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

he’d warned, the price on my head doubled, and his confidence in the authorities vanished. The fighting remained across the border, but the war had seeped everywhere into Ingush life. Nazran was a breeding ground for kidnappers, assassins, bombers. It was also, as a result of a 1994 quid pro quo with the Kremlin, an ofshornaya zona, a new term in post-Soviet jurisprudence that denoted a realm known in the West as an offshore tax haven.¹³ Everywhere the red-brick palazzi, as big as any in the woods outside Moscow, testified to the local growth industries in bootleg vodka, petroleum products, and arms. The Ingush hated to say it, and few did, but the war in Chechnya had been good to them.

      The Ingush and Chechens speak closely related tongues. Brothers in the Vainakh nation – the word means “our people” – they share many cultural and religious traditions. But the years of war had strained the fraternity. Never ones to fight in the Chechens’ defense, by now the Ingush had turned hostile. In the first campaign they had taken in Chechen refugees. But in the second round, Chechens had flooded across the border. As the storming of Grozny loomed, nearly two hundred thousand Chechen refugees had fled to Ingushetia, nearly doubling the tiny republic’s population.

      Outside Nazran we found two dozen Chechen families living in an abandoned pigsty. Shvedov found the irony – Muslims sleeping beside pig troughs – amusing. The camps farther on, however, left even him speechless. Here, for miles on the parched earth, thousands of Chechen refugees were trying to live. They were eating, sleeping, and, on a rare occasion, washing in a city of tents, the likes of which the world saw with regularity now, thanks to CNN and the end of the post – cold war bliss. At the height of the second Chechen war, the Sputnik and Karabulak camps had housed tens of thousands. Six thousand remained.

      It was a stifling summer day. In the tents, skin streamed with sweat. The train cars were even worse, much worse. The old Soviet cars, four dozen in all, had been dragged to the edge of the barren field and left to stand in place. There was no breeze and no water, nothing but flies and a rising rate of infection. For 3,657 Chechens, the train was home. The men squatted in the shade of the carriages and watched the day go by. Their wives said they had ceased to be men. There was no work and no money. How could they be men? The women offered dry crackers and black tea. Had it been “back then,” they said, had we been “over there,” they could have hosted me properly. Not all them knew, but nearly all suspected, that the homes they had left behind were no longer.

      The talk came to a end when the water truck arrived. The water came from the canal, two miles away. In an hour another truck came. Bread. There was no water here, the women explained. And no flour. There were only children. Everywhere, in the dirt, by the outhouses, under the train cars stopped in their tracks, the children played. So there would be a future, the women said, but what kind?

      IF VLADIKAVKAZ BREATHED with the mystique of the nineteenth-century Caucasus, Nazran still lived by Soviet deal making. Whatever it was you wanted – a bottle of beer or a rack of lamb, an interview with the president or a ride to the camps – it was always negotiated through a side door, in the back of the shop, under the table. The epicenter of the negotiations was the Hotel Assa. A place of legend, the Assa was built in the euphoric first years after the Soviet fall as a Western-style hotel and business center, the first to grace this side of the Caucasus. Given the bloodshed and misery a few miles away, the Ingush investment climate had failed to lure many prospectors. The Assa instead since its first days had played host, and faithfully hustled, the journalists and relief workers drawn to the war. On a good day the foreigners nearly outnumbered the agents of the Ingush arm of the Federal Security Service, the FSB. The hotel claimed three stars and possessed, at first glance, the reassuring appearance of a tidy refuge from the dust, an outpost of modernity, if not air-conditioning.

      Shvedov had looked forward to the Assa. For days it had been all he could talk of: the balcony one could eat on, the little artificial lake it overlooked, the presidential town houses across the way, the sweet waitresses he knew by name. His dreams all came true. Within a day he was dictating, in a painful recitation of no less than ten minutes’ duration, his four-course meals without a menu. At the Assa we stopped dining together.

      It was not hard to see why the hotel had earned a reputation as a hellhole. The Assa had taken a beating. Hotels in the West often offer lists of local restaurants and recommended boutiques. At the Assa, rooms came with price lists-each item and what it would cost if destroyed: “Broken door: $200. Broken window: $200. Broken bed: $300. Broken shower stall: $400. Broken mirror: $200.” The inventory closed with the administration’s sincere wish that its guests enjoy a pleasant stay.

      The place at least had color. The restaurant each night filled with Belgian doctors, Danish food distributors, even a crew of Irish clowns in from Bosnia to entertain the children in the camps. There was also a German engineer, a veteran relief worker who’d struck out on his own. Over coffee in the morning and drinks at night, he sat on the balcony, mumbling urgently about the verdammte Chlor, the damned chlorine. He was gripped by an obsession with the cisterns of chlorine gas in Grozny. I had heard of the cisterns, leftovers from an old Soviet plant. The Russians had claimed the Chechens had blown them up, in an improvised attempt at chemical warfare. The Chechens in turn blamed the Russians for shelling the gas tanks. Now here was the German insisting all the cisterns had not been blown up.

      “Sie sind tam!” he cried, blending German with Russian. They are there! “Sie sind in very bad shape, diese tanks! They could explode any day, today, yesterday, Morgen. When they do, they kill any brave Chechens who make it nach Hause.”

      The German failed, it seemed, to recognize that I spoke English. But he was passionate about preventing the chlorine cisterns from exploding. He had a simple plan. He would cool the gas, liquefy it, and store it in trucks while the cisterns were repaired. He figured he needed only a few thousand dollars, but no relief organization would help him. They all ran, he said, at the word “Chechnya.” And so the poor German had been left stranded at the Assa. Each night he retreated to the balcony on his own, to drink his furies away.

      IN THE REFUGEE CAMPS I had sat in a stifling tent drinking strong tea from glass cups with Kuri Idrisov. He was a rarity, a Chechen psychiatrist. In the first war, he’d worked with a syringe, administering morphine day and night. The hospital in Grozny had been destroyed-twice. In the interregnum, now in his forties, he had joined the French crew of Médécins du Monde. For more than a year he had tended to the refugees. His family had moved back to Grozny, to his native village of Aldy, the destination I’d marked on the map I carried every day. The psychiatrist had heard of what happened in Aldy. His relatives had been in the village that day. He had wanted to return with his family, but he said he could not leave. He was hoping to salve the psychic wounds of the children in the tent city.

      In another tent the children were listening to Musa Akhmadov. Akhmadov had written a series of books on the Chechens’ customary law, the traditions that governed relations among children and elders, lovers and enemies, known as adat. The psychiatrist had recruited the writer to spend time with the children. Adat, Akhmadov explained, had suffered in the war. It was not a religious but a social code. “The backbone of Chechen culture” he called it. Since the Chechens’ earliest days, adat had drawn the lines between right and wrong. But in the turmoil of the years of war, a new code – Shari’a–the Islamic religious law imported by young men with beards who called themselves Wahhabis had threatened the continuum of adat. Wahhabism, a strict form of fundamentalist Islam that originated in Saudi Arabia, had been carried to Chechnya from the Arab diaspora.¹⁴ The two were incompatible, Akhmadov said. He feared that the youngest refugees, with no knowledge of the laws of old, would fall prey to the Wahhabis. The children, the writer worried, would lose their Chechen heritage in the tents.

      As we walked outside, threading among the children, Idrisov did not smile. After the first war he had believed it was the Chechens’ fault. “We’d won our freedom,” he said, “but hadn’t learned how to use it.” Now he thought differently. This new round had convinced him. “Look around you,” he said. “The Russians don’t want our land or our oil or our mountains. They want us to die out.”