Baba Zoya trying on my hat
The next day, Pasha came in several times to drink beers and talk and recite approximate Shakespeare or Deep Purple for us. He told us he was from Novosibirsk, was a welder, and had a son who’d been in prison for eight years. Once he came in to tell us he had met a Russian soldier just returning from the war in Chechnya, and we should come by and meet him.Chechnya is a small oil-rich republic in the south of Russia. It is situated in the Caucasus Mountains between the Black and Caspian Seas. The war going on there is too complicated to explain here, even if I did understand it all. But the short version is that some Chechen and Islamic fundamentalist rebels, many of whom are involved in lucrative illegal activities, want Chechnya to secede from the Federation, and Russia is trying to stop them. Unfortunately the civilians who want nothing to do with the rebels are suffering the most, and a minority of civilians have been provoked into fighting by the brutality of the Russian attacks. The war is ripping apart the republic and its ancient buildings and ruins, its archives and universities, hospitals, markets, schools, and people. Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, has been leveled, and routine ‘mopping up’ exercises by the Russian military, in a sad parallel to U.S. operations in Vietnam, commonly involve violently pillaging and looting villages ostensibly looking for rebels but often tormenting and killing civilians as well.
I have read in several sources that more than 85% of the civilian population of Chechnya has fled. Many live in destitution in refugee camps in neighboring Ingushetia. Some make it to Moscow where they live in fear of racist violence, arbitrary document checks, and deportation back to Chechnya. The Russian government refuses to grant passports to most Chechens who want to leave Russia, and some are sent back to Chechnya even though it is clear they will face the threat of Russian guns. Some go so far as to call it another genocide attempt on the Chechen people, which Stalin failed to complete when he deported the entire Chechen population to the gulag in Central Asia in the early 1940s.
We talked to a Chechen refugee back in Moscow, one of tens of thousands living there, who was a professor and the former main political opponent of the rebel leader. As he put it, “It’s a war between criminals.” If the rebels take over, Chechnya will probably close up and become a rogue state like Afghanistan, making the rebel leaders very rich and the general population worse off. The Kremlin also has economic and political interests in continuing to fight. The people at the top want theirs, and they are throwing human beings at each other very recklessly.
In Professor Jolluck’s class in Moscow, we talked with two women from the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia (CSMR). They told horrible stories about illegal drafting, hazing, starving, suicides, and killings in the Russian military during peacetime. The Russian government has been living beyond its means, trying to maintain an army that it cannot afford, and a result is that morale is seriously low among the ranks. (Putin is attempting to cut the number of men in uniform and spend more on training for those who remain, and we’ll see how that pans out in the next few years.) Conditions are even worse for conscripted teenage Russian boys without proper training and with little motivation, often illegally plucked from their studies, sent into the guerrilla war zone in Chechnya against seasoned and highly motivated rebel fighters.
We followed Pasha to his coupee where he introduced us to a soldier with a young, fresh face named Dmitry. He said he was 23, had been in Chechnya for five years, and was now going home to his family who live north of Tyumen. Rob translated as best he could, but Dmitry was often difficult to understand because he used unfamiliar slang and had a slight lisp. Liz got most of it on audiotape with his permission. It was emotional to watch him talk even when I couldn’t understand what he was saying.
I kept looking at his hands and thinking of the other boy the Committee of Mothers had told us about. He had been 18, sent off to battle as human ammunition, and put in a tank on enemy ground. He had been very frightened and was holding on tightly to the periscope handles when a Chechen rocket hit his tank. It hit with such impact that his body was thrown against the back wall of the tank and both his arms were torn off. He would have bled to death in a few minutes if his pants hadn’t also caught fire and he instinctively used the blood from his arms to put it out. That cauterized them enough to keep him alive until help came.
While he was recovering in the hospital, he told the doctors he wanted to kill himself. The doctors called the Committee of Mothers to help deal with him, and a woman came and talked to him. The women in the CSMR are not paid, and they are not government sponsored. Two women from the group told us the government hates and even fears them because they can’t control them with purse strings. Also, many Russian people and powerful international non-governmental organizations sympathize with them. All of the women work other jobs during the day, and many, including the ones we talked to, put almost all of their free time into the Committee. There’s no safety net, and some boys can’t get medical treatment because no one has the money for it. One woman said that after her first two months on the Committee she had to spend a month in therapy because of the things she had seen and the emotional stress she had been through. Another said the Committee had saved her son, and seeing him alive and healthy every day was more than enough pay.
The woman who came and talked to the boy eventually became like a second mother to him, and she brought his case to the attention of a magazine, which came to the attention of a Swiss company, which agreed to sponsor prosthetics for him. For a time he had to stay at a boarding house while he was recovering, and a Chechen boy who had lost a foot was also staying there. He couldn’t imagine how he could live with the other boy, the enemy, someone he had been taught to hate with every fiber of his being. But he had no choice. And within weeks the two boys were like brothers. It sounds like a story with a (relatively) happy ending. But if these women had not interfered, the boys still would have hated each other, and maybe both would have ended up killing themselves. This was a rare publicized case. No one steps in for the vast majority.
I kept looking at Dmitry’s hands, Dmitry sitting there talking and laughing with us and heading to his Siberian home where his family was waiting. I was thinking how lucky we both were, and how easily it could be my friend or brother in his place, and how easily he could be not sitting here warm and happy but lying somewhere dead and forgotten, never to cross my path. It saddened me to think how absurd a world is given to so many people. And I couldn’t put it away in the back of my mind or pretend it was far away, or it didn’t affect me, or it was a different kind of person who had to deal with these things. He was just a kid, sitting there chatting, heading home just like me.
Pasha finally broke the ice with some absurd and inappropriate comment, as usual. He kept referring to Dmitry as ‘Rambo’ for example, and kept telling me that I should marry him before he got away. We started playing a weird Russian card game where you use only 36 of the normal 52 cards in a deck. I still don’t understand it even though I played it several times. Dmitry and I exchanged glances now and then. I wished so much that I could really talk to him.
Too soon it was Dmitry’s stop in Tyumen, and all of his new friends got out with him to see him off. It was dark and snowy, but the lights at the station were harsh enough to see by. We took a few pictures, talked a little, played around, and said our good-byes. As Dmitry was about to leave, he took me aside and handed me a small silver aluminum tag with BC CCCP written across the top half and a six-digit number etched on the bottom. He said something in Russian that I didn’t understand, smiled a little, and waited for me to respond. I nodded and handed it back to him, but he motioned for me to keep it and said something else. Not knowing what to say, I held on to it and said in a slightly confused voice, “Spacibo” (thank you). He smiled, waved to the others one last time, and disappeared into the night.
I cursed myself for not knowing the language or culture well enough to understand all he had said in the coupee, to really talk to him, or to understand the significance of our brief exchange. Liz and Rob asked me what he had given me, and I showed them. We couldn’t decide if it was his dog tag or that of a fallen Chechen or comrade. I looked on the back and found a name faintly scratched onto it, and it turned out to be the same name he had written when he gave Pasha his address. So it was his tag, the token that would have been sent home to his parents or collected by the enemy as a prize if he had been killed. I am not sure why he gave it to me. I look at it sometimes and think about him and other young people living and dying in comparable situations and how similar we all are except for external factors like criminals and politicians.
The Rossiya, a pocket of sauna-like warmth, hurtled on through a cold, darkened Asia.
Day 3--Nikolai