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

trying to relay a message to him in Chechnya. Shvedov, for some reason, insisted on code. “The package,” he screamed into the satellite phone, “has arrived and is waiting.” Issa turned up at last, claiming car trouble and the backup at the checkpoints from Grozny. We’d come back late to the Assa when I noticed a large man sitting at a pink plastic table beside the hotel. He was trying to crack pistachios with his fist on the plastic. Shvedov had walked right past him. The man, without looking up from his pursuit, had whistled. Shvedov, fearful the kitchen would close, kept walking. The man called out: “Is that any way to say hello?”

      Issa had come to me with the résumé of an opportunist loyal to Moscow. Colleagues he had previously ferried had passed on the collective intelligence: Issa was once a high-ranking official in the anti-Dudayev camp, a staunchly pro-Russian Chechen of the Soviet era. He could be trusted to get you into Chechnya and around the republic – to almost any place no journalist could otherwise get to. But he could not be trusted in any other respect. Rumor cast him as an intermediary in the kidnapping trade.

      He looked at me directly, the barest of smiles curling the edges of a thin gray mustache. “My dear Andrei,” he said, “I wish you a pleasant stay in the land the world has forgotten.”

      I don’t know what it was. Maybe it was the singing. (He was fond of Joe Dassin, the bards of the Soviet underground, and old Chechen ballads sung, naturally, in Russian.) Maybe it was the way he affected a wordly air. (He mixed, in a single sentence, the few words he knew in French with the few he knew in English.) Maybe it was his gentlemanly manner. (He wore a pressed shirt, a sleeveless undershirt, and polished shoes.) But against my better judgment, Shvedov’s insistent counsel, and all that I had heard, I took an immediate liking to Issa.

      It was too dark to set out. Issa, however, did not want to stay in the hotel. He knew it was infested with Ingush security agents, men who had no desire to see him working with an American journalist. We would leave before dawn the next day. This time Shvedov was right: It was best not to let Issa out of our sight. The Assa was short on comfort, but it was long on protection. Each night we ate in the restaurant beside men wearing camouflage bodysuits, their Kalashnikovs slung over their chairs. They were the bodyguards of aid workers. Each night there was gunfire outside, but inside, it was quiet. Until our last night.

      It was around ten in the evening. I was alone in my room when I was startled by pounding on the door. I opened it and saw only an ID card shoved in my face and a trio of well-armed men in plain clothes. Two had automatic rifles in their hands. The third, a pale fellow dressed all in black who now refused to show me his ID again, wore two holstered guns, one under an armpit, another in his waist. They said they were police, but I knew they were Ingush FSB.

      “You have failed to register with the police,” the lead man said when I showed him my documents. The hotel should have done that, I said. Like all hotels in Russia, it was required to do so. I had given the clerk my passport and visa. “You’ve committed a crime,” he said. It was a bluff, and one poorly orchestrated. All the same the next hour consisted of a spectacle of pounding on doors, rousting aid workers, and seizing passports. It dragged on to midnight.

      In the lobby I found an Austrian relief worker screaming at the Ingush FSB agents. He was pleading for his passport. He knew no Russian, had just arrived, and was justifiably confused. He had come from Vienna to build latrines in the refugee camps. I intervened to tell him that the gentlemen said he could retrieve his passport tomorrow. Did he know where the Interior Ministry was? Of course he did, he cried. His bodyguards worked there.

      All the while, the agents of the Ingush secret police spoke of arrests, jail, court orders. In time, however, the threats eased. They spoke of “fines” and then of “exemptions.” Before long they simply handed my documents back – with apologies. The lead man in black even offered to buy me a drink. I took a whiskey, a double. Later, once the men had vanished into the starless night just as suddenly as they’d arrived, the relief workers huddled in outrage in the lobby.

      What relief organization did I represent? they wanted to know. They were relieved, oddly, to learn I was a journalist. “That explains it,” said a Belgian nurse, a longtime Assa resident. The Ingush agents, she said, hadn’t given them so much attention for months. Moreover, this time they hadn’t really seemed to be after bribes. My presence, the nurse said, explained the goon squad’s interest. She had a thought: “You’re not going into Chechnya tomorrow, are you?”

       EIGHT

      THE POISONED EMOTIONS that pervade relations between Russians and Chechens have ample literary precedent. Lermontov’s “Cossack Lullaby” is still sung to Russian children at bedtime:

       Over the rocks the Terek streams

      Raising a muddy wave,

      Onto the bank the wicked Chechen crawls,

      sharpening his dagger as he goes;

      But your father is an old warrior,

      Forged in many a battle,

       So sleep little one, be calm …

      For Russia’s “people of color” there is no political correctness, no cultural police to purge Russian literature of its jingoism. Russian writers have long coveted, and feared, the Caucasus. Although slurs emerged – Lermontov’s “wicked Chechen” is only the most famous – the Chechens were not always cast as bloodthirsty bandits. Pushkin, in his 1822 classic “The Prisoner of the Caucasus,” used the south as a lusty backdrop to probe the nature of freedom. To the poet, the Chechens were noble savages who enjoyed a “Circassian liberty” he could only envy. Lermontov, ironically, was no defender of Russian hegemony. In an early poem, “Izmail-Bey,” he even undermined the imperial campaign to subdue the mountaineers.¹⁵ Still, by the middle of the nineteenth century, as the Caucasian wars raged, a singular image of the Chechens had formed in the Russian imagination. They were merciless thieves, head choppers who would slit their own mothers’ throats should a blood feud demand it. Worse, they lived by taking Russians hostage and holding them in a zindan–a dark pit carved into the earth.

      If the Russians had poets and writers to blame for their bias, the Chechens owed their opinion of the Russians in large part to one man, General Aleksei Petrovich Yermolov. Under Alexander I and Nicholas I, from 1816 to 1827, Yermolov served as viceroy of the Caucasus, the prime mover of the effort to pacify the mountaineers. In the post-Soviet decade, as the Chechens again acted on their yearning for sovereignty, the old bigotry rose anew in Moscow and across Russia. So, too, as Yeltsin’s failed campaign gave way to Putin’s new and improved offensive, did the tsarist military strategy. Yermolov was the progenitor of the Russian notion that there was only one way to defeat the Chechens: burn all their villages to the ground. Early in the second Chechen war one of Putin’s field marshals struck an uncanny echo of Yermolov’s conviction. “Our strategy is simple,” General Gennadi Troshev said. “If they shoot at us from a house, we destroy the house. If they shoot from all over a village, we destroy the village.”¹⁶

      Yermolov boasted an illustrious résumé even before he reached the Caucasus. A giant of a man–“the head of a tiger on the torso of a Hercules” is how Pushkin portrayed him after an audience in 1829–Yermolov had won the Cross of St. George for heroism in battle when he was sixteen.¹⁷ At the fall of Paris in 1814 he had led both the Russian and Prussian Guards. With the deaths of Kutuzov and Bagration, Yermolov became the most revered officer in the imperial corps.¹⁸ His cruelty was famed. “I desire that the terror of my name should guard our frontiers,” he is said to have declared, “that my word should be for the natives a law more inevitable than death. Condescension in the eyes of Asiatics is a sign of weakness, and out of pure humanity I am inexorably severe. One execution saves hundreds of Russians from