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

Chechens and Russians took place when Catherine ordered her troops to storm Aldy, the village that at the time spanned the area of modern-day Aldy and Chernorechiye.

      Catherine chose the target with purpose. Long before Yermolov built the line of forts that began with Grozny, Peter the Great had built the Line, a Great Wall of Russian forts and Cossack stánitsas. By 1784 the Russians had finished their critical garrison in the North Caucasus, the fort at Vladikavkaz. But in the following year Catherine’s men suffered an unprecedented defeat on the Sunzha River – at the hands of the followers of a mysterious Chechen holy warrior.

      In 1785, Prince Grigori Potemkin – Catherine’s viceroy in the Caucasus and the favorite among her lovers – learned of a potent force emerging from Aldy, a resistance movement led by a shepherd. Potemkin heard the news from his cousin Major – General Pavel Potemkin, who sent an alarming communiqué from the field: “On the opposite bank of the river Sunzha in the village of Aldy, a prophet has appeared and started to preach. He has submitted superstitious and ignorant people to his will by claiming to have had a revelation.”³⁵

      Many believe that Imam Shamil, the holy warrior who led the longest resistance to the tsar, was the first great Chechen fighter. He was not. The title belongs to Sheikh Mansour. (Shamil, an Avar from Dagestan, was not even Chechen. Sheikh Mansour was.) History tells Mansour’s story variously. His genealogy, theology, even name, have never been definitively revealed. But in the Caucasus what motivates men and triggers their weapons is not reality, but a perception of reality. In the realm of perceived reality, Mansour is revered as the first in the long line of Chechen holy warriors. He was born a peasant named Ushurma in Aldy. He had the good fortune to come of age just in time for Russia’s southern onslaught.

      “Muhammad paid this simple peasant a visit,” Shamkhan told me. “He revealed himself to this young man because he was the purest of believers. The time had come, the prophet told him, to lead a Ghazavat on the Russians.”

      In 1783, Ushurma took the name Mansour–“conqueror” in Arabic – and later added the honorific “sheikh.” A devout believer in Sufism, a mystical strain of Islam, Mansour already had a following. Sheikh Mansour led the Naqshbandi Tariqa, or path of belief.

      Eager to please the empress, his lover and lord, Prince Potemkin dispatched three thousand troops to capture Mansour. They stormed Aldy but did not find him. Frustrated, they torched the village. Mansour’s men got their revenge. They ambushed the Russians in the nearby woods and killed, the chronicles attest, more than six hundred men. Potemkin had to tell Catherine that nearly half his force had been lost. Many had drowned, trying to flee, in the Sunzha’s muddy waters. An “unfortunate occurrence,” Prince Potemkin called it in his report to Catherine.³⁶ The blood feud had begun.

      As Catherine’s men routed his followers, Mansour took refuge in the Ottoman fortress of Anapa. In 1791 he was captured and shipped off to St. Petersburg, where he spent his last years in the Schlüsselberg Fortress, an island prison in the Neva River near Lake Ladoga.³⁷ But Mansour’s spirit never left Chechnya. In Aldy it was especially strong.

      “We all know the history of this village. Sheikh Mansour lives on in each of us,” the mullah Shamkhan said, leaning forward on his staff. “We feel his strength every day. We know the struggle began here.” Shamkhan had just come from leading a service for one of the shaheed, the martyrs of the Fifth of February. At the service, dancing the zikr, a religious dance, was Magomed Dolkaev, an elegant elder with a flowing white beard who claimed Sheikh Mansour as an ancestor. No one knew the true genealogy. But as Shamkhan told me, it was not important.

      A year and a half later Dolkaev was dead. He, too, had fallen victim to the new times-shot four times in the head by an unknown gunman in his home in Aldy.

      ISSA, WHO SAT IN silence as I listened to Shamkhan, could no longer hold his peace. He had observed it all, taking in the mullah and his story with the weary eyes of a crocodile. When he begged permission to interrupt, I consented with a shrug to the inevitable.

      Issa leaned forward, squaring his elbows on the table across from the mullah, with a question. “How come Maskhadov,” he said, referring to the military commander elected Chechnya’s president after the first war, “couldn’t build a state that could defend any citizen, no matter his faith?”

      His voice had lost its usual calm and was rising. “Where were all these brave fighters when there was not one Russian soldier here? When all you had to do was bury one, or two, or three bandits so that none of this would have happened?”

      Shamkhan invoked the name of Allah. He swore that he was “against any embodiment of evil,” that he could not “tolerate Wahhabism,” and was a foe of “any extremism.”

      Issa did not let up.

      “You say you left with the fighters. Abandoned the village during the siege. You and I speak the same language. Tell me, as the spiritual father of these people, how did we come to this? How can we live like this?”

      Shamkhan struggled for a rejoinder. He stiffened his broad back and condemned the plagues that had visited Chechnya since the Soviet fall: the militarism of Dudayev, the romanticism of Maskhadov, the banditry of Basayev, the foreign Wahhabi virus of Khattab, and the venal hunger of the rest of Chechnya’s warlords. “All this we have earned,” he said, “because of our ignorance. Thanks to our lack of enlightenment, we were unable to establish any order.”

      The mullah was talking to Issa but looking at me. He said he had never led anyone to any jihad. He said the fighters had wanted to take him earlier from Aldy, that they were afraid the Russians would kill him on sight. He swore to Allah that everything he had done was done not in the name of Dudayev or Maskhadov or Basayev or Khattab, but in the name of Allah and Allah alone.

      As the torrent of words poured forth, I realized Shamkhan was talking too much. Then, suddenly, he dropped his guard. He declared his conscience clean. He said he had done all that had been asked of him, that he had journeyed “the path from beginning to end,” the path that was “written in blood.”

      Shamkhan, I realized then, had been with Basayev and the fighters the night they broke through the siege of Grozny. “The path” was the fighters’ macabre retreat through the minefields to Alkhan-Kala.

      I pressed for details.

      “They needed someone to bless and bury the dead,” he said. “So I made this journey with them and with my own eyes saw how they died. If someone were to sit and tell me what they had seen along this path, I swear to Allah, I would never believe him. I would not believe people could die like that.”

      The fighters had taken him from Aldy on the last day of January. Before he left, the mullah told his followers to stay in the village. “Do not abandon your homes to the Russians,” he had said. The words, as Shamkhan recalled them, weighed heavily.

      The minefields killed hundreds during the fighters’ retreat. Others froze to death. He had stayed with the fighters for the entire trek, from Grozny to the snowbound mountains in the south. He had left the fighters in their mountain hideaways.

      Would they fight until the end? I asked.

      “What lies in their hearts,” Shamkhan said, “is to me a dark wood.”

       TEN

      THE CREEK WAS DARK green and cloudy. As Issa and I bathed in it, resting our hands on the sludgy rocks below, our feet and arms stirred the water the color of burned sugar. Issa was telling me tales of the glory of his youth in Grozny, but I was preoccupied. I was wondering what else lay in the mucky creek of Shali.

      We walked here together, through the nettles of the overgrown orchard that was the backyard of the small house where Issa’s mother and two sisters lived. His mother was eighty; his