Let Our Fame Be Great

by Oliver Bullough

  Perhaps because of this incident, or perhaps just through sheer suspicion, the Soviet secret police swooped on Krasnaya Polyana in 1977, four years after the holy man’s death. His grave had become a pilgrimage site and, although the Chechen nation had been allowed to return home, more and more Chechens were moving to the village to be near his burial place.

  Of the inhabitants of the village today, 1,100 are Chechen, the schoolmaster told me. They make up almost the entire population, with just thirty-six Russians, two Germans and one Kazakh interrupting their dominance. Only a dozen families are not part of the brotherhood.

  The KGB wanted to find evidence of polygamy, which was practised by Vis Haji – who himself had four wives, according to Zagayev – as well as by other men in the village. They came up against a blank wall of non-cooperation, and it is difficult not to admire the locals in their stubborn insistence that they would obey their own rules and no one else’s.

  Ansar Ibayev, for example, is now the teacher in the school but he was a seven-year-old boy when the KGB came to the village to seek evidence of law-breaking. Since his mother was apparently a single woman with children – an impossible condition in a traditional Chechen community – it was obvious that she was someone’s second wife.

  ‘They asked me my name, I told them “Ansar”. Then they asked who had bought the television, and I said Uncle Volodya,’ remembered Ibayev. Saying ‘Uncle Volodya’ is a bit like saying ‘Fred Bloggs’, but it so happens that Volodya is the shortened form of Vladimir, which gave the investigating officials something to work with.

  ‘What? Volodya? Like Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, they asked. I said yes, that’s right. They said Lenin did not lie, and said he would not like it that I was lying. I said I did not know what they meant. They then asked me who bought the fuel. I said I did not know. They asked me if my uncle came to sleep in the house. I said I did not know. I was seven years old.’

  The sheer frustration of the KGB men in being stymied – in a three-on-one interview – by a headstrong Chechen child must have been something to see. The boy did not reveal who his father was and that particular investigation was stillborn. The police did arrest one man for having two wives, but the rest of the villagers carried on as before.

  Polygamy is still common in Krasnaya Polyana, and does not seem to cause friction with the authorities of now independent Kazakhstan. Or if it does, the Kazakhs are sensible enough not to try to break through the villagers’ wall of non-cooperation. When I asked Ibayev to introduce me to a polygamous family, he said I had already met one. Zagayev has two wives, he said, before taking me to see a neighbour – Alavdi Shakhgeriev, who, since he was born in 1930, is one of the elders of the community.

  Shakhgeriev barely spoke Russian, and every word he said to me was translated from Chechen. Most of the elders do not know Russian – a legacy of both their lack of schooling and their conscious rejection of the outside world – and his was the most limited I heard.

  He said he was introduced to the movement when Vis Haji visited Karaganda, the town he had been deported to. (In a bleak example of Soviet jurisprudence, the fourteen-year-old Shakhgeriev was deported to Karaganda without trial, was left with his sisters to support and no money, but was not allowed to work in a coal mine – the only work in town – since it would have been a violation of a child’s labour rights.) When the Chechens were permitted to move back to the Caucasus, he moved instead to Krasnaya Polyana, where he has lived ever since with his wives.

  ‘I used to have three wives, but one of them died,’ he said. He sat, stern, straight-backed and serious, and waited for his words to be translated. The perfect image of the patriarch that he presented was subverted by his wife Aminat, however.

  She was wearing the long dress and headscarf of the dutiful woman, but had no intention of fulfilling the role of a meek and silent wife.

  ‘He wants another wife now,’ she said, before hooting with laughter.

  Shakhgeriev ignored her interjection, and attempted to maintain his stern mien. ‘The prophet allows us to have four wives, and no Muslim can disagree.’

  Aminat, however, was not prepared to be quiet in the face of his disapproval. ‘I was twenty-three when we got married in 1958. His other wife was about a hundred,’ she said in bad Russian to make sure I understood, adding further hoots of laughter, which were beginning to be picked up by the children and younger men who had gathered to hear the story.

  Shakhgeriev manfully continued with his tale and pretended not to have heard. ‘It used to be two years in prison if you had a second wife, and they came and checked. But they asked her,’ he said, gesturing to Aminat (who was now bubbling with mirth), ‘if she had any complaints, and she said she did not complain. There was no law against mistresses so they had to stop.’

  Aminat contradicted her husband, however. ‘The prosecutors came and asked me if it was true that he had another wife. I should have handed him over to them so they could have imprisoned him.’ The ripple of laughter took in almost the whole gathering, and I was finding it harder and harder not to join in myself.

  Emboldened by the success of her joke, she then decided to take the initiative. ‘He took his third wife at the start of the 1970s. I already did not care. I went with him to fetch the bride,’ she said. I asked if she had been opposed to his marrying again, which set up a joke she simply could not resist.

  ‘I was much less opposed than his new bride was,’ she said, before dissolving into giggles, which were shared by everyone in the room. Even her husband looked at his troublesome wife and smiled fondly.

  ‘I always wanted another wife but two years ago my health worsened and now I have changed my mind a little,’ he said.

  I had been promised another chat with Utsiev that evening, so I walked through the village to the cemetery, passing a ford in the stream where women were washing rugs and clothes. The heat had become more bearable now evening was coming. That morning as we drove through the fields, the heat haze had hemmed us in and disorientated us. Chunks of the sky broke off and floated along the fields, and combine harvesters trailed great plumes of dust – smoking islands of machine in a wavering blue sea.

  Now the sun was lower, and I could walk without having to squint into the glare. As I strolled I wondered if Imam Shamil’s relationship with his own wives had been as boisterous and loving and funny as the one I had just witnessed.

  That evening, I returned to Utsiev’s house, where he and three other old men sat and chatted in Chechen. The acoustics of the room, which was not large but seemed to have a strange resonance, made the sound run around the walls in whispers. Their words were incomprehensible to me, but the occasional mentions of the word ‘Anglia’ – ‘England’ in Russian – made me suspect I was the topic of conversation.

  Eventually, their minds made up about something, three of them left, and Utsiev and I sat down to supper. We chatted for a while about the world, and he attempted to force food upon me with the good-natured but insistent hospitality of the Caucasus. Gradually, other men, many of them in their thirties and forties began to drift in. They were all wearing the same kind of baggy, long cotton shirts that Utsiev had worn all day, as well as skull caps. The shirts had bobbles of cotton instead of buttons, though I am not sure why.

  There was an air of excitement in the house now, as more people piled in. I asked Utsiev what was happening, and he told me they were going to have a prayer ceremony – the ecstatic zikr that had been banned by the tsars and distrusted by the Soviets – for me to observe. I was overjoyed, since it is a rare privilege to see it, and I felt increasingly impatient as we waited for the participants to drift in.

  Eventually, we rose and passed into the prayer room, and the men reached up to take drums down from the walls. The drums looked a little like Irish bodhráns, but were smaller and with a looser skin. The men sat down cross-legged on the wooden floor, and chatted and laughed with each other as they waited for latecomers to arrive. At this stage there were eight me
n in a circle, and one woman – Utsiev’s daughter – sat outside it.

  Utsiev suddenly – and unexpectedly, considering the spiritual air that had filled the room – addressed me in Russian. The language sounded harsh in this context, as if it was too large for his mouth, but he was keen to make sure I understood what he said.

  ‘Allah is listening, he is speaking but not like people speak. This is his attribute. Allah never sleeps, Allah never forgets, he loves his slaves, he has fed them with everything alive. This world is not held in a balance, it is held up by his strength, by his will. And we are strengthless in this,’ he said. ‘But we believe in him and love him and appeal to him. This people has nothing else. They work with their hands honestly, and earn what they eat with their own labour. The sacrifices they make don’t earn them any favours. This is all for the sake of Allah, for the sake of Allah.’

  He stopped there, checked I had understood what he said, then looked around at his comrades. They exchanged a few words in Chechen, then he threw back his head and began to sing. He started with the single word ‘Allah’, then expanded it with more Arabic words. The other chanters added a complex harmony beneath his words, giving his old man’s voice a purity it would not otherwise have possessed.

  The song grew from nothing into a thrilling and full crescendo, full of spiritual longing and loneliness. It was, although delicate, imbued with a confidence that carried itself gently. There was no swagger here, but the irresistible power of a force of nature.

  The chanters rose up onto their knees, and began to rock back and forth a little. The chant had not yet gained a rhythm, but it was clear one was on its way, and the men were feeling their way towards it. Three more men joined the circle after a minute or so, adding their voice to the swelling and intensely spiritual sound.

  Two more women entered the room at this point, sitting outside the circle. I noticed to my astonishment that they were weeping, the tears clinging to their eyelashes. One woman’s shoulders heaved with sobs. Utsiev slowly rose to his feet, raised his hands to the side of his face and chanted upwards. The change was immediate. The other chanters stood too, and the tempo began to become more insistent. More cries rose up above the background of the chant, and the men swayed back and forth.

  When the first clapping came in after five minutes, it felt like an obvious progression. From a simple moan to an insistent rhythm had been a movement as natural as breathing. Within a minute of the clapping starting, the circle had unwound itself and re-formed in the neighbouring room. All the women now joined the circle, as the dancers started to follow each other round and round. Faster and faster they danced, and the rhythm became irresistible. Utsiev’s hesitant old legs had become spry and nimble under the influence of the dance. Despite myself, I found my foot tapping along by itself, and had to deliberately stop it since it seemed somehow sacrilegious.

  I noticed four children in the far corner of the room watching with wide-eyed amazement, and the circle moved faster still. The women were taking a full part in the ceremony – there were twelve men and four women – although one woman’s shoulders heaved with sobs and she hid her face behind her hands. Her high female screams rose above the deep, bass chant, with the fierce urgency of childbirth or terror.

  The clapping became faster, and faster, the dancers raised hands above their heads. And then they just stopped. The chanting slowed, swelled, subsided, coiled round itself, and came to a halt.

  ‘Allah-h-h-h-h,’ called out Utsiev once more, in a cry echoed around the circle. The sound gradually died away, and was replaced by silence disturbed only by sobs. The men and women turned to face each other, breathing heavily.

  Utsiev talked to the group in Chechen, while the hysterical tears of one of the women too faded away of themselves.

  The children, who had been watching the dancing, became bored by the talking and started to whisper to each other. Perhaps they had seen this ritual too many times for it to be interesting. One of the dancers surreptitiously handed one of them a telephone to play with, and turned his attention back to Utsiev.

  For the next part of the ceremony, they returned to the first room, where they sat on the floor once more and chanted to the tunes of stringed instruments, which they called ‘fiddles’ and played with bows, but which looked nothing like any violin I’ve even seen.

  As they played, I wondered to myself what chance a Soviet bureaucrat – raised on the certainties of Marxism and dialectical materialism, sure of the progression of history towards a future when the state would wither away, happy to take a bribe to make someone’s life easier in the meantime – would have had if faced with these people.

  They lived in a different world to the people who made the rules. They had no interest in imposing their values on anyone else, which might have made them seem soft. But they had survived torment, and emerged vibrant and strong, which is something the Soviet Union itself failed to do.

  They worked, and they loved, and they danced. That was their life, and it was wonderful.

  The ceremony over, I bid them farewell fondly and drove slowly back to my hotel in Balkashino with Birsanukayev. The stars were bright and huge overhead as we picked our way along the dust roads between the wheat fields. We turned off the headlights for a while, and sat just looking at the stars, which were peaceful and calm after the emotions of the evening.

  I was overawed by what I had seen, at the little world that the Chechens had built for themselves in the midst of desolation, and struggled to answer Birsunukayev’s good-natured questions about my impressions of his home village.

  I thought back to supper, to a question Utsiev had asked me.

  ‘Do you think I am wise?’ he had asked.

  Strong? Maybe. Kind? Definitely. But wise? It did not seem the right word somehow. I think perhaps English does not have the word to describe him.

  25.

  Everyone was Scared of Them

  The Chechens were obviously not the only people deported to Kazakhstan. Aside from the North Caucasus nations they were united in exile with ethnic minority deportees from Crimea, from Georgia, from the Far East and elsewhere. Political deportees joined them too, as the barren steppes of Central Asia became a giant dumping ground for those people that Stalin wanted to simply get rid of.

  Among them was Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was to become legendary as a dissident writer and would even win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970. As a young officer, he was caught making slightly facetious comments about Stalin, which was enough to condemn him to the camps.

  In March 1953, at the end of his sentence – and, coincidentally, in the same month that Stalin died – he was exiled for life to the southern Kazakh village of Kok-Terek. There he taught in a school and observed first-hand how the Chechens lived in Central Asia – observations he wove into his giant indictment of Soviet rule The Gulag Archipelago. According to his account, the Chechens just refused en masse to compromise.

  ‘After they were treacherously thrown out of their home, they believed in nothing ever again. They built themselves huts – low, dark, sad, such that you could almost destroy them with one kick. And all their life in exile was like that – for a day, a month, a year, without accumulating property, or reserves, without plans. They ate, drank, they clothed their young. Years went past, and they still had nothing like at the beginning,’ Solzhenitsyn wrote.

  ‘No Chechens ever tried to please or ingratiate themselves with the bosses. They were always haughty before them and even openly hostile.’

  He recounted a story from his time in Kok-Terek which demonstrates the Chechens’ sheer refusal to surrender better than any other I have ever seen. His star pupil was a Chechen boy called Abdul Khudaev, who was in the ninth year of school – hence, aged between thirteen and fifteen. Abdul did not ingratiate himself with anyone, being too proud, but he was respected for his sheer intelligence.

  The boy lived with his elderly mother, and had no other close relatives except an uncle and an older broth
er. The brother had been imprisoned as a thief and a murderer, but had been released under amnesty. He returned to the village and got drunk for two days, then quarrelled with a local Chechen and attacked him with a knife. Before he could do his drinking partner any damage, however, an elderly Chechen woman stepped in to stop him.

  By tradition, the brother would have stopped at this point, since no Chechen could ever harm an older woman. But he was too drunk and too fractious, and he killed her. He was not drunk enough to fail to realize what awaited him when the other Chechens heard what he had done, however, so he fled the village, turned himself in to the police and was sent to prison.

  The Soviet legal system might have considered that to be an end to the affair, but the rules of blood had not been satisfied. In the absence of the brother, someone else from the family would have to pay for the murder. So Abdul, his mother and his uncle stocked up with food and water and barricaded themselves in their house, which was besieged by Chechens.

  The whole community knew what was happening, but no one – not the Young Communist League, not the Party, not the police, not the teachers, not anyone – went to save this child from the threat of violent death.

  ‘Before the revival of blood revenge these formidable organizations like the regional committee of the Party, and the regional executive committee, and the Interior Ministry komendatura and the police hid away like cowards. The barbaric savage ancient law had taken breath, and it seemed there was no Soviet rule in Kok-Terek,’ Solzhenitsyn wrote.

  The Chechen elders went to the police and asked them to hand over the brother, but the police refused. They left, discussed among themselves, and returned to the police to ask for there to be an open court case and that the brother be shot in their presence. Again, the police refused. So the elders summoned more elders – the most respected in the nation – from Almaty. They held a council and condemned the brother to death. Any Chechen, anywhere, was instructed to kill him on sight.