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

her forties, who had guided a generation of Aldy children through School No. 39, stood with her back to a wall in the yard of a house on Khopyorskaya Street. Her three girls and mother stood near her. So did thirteen other women. They had slept and eaten together in the basement of the house. It was large, and they had kept glass jars filled with water and kompot, homemade fruit juice, there. Up until the day before, there had been many more women and children here. In January as many as thirty had slept in the cellar.

      The soldiers had told them to stand at the cement wall, in the cold. Hours passed. The women dared not move. They stood there, their backs to the wall. The soldiers brought chairs out of the house and sat across from the women. Two soldiers ventured in the cellar and found the jars of kompot the women had kept there. They emerged with smiles and passed the sweet drink among themselves. Every so often the soldiers shot into the wall. The bullet holes traced an arc a few feet above the heads of the women and their daughters.

      When their squad leader came upon the scene, he yelled. He told the men to get rid of the women. The soldiers went to work. Two took the children aside, while one led the women into an abandoned house next door.

      Malika had already said her prayers. She had asked Allah not for mercy but to light her path. She did not look at the soldier. She averted her eyes. As the women walked into the house, the soldier stuffed a note into her hand. On the paper, he said, was his home address. He told Malika not to worry. He wasn’t going to shoot her or any of the women. She reminded him, he said, of his mother. “So write my mama,” he said. “Tell her I didn’t kill you.”

      BISLAN PASSED TWO houses before he entered the yard of No. 170, nearly tripping on the first body. Just by the gate, half on the road, half in the yard, lay Rizvan Umkhaev, a seventy-two-year-old pensioner who in recent years had guarded the parking lot of the TB hospital in Grozny. The bullets had ripped right through him. Issa Akhmadov, a short, muscular man who at thirty-five had never held a job and spent too many years in jail, lay near him. It had been a close-range execution. They, too, still clutched their passports.

      Bislan turned toward the house and took two steps forward. He could go no farther. Behind him lay the ghastly remains of Sultan Temirov, whose head had been blown off He was forty-nine. His body was mangled, destroyed by a mass of metal. His head would never be found.

      A few steps on, behind the high metal fence of No. 140, seventy-two-year-old Magomed Gaitaev lay dead. He had driven a tractor in the fields beyond the reservoir his whole life. He had lived for years alone. A bullet had pierced the base of his neck and torn his left cheek open as it exited. His chest pocket was open. It held his passport. His glasses hung on the top of the gate to his house.

      Across the road, a scene had unfolded that revealed that the villagers were not the only ones afraid. Malika Labazanova, a plump round-faced woman in her forties who wore her dark brown hair in a bun, stood between two soldiers and her front door. They told her they wanted only to search her house. She opened the door. Once they checked the house, one of the soldiers turned to Malika and raised his gun at her. She fell to her knees and pleaded.

      He stood over her in the front room of her house and said, “Lie down and don’t move.”

      He shot into the air. If anyone knew, he said, that he had not killed her, he’d be killed as well.

      At No. 1 Podolskaya Street, a ten-minute walk from the center of Aldy, the terror struck mercilessly. Sixty-seven-year-old Khasmagomed Estamirov, a disabled former chauffeur, had sent his wife, two daughters, and toddler grandson away to the refugee camps of Ingushetia. But the rest of his clan was home: his cousin Said-Akhmed Masarov; his son, Khozh-Akhmad, who had returned to care for his ailing father; and his daughter-in-law, Toita. At twenty-nine, Toita was eight and one-half months into her third pregnancy. Her one-year-old, Khassan, was also with them. He had taken his first steps that week.

      By noon his older brother, Khusein, the toddler who had been sent off to the camps of Ingushetia, had been orphaned. The soldiers had killed everyone in the Estamirov house. The old man. The little boy. His pregnant mother. They even killed the family cow. It was trapped when the soldiers set everything they saw aflame. They torched the yard and the house. They burned the family car as well. Then, as the flames engulfed the cow alive, they left.

      Khasmagomed’s cousin found the bodies. As he approached the burning house, a mud-splattered APC was driving away. Father and son lay in the yard, side by side. Khasmagomed had been shot in the chest, several times. His wallet was on the ground, empty. The corpses were burned. Toita and her little boy Khassan lay under the awning in the courtyard on the concrete floor. The concrete was pockmarked with bullet holes. Toita, due to give birth in two weeks, was shot in the chest and stomach. Her ring and earrings were gone. Across the threshold to the small house lay the body of the cousin, smoldering. Blood covered the floors and walls.

      In the house Khasmagomed had built a small iron stove to keep the family warm. Thirty-two bullet holes had pierced it. Khasmagomed had asked his cousin Said-Akhmed to come live with him. “It’s frightening on your own,” he had said. “Here we’ll be together.”

      Here, too, the young conscripts had come the day before, February 4. They had warned the Estamirovs. “The kontraktniki are coming next,” they said. “You’d better leave.”

      Khasmagomed, a proud grandfather who could count at least seven generations that tied him to the Chechen land, had stayed in the house he had built. He was retired, and his health was bad. But he had earned Hero of Labor medals for his decades of driving Party officials around Grozny. He did not believe the soldiers. He did not think the Russians would do anything. “They’ll just come,” he told his family, “and check our passports.”

      He and his wife had remained throughout the first war on Podolskaya Street. They had lost their first house but rebuilt it from the ground. He did not worry about the Russians coming. He believed they would bring order. So as soon as the conscripts left, Khasmogamed and his son went into their yard. They hung white sheets in front of the house, and on the fence, in white paint, they wrote, “Zachistka done.”

      IT WAS NEARING THREE in the afternoon and the sun had still not appeared when the soldiers came back to the center of Aldy, to the Abulkhanov house at No. 145 Matasha-Mazayeva. Five members of the family were living there: the elderly owner, his wife, their daughter-in-law, Luisa, their niece, and her twelve-year-old son, Islam – an old man, three women, and a boy. The soldiers first came early in the morning. They shot the family dog. All day long other soldiers had come – some wore white snowsuits; some had faces so dirty you could see only their eyes.

      This time the owner of the house, seventy-one-year-old Akhmed Abulkhanov, tried to give them his passport, but they threw it on the ground. They lined them all up – Abulkhanov, his wife, their niece, her son, Islam, and their daughter-in-law, Luisa – against a wall at the side of the house.

      The soldiers swore at them all and grabbed Islam.

      “You’ll make a good little fighter,” one said as he laughed.

      “Look, you guys,” the old man said, “what are you doing?”

      A soldier butted him with his Kalashnikov. They asked for whatever the family had: jewelry, money, wine. The women undid their earrings and surrendered them. The old man said he had no wine in the house and no money. He said if they let him, he’d go borrow money from a neighbor.

      Several soldiers went with Abulkhanov as he went to his friend’s house, around the corner on Third Tsimlyansky Lane. Khusein Abdulmezhidov, forty-seven, and his elder sister, Zina, both were home. Zina, a short black-haired woman, had turned sixty not long before. For years she had manned the counter at the bakery in Chernorechiye, the adjoining district just across the dam from Aldy.³⁴ They gave the soldiers all they had, three hundred rubles. It was not enough. There in the yard of his friend’s house the soldiers shot Abulkhanov. They did not spare Zina or Khusein. Alongside their neighbor they both were killed in their own yard.

      Aldy lay in flames. Black smoke filled the sky, and the stench was heavy. Whatever the liquid was that the soldiers poured on the