Let Our Fame Be Great

by Oliver Bullough

  Chechens dying abroad is not a new thing. Two Chechens were killed in London as early as 1993, while the poet Yandarbiyev was killed by Russian agents in Qatar in 2004.

  But the latest wave of killings seems far more extensive, and far more politically driven.

  The world has ignored the horrors and killings in Chechnya these last years, but with an ever-growing Chechen population outside Russia, and no sign that Moscow is prepared to compromise on its heavy-handed approach to Chechens’ dreams of independence, perhaps we will find more Chechens being killed on European streets. And that would surely be impossible to ignore.

  Postscript The Boy Who Chose an Orange, Not a Gun

  In the depths of winter, in early 2003, my editor sent me out of Moscow to a little town where the central heating had broken down. Russian towns often still possess these Soviet-era heating systems, when a whole block or suburb gets its hot water from a single factory.

  In this case, the factory had halted its work briefly. That meant the water in the pipes had stopped moving, had frozen and had exploded out in extraordinary frozen waterfalls of rusty ice. It was the kind of slow-news-day story that journalists have to do sometimes. It would barely be noticed in the slew of interesting articles from other places.

  The excitement for me was that Adlan Khasanov, Reuters’ Chechen photographer, was coming with me. I had been trying to learn enough to report properly on Chechnya for months and this, it seemed, would be the perfect time to learn a few details about the fighting, the people and the culture. I would have a real-life Chechen to myself for the whole four-hour drive there, and the four hours back, and reckoned I would learn as much from him as I had from all the books I had read.

  It did not turn out that way.

  Adlan had no interest in talking about war. He wanted to talk about my home in Wales, about music, about concerts, about vodka and about girls. We gossiped all the way there, and laughed our way around the story. The unfortunate people we were meeting, whose houses were so cold there was ice on the light bulbs, were welcoming and jolly in the face of his charm. One family was from Grozny. As Russian emigrants, I expected they would loathe their Chechen visitor, but Adlan made friends with them too. They gave us tea and biscuits and thawed us out in their warm house, where they mocked their neighbours who had not had the brains to install a private heating system.

  So, my plan was a failure, and I found out nothing about the war. But I gained a new friend, and Adlan proved a ray of light into the often dark job of covering the Chechen war.

  I can picture him now, striding down the open-plan Reuters office: long, dark hair; handsome, wide face with a grin of welcome; big, laughing voice.

  ‘Oliver, you have become so fat’ was a common opening to our conversations. If I had not seen him come in, he would sneak up behind me and grab the side of my stomach to prove the point that, as I got closer to thirty years old, I was indeed getting fatter.

  He spent much of his time in Grozny, whence he would send photos of refugees, soldiers and poverty. But his pictures often missed the standard war clichés – tanks, guns, soldiers – in favour of children, or weddings, or sports practice, or prayers. In short, he documented how Chechens kept living while the bombs exploded around them, while the politicians failed to save them.

  When he came to Moscow, he became playful. He took daft photos at the zoo, including a whole series depicting monkeys with bottles in their mouths; and touching shots of a polar bear cub with its mother. A favourite game was to swipe the most impressive-looking cameras from the cupboard and shoot close-up pictures of the models at the fashion shows held downstairs in our office building. Adlan loved girls, and these girls loved him: tall, dark, good-looking and a photographer.

  Adlan and I went out for beers, and he taught me a bit about his homeland, when he wasn’t talking about the subjects that really interested him. I had an insatiable appetite for war gossip, since this was a time when Reuters did not let its staff travel to Chechnya without an official escort. But most of his chat was about his friends, or his parties. He talked about them with such life that eventually I learned that war isn’t about politicians anyway, it’s about the people caught up in it.

  Even when we covered events together in Chechnya, he didn’t much want to talk about what we were doing. I can remember standing with him outside the polling station in the village of Tsentoroi on 5 October 2003, waiting for Akhmad Kadyrov, the former Chechen mufti who changed sides to become Moscow’s man in Chechnya, to come out and talk to us. I was so excited to be there I could hardly stand still. Adlan wanted to talk about a film he’d seen.

  After that, whenever I wrote something about Kadyrov and the convoluted loyalties of Chechnya, I would imagine Adlan, his eyes glistening with merriment, ducking through the crowds at the polling station, sidestepping men with guns to get the shot he needed so he could finish for the day, and get stuck into the real business.

  At the time, I had been mystified. How could he not have been fascinated by these changes in his homeland? I learned later how completely I had misjudged him. He had spent the night before huddled with a friend in the corner of his courtyard as the bullets flew overhead.

  It was a useful image to have, because Russia is so large that it is easy to forget that history and politics are not about enormous social forces, or economic interest groups, but about the people who are trying to live their lives. Having a teacher with a life-force as strong as Adlan’s, it was impossible to overlook the fact that Chechens were not pawns being moved around a battlefield by generals or terrorists, but individuals whose lives had been turned upside down by a war they had not wanted.

  And it is an image I have kept in my head when writing this book, to avoid the world view of the Russian rulers who have imposed their own pictures on the Caucasus for too long. I hope readers will have seen that the history of Russia’s conquest is one of tragedy for the people of the mountains. The Circassians, the mountain Turks, the Ingush and the Chechens have all suffered horribly just so the map of Russia could be the shape the tsars, the general secretaries and the presidents wanted it to be.

  Sadly, that suffering is not well-known in Russia, perhaps because Russians themselves have suffered so terribly that they prefer not to remember the horrors they have imposed on others. Joseph Stalin is supposed to have once said: ‘One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.’ It is a proverb that fits Russia’s policies in the Caucasus like a Cossack fits his boots.

  ‘Russia for centuries has played in this region of the world, in the Caucasus as a whole, a positive, stabilizing role, has been a guarantor of security, cooperation and progress in this region, and it will behave in the future as it has in the past. Let no one doubt this,’ Vladimir Putin, once again prime minister, told Russian television viewers on 9 August 2008, as he prepared them for the Russian – Georgian war.

  I am not defending Georgia’s attack on South Ossetia, which killed hundreds of people who should not have died, but Putin’s comment was so far removed from the actual experiences of people living in the Caucasus as to appear to be describing a completely different part of the world. Putin actually seemed to believe that the brutal conquest of the mountains, the destruction of the Circassians, the mountain Turks, the Chechens and the Ingush, along with the corruption and the violence that Russia brought, came under the heading of ‘security, cooperation and progress’.

  Or perhaps, more worryingly still, he did not even know about the massacres, the deportations and the destruction.

  In June 2007, Putin, then still president, met a group of history and humanities teachers at his official residence just outside Moscow. The teachers expressed their concerns about their jobs and their wishes for the future. One history teacher, Vladislav Golovanov, from the remote Siberian region of Yakutia, was appalled by revisionist approaches to the past, by attempts to introduce a bit of balance to Soviet hagiography, as exemplified by a pupil who claimed to have read a book saying that Sov
iet forces had killed their own comrades in the Second World War.

  For real historians, this is not a contentious point. Execution was a crucial element in steeling discipline against the German invasion, and special units were created to scour behind the Soviet lines, to find deserters and to kill them. Many veterans of the Red Army, particularly those who were freed from German prison camps by Soviet soldiers, can testify to it and it is an accepted fact in standard histories of the Second World War.

  For Golovanov, however, it was blasphemy.

  ‘Our history is not a cause for self-flagellation,’ he exploded.

  ‘For me personally our history is always successful: it is successful per se, together with all its difficulties, maybe it is successful particularly with its difficulties. The importance of success is that a child wants to be in a successful team, do you understand? They demand to be in a successful team, they want, they delight in the successes of our history.’

  It is perhaps worrying for residents of Yakutia that Golovanov sees history not as a record of the past, which can teach children about the world, about how they got where they are, but rather as a tool of propaganda, a list of ‘successes’ to turn his pupils into cheerleading Russian patriots. But, essentially, that is not too surprising a comment from a provincial teacher in a country that was, after all, communist just sixteen years before.

  Far more worrying is Putin’s response to his little rant, which I will quote at length, just because it is so revealing of his mentality and, by extension, the mentality of the whole ruling class of modern Russia.

  ‘Yes, there are problematic pages in our history, in just the same way as there are in the history of every state and every people! And we had a lot fewer than some others. And ours were not so terrible as those of others. Yes, we had scary pages: let’s remember the events starting in 1937, let’s not forget about this. But in other countries there were no fewer, and there were many scarier. In any case, we did not use atomic bombs against a civilian population. We did not pour chemicals on thousands of kilometres, and did not drop onto a little country seven times more bombs than were used in all the Second World War, as occurred in Vietnam for example. We did not have other black pages, like Nazism for example,’ Putin said, in a rant of his own.

  ‘And it must not be allowed that we are forced to feel a sense of guilt. Let them think about themselves.’

  It is true that Moscow did not drop atomic bombs on civilians; nor did it attack Vietnam; nor was it Nazi. But, for all that, Putin is profoundly wrong. As I hope this book has demonstrated, Russia’s actions in the Caucasus – independent of the politics or beliefs of its rulers over the centuries – have been destructive, murderous, brutal and cruel. A history that only portrays the successes of the Russian nation cannot accommodate the experiences of minority peoples that were oppressed in altogether non-glorious episodes.

  A glorious narrative of the nineteenth century can have no place for the genocide of the Circassians in 1864. A glorious narrative of the Second World War cannot include massive crimes like the deportations of the Chechens, the Ingush and the mountain Turks, let alone squalid little massacres like that in the Cherek valley in 1942. A glorious narrative of the post-Soviet years can find no place for the tactics of murder, destruction and robbery used to crush the Chechens, nor for the mass exodus that has been the Chechens’ response.

  And it can have no place for the character of someone like my friend Adlan, who will never fit any historian’s theories.

  In the winter of 1999 – 2000, Adlan and a friend were driving back from Georgia, where they had been delivering pictures they had taken of the bombardment in Chechnya.

  Just forty kilometres from Grozny, their car stalled when crossing a river, where it was a perfect target for the roaming Russian jets. The terrified driver vanished, and the two friends desperately pushed the car off the bridge, nervously scanning the skies. His friend later recalled that Adlan shouted throughout: ‘I hate war. I don’t like people with guns. I am a peaceful man. This is not for me.’

  And he had always been like that. As a child, his father once offered him an orange with one hand and a gun with the other. The stereo-typical Chechen boy, the trainee bandit of the Russian newspaper reports, should have reached out for the gun. Adlan took the orange.

  In early May – or perhaps late April – 2004, I was working in the office, when Adlan walked up to my desk. He was leaving for the day. I was doing some administrative tasks, but they were not important as such, so I stopped what I was doing to have a chat.

  ‘Let’s go and have a beer,’ he said after a while. ‘We can go to the Chechen bar.’ The Chechen bar was a café near the office run by a woman from Grozny who, like Adlan, now spent much of her time in Moscow.

  ‘I can’t,’ I replied, gesturing to the various bits of paper I had pulled out of the chaos of my desk. ‘I’ve got to get this stuff done. Let’s have a drink tomorrow.’

  He said he was going back to the Caucasus in the morning, and we agreed to have that drink as soon as he got back. He made a couple of jokes about the size of my stomach, shook my hand and left to find another drinking partner.

  He was killed by a bomb in a Grozny stadium a few days later, on 9 May 2004, in the same attack that killed Akhmad Kadyrov.

  Pictures of my friend’s body – twisted and ungainly as it sprawled on the grass of the stadium, lacking all the grace and lightness he possessed as he bounced through life – decorated Russian newspapers for the next few days. The Moscow papers lack the squeamishness of Western titles when it comes to graphic pictures of death, and every time I saw him it was like another blow of grief.

  I saw him at night too. At first, the dreams were urgent and ugly. He had something to tell me, and I could not make it out. Time passed, the grief faded, and the dreams became less frequent. Now, when I see him, he is his old funny self again. Before my last trip to Chechnya, he popped up to counsel me to buy a ruinously expensive camera lens I had been coveting for months.

  ‘What are you waiting for?’ he asked me, with that same old grin. ‘You’ll regret it if you don’t get it and you won’t regret it if you do.’

  He was right too. I haven’t regretted it for a moment.

  I had that lens in my bag when I visited his grave a few months ago. It is marked by a tall slab of concrete, painted white, with his name and dates set into it. The earth is piled high over his body, and the friends who were with me prayed, passing their hands over their faces in the graceful Muslim ritual, while I stood with my head bowed.

  Since his burial four years previously, another 300 or so grave-stones had been erected in this little cemetery, on the edge of the village of Starye Atagi, just a few kilometres south of Grozny, where the plain slopes into the wooded foothills, which in turn soar upwards until they become the high, white peaks. Every person in that graveyard had been – like Adlan had been for me – a friend, or a father, or a sister, or a daughter. And every death was one more tragedy. Stalin was wrong. If you add a million of them together, you don’t get a statistic, you just get a million tragedies.

  That evening, although it was Ramadan, I raised a glass of beer to him in a café in Grozny, and made sure to take leave of my friends properly, and to tell them how much they meant to me.

  Very early the next morning, they came to see me off when I departed from the dusty square where minibuses pick up loads of passengers, squeeze them in next to large, checked nylon bags tied up with string, and drive off to the other cities of the North Caucasus: Vladikavkaz, Makhachkala, Nalchik, Pyatigorsk, further still.

  As dawn lightened, we were climbing one of the many ridges that score the rolling plains of northern Chechnya on the road towards Mozdok, a garrison town of dirty, low-rise red-brick buildings that had been my staging point on the way out of Chechnya so many times.

  The rising sun had burned off the fog and, as we topped the long ridge, the mountains suddenly loomed up to the left of us: impossibly grand in the pin
k light of the morning. There was Kazbek, with its sloped shoulders like a monk in white. Then there was the jagged chain running away from it, far into the west, higher and higher to the sharp peak of Dykhtau, which rears above the Cherek valley. And that solid loom on the horizon was Elbrus, the double-headed giant of the central Caucasus, emblem of the land of the mountain Turks.

  The peaks, despite their bulk, floated in the buttery morning light with a grace the harsh noon glare never allows them. Blue pockets of the sky hung in the shadows where the light did not reach. I gazed entranced as the light changed, and the mountains shifted and altered with it.

  The minibus slowed down. It was time to concentrate again. Ahead was the ugly gatehouse of a Russian checkpoint, a temporary structure that had over time become permanent, surrounded by vicious tangles of barbed wire. The soldiers, bored after their night on guard, scanned our van with casual arrogance and waved us through.

  The passengers around me relaxed a little, as we sped away from the wire and the warning signs. I was tired, leaned my head on the window and dozed. The mountains melted into the morning haze as we jolted through Mozdok, and were invisible long before we arrived at the old spa town of Pyatigorsk, where Lermontov died in his senseless duel. There I paid a bribe to a policeman who questioned my passport and he, perhaps out of gratitude, found me another bus. This one took me through Cherkessk, Maikop and Krasnodar, before we arrived by the sea, in Sochi, where I had plans.

  The roads I followed in that bumpy twenty-four-hour bus ride were laid down more than two centuries before as tracks linking Cossack villages to Russian forts. They solidified into post roads, the nerves of empire, before becoming the tarmac arteries that they are today.

  I sat in Sochi, drank a cup of tea and watched the tourists in their shorts and bikinis. I wondered if even one of them knew that this stretch of balmy coastline once belonged to the Circassians, or that Circassians had died on these very beaches as they waited for Turkish boats to take them into an exile from which their nation never returned.