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

in perfect place. She could quote her neighbors verbatim. She was, I feared, too good a witness. I worried that in her shock she had reconstructed the day in greater detail than she could possibly have known. I even entertained the idea that she might have been sent to Western human rights groups and Western correspondents to enhance the story of the massacre. But as I sat and listened to her talk not only of the massacre but of the war that preceded it and the war that had preceded that war, I came to believe her without pause, and I admired her courage. Given the prominent threat of retribution, only a handful of survivors had spoken publicly of the massacre. None spoke more eloquently than Aset. In the years that followed, we spoke often. I played and replayed the day as she saw it. Never once did she stray from her first telling. Never once did she retract or recast those first words.

      To her the commander had been human. He had looked at her, she said, and nearly pleaded.

      “What do you want me to do?” he asked as they stood together in the midst of the carnage. “My men shoot old men? Well, sometimes old men and young children carry things hidden on their bodies that blow up when you get too close. You know it yourself.”

      Aset did. She had seen others do it, and once the men had left that day, she, too, would tape a grenade to her waist. For two days she wore it hidden beneath her blouse.

      “I told Timur I was worried about being raped,” she said.

      “Don’t worry,” her brother told her, “tape a grenade to your body, and if anyone comes at you, pull the plug.”

      Aset bought the grenade from a Russian soldier for four packs of Prima, the cheap Russian cigarettes that Shvedov, when he couldn’t find his beloved papirosi, smoked.

      Months later, after we had met countless times, Aset told me what her name meant. It was derived from Isis, she said, the Egyptian goddess. But Aset did not know what Isis had done. Isis had collected and reassembled the body of the murdered Osiris. Isis had impregnated herself from the corpse, becoming the goddess of the dead and funeral rites.

      Aset’s black hair hung sharply above her shoulders. Her eyes were deepset and almond-shaped. Her cheekbones, high and round, were pronounced. Hers is hardly a typical Chechen face. Rarer still, for a woman in her fourth decade of life, Aset was single.

      “The war,” she said, when I asked why.

      SHAMKHAN, THE MULLAH of Aldy, closed his eyes. He lifted his large hands and opened his pale palms to the sky. Every other man, including Issa, at the table did the same. The mullah led the prayer. He began: “La ilaha illa allahu …” (“There is no God but Allah …”) In a moment, he drew his hands together and, with his eyes still closed, swept them down his broad face.

      “I cannot speak of the events of February fifth,” he said straight off. “I was not here. I left with the fighters on the night of January thirty-first.”

      Shamkhan was not a typical village mullah. Well over six feet and barrel-chested, he was slightly larger than a good-sized refrigerator. Moreover, he was impeccably dressed. Despite the high temperature, he was draped in a brocaded frockcoat. It was made of white cloth and lined with gold stitching. It lent Shamkhan a religious aura that impressed. So, too, did the staff of carved wood he carried in his hand. On his head he wore a heavy papakha, a tall gray hat of Astrakhan lamb’s wool. I was hardly surprised, given his physique, to learn that Shamkhan had been, during his tour of duty in the Soviet Navy, the wrestling champion of the Black Sea Fleet.

      He was the son of a mullah, but he came to the clergy “late,” he said, in his mid-thirties. Shamkhan was born in Kazakhstan in 1953, the year Stalin died. He had been the mullah of Aldy since 1996–since the end of the first war. A graduate of Grozny’s technical institute, before the war he worked as a welder in the Chechen gasworks.

      “Gas or electric, I could do either, and I earned a lot. But after the death of my father my brothers wanted me to continue my education. So I entered the Islamic University here in 1992. I was about to complete my sixth year in the Shari’a department when the war started. And now two wars and still no degree.”

      Shvedov liked to remind Issa and me that before declaring their independence in 1991, Chechens were not the most observant Muslims. “Of all the peoples of the Caucasus,” he said, “the Chechens were the last to find Islam.” As with much of his ramblings, Shevdov’s claim was at best half right. It was true that for decades a folk Islam, not a strict adherence to the laws of the Koran, had predominated among Chechens. It was also true that Dudayev, when he seized power in Grozny, had led a movement for independence first and for religious freedom second. The first chief justice of Dudayev’s Shari’a court smoked Marlboros during interviews. But as the first war raged, more and more young Chechen fighters donned green headbands that declared “Allah akbar” in Arabic. The Russian onslaught did what Dudayev had never envisioned: It turned the rebels ever more fundamentalist. By the time the second war began, the talk was less of independence and more of jihad.

      THERE WAS A THEORY on why hell visited Aldy on February 5. It had to do with the brutality of Basayev and his comrade Khattab. I had heard it in Moscow from Russian journalists and in Nazran from Ingush bureaucrats. I heard it from Issa as well. It had to do with the abuses suffered after the end of the first war by the Russians who lived in Chernorechiye, the district bordering Aldy. It was once a workers’ district, home to those who traded shifts at the nearby cement, chemical, and oil works. In Chernorechiye, the story went, the Russians enjoyed the best apartments. After the first war, once the Chechens had retaken Grozny, they exacted revenge. “That they kicked out Russians for apartments, this is absolutely true,” said the reporter Andrei Babitsky. “It happened everywhere in Grozny, but Chernorechiye had a large Russian population. And in the months before the second war, the practice there is said to have grown more and more violent, with Russians leaving their apartments through their windows.”

      Chernorechiye suffered a zachistka the same day as Aldy. The theory held that the Russians who had come on the Fifth had come to avenge the Russians killed in Chernorechiye. “WE HAVE RETURNED,” read graffito painted in large letters during the zachistka in Chernorechiye, “YOUR VILLAGE NEIGHBORS.”

      There was another theory, one that concerned the question of fighters. In the wake of the Aldy massacre, news stories and human rights reports downplayed the possibility that Chechen fighters had been in Aldy. But the fighters had been there. Babitsky had been there with them. On January 14, in his last radio broadcast from Grozny before disappearing, Babitsky told Radio Liberty’s Russian listeners, “In the village of Aldy, where I was also today with armed Chechens, bombs and missiles hit literally two hundred to two hundred and fifty meters from us.” The fighters had come through the village, Aset said. Some had stayed a few days, only to rest and have her treat their wounds. The nearest rebel base, everyone insisted, had been in the adjoining district, District 20, three bus stops east from Aset’s house.

      Babitsky, when I asked him later what he had seen in Aldy during his hellish last weeks in Grozny, was forthcoming. “I was in Aldy nearly every day. In the middle of January I did spend two days there at my close friend’s house.” His friend, Babitsky said, was Kazbek, the commander of Aldy. “I’d thought Kazbek had surely died, but he survived the zachistka. He’d dug a hole in his cellar so deep that even though the Russians threw a grenade in, he lived.”

      Aldy, however, was never a rebel stronghold. The fighters were too smart to stay for long. Chernorechiye, Babitsky and other reporters who had been going to Chechnya since the first war told me, was by far the better defensive position. Chernorechiye sat high above the road and, unlike Aldy, boasted multistory buildings. For the wounded, Aldy offered a sanctuary, a rare corner of Grozny where there were still people, good water, and, most of all, medicine. But given the number of villagers who remained in Aldy, the fighters were reluctant to use it as a position. The fighters, Babitsky said, deemed the village too important to risk the inevitable reprisal. “They thought,” he said, “Aldy was a good refuge.”

      THE CARNAGE THAT DESTROYED so much of Aldy is not peculiar to our time. Indeed Aldy, unbeknownst to the Russians who arrived on February 5, had a history. A river of violence