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

villagers whose houses went untouched could only stand and stare as the fires gained force. All the while the screams, wave after wave, continued to rise behind the fences. But they were screams of discovery now – of horror, not pain.

      By late afternoon, when the soldiers finally left, the list of the dead was long: at least fifty-two men and eight women. In English we call such an event a massacre. The Russian military command, and the investigators who later exhumed the bodies, persisted in calling it a zachistka. Given its privileged place in Putin’s War, the term had moved from the front line into the political vernacular. Although the Russian military command likes to translate zachistka as a “mop-up operation,” the word derives from the verb chistit’, meaning “to clean” or “to cleanse.” Linguistically, at least, Putin’s zachistki were related to Stalin’s purges, the chistki. For Chechens, however, a zachistka had little to do with mopping up and everything to do with cleaning out. To them it meant state-sponsored terror, pillage, rape, and murder.

      IN MOSCOW THE following day, a quiet snowbound Sunday, sheets of thick flakes, buoyant and motelike, fell steadily and kept the avenues empty and white. No one had yet heard of the horrors wreaked on Aldy, when Putin, now acting president of Russia, went on television to announce the end of the military operation in Grozny.

      “As far as the Chechen situation is concerned,” he said, “I can tell you that the General Staff has just reported that the last stronghold where terrorists were offering resistance – Grozny’s Zavodskoi district – was seized awhile ago and that the Russian flag was raised on one of its administrative buildings.”

      Grozny’s Zavodskoi district is where Aldy lies.

      “And so,” Putin concluded, “we can say that the operation to liberate Grozny is over.”

      The troubles, however, were far from over. All that spring and into the summer, when I arrived in Chechnya, the pace of the war may have slowed, but to those on the ground, both Chechen and Russian, it remained as devastating as ever. After the fall of Grozny the Chechen fighters turned increasingly to a new tactic, low-intensity, but persistent, guerrilla warfare. As in the first war, they bought grenades, land mines, and munitions from Russian soldiers – some corrupt, but some just hungry or awake to the grim reality that Putin’s War would drag on with or without their patriotic duty. Almost daily Chechen fighters ambushed Russian convoys, checkpoints, and administrative headquarters. They killed at night and in the day, choosing their targets at random – a clutch of Russian soldiers buying bread in a local market – or with precision: high-ranking Chechen officials whom Moscow had appointed their administrative proxies in the region.

      At the same time, the civilian population grew rapidly. By the summer of 2000 more than one hundred thousand Chechens had returned from Ingushetia. They came home to more than destroyed homes and fresh graves. Chechnya was now under Moscow’s arbitrary rule. The sweeps continued, and with them, the cases of extrajudicial reprisal. Human rights advocates collected new reports of extortions and beatings, rapes and summary executions. For young male Chechens, however, the primary fear was detention. Each month more and more young men disappeared from the streets. At best the detentions were a rough form of intelligence gathering. At worst they served the enforcers’ sadistic urges. But perhaps most commonly, the men were taken hostage merely for ransom. It was also not uncommon that days or weeks later their bodies would be found, dumped at a conveniently empty corner of town.

      WE SAT UNDER A TRELLIS heavy with grapevines, in the still, hot air of the narrow courtyard of Aset Chadayeva’s home. Aset, the nurse who survived the massacre, was not here, but I handed a note from her to her mother, Hamsat. Aset told me that without it, her parents would not talk. No one would. Such was the fear, she had warned, in Aldy.

      “This man is a journalist,” Aset had written. “You can trust him. Tell him about the Fifth.”

      Hamsat had dropped the note and was crying. She wore a dark blouse, a long black skirt faded gray, and a cloth apron around her waist. She wiped her eyes with the end of the apron. Aset’s seventy-two-year-old father, Tuma – I recognized him by his great bald head – came into the yard to embrace me. Around us, sisters emerged (Aset was the eldest of seven children), then cousins and grandchildren. In all, there must have been a dozen members of the Chadayev family here, but only Aset’s father and brother, Timur, sat at the table with me. Timur was in his early thirties. He wore no shirt, only a well-worn jeans jacket. His ribs were protruding. Beneath his long lashes, his eyeballs bulged slightly. Timur, I knew from Aset, remained in shock. “When you gather the burned pieces of flesh of your friends and neighbors,” she had said of her brother, “it affects how you think.”

      Aset’s mother, shifting her weight nervously from her left to her right foot, stood behind her son and husband. Her grandchildren brought bowls of candies wrapped in brightly colored wax paper. Her daughters produced flat, hard pillows for me to sit on.

      Tuma wandered the square concrete yard, under the green of the arbor, mumbling to no one in particular. Occasionally he turned in my direction, and I could make out what he was saying. The afternoon, like every afternoon for weeks, was stifling. It must have been over ninety degrees.

      “We’ve never had such heat,” Tuma said softly. “Never. Such heat. Look at the grapes.”

      It was all he could say. He, too, I could see, was crying. Tuma, long retired, had spent his life helping build the concrete edifices of power in Grozny. A construction engineer, he had worked on most of the government buildings that lined the center. In 1992, after the Soviet fall, when everything suddenly changed, he had dreams of his own construction firm, Tuma & Sons. War of course intervened. In the first campaign his house was leveled. Tuma had rebuilt it by hand. Then there had been plumbing, hot water even. Now there was only the outhouse and the well down the road.

      “Never had such heat,” Tuma repeated. He wandered beneath the tall walnut tree that dominated the yard. “There’re so many grapes. And all dried up. We’ve never had such heat.”

      Timur brought Bislan. They had not always been good friends, but now they were bound for life. Together they had collected the bodies after the massacre. Together they had watched that night as the Russians returned, this time with trucks, big open flatbed trucks. They had watched as the soldiers returned to the houses that had not burned and emptied them of their belongings, of televisions and sofas, carpets and refrigerators. In the morning Bislan and Timor began to collect the bodies. Several they just put in the empty houses. They nailed the windows shut, so the dogs wouldn’t get them. It took six days to find all the bodies.

      Timur and Bislan spoke softly. They had had to tell what they had seen more than once already. They had had to tell it to the men who came here before me, the Russian “investigators.” Men who carried video cameras and tape recorders. Men who showed no identification and did not give names. Men who were interested only in what the villagers knew.

      As Bislan talked, Timur sat in a far corner of the yard. Hunched over, he stared at the rough ends of his short fingers. He was haunted by more than his memory of the massacre. Since the Fifth the Russians had come for him several times. Each time they took him away he came home with bruises. Only rarely did he interrupt Bislan.

      “Forever,” Timur said, when I asked if he would remember the commander’s face. “A typical face, one of those simple Russian faces,” he said. His men, too, he was sure were Russians, not Ossetians or Dagestanis or even Chechens, as some in Moscow had wanted me to believe.

      EVEN BEFORE GOING to Chechnya, in Moscow and Nazran I had met survivors of the massacre. I sat and listened, often for hours, at times for days, as they told of the events of the Fifth. I took notes and wrote up the sessions, but these were not interviews. It was testimony.

      In an empty hovel on Moscow’s outskirts, where refugees from the Caucasus often lived, lying low from the Moscow police, I spent hours talking with Aset. She had risked arrest, or worse, and come to the capital to tell the human rights advocates what she had seen. I was to meet many others who had been in Aldy that day, but even years later I was convinced that Aset knew more about the massacre than anyone who had survived that day.

      The