Let Our Fame Be Great (39 page)

Wearing a flowery dress and a polka-dotted dark headscarf, she had sat and looked sadder and sadder as the story went on.

‘They broke all of my dishes. The house was half-burned, so we were without gas or electricity with war all around. The bombing, we did not think we would survive. Then on 4 April, we went back to Almaty, and here we are,' she said.

Russia's bombing had forced them to return into the exile that Stalin had imposed on them. They had gone to a free Chechnya by train with two containers full of their property, and hearts full of hope. Less than a year later, they flew back into exile with the few things they had salvaged in a suitcase, and a leaden burden of despair they have never managed to shake off.

‘It was impossible for men to walk around the town; if you were between twelve and sixty and you appeared in the town, you would be killed or disappeared,' said Ilyas, who had left the room and come back holding the three records that survived – one by Creedence Clearwater Revival and two by The Beatles.

‘One half of our house was all burnt, and in the other half officers had lived and it was appalling. All 600 records were broken, and they stole all the furniture,' Ilyas added, giving way to his mother once more.

‘If they could take it away, they took it, and if they could not, they burnt it or broke it so nothing remained,' she said, stern-faced and sad.

‘I used to pity the soldiers when I saw them, we used to take them food because we felt bad for them. But when I saw what they did to our house, it was so unpleasant, and . . .' She ran out of words for a few seconds, before starting again. ‘War is war, I know, but to behave in that way is not right.

‘All these young men, they wrote on the walls, they stole everything. They ate what was in the house but that is not a problem. But why, why did they have to be so uncultured? Russians think of themselves as a cultured people, but they acted in this way. Please take the food, it is war. But what they did was just not nice. There was dirt everywhere, they did it on the floor and the rain and the snow spread it everywhere.'

I did not quite understand what she was saying, since she – as a Chechen woman with the sense of dignity expected of her – had spoken euphemistically. But her husband had been saving up this one great insult and, seeing that I had not understood his wife, he made things clear.

‘You are a Russian soldier, imagine, you go to someone's house. They took what they could, they burnt everything, but why? Why did they do this? They used our house as a toilet, why was this necessary? I will never forget this, and I will tell the children what they did. Now if you go to any town, there are lists of people killed in Chechnya: Ivanov, Peskov, Siderov,' he said, listing typical Russian surnames.

‘Every Russian will read these lists and hate Chechens. And why will they hate us? Because these Russians came to kill Chechens and were killed themselves.'

I had not planned to talk to them about their house in Grozny, about how they had dreamed and dreamed about going home to finally build a home in their own land. I had intended to ask them about the deportation, and about their early years in Kazakhstan. But as their story poured out of them, I forgot my carefully planned questions, and listened sadly to how one man's dreams, along with those of his wife and sons, had been crushed by politicians they knew nothing about.

I was appalled by the depth of sadness with which they had recounted how their home in a free Chechnya had became a toilet for Russia's occupying soldiers in just three months.

Despite myself though, I could not help being amazed by the appropriateness of how those Russian soldiers had acted. If divorced from the Khazalievs' own tragedy, their tale was a metaphor for
everything Russia has ever done in Chechnya: the spitefulness, the brutality, the lack of justification, and the stupidity. It has, in short, used Chechnya as a toilet.

I have talked to hundreds of Chechens – politicians, poets, warriors, businessmen, officials – about their life stories, but the story of the Khazalievs' dream home moved me more than any other.

They were simply a Chechen family that wanted to live in freedom, but Russia – no doubt without even realizing what it had done – did not let them. In the same way, their whole nation has been denied the right to manage itself for the last 200 years.

‘In short,' Khazaliev said, ‘in my life I have seen nothing good. I have been scared all the time. It has never been calm. In 1944, I was brought here, then I went home, and there was war and I had to leave.'

He had earlier shown me photographs of his wife's relatives. They were descendants of a Chechen who in 1918 led another doomed attempt to win freedom. The black-and-white photographs showed straight-backed bearded men with the traditional, long dark tunics of the Chechen nation, with the row of cartridge cases across the breast.

‘Such people do not exist any more. Their word was their word. They were friendly. There is no one like that left.'

It is true that the photographs belonged to another age. But it was an age with the same problems; the same depth of violence and oppression. And those problems started with the first encounter between Russians and Chechens, more than two centuries earlier, and have been continuing ever since.

In 1721, Tsar Peter I, one of the strongest and most ambitious rulers Russia has ever had, learned that Persia was in chaos. Afghanistan was rebelling against the Persians and one of the many rulers in Dagestan – an ethnically mixed province partially under nominal Persian control on the northern slopes of the Caucasus mountains – thought he might do so too and appealed to St Petersburg for help. For the energetic tsar, both events were opportunities to gain a strategic hold over lands that could one day prove stepping stones to India, the greatest prize of all.

He was aiming, he said, to grab the southeastern shore of the Caspian Sea from Persian hands, because from there ‘to Balkh and Badakshan with pack camels takes only twelve days. On that road to India no one can interfere with us.'

To secure the Caspian, he had to make sure the Turks did not fill in the gap left by the crumbling Persian empire, and so, to forestall them, he sent his army south.

His soldiers streamed along the shores of the Caspian Sea, heading for the town of Derbent, which sits on the coast at the only place where an army can bypass the Caucasus mountains, as they needed to do. They took Derbent with ease, but after that the campaign was not a great success, since Russia was not yet strong enough to challenge the Persians and Turks for mastery south of the mountains. As a result, the year would hold little relevance for this book either, were it not for one event.

A Russian cavalry detachment rode west from the main line of march to the village of Enderi, which is close to the modern town of Khasavyurt, on the borders of Chechnya. Russian-speakers were known to the locals, since Cossacks had settled along the river Terek fifty years earlier, but regular Russian troops had not been seen there before.

The Russian horsemen were wiped out.

It was a first encounter between the Russians and the mountain peoples of Chechnya and Dagestan, and it was a chilling sign of what was to come. For contacts were to become regular events. Peter's successors founded a fort at Kizlyar, north-east of Chechnya, to control the trail he had followed along the Caspian shore, and the Russians were clearly here to stay.

The Russians' presence was to have a profound impact on both sides. For this 1721 expedition was not just the first Russian incursion into Chechnya and the free mountain lands of Dagestan. It was the first incursion by any modern army. The Persians, it is true, occasionally ventured into Dagestan, but their visits were so serially unsuccessful that a Persian saying ran: ‘When a Shah goes mad, he takes his army to Dagestan.'

In the decades after Tsar Peter, one such shah was Nadir, who managed to restore for a while some of his country's lost might but came badly unstuck when venturing north of the mountains. He took much of lowland Dagestan back from the Russians, but an attempt to advance into the mountains in 1741 met with disaster.

According to a legend still told in the highland villages of Dagestan, he sent an envoy to the free, self-governing community of Andalal, with a demand that it surrender.

‘We are as many as stars in the sky, or fish in the sea,' said the message to the highlanders, who were supposed to be overawed by this boast of Persian might. Predictably, they were not. Their reply contained a chicken and a bag of millet.

‘As it is easy for this chicken to eat all this grain, so Andalal has the power to crush your numerous forces,' the attached message said.

The story should not be taken as gospel truth, since the same man who told it to me also told me that a spiritually blessed resident of his village – Megeb, which is high in the central mountains – had kidnapped the shah's daughter and flown away with her. But Nadir was indeed defeated at Andalal in a battle seen by Dagestanis as a symbol of their unity in the face of foreign aggression.

In the absence of conquest or foreign domination, the mountain communities of Dagestan, and the forest-dwellers of Chechnya, had
never created a centralized system of government of their own. They lived in free societies that governed themselves under an ancient system of customs common to all, no matter what language they spoke.

Dagestan itself is almost uniquely suited to creating a fractured society. Bleak and raw, its deep valleys plunge hundreds of metres from a high treeless plateau. The rocks of the mountains break out of the valley sides, sometimes squeezing together to make narrow gulleys, sometimes rearing up to make crags. The freebooting societies that lived in these inaccessible, tawny valleys needed protection from each other, and used the crags as natural castles on which to build villages.

To travellers along the valley bottoms, the villages are visible on the top of the slopes above, natural fortresses for some of the most warlike people in the world.

And the valleys created an ethnic mosaic also. Dagestan is home to dozens of languages, as many as forty, and the ethnic groups often live in isolated villages surrounded entirely by other nations. It is a bewildering place.

Megeb, for example, is a village of Dargins, Dagestan's second-largest nationality. Seen from the side, it resembles a step pyramid, with flat-roofed houses built on the sides of a rocky hill. Each one's walls nudge up against the back of its downward neighbour.

It is isolated in the midst of lands dominated by Avars – the region's largest nationality – and its residents moved to their current homes 600 years ago from around thirty kilometres away. They have intermarried inextricably with the neighbouring Avars over the subsequent centuries, but they are seen as interlopers in these high valleys.

Megeb residents – they are after all foreigners, and cannot be expected to know the local customs – freely admit to having a bit of a reputation for stupidity.

According to one of their legends, they once got swindled out of land by villagers from next-door Sogratl – which has a reputation for low cunning. A delegation from Sogratl came to insist that some land that had long been considered as belonging to Megeb really belonged to them. An elder from Sogratl, who was respected as a particularly
honest man, stood before his neighbours and swore he was standing on Sogratl's soil.

No mountain Dagestani would break his word in a solemn oath, so the Megeb villagers shrugged, scratched their heads, admitted they must be mistaken and gave up their claim. Unbeknownst to them though, the elder had filled his boots with dirt from his village's own fields, allowing him to rightly swear he was standing on Sogratl's soil, and thus muscle in on their village's holding. (For the sake of fairness, I should point out that I did not get balancing comment from Sogratl, where villagers probably say the land was theirs all along.)

Apart from being a funny story, the folk tale shows how seriously the customs of the mountains are still respected in Dagestan. Honesty is such an important part of their culture that a villager would fill his boots with earth so he could technically tell the truth, rather than achieve the same results with just a straight lie.

Islam arrived in Dagestan as early as 733 when the Arabs conquered Derbent, and brought their new religion with them, but it took many centuries to spread. Dagestan was not considered entirely Muslim until the late sixteenth century. Chechnya was also late to Islam, and the last Chechens probably did not convert until the late eighteenth century. Some Ingush were still pagan until the 1860s.

The long absence, therefore, of a foreign ruler or a foreign religion allowed the mountain customs to continue largely unchanged into the modern age. Communities were governed by councils of elders, and land was held in common by each village. The rigid ownership of land – as in the tale of the cunning elder with his boots full of earth – could cause centuries-long disputes between rival villages or communities.