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

in old coats and blankets in cramped basements, heard something strange. As first light came, and the slopes of the snowy peaks far to the south brightened, as they rolled their prayer rugs out toward Mecca, bent to their knees, and praised Allah, they heard silence. No thunderclaps. Only the sounds of chickens, sheep, and cows. The numbing monotony had broken. The shelling had stopped.

      For months the families of Aldy had waited. For months they had been transfixed by one question. They knew the Russians had surrounded Grozny; they only wondered when the attack would come. For days they had stored water from a nearby spring and kept the few fish the men could catch, the belyi nalym that once grew three feet long in the reservoir, frozen under the snow. When the Russians come, they thought, it would be good not to go out. The silence disturbed them, but they welcomed an hour for urgent repairs.

      Bislan climbed up onto the low roof of his single-story house with a hammer and three scraps of plastic sheeting. From the roof he saw that his neighbor Salaudi, a mechanic in his forties, had done the same. Salaudi, deaf since birth, had done better. He’d found a sheet of aluminum siding. He was trying to nail it over a hole the shelling had left.

      At just after nine, smoky layers of chill mist still blanketed the corners of Grozny. Aldy sits up high. It commands a vantage point over the lowlands that edge the city. But Bislan could not yet see the sun. He only heard the shouts. From the northern end of the village, APCs churned the asphalt of Matasha-Mazayeva. Three bus stops long, Matasha-Mazayeva is Aldy’s central street, the only one that runs the length of the village. At the same time, the Russians came along the frozen mud of the parallel streets, Almaznaya and Tsimlyanskaya. Still more men and armored vehicles filled the roads that run perpendicular, Khoperskaya, Uralskaya, and Kamskaya. Within minutes the village was clogged with APCs and, running on each side of them, more than one hundred soldiers.

      They did not all wear the same uniforms. Some wore camouflage. Some wore white snow ponchos. Some wore only undershirts or were naked to their waists. Nearly all wore dark camouflage trousers covered in dirt. Some had scarves wrapped around their necks, and some bandannas. Some wore knit hats pulled down close to their eyes. Some had tattoos on their arms, necks, and hands. Some carried five-liter canisters, marked only with numbers stenciled onto the plastic. But they all carried Kalashnikovs.

      These were not srochniki, the conscripts of the day before. These were kontraktniki contract soldiers. The distance between the two is vast. Conscripts stand on the far edge of puberty, often just a few months over eighteen. Contract soldiers, however, are older, more experienced, and fighting for the money. They earn much more than the newly drafted soldiers, and they are in the main far more battle hardened.

      Kontraktniki were easy to spot, Shvedov said. “They look like criminals.” With their shaved heads, bandannas, tattoos, and muscles, they tended to look like convicts who had spent too much time on the prison yard weights.

      At the edges of Aldy, the soldiers had parked APCs and olive drab trucks whose open flatbeds sat high off the ground. They had blocked all the exits, sealed off the village.

      Bislan was nailing the plastic sheet onto his roof when he heard the first screams. He looked down Matasha-Mazayeva, to the houses at the northernmost corner of the village. Two plumes of blue-gray smoke swirled there. The screams grew louder. He clung to his roof and looked down the other end of Aldy. Smoke had begun to billow as well at the southern end of the village. House by house, from either end, the men were moving down Matasha-Mazayeva. House by house they tried to get into the locked courtyards. First they kicked the gates with their boots. When that failed, they shot the locks.

      The killing began at the northern edge of the village, on Irtyshskaya Street. The Idigovs were among the first to face the Russians. They were brothers, Lom-Ali and Musa. They stood at the door of their uncle’s small house and tried to reason with the soldiers. There were a lot of soldiers. Too many. There would be no pleading. They were not listening. They screamed at Lom-Ali and Musa.

      “Get in the basement!” one barked.

      “Come on!” another yelled. “Don’t you want to be in the action film?”

      There was no cellar in the house, so the soldiers took them to the house next door. They forced the brothers into the cellar and threw a grenade in. It hit the cold floor and bounced. Lom-Ali, the younger of the brothers, threw himself on the grenade. He was in his late thirties. The shrapnel tore him to bits. Those who collected his body later were certain there must have been more than one grenade. His body had been cut into too many parts. The force of the explosion threw his elder brother, Musa, against the concrete wall. He was knocked unconscious, but came to as the smoke seeped into the basement. He looked for his brother and started to climb out of the cellar.

      It was still not yet ten when the men reached the heart of Aldy and started to shoot – in every direction. Smoke and screams filled the air. Bislan climbed down from his roof. He saw people gathering at the corner of Kamskaya and the Fourth Almazny Lane. They had come into the middle of the street to show the soldiers their documents. The soldiers encircled them. They were shooting into the sky, and they were yelling.

      “Get out of your houses!” one screamed.

      “Go collect your bodies!” another yelled.

      Not everyone that morning in Aldy was making repairs. In his small square house on the corner of Matasha-Mazayeva, No. 152, Avalu Sugaipov was making tea. Avalu, like his brothers, was a bus driver. He was forty, and driving a bus was all he had ever done. There was no food for breakfast. He could only put the kettle on. He would make the morning tea for his guests, two strangers who had come from the center of Grozny. One man was in his sixties, the other his late fifties. In Aldy, they had heard, there were still people. Safety, they imagined, was in numbers. Avalu had taken them in. They sat at his small kitchen table, waiting for the water to boil.

      A woman, Kaipa, sat with them. No one knew her last name. She and her nine-year-old-daughter, Leila, had come from the town of Djalka. Her husband had died long ago. She had seven other children. The war had scattered them all save her youngest. The shelling in Djalka had become unbearable. They’d moved to another village, and then another, before coming to her mother’s house in District 20 next door to Aldy. At the end of December 1999 she came to Aldy. Shamkhan, the mullah, was her distant cousin.

      Avalu lived in his mother’s house. His mother and younger brother had gone to Nazran in November. There were two small houses here – six rooms and a cellar in all. Avalu took in Kaipa and her girl, Leila. They had been living in the second house for a week now.

      As Avalu poured the tea, they heard the screams. The men did not want her to, but Kaipa went out. They rushed after her. Just as she stepped out into the courtyard, the soldiers lowered their guns. Kaipa was hit twice, in the head and chest.

      “Mama jumped in the air and then fell to the ground,” nine-year-old Leila would later say.

      The next bullets hit the two men. They were shot in the face.

      Avalu stood at the threshold of his house and held the little girl tight. He told her to go back into the house, and he took a step forward. She turned around and saw his body leap into the air, too. Avalu fell backward, into the house.

      Leila ran through the house to the room in its farthest corner. She crawled under the bed and hid behind a sack of onions. She lay there in silence as two soldiers entered the house.

      “Pour it,” one said.

      She heard something splash against the floor.

      “But where’s the girl?” the other asked.

      “Don’t kill me,” Leila said, coming out from under the bed.

      One of them lifted her out. He covered her eyes with a scarf and, stepping around the bodies, carried her from the house. In the yard, from under the cloth, she saw her mother, lying facedown in a circle of blood. In the street he put a can of meat in her hands. He tried to calm her down. He looked up and found two women staring at him.

      “Take her,” he told them, and returned to the courtyard of the house.

      The