Let Our Fame Be Great

by Oliver Bullough

  Nevertheless, the atmosphere in Moscow was one of fear. The funerals dragged on for days, and Muscovites wondered when the next strike would be. The threat was real for everyone, and tales of close escapes abounded. Months later, I learned that the hostage-takers in their quest for a suitable target had videoed the inside of two Moscow theatres. As it happened, they had decided to seize control of the theatre on Dubrovka, but they could easily have chosen the other one they filmed. Had they done so, I would have been one of the hostages.

  Basayev blamed Putin for the deaths, and promised there would be no let-up in his terrible campaign. A series of suicide bombers struck in and around Chechnya, destroying a government building, a bus used by military pilots and other targets. The bombers were often women, who were videoed wearing black veils and saying they were on their way to heaven, before they were sent out to blow themselves up. They became known in the Russian media as the ‘Black Widows’.

  Moscow was struck again on 5 July 2003, a summer day, the kind of day when Moscow is at its most beautiful. It was a Saturday and I was shopping in a major electronics market on the edge of town when my phone rang. Reports had come in of a suicide bombing at a rock concert. Getting to the Tushino air field through the traffic was a struggle, but at last I was confronted with the grim reality of it: the crumpled heap of the bodies, the shrapnel from the explosive belts the two bombers had worn, and the continuing beat of the rock festival. Organizers had decided there was no need to end the party.

  The two bombers killed fifteen young Muscovites, and injured many more. It turned out that only sharp-eyed security guards had stopped them entering the festival, where the carnage would have been even worse. The thought of two bombs in the heaving crowd was enough to make any festival organizer sick with worry.

  And just four days later, another bomber was aimed at the capital: this time a young woman called Zarema Muzhakhoyeva was sent to explode herself against the plate glass window of a café, the idea being to kill all those inside with fragments of broken glass and shrapnel.

  She later said she lost her nerve, and she was captured after she put down her bomb and surrendered to police. She was allowed to give an interview to the Izvestia newspaper from prison, and she told a story so bleak as to almost defy comprehension.

  Her words showed how low Basayev has sunk in his quest to terrify the Russian people into peace. He was now not only targeting people whose only crime was to be in Moscow; he was actively recruiting vulnerable Chechen women to do it for him.

  Muzhakhoyeva was just twenty-three when she was sent out into Moscow with a rucksack full of explosives by two men she knew as Igor and Andrei. Her background is so tragic, that it would be hard to condemn her at all, had the bomb she left behind not killed the sapper sent to defuse it.

  Her mother abandoned her when she was just ten months old, and her father died while working as an unofficial labourer in Siberia seven years later. Living with her father’s parents, she was regularly beaten and only saw her mother on special occasions. It was a loveless childhood, followed by a loveless marriage. She married in 1999, just before Putin sent the army back into Chechnya, but this impoverished orphan was no catch for a Chechen man and the man who stole her from her home – as is traditional in Chechnya – was an Ingush two decades older than her.

  She got pregnant almost at once, but two months later her husband Khasan was shot, leaving her to carry his child alone in his family home, surrounded by his relatives, whom she hardly knew.

  ‘I gave birth to a daughter, my husband’s relatives called her Rashana, and I breastfed her for seven months. And then something had to be decided. A little girl without a father. My husband’s relatives visited my grandparents, asked if they would take back their granddaughter and the child. They said they could not feed us,’ she told the newspaper.

  ‘Khasan’s parents took my daughter from me and gave her to a different son, who had no children in his own marriage. And they sent me to my grandfather and grandmother to build my own life. By our traditions, that is a commonplace situation, it is always like that. It would have been fine, but I loved Rashana too much. I suffered a lot.’

  Muzhakhoyeva, who was perhaps only then feeling human love for the first time, could not live without it.

  ‘The last time I went to them, I bought different toys and clothes for Rashana. She was so zappy, she had begun to speak, although in Ingush. She was sitting in her aunt Lida’s arms and said about me: “Mama, look what beautiful things the lady has brought me, let’s go and show Daddy”,’ she said.

  It was too much to bear, so she hatched a plan in her desperation. She stole jewellery from her grandmother and aunts and sold it at the market for $600. She planned to go and ask to take Rashana for a walk, then buy plane tickets for them both and fly to Moscow, where an aunt of hers lived, whom she barely knew. It was a desperate plan, and it was flawed from the start, because she left her grandmother a note saying what she had done.

  ‘I wanted them not to worry about me, to be nice. What a fool! Six of my aunts stopped us in the airport. Four took me away, and two took Rashana back to Sleptsovsk.’

  Her life had got even worse. She was beaten at home for the theft and for the disgrace she had brought to the family. Her aunts told her they wished she was dead. Eventually, they got tired of that, and her grandmother and aunts stopped even bothering to beat her. They just refused to acknowledge her. Even her mother had stopped coming to see her, and now her life felt completely worthless.

  That was when she had her great idea. She would go to a woman she knew called Raisa who had connections to Basayev, who was deep underground by this stage, and she would volunteer to become a suicide bomber. She had heard that relatives of a bomber received $1,000. Her grandmother would get her money back and even make a profit on the deal.

  ‘Of course, even if at the cost of my life I returned this money, then the disgrace would still remain, but I needed to take action. I always wanted to be good. And so I went to Raisa and said I wanted to sacrifice myself.’

  She found it harder than she thought. The rebels had no use just then for a suicide bomber, despite her pleas. But eventually, they assigned her to an operation.

  At first she was taken by the rebels to the town of Mozdok, armed with an explosive belt and told to blow up a bus full of pilots. She failed to do so. She just sat on a fence feeling worse and worse. A soldier even came up to her to check she was all right, perhaps thinking the bulge in her belly was a pregnancy.

  She went to a phone booth and called Rustam Ganiyev, the man sending her to her death, and told him no bus had come. He picked her up, and she felt so ill they took her to hospital. Here, Ganiyev treated her well, they laughed and enjoyed each other’s company. She later said she hoped she would never have to explode herself, but she had made her agreement and they had not forgotten. Soon they sent her to Moscow for another final journey.

  She stayed outside the Russian capital with the two women who were to blow themselves up at the rock concert. One had been married to a rebel, had got pregnant, and the group leader had forced her to get an abortion. Shortly afterwards, her husband had been killed in battle, leaving her without a child or a husband, and she had decided to just kill herself.

  The other woman’s husband was still alive, but apparently he had sent her to her death, since a suicide bomber wife earned a man great praise among his fellows.

  They departed on their mission to the rock concert, and did not return. Theirs had been two of the bodies crumpled up while the music thumped on. Days went by, during which she was taken around the city to get to know it, and to choose a target. Then Muzhakhoyeva was finally told it was time. She was dressed up like a fashionable Moscow girl, given a mobile phone and some money, and dropped off in the middle of town.

  ‘Blue jeans, trainers, a T-shirt, a cardigan of a sandy orange colour. They also gave me beautiful dark glasses and a baseball cap, which went with the colour of the cardigan. I had never worn
a baseball cap,’ she said.

  ‘When before my departure I looked in the mirror, I liked how I looked very much. I had never dressed that way. I was just happy for a few seconds. Good things, a mobile phone, more than a thousand roubles in my pocket. It’s true that only Igor called me on the telephone, and I called no one, but all the same I loved my mobile. It was a Nokia, it was beautiful.’

  She then took a taxi to the café she had been assigned to blow up, and took a seat on a table outside it. That was when her nerve failed her once more. She paced up and down. When people approached her, she walked away, then came back. Finally, when challenged, she told the three men who spoke to her that she had a suicide bomb. She waited for the police to come.

  And so she was in prison when the Izvestia journalist spoke to her, and she was all alone. Her relatives did not come to see her, and she was left with nothing but dreams of her daughter.

  ‘I of course want to see her. And I probably will some time. But it’s unlikely she’ll see me. And what do I have left? A young woman in Chechnya can’t do much as it is, and a widow even less. I could only marry an old man or as a second or third wife. I had disgraced everyone. I had stolen from my aunt – disgrace. I had tried to kidnap the child – disgrace. I wanted to escape – disgrace. I left home – disgrace. I had not only left home, but I had gone to the Wahhabis [religious extremists] – disgrace. I wanted to blow up the Russians – disgrace. I failed to do that – disgrace.’

  She had a photo of Rashana, but Igor took it away from her before she set off to kill herself. Now, she had nothing to remember the one person who had ever loved her by.

  Two months after she gave the interview, on 8 April 2004, she was sentenced to twenty years in prison by a Moscow court. If she had hoped her decision not to cause mayhem would save her, then she was wrong.

  ‘I had the possibility of running away, of doing something, but I did not do this. I put my hopes in you, I hoped that someone here would understand me,’ she told the court. Her pleas went unanswered.

  She argued at her appeal, a few months later, that surely it suited Russia to pardon her, to show damaged Chechens that they had protectors other than the men of jihad.

  ‘I ask you to reduce my sentence. I could have walked away, leaving the bag, but I stood and waited for the police. No one teaches us to surrender, just to press the button,’ she said. ‘I did not press the button, and I think my example would be followed by other girls forced to this. They might do the same.’

  The appeals court did not agree with her, upheld the sentence, and she is now in a prison near Moscow. Her lawyer has said she wants to become a doctor, but I have little hope for her. Two decades will not be enough to wipe out the stain of what she did, not for the Chechens, and not for the Russians.

  After a decade of war in Chechnya, such people as Muzhakhoyeva are many. The trauma of the war, and the rape, and the death, had left a whole generation of people emotionally scarred, and Basayev and his rebels had rich pickings when they needed suicide bombers. Muzhakhoyeva’s will to live, as it turned out, was so enormous that it overcame everything that was thrown at her. But many others were not so keen to survive.

  Before Muzhakhoyeva was even sentenced, on 5 December 2003, another woman blew herself up in central Moscow. It was a snowy, crisp day, and I was sitting in the office when the call came in that a bomb had gone off nearby. I swung on my coat and sprinted the 400 metres or so to the site of the blast, reaching it before the police had set up an effective cordon. They had stopped traffic, but pedestrians were milling around, unsure of what to do.

  As I ran around a parked truck towards the National Hotel, where the bomber had struck, I almost slipped on something in the snow. Looking down I realized it was a piece of skin, mainly fatty tissue, but pale and ghastly in the snow. Scattered all around me were more pieces of flesh, some of them quite large – the size and colour of a medium portion of chicken – others just flecks of bloody red on the roadway.

  Behind the trucks was the hotel façade, and the place where the bomber chose to end her life. Chips of marble had been scarred off the hotel by shrapnel, and the plate glass window shattered. At the foot of the wall were the crumpled heaps of five ordinary Muscovites.

  Perhaps they had been going shopping, or to study at the university building nearby, or to work in the hotel. Or perhaps they were just out for a walk. Now, they had the same look as the boy in the morgue in Beslan. Everything about them looked normal, except that they were unquestionably and totally dead.

  Slightly closer to the edge of the pavement than the heap of bodies was a woman’s head, perfectly upright, with long blonde hair. It was neatly severed and did not seem harmed in any way. It sat in the snow as if it had been placed there. A briefcase stood nearby, and all around was the terrible hail of flesh, skin, fat, bone and blood that just fifteen minutes before had been a Chechen woman who met not sympathy from her neighbours and relatives, but words of hate and disgrace.

  These attacks seemed pointless. There were no demands expressed, or pattern, or justification. It was pure murder. It was rage, an instinctive desire to inflict pain. And they went on. The next summer, on 24 August 2004, two planes exploded simultaneously over southern Russia, killing eighty-nine people. Seven days later, another suicide bomber killed ten Muscovites outside a metro station.

  I think I was getting numb to the attacks by then. My only memory of that last bombing is the Moscow mayor giving an impromptu press conference while a car burned, and dead bodies lay just ten metres or so behind him.

  The next day, a group of thirty men and two women took over School No. 1 in Beslan.

  What was driving Basayev by this stage? What could possibly justify the casual death he was handing out and the opprobrium he was bringing down onto his own people?

  According to Andrei Babitsky, a remarkably brave Russian radio and television journalist whose contacts with the Chechen resistance are unrivalled, Basayev was suffering from a ‘Budyonnovsk Complex’. The success of his raid on the hospital in Budyonnovsk, the fact that he won peace talks for his people and gained a famous victory, outweighed any harm he did to the lives of the civilians – both Chechen and non-Chechen – he exploited.

  ‘Basayev believed that sooner or later he could repeat Budyonnovsk and put Putin on his knees. And he thought that children’s lives would not be risked by anyone, that Putin would have to stop the war,’ Babitsky told me one afternoon in his flat in Prague.

  ‘But Putin disappointed him, there could now be no other terrorist act to make Putin stop. And I think this was a serious moment for Basayev. If you look at these terrorist activities before Beslan – the suicide bombers, the planes – then after, when there was nothing, then you will see that he stopped. Terrorism was designed to achieve a goal, and it stopped achieving anything.’

  But there is no need to just take Babitsky’s word for it. In the most spectacular journalistic coup of the entire Chechen war, he interviewed Basayev in his forest hide-out on 23 June 2005, thus having done what the entire Russian state apparatus had failed to do, and found the warlord.

  The film he shot was fascinating. He pictured Basayev and fellow rebels in a little camp in the woods, heavily armed, praying, eating and relaxing. He conducted a long interview with Basayev, who clearly relished the chance once more to talk to the press – something he loved doing before there was a $10m price on his head.

  Basayev was dressed all in black, and played constantly with a string of prayer beads. Strangely, considering the Islamic inspiration he had regularly trumpeted, he sounded just like he had ten years earlier. He did not talk of holy war or martyrs, but spoke in the language of a secular revolutionary.

  ‘We are fighting for our liberation from colonial dependence, the result I see is of course freedom and independence for our people and our state,’ he said.

  ‘The most important thing is to protect our people from a repeat of the genocide of 1944, and of the past years, and the current ge
nocide, to protect our people from the degradation that Russia brings with it.’

  Babitsky sat next to Basayev as they spoke, holding a microphone, which was occasionally too far from Basayev’s mouth for the Chechen’s words to be audible. Sometimes Babitsky would check that the camera was still running, or look at his watch. It is a surprisingly amateur-looking film for such a respected and experienced journalist, but there was nothing amateur about his questions.

  Babitsky asked how Basayev could possibly justify sending his people against the children in School No. 1. Basayev responded with a development of that same logical but horrific position expressed by his lieutenant after the attack on Budyonnovsk. Forty thousand children had died in Chechnya, he said, and no one cared about them.

  ‘It is not the children that are responsible but the whole people of Russia which today with silent agreement gathers food and things for these aggressors in Chechnya. They pay their taxes, they approve of these actions, they are all responsible. Therefore, until war comes to all of them, it will not stop in Chechnya,’ he said.

  ‘You can ask why I did this, it was to stop the killing of thousands and thousands of Chechen children, Chechen women, Chechen old people ... I do not see a different way to stop the genocide of the Chechen people. Today there is a genocide of the Chechen people and to me the Chechen people is more valuable than the whole rest of the world. You understand? My own people is more valuable to me because it is my own.’

  He was right when he talked about the horrors faced by Chechen children. The handful of psychologists working in Chechnya said a whole generation was traumatized by the terrible warfare that had waged around them for their whole lives. They had no schooling, no health care, and their families were ill-equipped to deal with their damaged offspring.