The politics that was driving the war was scarcely relevant to him, and it is given no more space than any other aspect of his life, but the ironies of his situation scar every paragraph.
One day, for example, he found his yard full of dead doves, which he along with his neighbour Salavdi gathered for food. ‘Yes, it would seem the Chechen doves have lost the war, and failed to become the doves of peace. And so far I haven’t seen a single dead crow.’
And then a little later: ‘Radio Liberty is reporting that fifteen shells are landing on Grozny every minute. I counted forty-seven and the minute had not even ended, and I did not count more. If the world was only listening to Radio “Russia”, then it wouldn’t hear a single explosion.’
As he wrote, he wove in his thoughts on the deportation, on the nineteenth-century war, on democracy and the Chechen leadership. His account seamlessly links what is happening in Grozny around him with everything that has happened in his homeland in the last two centuries. It is a very Chechen book.
‘When the government in Chechnya became Chechen, it lost that aura that any government puts around itself. For a Chechen, it had ceased to be a government but was someone’s son or brother who ended up in a good position when the Muscovites left. And, by what right? Why not me? How is his father better than mine?’
Barsik becomes an ever greater presence in the book, as the people around him die or are driven away. The dog’s actions gradually allow the reader to picture his character. At one point, Barsik steals one of Yashurkayev’s boots, and places it in front of the room in which Yashurkayev used to sleep before the war. Taking this as a sign of some kind, Yashurkayev decides to sleep in that room, although it was very cold and he normally chose to sleep elsewhere. In the morning, it turns out that a bomb had shattered the window in his normal room, and that most of the glass ended up on the bed and would have done him serious damage. From then on, he listens to Barsik’s advice more carefully, and holds long, imaginary conversations with him.
The bombs that fell gutted apartment blocks, and shattered factories. The shoddily built five-storey buildings that housed workers all across the Soviet Union required little encouragement to fall down. When they collapsed, they buried anyone sheltering in the cellar under tonnes of concrete. Metal gates became shredded like doilies in the rain of shrapnel, and life in the city became ever more animal and basic.
Parallel with this, Yashurkayev’s distant, ironic tone starts to become angrier, as he describes the murders of civilians all around him, how a shell landed by his house and miraculously failed to explode, how the roof of his barn is destroyed, and how Barsik is so scared he hides under the sideboard and refuses to come out.
The shelling starts to terrify him, and those of his neighbours who are left. One neighbour refuses to lend another a packet of cigarettes, since he would not get them back if his friend was killed. Relationships break down, but the neighbour is lucky because Yashurkayev was feeling light-headed that day and wanted to help everyone he saw.
As the months go by, the Russian soldiers inexplicably leave him in peace, perhaps because of his white beard, but their regular appearances terrify Barsik, who is becoming increasingly traumatized.
‘It turns out my Barsik is a very clever dog. I never thought about this, I kept him just so he could bark in my yard. But when the shooting starts, he lowers his tail, and makes himself very small and prevails upon me to leave the building. If I refuse, he leaves me, looking both reproachful and guilty and runs to hide in his corner.’
Soon he has a new animal to worry about too. One of his cows gives birth to a calf he calls ‘War’. As if as a counterpoint to this happy news, he follows it with a paragraph about Russian soldiers executing several young men in cold blood.
And so his life wore on: conversations with Barsik, feeding his livestock, survival, death and friendship. It was the life of a Chechen surrounded by a war that had been brought to him by others. Sometimes, the fighting slackens and sometimes he leaves Grozny to see family or friends elsewhere, but it never dies away completely.
And then suddenly the tale stops.
‘I have decided to stop with that. For now, anyway. If these writings have not given anyone an impression of the tragedy of a people, and of its roots, if they have not included the whole depth of the events, everything that was unembraceable, inexplicable, then at least they have done one good thing. They have stopped one man from going mad . . . Or at least, he hopes so.’
It is a profoundly disquieting finish. In the 200,000 words or so that he wrote to describe spring 1995 in Grozny, there is not a single paragraph that is not imbued with war. And the fact that it ends without resolution is the most upsetting element of all.
Excerpts of the diaries were broadcast on Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe years later, and that is where I first came across them. The unresolved ending prompted me to find out where Yashurkayev was. Did the diary end because he was killed? Or just because he got tired of writing? Was he still in Chechnya?
As it happened, I found him in Belgium, living in a little provincial village in the rolling Flemish countryside. He had arrived here in 2000, after a Russian bomb destroyed the house he had lived in throughout the spring of 1995. The chaos in Chechnya had become more than he could bear, and he had chosen a second deportation: this one self-imposed.
Here, as if in mocking answer to the horrors described in his book, everything was neat and orderly. The trains were frequent and clean, the fields I looked out on from the train window were cropped and green. When I arrived at my destination, the cars were shiny and European. Stolid Belgian citizens ignored me as I sat outside the train station and waited for him to pick me up.
He arrived in a black Volkswagen, and smiled as I dashed through the traffic to his car. He was lean and hard-faced, with white hair and a firm jaw-line, but looked delighted to see me. He has now had his diaries translated into several European languages, but was pleased to talk more about them.
Over lunch – fish, potatoes, a vegetable stew, peppers, brandy and beer – we talked about the war, and the deportation, and why he had not left Grozny with his livestock before the fighting started.
‘War is – well, you know, everyone expected it, but, well, everyone says there will be a third world war, but no one is taking their livestock anywhere at the moment. And such a large, insane, uncontrolled war was hard to imagine,’ he said, trying to make sense of the danger that had engulfed his quiet life.
‘I built my own house with my own hands, and a man who himself built his own house with his own hands, he somehow becomes very attached to it, Not in a material sense, but at the time I looked down on people who left.’
So he stayed and survived the war, and had only stopped writing for other, complicated reasons that he struggled to describe. I told him his diary was some of the most touching war writing I had ever read, and he thanked me. But, I said, I had one other question. What had happened to Barsik?
Yashurkayev looked down at his plate, and his son – who was sitting on the sofa – spoke across to me.
‘He was killed. The Russians killed him,’ he said.
26.
My Sons were Killed
The savagery of the Russian assault on Grozny in 1994 drove wavering Chechens back squarely behind Dudayev, no matter how erratic his rule had been. Zakayev, the actor who helped lead the national revival, came home as soon as war looked inevitable. Dudayev made him culture minister, but he never really took up the post, going instead to his home town of Urus-Martan to help lead the resistance.
Nationalist poet Yandarbiyev was already installed in the heart of government, as Dudayev’s deputy, and other cultural leaders were too. The war made them forget their differences, and unite to fight the invader. They fought in family groups, or friendship groups, taking advantage of their superior knowledge of the geography of Grozny and other towns to outflank and outwit the lumbering Russian tank columns.
The terrible bombardment of Groz
ny that Yashurkayev and his dog Barsik endured was born of the Russians’ inability to take the centre of the city and the great edifice which had been the headquarters of the Party’s Regional Committee, and which Dudayev called the Presidential Palace. Groups of Chechens moved into the centre to fight around the giant concrete hulk, which was ever more scarred and damaged.
Among them, perhaps inevitably, was Dedushka, my foul-mouthed friend.
Dedushka, on release from prison, had lived in Siberia, where his gang had its business interests. Krasnoyarsk, a city of aluminium smelters far from Moscow, epitomized the collapse of law and order in post-Soviet Russia. Here business disputes were settled with guns and bombs in what were known as the ‘aluminium wars’. Reputations for hard business practices were made among the smelters, and small armies were employed by the bosses to keep their competitors and their employees in line. It was, I suspect, fertile ground for a man of Dedushka’s talents.
He returned to Chechnya in autumn 1994, he said, along with two of his sons, to fetch his father to safety. War was inevitable, everyone knew, and he wanted to take his father back to Krasnoyarsk with him. He had seen the propaganda sweeping the country, in which Chechens were demonized, and he wanted nothing to do with the hostility being poured out.
‘When I was going there, I heard how the Chechens were barbarous and sadists, and I knew it was not true,’ he said.
He did not like being in Chechnya, and never had. The traditions were too strict for him, and he barely spoke the language after a lifetime in exile and in prison in Russia. But even this old cynic was swept up in the spirit of the times. Perhaps he saw this as a chance to get back at Moscow, which had ruined his life so comprehensively. Perhaps he was just having fun. Even he could not explain the fact that he and his sons then joined up with one of the groups fighting the invading army, and took up their positions on the edge of Grozny.
That was when the heaviest shelling came.
‘My sons were killed,’ he said. ‘These sons that were killed, the oldest had two sons and a daughter. The youngest had two sons. And how can I go to my grandsons now, because they will ask what I did with their fathers. I would answer that they were killed in the war, but then they would ask why I was not killed too.’
I thought about that, and asked him why he had not been killed, and he paused for a while. Then he reached across and shut the door. He did not need to stand up to do so, since the room we were sitting in was only about the size of a small car. The door of his house was never normally shut, so two refugee children called out to him from outside, speaking in Chechen, but he ushered them away. And he began to tell his story.
‘I said to my sons that they should not come with me, that they should stay in Krasnoyarsk, but they came with me, and we were under shellfire. I was concussed terribly, and I lost my memory. And I knew nothing, nothing. The Russians took me then, and they held me for 103 days,’ he said.
He later told me that he had been stunned by the same Russian raid that killed senior commander Umalt Dashayev, which places it on 28 December 1994. He did not even manage to see in the New Year in Grozny. I had not expected this, and was taken aback by the bleakness of his tone. He had gone from twinkling patriarch to tortured old man in less than five minutes.
‘See these teeth,’ he said, reaching into his mouth and pulling out a plate of dentures. ‘See them, they are not mine. These Russians, they got a file, you know what a file is, and they put it between my teeth, and they twisted it like this. Like this. And they snapped my teeth off. The roots were still there, but nothing else.’
I did not know what to say. He was looking down at the table now, with its oilcloth cover, and fumbling in his packet for another cigarette. Realizing he was still holding his old cigarette end, he dunked it in his cold tea and put it on the table, before lighting a new one.
‘Then they took electric cables, they put one on my cock, and then put the other one on my ear, and they turned the power on. And they asked “What is your name, what is your name?”, but I did not know. I could not tell them what my name was. Then they would strip me down until I was as naked as when I was born, and they threw me out of the train. They were keeping us in these wagons, and they made us sit in a row on the rails. It was twenty-seven degrees below zero, and we were just sitting on the bare iron of the rails. Anyone who could not stand up after that was shot and the train rolled over them, they were listed as “unknown”.’
I wondered whether it was true that he had not been able to remember his name. For a man with a past like his, admitting his name would have led to life in prison. But I was not going to interrupt him. I’m not sure I could have stopped him talking anyway.
‘I’ve never mentioned this before to anyone. I have never said a word of it. But my cock is two and a half centimetres shorter than it was. I could not go with a woman now and I am ashamed. People sympathize with me but they do not understand really.’
The torture, he said, became unbearable after a while. He lit the next cigarette before he told me what had happened. His hands were even shaking a little, which was shocking in such a proud man.
‘When they were torturing me, I swore at them, using every word I could think of. I used prison slang, and normal slang, and all the other prisoners told me not to do it because it made them beat us harder, but I told them to help me swear, because then at least we would be shot,’ he said. ‘And then came the time for them to shoot us. They did not say they were going to shoot us, they said it would be the “liquidation” and that moment my heart began to beat so loud it was like the people in the first compartment could have heard it, and we were in the fifth compartment. And I was scared, scared for the first time. But when I took my first step, it calmed down. My heart calmed as if it had never beaten, and from that moment onwards I have never been afraid again.’
With Dedushka now even less cooperative after the fake execution, the Russian guards turned to ever more extreme methods. The train they were kept on was moved from place to place, but the prisoners were constantly kept in pain or suspense.
‘When I was let out, I could hardly walk. They beat me on the feet. They would hang me upside down and beat me. You know, when you are beaten on the feet, you feel the pain in your head,’ he said.
He was lucky as it turned out; a group of French journalists asked the Russian authorities for permission to see the train, and the pressure they put on the jailers freed the captives. After three months in the train carriage, Dedushka was allowed out.
‘Some of the prisoners went back to Chechnya, and I went back to Chechnya with them and that was when I heard that my boys had been shot. What did I have left to do then? That was when I decided to go to Moscow to be treated by doctors. I could not even walk for ten or fifteen metres.’
While he was in Moscow, the war ground on, with desperate clashes in which the Chechen forces grew in confidence and the Russians became more mired in the mess they had created. As 1996 dawned, Yeltsin had elections coming up. The messy, costly war on Russia’s southern flank had proved disastrous. The authorities were lying frantically about the human cost, but the people were not fooled. The adventure was ever more unpopular and the Kremlin had to get it over with.
Dudayev had been assassinated by now – a rocket had allegedly been fired down his satellite phone signal; either that or it was a car bomb – and Yandarbiyev the poet led the talks in Moscow, with Zakayev the actor by his side. They won a ceasefire, and a Russian withdrawal. Incredibly, the Chechens had won.
As I sat and talked to Dedushka, I became increasingly convinced that his life story was too perfect a mirror of Chechen history to be real. He had been deported as a blameless infant, mistreated, brutalized, and imprisoned. On release from prison, he had fought, been grievously wounded, and then set free in a ruined state to make the best of what had survived the war.
Likewise, the Chechen nation had been unfairly deported, abused in captivity, then allowed home but not given the rule of its
own land. When it had finally achieved some freedom, it had been only the prelude to a new, dreadful war that left the capital city in ruins and the country strewn with mines.
As Dedushka had survived his terrible interrogation and been released, the Chechens as a whole had defeated Russia’s brutality and won independence. Estimates of the cost of the fighting vary wildly, because of the nature of the war, and the fact that no one has made full lists. According to the best estimate from the most reliable sources, the two years of fighting in Chechnya killed at least 50,000 civilians, and probably more than 100,000. Around 15,000 Russian soldiers and perhaps 5,000 Chechen fighters also died.
It had been a terrible loss for every Chechen family. As Dedushka had lost two of his sons, others had lost parents, daughters, brothers and friends. Dedushka’s punishment, I thought as I sat and listened to another one of his anecdotes about prison life, was his nation’s punishment, and I could not resist asking him if he agreed that his life mirrored that of the Chechen people.
He shrugged, and changed the subject. ‘Perhaps I will visit you in Europe,’ he said, ‘if I get married and my new wife wants to come.’
Would that be your fourth wife, I asked, trying to keep track of the marriages he had told me about.
‘What are you talking about, my fourth?’
Well, perhaps it would be his sixth then, I ventured.
He just smiled and I wondered if I had understood him at all.
For, of course, his punishment did not end in 1996. I was talking to him after all in a refugee camp by the Bosphorus in Istanbul, and by that time the Chechen attempt to win independence had collapsed in the face of brutality as bad as anything the Caucasus had ever seen.
By the time Russian tanks returned to Grozny in 1999, fighters on both sides would have thrown away the last remnants of humanity, and were lashing out to kill without thought for the victims.
Let Our Fame Be Great Page 39
