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

      BISLAN WAITED FOR the soldiers to turn the corner before he opened the metal gate of his house. He crossed the street and walked into Avalu’s yard. That was when he saw the bodies: two men, badly burned, one shot in the eye, and a woman. Bislan had known Kaipa. He stepped into the house. There, he saw the body of his friend Avalu, lying faceup in the middle of his kitchen. Bislan looked around the kitchen. The teapot sat on the stove, the cups on the table.

      ASET CHADAYEVA RAN from her family’s house on the Fourth Almazny Lane. She threw open the gate and ran into the street. She had heard the APCs, but when the screams grew close, she could wait no longer. There in the street, some thirty feet to the right, four houses down, she saw two Russian officers. They were staring up at Salaudi, the deaf mechanic who persisted in trying to fix his roof

      “Look at that idiot,” one said.

      “Bring him down,” yelled the other.

      As one of the soldiers raised his rifle, Aset screamed, “He can’t hear you! He’s deaf!”

      The soldier turned toward her and fired.

      “Get on the ground!” they yelled.

      She fell to her knees. The days had warmed since January. In the first days of February the snow had even begun to melt. The ground was icy and black, half-frozen mud. Her younger brother Akhyad, who’d turned twenty-five weeks earlier, ran from the house. “Come here and show us your documents!” the soldiers screamed. Aset and Akhyad walked slowly, arms in the air, toward the men. As they went through Akhyad’s papers, Aset measured the men’s faces. One, she sensed, was the commander. Aset’s father and brother Timur came out into the street. They pleaded with the commander to let Aset and Akhyad go. Several more soldiers joined the two in the middle of the street. One of them screamed curses at Aset, her brothers, and her father. Tall and reeking of vodka, he stuck the barrel of his Kalashnikov into her ribs, pushed her to the fence.

      The commander had had enough. “Svolochi!” he yelled at his own men. “You bastards! Get the fuck out of here! Move it!”

      Aset saw an opportunity. There were still many people in the houses, she said. “I can collect them,” she told the commander. “I can bring them to you. That way,” she said, “your men can check their documents faster.” Timur, Akhyad, and their father said they’d stay with the soldiers if the commander let Aset gather their neighbors.

      He agreed but turned to Timur. “Walk behind me,” he ordered.

      “Don’t worry,” Timur said. “Our people won’t shoot you.”

      The commander looked at Timur. “But mine might,” he said.

      Aset went down all the houses on Fourth Almazny Lane and on the side streets left and right. She came back with a crowd, two dozen women, men, and children. The soldiers pushed them forward, out into the intersection of Kamskaya and Fourth Almazny.

      “You’ll stand here,” they said, “until we’re through.”

      The commander came close to Aset. She was carrying as always a green plastic bag. In its folds, a gray wolf, the symbol of the Chechen people, howled. It was the flag of Ichkeria, the free state Dudayev had founded.

      “What’s in the bag?” he asked.

      Aset had spent the war in Aldy. She too had helped bury the dead. She had collected the bodies, and body parts, and washed them for burial by the mullah Shamkhan. She was a nurse. She had finished her nursing studies at Grozny’s medical college in 1987, in the heyday of Gorbachev and glasnost. She had worked in a children’s clinic in Grozny until December 1994, until the Russians first stormed Grozny. In Putin’s War, at thirty-two, she had become a one-woman paramedic unit. Day and night for months she had nursed the wounded and foraged to feed Aldy’s elderly and sick. She had prepared food for her neighbors, both Chechen and the few stranded Russians, old men and women who had nowhere to go. She had also tended the fighters. They brought medicine from their fortified basements in the city and fish from the nearby reservoir. When the fighters passed through, she had sewn them up. She had cleaned their wounds – with spirt–pulled the metal from their flesh, and sent them on their way. Aset had feared the day they would abandon the city, and when at last they did, it was the first time in Putin’s War that she cried.

      “Bandages, medicine, syringes,” Aset answered the commander. “I am a nurse.”

      “Then you can help me,” he said.

      He grabbed her by the sleeve and pulled her close, away from the crowd gathered at the corner.

      “There’s been a mistake,” he said. “Some of my men have killed some of your men. They’ve got to be covered up quickly.”

      She looked at him but did not understand.

      The commander had blue eyes and light hair. He was neither tall nor short. He was average, Aset said. “A typical, average Russian man.” As she stood next to the commander, his radio crackled. Across the static, she heard a soldier’s call name – Kaban–clearly: “Come in Boar, come in.” In the street his men had shouted the names Dima and Sergei.

      The commander seemed stunned. “What the hell are you assholes doing?” he screamed into his radio. “Have you lost your minds?” He looked at Aset and said, almost softly, “Stay with me. Don’t leave my side. Or they’ll kill you too.”

      At the corner the men and women and children stood still. They stood close to one another. They did not move from the corner. They stood there, as the smoke grew thick, for nearly two hours.

      IN MOSCOW THAT SAME Saturday afternoon I had heard on Ekho Moskvy, the liberal news radio station of the Gusinsky media empire, that in the settlement of Aldy on the southern edge of Grozny a zachistka was under way. To many Russians, the word, meaning “a little cleanup,” resonated with positive overtones. It meant “they’re cleaning out the bandits.” By the time Aldy burned and bled, zachistka operations had become routine, a staple in the “counterterrorist operation.” A zachistka, it was understood, was a house-to-house search for members of the armed opposition. Broadcast on television back home, the endeavor was meant to impress. On the evening news the footage resembled scenes from American real crime shows. Russian soldiers moved house to house in search of bandits, not unlike the cops, guns drawn, who sidle down crack house corridors to ferret out dealers. On the ground the news carried a different meaning.

      BISLAN KEPT RUNNING. He went to the next house on Matasha-Mazayeva, No. 160. The Magomadov brothers, Salman and Abdullah, lived here. Flames licked at the porch and the roof above it. He looked left and right. Three houses in a row were on fire. Salman was sixty, Abdullah fifty-three. Bislan had seen them the day before.

      The stench of burning filled the winter air. Bislan could not find the Magomadovs in the yard. The Russians set the basements on fire first. He knew that, but he could not get through the front door. It was already aflame. He knew the brothers were in there. The stench was so strong. Then he heard the screams. Bislan broke a side window and climbed in, but in the dense smoke he became disoriented. He could see nothing. A staircase led to the basement, but he couldn’t find it. He couldn’t even find the window again. He ran to a wall, felt the glass pane and smashed it. He pulled himself through and fell into the yard.

      The remains of the Magomadov brothers were found days later. They had been in the cellar. Both had been shot and then set afire. In the yard, to the right of the front door, bullet casings were on the ground. Among the ashes in the basement were bullets from 5.45-mm and 7.62-mm automatic rifles, the new and old standard-issue Kalashnikovs. There was also a wrist-watch. It had stopped at eleven twenty-five.

      Next door, in front of No. 162, Gula Khaidaev was already dead. He had left his house and been shot before he could step onto the street. Maybe he had heard the screams; maybe he had come out to show his passport. He was seventy-six. Shot three times, in his knee, chest, and forehead, Gula still held his passport in his outstretched hand. A few feet away lay his cousin Rakat Akhmadova. She had been shot in the neck and chest. She was eighty-two.