Let Our Fame Be Great (53 page)

He was deported as an infant, and knew nothing of his homeland but what his elders told him. His childhood was one long torment: not enough food, not enough clothing, abuse, disrespect. He fought back in the way he found easiest: with his fists.

It was hard to cast back to the events he was describing, as we sat in his little room with its kettle and its pictures of Chechen leaders on the walls. He seemed to consume only tea, cigarettes and perhaps bread. I never actually saw him eat bread, he just drank tea with sugar and chain-smoked, but he sometimes had a loaf on the table. Chechen children ran and played outside his hut, but inside – on visit after visit – we dissected how a young boy in a shack in Kazakhstan became an old man in a shack in Istanbul.

He grew up in the Chimkent region of Kazakhstan, in a town called Lenger – not far, as it happens, from where Solzhenitsyn taught Abdul in his school.

‘I was small and I was always a scrapper. I was always fighting. These Kazakhs wanted to break us down, but we never let them. They wanted to beat the Germans too, and the Balkars, but we did not let them knock them down either. We are stronger than Kazakhs,
if they see blood they run away. But we were real hooligans,' he said, with an irresistibly naughty grin in his white beard.

The time to go ‘home' to the mountains he had no memory of came when he was sixteen. The whole nation was allowed to go back to the Caucasus, and most of them took advantage of the offer, some even digging up their dead relatives and taking them home for reburial. But they did not forget their ordeal, which affected them all in different ways.

‘In 1959, my father came for me and took me home to the Caucasus. I lived there for a bit but I remained a scrapper and for these scraps, for using a knife, and for other things, they put me in prison,' said Dedushka.

As it turned out, ‘they put me in prison' was something of an understatement.

Dedushka spent twenty-seven of the next thirty-five years in prison, becoming a genuine star of the Soviet criminal underworld. Chechens are famous in Russia for having run many of the Soviet-era mafia groups that control Moscow and the other cities. They are rumoured to be deliberately brutal. One former colleague of mine called Andrei worked as a student in a police photo lab during the 1980s and described developing forensic photographs of murder scenes where the guts had been pulled out and rearranged to spell rude words on the floor. That, he told me, had been the Chechens.

If Dedushka had done anything like that, he did not tell me; he said his business had mainly been the classic mafia scam of protection rackets. But he delighted in shocking me with the coarsest of prison slang. Russian prisoners are so rude that they almost speak a different language, and employ the Russians' rich stock of obscenities to maximum effect. On one occasion I amused myself by trying to directly translate one of Dedushka's anecdotes – it was about his relationships with his various wives, but moved on to the sexual habits of the Turks – into my notebook as he spoke.

It does not give a correct impression of the richness of his speech, since every Russian swearword can be twisted by the language's complex grammar into many different forms. But, even nannied into the
dull handful of English swear words, I think the obsceneness of his speech comes across rather well.

‘My bitches used to ask me where my money came from, because I never worked, but I'd tell them to fuck off. I'd give them money, I'd fuck them. They would go and work, that's how to treat a woman, not like these Turks, they are—' Here he used an obscenity so rude I had never heard it before, so I asked what it meant. He took a sip of tea from his glass, grinned, and gave a deliberately obscene explanation. ‘Well, that means they do not fuck women. They will have a couple of children, then they stop fucking, they just lick them in the cunt. Imagine. For a Chechen, this is a load of cock.'

All his conversation was like that, and his eyes kept twinkling at me like a deranged Father Christmas to see how I was taking it. I have edited the rest of the comments he made, to exclude the swearing, but you should imagine it as a constant undertone to his words when we meet him again in the next chapter. In English it would have none of the humour of the Russian language though, so I decided to leave it out.

Although Dedushka would never say it, it is hard not to interpret his furious reaction to the world as a response to the horrors of his infancy. Growing up reviled, poor and dishonoured, he rejected the rules of his own society and Soviet society, and became a brutal man. The Chechen nation was allowed home in stages in the late 1950s, but the stain of their treatment did not leave them. Deportation – the injustice, the memory of the dead, the ill-treatment – would condition everything over the next three decades.

On returning home, it was hard for the Chechens to regain their old houses, but they were at last left alone for a while. The three decades or so that followed Dedushka's return to Chechnya – the three decades that he spent in prison and thus missed out on almost in their entirety, as it happens – were the only period in the last two centuries when Chechens lived in relative peace.

Many Chechens were not allowed to resettle in the mountain areas which had been their homes before the deportation. They were instead given houses in the lowlands, where they could be more easily watched and their hands would be kept busy in factories or on collective farms. Similarly, the local Russian-speakers were careful not to
give the Chechens too many of the leading posts in government or industry.

Even Dedushka experienced this discrimination in his own unique way.

‘Our group of lads,' he started, referring to the criminal gang he was part of, ‘well, a lot of them did not know who I was or my nationality. They thought I was a Russian like them. And when you live among them, they tell you everything about how they think, and you will really find out how they hate non-Russians,' he said.

‘I learned a lot, and understood that the majority of them are hypocrites. They say one thing and do another. When they find out you are not Russian they speak nice things until you leave.'

But still, while the Soviet state became ever more corrupt and sclerotic as the 1970s wore on, the Chechens began to work their way into the unofficial economy, and as criminal gangs like Dedushka's became powerful even in Moscow, that reflected on the position of Chechens in their homeland.

An extraordinary cultural awakening started, as Chechens began to write, perform and create in their own language for the first time.

Those Chechens who survived the deportation had children, and they told their sons and daughters about their homeland – the mountains, the forests, the rich land – and about the injustice that had been committed. Many of these children sensed the unfairness of their life as well, and dedicated themselves to trying to reverse it.

Sultan Yashurkayev, for example, who will play a big part in this story, remembered a one-armed old man called Nazhmuddin in his village in Kazakhstan who used to write to Stalin every week to explain the terrible mistake that had been made. The old man was convinced that had Stalin but known what had happened to the Chechens, he would not have allowed it.

Yashurkayev, who was deported aged two and who was separated from his parents during the deportation, grew up almost alone, since his grandmother and aunt died, and his uncles were forced to abandon him for days at a time while they went to work. He learned to write specifically so he could tell Stalin about his nation's troubles like Nazhmuddin was doing.

‘If you were a Chechen, I could explain it to you in just a few words. There is the suffering and pain of the deportation of the Chechens, but it was not just those who were there that were deported but our children too, it has been passed on. I have written about this. The unborn were also deported, those who were born in 1980 or 1970,' he told me over an endless lunch one day in early 2009.

He was to grow up to write poems, but he was a little bit too old to take part in the true national movement. The awakening would belong to those who were too young to experience the raw horror of the Chechens' fate, but who heard at first hand the anger that it caused. These men – Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, born 1952, Apti Bisultanov, born 1953, Akhmed Zakayev, born 1959, and others – would go on to lead the national movement. First, they would lead it with their voices, then with their pens, and then with their guns.

‘The 1970s was like the beginning of the rebirth of national culture, mainly these were people who were born in Kazakhstan, or those who had just been born in Chechnya, and then were taken to Kazakhstan,' Zakayev recalled.

‘They were educated in Kazakhstan, and their education was on the highest level. Meanwhile, all the Chechens' conversations for thirteen years were just about Chechnya, there was this melancholy and nostalgia for the homeland. “When will they let us go home?”, “When will our problems be resolved?”, all was about this, “When will we return home?”, “When will we receive permission to go home?” Conversation, plans, everything was built around Chechnya, where we could not live. And this nostalgia for the fatherland assisted the surge in national culture – folklore, musical folklore, literature, prose, poetry.'

The young Chechens who were in their teens and early twenties in the 1970s felt increasingly able to express themselves, at first in private, and later in public, and thus to express the feelings of their people. They gathered in little cultural groups, which may sound like nothing much, but at the time these were brave attempts to push the boundaries of what was allowed.

‘I remember when I was a child, in the 1960s, or the start of the 1970s. Let's say, in the 1960s, when I was with my contemporaries, aged nine or ten, and we found ourselves in Grozny, it was a big deal
for us. But on public transport, if you spoke in Chechen you caused this wave of dissatisfaction among Russians. If you were a child, you'd definitely get a clip around the ear, and a reprimand. “Speak in a human language,” they'd say. So our language was not even considered a human language,' Zakayev told me.

As a young man who loved his own language, he decided to become an actor, since the theatre was one of the few places where Chechen was publicly spoken. He studied to become an actor from 1977, first in Grozny and then in the Russian town of Voronezh. The young poets meanwhile were gathering in a group they called Prometheus.

‘It is not that we were an elite, but we lived in our own world, all the cultural workers: writers, poets, actors, directors, dramatists. The theatre and this Prometheus group were interconnected and we knew each other. We held joint events, meetings that were official and non-official. We often met, just to discuss things that happened. We discussed questions about the deportation, the Caucasus war,' he said, with a sense of great excitement in what they had done, even three decades on.

This was still a time when dissidents were being locked up, or even put in psychiatric hospitals, so the risk they were taking was real.

‘These writers, they had problems with publication, they could not publish what they wanted or write the truth, but in the theatre we could already speak out. And we discussed these problems too. And this all created a new generation with a new mentality. I would not call them nationalists, but this was an elite fighting against assimilation, fighting to preserve our national identity.'

The shows that Zakayev's theatre in Grozny put on in the 1980s had titles like
Freedom or Death
or
There is Only One God
, and these were to become slogans of the nationalist movement that was to explode at the end of the decade. The generation that the literary movement was to create would stand on the barricades with them.

Although the number of people involved in these groups was small – just a handful really, compared to the mass of the nation – their influence would be disproportionately large. When Gorbachev relaxed the restrictions on behaviour in the late 1980s, these poets and
actors were young, energetic, motivated, handsome and organized. They seized control of the debate and pushed it in the direction they wanted it to go. And that is the direction that led to the Chechen National Congress of 1990, to the leadership of the renegade General Dzhokhar Dudayev with his spiv's moustache, and finally to confrontation with Russia.

Yashurkayev, who as a boy had learned his alphabet so he could write to Stalin, took part in the renaissance in a small way. He worked in the state prosecutor's office, then in the cultural bureaucracy, but he still wrote his poems and he knew and befriended the radical young men who were driving politics in the later 1980s. He was radical in his own way too, and worked for Zavgayev – the Chechen who became head of government in 1989 – as an adviser. But, when Zavgayev was overthrown, he refused to have anything more to do with government, and concentrated on raising calves and writing his poems in his house just outside Grozny.

That was where war found him when the Russian tanks pushed into Chechnya in 1994, and in him it would find its most compelling witness.

As the bombs fell, and the war surged around him, he wrote in a large notebook everything that he saw. He described the difficulties of feeding his cattle, and the nervousness of his dog Barsik. And passages of what he produced have the strength and power of the best war writing. Its very banality lifts it above attempts to intellectualize the fighting, and provides a bleak, funny and true tale.

‘Today, 4 January 1995, under the howl of planes, which bomb the city without a break, I suddenly sat down and started these writings. When civilian houses fly into the air, like grey dust and do not return to earth, this may well be interesting. A plane has dropped a bomb or a rocket somewhere nearby and sent fifteen splinters into the house. All four windows on the side of the street are broken. One splinter broke the wall near the ceiling and knocked down the book shelf, the one that had books from the “Life in Art” series on,' he wrote.