Black Earth: A journey through Russia after the fall. Andrew Meier

young doctor, Borya. He took me to the train car. It was all corpses, some without heads, some without arms, others without legs. I looked through them – but my Kostya wasn’t there. I went to bed, and just as I fell asleep I saw Kostya. He said, “Mama, how could you walk past me? Come back tomorrow. I’m lying in the first row, third from the end. Only I’ve got no face. It burned off. But there’s still that birthmark under my arm. You remember.” The next day I went to the train car and found Kostya straightaway – just where he said he was.

      Chekhov in his diary wrote, “Alas, what is terrible is not the skeletons, but the fact that I am no longer terrified of them.” The words raised a bitter smile on the lips of Vladimir Vladimirovich Shcherbakov. He was a military doctor, the head of Military-Medical Laboratory No. 124, known more precisely among the women who traveled to it from all corners of the country as a morgue. Rostov was not just a city of trade. It had a second life as an army town, the military headquarters for the North Caucasus. Its cafes were filled with camouflage, and its streets with UAZik jeeps. Lying, as a matter of considerable convenience, nearly halfway between Moscow and Grozny, the city also served as the main repository of the dead from Chechnya. Since 1995 Shcherbakov and his team of forensic sleuths had tried to return Russia’s dead sons to their mothers. When I walked into his morgue, more than three hundred unidentified corpses remained locked in its refrigerated recesses. Two hundred and seventy had been there since the first Chechen war.

      Tall and thin, Shcherbakov coiled his long legs behind a big desk piled with red files. He wore thick glasses and a yellow sleeveless shirt with three gold stars on its epaulets. A double-headed eagle adorned a tie clip that held a short blue tie tight against his frame. The office was small, spare. Over his shoulder hung a faded poster of the Virgin Mary in repose. For years now the women of the Soldiers Mothers’ Committee had tirelessly dispatched mothers to his door. He had never tried to dissuade them. “What can I do,” he said, “but let them search?” The mothers, in turn, called him the Good Doctor.

      The morgue took them all, but the dead who remained, the doctor explained, were “the most severe contingent” – those impossible to identify visually. In contrast with the U.S. Army, the Russian military sent its soldiers into war without keeping fingerprints, let alone dental histories and DNA samples. The sleuths were lucky to get ID mug shots. In a room down the hall a balding man in a white lab coat peered into a computer, his eyes only inches from the screen. The monitor was filled with smudge lines, the inked tips of a man’s fingers. The technician, Valery Rakitin, had just inked the prints from the corpse. “Wasn’t much left,” he said. The dogs had made a mess. “Only four fingers and a couple of toes.”

      The soldier had died at twenty-two. His mother, a forty-four-year-old teacher from Kemerevo, a coal-mining city in Siberia, had called that morning. She had come to collect him. In another age, a decade earlier, I’d been in Kemerevo. Lera, my friend who’d hosted me with her husband, Andrei, in their kommunalka in Moscow, came from there. In those days Kemerovo was synonymous with worker unrest; the miners had been among the first to strike as Soviet power ebbed. The boy who had died in Chechnya, been abandoned to the strays, and lain for months unidentified had left a hometown cold and bleak, a blighted city shorn of Siberia’s beauty long before his birth.

      On the screen, Valery compared the squiggles of a right palm with the whorls of a right forefinger. “Not perfect,” he said. But the odds were “extremely good” it was the young man from Kemerevo. He pointed to the prints. “Almost identical,” he said. “A match at a degree of one in a thousand.” I got the idea – comparing prints and weighing the frequency of like patterns – but the calculus was beyond me. A local programmer had designed the software that tallied the probabilities pertaining to every known fingerprint pattern. Probables were matched, and the composite comparison yielded a percent range for positive identification. The system was far from perfect, Valery conceded, but it gave a fair estimate. Short of genetic analysis, it was the best the state could afford.

      Across the narrow room sat Valery’s wife. Svetlana had no computer on her desk, only a small white candle that stood before an icon framed in aluminum. “Valery takes care of the boys,” she said, “and I take care of the mothers.” She lit the candle. The mother from Siberia would be here soon.

      NEARLY FIFTY, Shcherbakov could have retired. He was a local, born in the Don village of Aksai. He’d studied in Petersburg, then Leningrad, at the prestigious military medical academy there. Then it was the navy-Pacific Fleet destroyers, tours from Mozambique to Vietnam. His wife, Zina, worked at his side. She was his head nurse. They’d met over an operating table. Their daughter, Yelena, was in medical school, and their son, Andrei, fourteen, was heading for the military academy. Shcherbakov could have been enjoying the quiet at home. Theirs was a small house; an apple orchard lined the creek out back. But he couldn’t quit. Returning an identity to the dead was more than a duty. It had become a calling.

      There was nothing dramatic, Shcherbakov said, nothing unusual or heroic in the work, nothing that deserved any sympathy. Orthodoxy, he said, did not allow it. Everyone, he was certain, was given his own cross according to his abilities and had to carry it with dignity. At times, when he could deliver a mother and a father from uncertainty, a sense of relief did come. For the parents, he said, not knowing was worse than knowing. “If they can leave here with certainty, they can go home, defeat their grief, and find peace.”

      Down the hall the mother from Siberia had arrived. The fingerprints remained enlarged on the computer. She sat with her back to the burning candle and stared at the screen. “There you see it,” the technician said. He leaned back in his chair.

      The mother called him Doctor-in deference to the white lab coat-but was not convinced. “I see absolutely nothing,” she said. She rubbed her eyes with a yellow handkerchief in tight, furious circles. “I see nothing,” she said again. “But if you say they’re his, I believe you. I do. I must. What else can I do?”

       FIVE

      ROSTOV HAD ITS pleasures, but the hotel was not among them. The phone rang incessantly each night – always females, always the same question: “You need girl now?” – before I pulled the plug from the wall. Then they took to knocking on the door. Worse, one morning I got out of bed to discover the sheet blackened with blotches – dozens of dead cockroaches. So when after a week Shvedov flew down from Moscow, I was happy to see him.

      He arrived kitted out for battle. He wore Red Army surplus: old khaki jacket and trousers, layered with pockets and liberally frayed. It was Shvedov’s idea of camouflage for journalists. He’d also brought the satellite phone I’d rented in Moscow and an old army backpack stuffed with six cartons of papirosi. Native to Russia, foul-smelling and absurdly strong, papirosi do not even pretend to be cigarettes. Stuffed with rough tobacco, they end not with a filter but with a long, hollow tube of rolled cardboard. Their drag, made famous by Jack London, is so coarse even hardened smokers – Russian, French, Vietnamese – beg off. Papirosi, however, have a singular virtue, never lost on Shvedov. They are cheap. A pack runs under five cents.

      By then the world had heard of Andrei Babitsky, the Radio Liberty reporter who had dared report from the Chechen side of the war and been arrested by the Russians. Babitsky had suffered a dubious POW “swap,” when the FSB staged a videotaped handover, turning the reporter over from its officers to masked men, who were almost certainly FSB operatives. Held captive for months, Babitsky had become a cause célèbre.⁴ Nobody, however, outside a small circle of Moscow journalists, had ever heard of Shvedov. He did not write much, and he did no radio. But he was one of the best in the business. Born to a father who toiled in the upper reaches of GOSPLAN, the Soviet planning ministry, Shvedov did have a degree in journalism – Moscow State, late 1970s – and a string of credentials – BBC, NTV, Moscow News–not all of them false. Given the Kremlin’s strict ban on journalists’ traveling independently in Chechnya, the robust kidnapping market, and the only other option a government tour in a press herd, I sought out Shvedov.⁵