging on. One moment a woman would run quickly down the ruined street carrying a water canister; the next, a man’s sallow face would appear for a minute, shyly checking out ‘the situation in the city’, as though he lived not in the city but somewhere deep in the countryside. I remember two colourful characters, a Chechen and a Russian. Sitting in the courtyard of a wrecked five-storey building with an open bottle of vodka and a jar of pickled tomatoes, in the company of a giant Caucasian sheepdog, they posed excitedly for my camera: ‘For the journalist, for posterity.’ They united in cursing the attacking forces and Boris Yeltsin for starting this ‘colonial war’; they vowed to unleash the sheepdog on the Russian soldiers ‘if our side runs out of ammunition and the Russians reach us’. And they wanted me to get their photo into some newspaper or magazine, for some reason deciding, ‘Best choice would be Forbes, of course.’ What became of them I don’t know – chances are they unleashed the sheepdog on some soldiers and all three were shot dead, but their carefree candour left a deep impression on me. Then there was the old man feeding his hens to the thunder of guns and the drone of attack planes. One very uplifting scene was vividly seared in my memory. It happened in January 1995 when the battle for the capital had reached its peak. The relentless roar of guns was echoing through the city. You were wearily walking through the streets of the devastated city when you saw a remarkable scene. A young guy around the same age as you was standing on the street corner with two very striking girls. They had slim, elegant figures with classically beautiful faces. One was blonde with deep-blue eyes, the other had raven hair and a limpid expression. Meanwhile ground-attack planes were whining overhead, flying so low that you could make out the figures of the pilots in the cockpits. They were not just doing air reconnaissance of the warring city, they were pounding it with missiles and fire from their aircraft guns. But these three seemed oblivious. They were chatting quietly and laughing, artlessly, gaily. A woman walked past carrying water and, seeing them, she remarked, ‘How happy you look!’ But they didn’t hear her. You realized that this guy must have left his post defending the city (this was clear from his attire) and come to see these girls. And stifling their natural fear of death, the girls were standing with him under this blitz and laughing. They knew that this moment might perhaps save their friend’s life when he has nothing left to keep him going. Like the daughters of Dadi-Yurt,[15] who, on the day their village was destroyed, performed a last dance for their menfolk defending the doomed village to the roar of Yermolov’s[16] guns. Overcome by what you saw, you declared, ‘As God is my witness! As long as our women can laugh in the face of death, our people will remain unconquerable!’
‘Brother, you’re right!’ laughed the guy.
Of course there were looters, too, who plundered the ruins and the houses that still stood. The Chechen soldiers and militiamen executed them as mercilessly as they shot the man-eating dogs, but, like all evils, they were ineradicable. There was also the occasional lone drug addict roaming the streets.
I remember one I’d often encountered in this part of the city before the war. He was small and dark-haired and he used to wander about the market quietly in search of something sweet. Soft-hearted women-traders would give him free chocolate. I last saw him in January 1995. His bare feet were in slippers, he’d covered his naked body with tracksuit trousers and a jacket, and he was shivering fiercely from the cold as he walked down the devastated street. What brought him to mind was his death, which came later, in February. By then the occupation of the city was complete. In full view of passers-by, Russian OMON (Special Designation Police Detachment) paramilitaries had been savagely beating a Chechen boy of around fifteen. The entire time they were beating the boy, the swarthy drug addict was studying them in silence, spellbound. The paramilitaries knew he was a drug addict and they paid him no attention. That night he slipped into their quarters with a knife. The city had no electricity and so it was dark indoors. How he managed to steal into the badly damaged building remains a mystery. He must have known every last alley of that district, where he’d lived all his life – drug addicts usually know all the hidden nooks and corners in their locality. Once inside, he plunged the knife into the first paramilitary he encountered. He managed to knife two or three more before the petrified OMON were woken by the screams of their comrades and opened fire randomly in the pitch dark. They killed and wounded more than twenty of their own before they realized what was happening. The junkie was taken alive. After they’d tied him up, beaten him viciously and promised him ‘the most horrible death ever invented’, his adversaries began gathering their dead and wounded. At that point a seasoned colonel walked up and shot him once in the heart, quickly and painlessly. He handed the corpse over to the Chechen women: ‘Bury him decently. He may have lived like a bum. But he died like a man.’ Unfortunately his name is lost from my memory.
13
In January 1995 the streets of Grozny were strewn with the many corpses of Russian soldiers killed during the storming of the city. The abandoned corpses of soldiers and officers were eaten by feral cats and dogs. Only two weeks later did the Russian commanders agree to a temporary truce to remove the corpses from the streets of the city.
14
‘Nakh’ is the ancient name for the Chechens, the Ingush and the Batsbi, who are a Christian community of Chechen origin living in Georgia.
15
Dadi-Yurt was a large village, the site of a bloody battle in September 1818 between the Russian occupation forces led by General Alexei Yermolov and the Chechen resistance. The village was totally annihilated; almost all the inhabitants were killed, including the women and children. Legend has it that the girls of the village danced for their male defenders to raise their morale. And then these girls fell too, charging at the Russian soldiers with daggers. Among the few captives were two boys who were taken to Russia. One grew up to be the famous artist Pyotr Zakharov-Chechenets. The second, Bata Shamurzayev, became a Russian officer who crossed over to the Chechen side and fought against the Russians. In 1851, he sided once again with the Russians and fought against his former comrades. The Tsar rewarded him for his loyalty with 600 hectares of land.
16
Alexei Yermolov, the Russian infantry general, appointed Proconsul of the Caucasus by decree of Alexander I on 6 April 1816. A bloodthirsty tyrant and slaughterer of the Chechen people.