Let Our Fame Be Great

by Oliver Bullough

  I would like to think Misirov enjoyed acting the role of the man whose troops killed his family and destroyed his nation, since his part consisted of little more than choking, vomiting and wallowing in his own faeces. The film itself, though it veers into very self-indulgent territory, presents a horrible picture of Stalin’s Moscow as a place of arbitrary arrest, random and unexplained violence, rape, cruelty and nightmarish weirdness.

  It must have been a bewildering journey for Misirov to have started his adult life hiding in a potato store listening to his whole family being murdered by Stalin’s forces, then to reach the end of his life impersonating the great ruler while a nurse removed his soiled pyjamas. This new Russia was surely a land of freedom.

  But, as ever, the situation was more complicated than that. It might now be possible to make films showing Stalin as a frail and pitiful old man, but that did not mean the majority of Russians disapproved of what the dictator had done. As I write this, one of Russia’s subservient state television channels – which never take a step without Kremlin approval – has just announced that its viewers voted Stalin the third greatest Russian of all time. Stalin had been in first place in the poll, and even threatened to win it, until a producer appealed for people to vote for someone else to avoid embarrassment.

  And, despite the state commission and the definitive account of the events in the Cherek valley published in The Cherek Tragedy, their version had not found universal acceptance. Only 1,000 copies were ever printed and it has vanished from bookshops. My copy was given to me by a kind family in Upper Balkaria, and has a child’s doodles inside the front and back covers, and several pages ripped out.

  In the absence of this account of the truth, the myth of German involvement in the massacre has resurfaced.

  Valery Dzidzoyev, an academic in the nearby city of Vladikavkaz, wrote an article in 2005 called ‘In Search of Historical Truth’ analysing whether Muslim nations in the North Caucasus had really betrayed their homeland during the Second World War. In it, he blamed the massacres in the Cherek valley on German soldiers from the Edelweiss Division, and did not mention the Red Army at all. The article was published by a research body run by the government of Kabardino-Balkaria, in clear breach of promises made in 1992 to publicize the truth of what had happened.

  And this was not the only promise it has broken. After the government officially announced in 1992 that what had happened in the Cherek valley had been an act of genocide, it pledged to investigate the legality of the 1943 investigation into the killings, to check if any of the guilty parties were commemorated in street names or in monuments and to make recommendations to correct that, to erect a memorial complex in Balkaria itself, to ask the central government to give compensation to the victims or their relatives, and to ask the prosecutors to re-examine all criminal cases connected to the events.

  These promises seem to have been forgotten. General Kozlov, who ordered his subordinates to wipe the villages of Upper Balkaria from the face of the earth, still has a street in Nalchik named after him. Apart from the two women who trudged through the courts, none of the survivors of the massacre, or the victims’ relatives, who spoke to me had received compensation, and they did not expect to get any. There have been no further investigations into the killings.

  As for the memorial complex, that has also not materialized. A bare slab of granite stands on the hillside near where Sauty once was, and bears the words ‘The Place Where a Memorial to the Victims of the Genocide of the Civilians of the Cherek Region will be Set Up’. The slab is set on a plinth of rough rocks, and the words are now so faded as to be barely legible. The residents do not expect to see their memorial complex any time soon.

  The authors of The Cherek Tragedy made a series of conclusions at the end of their book, which reflected the hopes still present in 1994 that Russia would develop democratically and peacefully.

  ‘We must with all our strength fight against any war, before it has even started. Any war, especially in the atomic age, cannot be a means to resolve an argument,’ they wrote.

  The new era of freedom and equality that those authors hoped for was to prove illusory. Even before they wrote those words the Caucasus had been aflame in Abkhazia, in South Ossetia and in Ingushetia, as the new freedoms of long-oppressed nations collided with each other. The losers and the gainers of the unfair Soviet system flew at each other, in their attempts to secure what they saw as their rights.

  The new Russia was to prove every bit as violent, corrupt and inhuman as the old. For the people of the Caucasus, the rule of the presidents would prove little better than the rule of the tsars, or the rule of the communists. For the most brutal war the mountains has ever seen was about to break out: in Chechnya.

  PART THREE

  Grozny, 1995

  18.

  War is War, But to Behave in That Way is Not Right

  Aidrus Khazaliev had been waiting to go home for all his adult life.

  Deported from his native Chechnya by Stalin’s troops aged just sixteen, he had lived in Central Asia ever since. One obstacle after another had stopped him returning home – the Soviet police, then difficulties selling the house, then his father’s illness, bureaucratic problems, work, family – but now nothing was going to get in his way. It was 1994, the freedoms secured when the communist state collapsed were safe, and he was finally going back to the Caucasus.

  ‘We took our children, and we had two whole wagons on the train for our things. It was in May, I remember it,’ said Khazaliev, a thick-set, handsome 81-year-old wearing a white shirt buttoned up to the top, fourteen years later.

  It had been a risk selling the house that he and his sons had built in Almaty, in the south of what is now Kazakhstan, but the call of his blood had been overwhelming. He wanted to go back and live out his declining years in a land where Chechen was spoken and Chechens were finally in charge.

  The preceding five years had been revolutionary for the Chechen nation. After almost two centuries of oppression, war and discrimination, the Chechens had finally begun to rule themselves. The first major shift came in 1989, when Doku Zavgayev became the first ethnic Chechen to head their government since the deportation.

  The whole nation was taking part in a national reawakening. Amid the ferment, Chechen historians were working to unpick the mesh of Soviet lies surrounding their ancestors. Their children had been taught that Chechnya had voluntarily joined the Soviet Union, and that the men who had fought the Russian conquest in the nineteenth century were agents of Turkey and England. A statue of their most hated oppressor, Alexei Yermolov, stood in the centre of Grozny, and their ethnic kin were excluded from senior positions.

  In Checheno-Ingushetia, the legacy of the deportation still hung over the native peoples, although the overwhelming majority of them had returned home under Stalin’s successor in the Kremlin. In the mid-1980s, only a third of top officials in the Communist Party were Chechen or Ingush. Russians outnumbered locals in all key positions – a political divide that extended into the economy where the oil and heavy industries that dominated Grozny were also controlled by Russians.

  Young nationalists united into a movement called Kavkaz – ‘Caucasus’ in Russian – in 1988, and Visita Ibragimov was one of them. He was thirty-eight years old, and had only just come back to Grozny. As a young man, he had left his homeland to find work in central Russia. He had been unable to afford the 3,000-rouble bribe to secure a good job in his homeland and, without a job, he could not get a residence permit from the police so Grozny had been barred to him.

  The corruption in Chechnya angered him, as did the incompetence and graft in his adopted city. As the 1980s passed by, the Soviet Union began to relax its grip on political activity, and he attended opposition meetings in Moscow and elsewhere. He began to sense that times had changed, and the balance of power was shifting, and that it was time for him to go home.

  ‘In 1981, the Russians in Grozny would not even reply if I said hi to them on the stre
et. Now, they would come up to me and ask how I was doing,’ he remembered later.

  With a Chechen running the government, many Chechens believed they were witnessing the dawn of a new age. The nationalists harnessed the anger and frustration of a generation of men like Ibragimov to demand broader autonomy and new rights.

  And the Chechens began to listen to them. The version of history that the nationalists expressed – that of resistance, and oppression – appealed to national pride, and made more sense than the cant taught in Soviet schools. If the Chechens had indeed voluntarily joined the Soviet Union, why was the tsarist General Yermolov quoted as saying: ‘Chechnya may rightly be called the nest of all the bandits’?

  The Soviet economy was collapsing, so underemployed young people had little to do except attend demonstrations, and the nationalist movement began to put pressure on the local government, which had declared regional sovereignty within the Soviet Union in November 1990. A Chechen had only been heading the region for a year, and already the first step towards independence was taken.

  Nationalists like Ibragimov organized a national congress for November 1990. Here they would discuss and define their nation’s aspirations. Could the Chechens really gain independence? And, if they did, who would lead them? Would it be Zavgayev, the dour former collective farm chairman with experience of the back-room style of Soviet government? Or would it be one of the flashy and charismatic ideologues of the opposition? All camps were represented in the congress, which had invited other Chechens to speak too – including the most high-ranking Chechen in the Soviet air force, Major-General Dzhokhar Dudayev.

  Dudayev was a rare star among the Chechens. He had a Russian wife, and had lived almost his whole life out of his homeland. But people who expected him to have become russified during his exile were proved wrong. Handsome, successful and gifted, the military aviator hit the congress like a missile. It was love at first sight.

  ‘He gave an excellent speech,’ remembered Ibragimov with passion, as if the seventeen years that had passed were nothing, ‘even though he was from western Chechnya and had an accent. Everyone was quiet and listened.’

  The speech was a call to arms, appealing to the Chechens to restore their lost independence and to throw off Russian rule. Some of the listeners were appalled by it, but most cheered and roared. Completely seduced by the general’s charm, they elected him to head the congress’s executive committee.

  ‘Just imagine it,’ said Ibragimov, his voice sunk to a whisper. ‘Dudayev was such a beautiful man, and he gave this inflammatory speech. He was a real general, a fighter. The rest of us were all the same, we all knew each other. It is like when you are at school, you are not interested in the girls you study with every day. Then a girl comes from another school and you’re interested. This Dudayev was like that, he was someone we did not know. And he took charge.’

  In photographs now, I can see how this general could have used his charisma to win the Chechen nationalists over.

  On the cover of a book of state documents published in 1993, Dudayev is in the pilot’s seat of an aircraft. Wearing headphones, a fur-collared camouflage jacket and a chunky military watch, he is giving the thumbs-up to the camera. A thin moustache – the kind that for British people belongs only on the face of Errol Flynn or a Second World War spiv – is raised up by a wry smile, which has creased the lines around his twinkling eyes. It is a picture of a handsome, dynamic, successful man. He looks like he has a sense of fun, but – since he is at the controls of a warplane – he also knows how to control and to kill.

  On the back cover of the book, a young teenager is the focus among a crowd of men. His clenched right hand is raised in a defiant fist above his head, while his left hand clutches an ancient shotgun. The barrel of another gun, which looks like it may have more killing power than the shotgun, peeps out from under the jacket of the man next to him.

  Other photographs inside the book show Dudayev relaxing at home, engaged in martial arts, meeting the people, talking to religious leaders. In one of them he is pictured opposite the lone wolf he chose as the symbol of Chechnya. The wolf summed up how Dudayev saw the Chechens: fierce if attacked, but only killing to eat. The wolf cannot be tamed, but is loyal to its comrades.

  In all the photographs, he maintains the same unflappable quality. The sardonic half-smile suggests a man looking on the world as some kind of joke.

  It is an entirely misleading impression.

  As his enemies were to discover, Dudayev was erratic in conduct, but single-minded in attaining his goal. He wanted an independent Chechnya, and was prepared to shed blood to achieve it. His last post in the Soviet military had been as head of a strategic bomber wing in Estonia and he had witnessed how a small nation could throw off Soviet rule. Estonia’s population was greater than Chechnya’s, but its Russian minority was larger too, so the gap between the number of ethnic Estonians and the number of ethnic Chechens was only 100,000 people or so.

  For Dudayev, the independence that Estonia was achieving could come to his homeland as well, even though Chechnya – as an autonomous region within Russia, not a republic within the Soviet Union – did not technically have Estonia’s legal right to proclaim itself independent. Full republics, like Estonia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and the others, had a legal right to declare independence under the Soviet constitution. It was not a right the framers of the constitution ever expected them to exercise, but it still existed.

  Autonomous regions – like Chechnya, Dagestan and dozens of others – did not have the same constitutional right to independence. They were tied to whichever republic they had been assigned to by Soviet mapmakers.

  The debate over whether Chechen independence was legal or not has been going on ever since, but for nationalists there is no question about it. Their land had been forcibly incorporated into a state they wanted no ties to, and they did not see why a constitution imposed on them should stop them proclaiming their rights.

  Dudayev was no radical Islamist like many of the Chechens who would follow him. He loved Russian culture, and his wife wrote poems in Russian. In an interview in May 1992, he said he had read and reread Pushkin and Lermontov, and that every time he pondered their words, he understood them more deeply.

  ‘Personally, I find it hard to imagine Chechnya without Russia,’ he said.

  But he had been deeply scarred by the experience of the 1944 deportation of his people. He was just an infant when the Chechen nation was taken and dumped in Central Asia. He grew up accused of being a traitor, although two of his brothers had fought in the Soviet Army against the Germans. He had struggled even to win a place at school, since he lacked official documentation and could not prove his age.

  Such petty humiliations coupled with the desperate conditions the nation lived in after deportation had aroused a feeling of injustice in him, as it had in the whole Chechen nation.

  This is surely the root of the desire to break free of Russian rule. Russians to this day simply fail to understand how an event like the deportation, in which 478,479 Chechens and Ingush were loaded onto trains and sent away in February 1944, created the world view of their Chechen neighbours. Between 1926 and 1939, the Chechen population grew by 26 per cent. In the next twenty years, it grew by only 2.5 per cent. The suffering that caused that statistic is indescribable.

  Anne Applebaum, a journalist and historian whose book Gulag gives the most complete and harrowing picture of the horrors of the Soviet Union prison system, compared Russian ignorance of what had been done to the Chechens to an imaginary Germany that had forgotten the crimes of the Nazi regime.

  ‘If the Russian people and the Russian elite remembered – viscerally, emotionally remembered – what Stalin did to the Chechens, they could not have invaded Chechnya in the 1990s, not once and not twice. To do so was the moral equivalent of post-war Germany invading western Poland. Very few Russians saw it that way – which is itself evidence of how little they knew about their own history,’ she wrote.

/>   In August 1991, hardliners rose up against the Soviet Union’s reforming leadership. The freedoms of perestroika and glasnost were under threat, but the government in Chechnya hesitated to speak out. Though he was a Chechen, Zavgayev was a good Soviet functionary too. He intended to choose sides when it had become clear who had won. He was in Moscow when the hardliners rebelled, and he sought counsel while he was there. He waited two days before returning to Grozny. When he came back to Chechnya he talked, he thought, he hesitated, and he lost the moment.

  Dudayev on the other hand had no hesitation about acting. He called the people out onto the streets to support the democratic movement headed by Boris Yeltsin, who was leading the crowds in Moscow against this attempt to crank back the clock.

  Grozny was paralysed by a general strike, and the central squares were thronged by crowds of Chechens revelling in the destruction of communist control.

  A fortnight later, they seized the Supreme Soviet and threw a Russian communist out of a window. He was the only casualty of the revolution, which also effectively ended Zavgayev’s political career. Yeltsin, who had by this stage defeated the coup in Moscow, put pressure on Zavgayev to quit and Chechnya’s Supreme Soviet dissolved itself.

  Dudayev ignored attempts to set up an interim government, and took control himself. A hastily arranged election swept him to power with 90 per cent of the vote, and on 2 November 1991 the new parliament held its first session and declared independence.

  It was a momentous time for the Chechen nation, made even better a week later, when Yeltsin’s attempt to proclaim a state of emergency in Chechnya failed. Moscow sent 600 troops to Grozny, but they were surrounded by a crowd of civilians, disarmed and sent home. By June 1992, all Moscow’s soldiers had left Chechnya. The Chechens were free to decide their own destiny.