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

By his career’s end he had become a legend. “Nothing has any influence on Yermolov,” wrote the head of Nicholas’s secret police, “except his own vanity.”²⁰

      In short order, Yermolov set out to subdue the south. He built a line of fortresses along the Sunzha River. Forward bases in enemy territory, they bore names declaring his intentions: Groznaya (Menacing) was founded in 1818, the same year as Vladikavkaz, followed by Burnaya (Stormy) and Vnezapnaya (Sudden). He wrote Alexander I, Napoleon’s most unyielding foe:

      When the fortresses are ready, I shall offer the scoundrels dwelling between the Terek and the Soundja [Sunzha] and calling themselves “peaceable,” rules of life, and certain obligations, that will make clear to them that they are subjects of your Majesty, and not allies, as they have hitherto dreamed. If they submit, as they ought, I will apportion them according to their numbers the necessary amount of land … if not, I shall propose to them to retire and join the other robbers from whom they differ only in name, and in this case the whole of the land will be at our disposal.²¹

      It was psyops, tsarist style. Fortress Groznaya presaged not only the terror to come but the Russians’ misguided strategy as well. Yermolov succeeded only in uniting the Chechens and their neighbors to the east, the Dagestanis, in a rebellion led by Imam Shamil, the fabled nineteenth-century Muslim warrior. Shamil’s holy war, the Ghazavat, lasted more than twenty-five years. As early as 1820 one wise contemporary of Yermolov’s foretold his failure. “It is just as hard to subjugate the Chechens and other peoples of this region as to level the Caucasian range,” wrote General Mikhail Orlov, who did not fight in the campaign. “This is not something to achieve with bayonets but rather with time and enlightenment, in such short supply in our country. The fighting may bring great personal benefits to Yermolov, but none whatsoever to Russia.”²² In 1859, surrounded by imperial troops, Shamil gave up. But as the Russians knew well, the surrender was tactical. His Ghazavat would live on.

      WE ARRIVED IN GUDERMES, Chechnya’s second – largest city, as the sun set, moments before the shoot-on-sight curfew fell. Chechnya is only slightly larger than the state of Connecticut, covering some six thousand square miles. Once it took a couple of hours to drive from Nazran to Gudermes, the town that rose only a few concrete floors off the dry ground to the north and east of Grozny. Now thanks to the vagaries of the checkpoints and the Russian convoys on the road – the endless caravans of tanks, trucks, and kerchiefed soldiers clinging atop armored personnel carriers (APCs)–it took us the whole day. Gudermes had little to offer. But the Russians, in an attempt to lend a semblance of governance to their military adventure had made it the republic’s temporary capital. Grozny was in no shape to host the officers and bureaucrats visiting from Moscow.

      Issa, exhausted, went to his bedroom to undress. He rolled a small rug across the uneven floor and, stripped down to his sleeveless T-shirt and undershorts, bent to his knees to pray. Shvedov meanwhile was overjoyed. “Not a bad day’s work,” he said, declaring it over, as one shoe removed the other. He pulled off a sweat-soaked shirt, lay across an old sofa, and reached for another papirosa cigarette. As he smoked, the sweat continued to drip from his bald head.

      It had been a long day. We’d started out early in the morning, crossed into Chechnya, driven across its dry northern plains and into the remains of Grozny. I had seen Kabul in the summer of 1996, just before the Taliban took the Afghan capital. Leveled so many times, Kabul had no cityscape. Little, save the remnants of the old Soviet apartment blocks, distinguished it from the Stone Age. Grozny, however, looked worse, much worse. When the USSR collapsed, the Chechen capital had been a modern city of Soviet architecture and European aspirations. It had been a city with promenades and parks, where the sweet smell of jasmine mingled with the smell of grilling lamb at sidewalk stands, where mammoth industrial works – one of the USSR’s largest petroleum refineries, a chemical factory, a cement plant – belched black plumes day and night, ever reminding the residents of their service to the empire. The square blocks downtown had once boasted the landmarks of Soviet power – Party buildings of stone that lengthened the reach of the ministries in Moscow. Grozny had once been a destination for the ambitious from across the North Caucasus, a center of education (with a university, technical institutes, sixty schools) and culture (with a national library, fine arts museum, museum of national culture, puppet theater, drama theater, and concert hall).

      There had also been people. Grozny before the first war was home to nearly half a million residents. Between Lenin Square and Lenin Park, university students had gathered in the long summer evenings at the square named in honor of the druzhba narodov (“friendship of peoples”). Nearby stood a famous statue that pretended to testify to the ethnic solidarity. Three Bolsheviks – a Chechen, an Ingush, and a Russian – were sculpted in stone, shoulder to shoulder. The years of war, however, had laid the myth bare. The heads of the happy trio had been blown off by a rocket-propelled grenade.²³ Now everything was different. Nothing functioned, and little remained. Grozny was a city of ruins.

      We entered the long Staropromyslovsky district. Block after block had been bombed and burned out. Of the few buildings that still stood, many were sliced open. Walls and roofs had fallen, revealing the abandoned remains of homes inside: sinks, burned cabinets, old stoves. Furniture, belongings, anything of value had disappeared long ago. We drove on, accelerating between the checkpoints, now approaching the city center. Each turn revealed only more concrete carcasses, more black metal twisted and torched, more gaping holes that held only darkness. “This,” announced Issa, though the images required no captions, “is the wreckage of Putin’s War.”

      FOR THE CHECHENS the winter of 1999–2000 may have been the harshest ever. While the West greeted the new millennium with apprehension, fearful that computers and fiber optics might usher in the Apocalypse, Armageddon had already arrived for the Chechens. The fortunate ones had survived one horrible war, the campaign that began on New Year’s Eve 1994 and ended for all practical purposes on August 6, 1996, the day the Chechen fighters swarmed back and retook Grozny. The first war left as many as one hundred thousand dead. Launched to quell a nationalist movement for independence, it dragged on thanks largely to Yeltsin’s vanity, the shambolic state of his armed forces, and the resolve of the Chechen rebels. In the summer of 1996 Yeltsin won reelection, and “the Chechen question” was put on hold. On August 31, 1996, Yeltsin’s envoy, General Aleksandr Lebed, cut a deal with Aslan Maskhadov, the shy military leader of the insurgency.²⁴ The pact, signed in the Dagestani town of Khasavyurt, brought a cease-fire but put off the critical issue of the region’s status for five years. The deal haunted both sides. “Khasavyurt,” in the coded lexicon of Moscow politics, lingered as a metaphor for Russia’s weakness.

      David had beaten Goliath but not killed him. The rewards were few. For Chechens the interregnum brought an ugly period of isolation, dominated by banditry, kidnapping, and arbitrary attempts at Shari’a. In January 1997 Maskhadov was elected the first Chechen president, but even he had no illusions the republic had attained sovereignty or peace.²⁵ In Moscow, Chechnya was pushed to the back burner, its troubles relegated to the expanding realm of the country’s political taboos, another embarrassment best left unspoken and forgotten.

      Then, one warm morning in August 1999, the back burner caught fire. The two most famous fighters of the first war, Shamil Basayev and the Saudi-born mercenary known as Khattab (his single nom de guerre), opened a new front. The Kremlin had made Basayev Russia’s most wanted man after he had led a daring, and homicidal, raid on a hospital in the southern Russian town of Budyonnovsk in the summer of 1995. Basayev had led the rebels’ return to Grozny on August 6, 1996, but struggled after the war. For a time he tried governing, serving briefly as prime minister under Maskhadov. By his own admission, Basayev as a politician was a disaster. His talent lay in warfare. Khattab, meanwhile, had become the most odious rebel to the Russians. An Islamic militant with a sinister giggle and long, curly hair, on Russian television he was branded