Politkovskaya about Chechens. Life at war. Ordinary. Chechen

Anna Politkovskaya Second Chechen

Anna Politkovskaya

Who am I? And why am I writing about the second Chechen war? I am a journalist. I work as a special correspondent for the capital's Novaya Gazeta, and this is the only reason why I saw the war - I was sent to cover it. But not because I am a war correspondent and know this subject well. On the contrary: because a purely civilian person. The editor-in-chief's idea was simple: it is for me, a purely civilian person, to understand the experiences of other purely civilian people - residents of Chechen villages and cities, on whose heads the war has fallen. That's all. Therefore, I go to Chechnya every month, starting in July 1999 (since the events of the so-called "Basayev's raid on Dagestan", which provoked flows of refugees from mountain villages and the entire subsequent second Chechen one). Naturally, it proceeded all over Chechnya far and wide. I saw a lot of grief. The main one of which is that many of my heroes, whom I wrote about during these two and a half years, are now dead. Such terrible war happened ... Medieval. For nothing that at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries and in Europe.

“... Nature breathed conciliatory beauty and strength.

Is it really crowded for people to live in this beautiful world, under this immeasurable starry sky? Can a feeling of malice, vengeance, and the passion for the extermination of one's own kind be retained in the soul of man in the midst of this charming nature? Everything unkind in the heart of a person should, it seems, disappear in contact with nature - this most direct expression of beauty and goodness.

War? What an incomprehensible phenomenon! When reason asks itself the question: is it fair, is it necessary? – the inner voice always answers: no. The mere constancy of this unnatural phenomenon makes it natural, and the sense of self-preservation makes it just.

Who will doubt that in the war between the Russians and the highlanders, justice, arising from a sense of self-preservation, is on our side? If this war had not taken place, what would have provided all the adjacent rich and enlightened Russian possessions from robberies, murders and raids of wild and warlike peoples? But let's take two individuals.

Whose side is the sense of self-preservation and, therefore, justice: on the side of that ragamuffin, some Jamie, who, having heard about the approach of the Russians, with a curse will remove an old rifle from the wall and with three or four charges in refills, which he will fire not for nothing , will run towards the giaours and, seeing that the Russians are still moving forward, move towards his sown field, which they will trample, towards his sakla, which they will burn, and towards that ravine in which, trembling with fright, his mother and wife hid and the children, he will think that everything that can only make up his happiness will be taken from him - in impotent rage, with a cry of despair, he will tear off his tattered zipunishka, throw the rifle on the ground and, pulling his hat over his eyes, will sing a dying song and with with one dagger in his hands he will rush headlong at the bayonets of the Russians?

Is justice on his side, or on the side of that officer in the retinue of the general who sings French songs so well just as he passes us? He has a family in Russia, relatives, friends, peasants and duties towards them, has no reason and desire to be at enmity with the highlanders, but came to the Caucasus ... so as to show his courage. Or on the side of my acquaintance adjutant, who only wants to get the rank of captain and a warm place as soon as possible, and on this occasion has become an enemy of the highlanders?

"Raid. Volunteer story. It was written exactly 150 years ago, in 1852, by a 24-year-old Russian military officer, Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy

Foreword

Who am I? And why am I writing about the second Chechen war?

I am a journalist. I work as a special correspondent for the capital's Novaya Gazeta, and this is the only reason why I saw the war - I was sent to cover it. But not because I am a war correspondent and know this subject well. On the contrary: because a purely civilian person. The editor-in-chief's idea was simple: it is for me, a purely civilian person, that the experiences of other purely civilian people, residents of Chechen villages and cities, on whose heads the war has fallen, are much more understandable.

That's all.

Therefore, I go to Chechnya every month, starting in July 1999 (since the events of the so-called "Basayev's raid on Dagestan", which provoked flows of refugees from mountain villages and the entire subsequent second Chechen one). Naturally, it proceeded all over Chechnya far and wide. I saw a lot of grief. The main one of which is that many of my heroes, whom I wrote about during these two and a half years, are now dead. Such a terrible war happened ...

Medieval.

For nothing that at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries and in Europe.

London. May 2002. Meeting

Summer Eve 2002, 33rd Month Two Chechen war. Hopelessness and impenetrability - in everything that concerns its finale. "Cleansings" do not stop and are similar to mass auto-da-fé. Torture is the norm. Extrajudicial executions are a routine. Looting is commonplace. The kidnapping of people by the forces of federal military personnel for the purpose of subsequent work (alive) and corpse (dead) trade is a trivial Chechen life.

Ritual a 1a "37th year" - no traces of nightly disappearances of "human material".

In the mornings - shredded, mutilated bodies on the outskirts, planted at curfew.

And for the hundredth, thousandth damned time, I hear how children habitually discuss on the village streets which of the fellow villagers and in what form they found ... Today ... Yesterday ... With cut off ears, with a scalp removed, with severed fingers ...

Are there no fingers on your hands? one teenager asks casually.

“No, Alaudin has it on his feet,” the other answers apathetically.

State terrorism opposed to non-state. Wahhabi gangs raiding villages and demanding "money for jihad" ... Complete moral decay of almost 100,000 army and police contingent "walking" in Chechnya. And the answer that was to be expected was the reproduction of terrorism and the recruitment of new resistance fighters.

Who is guilty? How to figure it out? And understand everything and everyone?

How do the principals feel? characters second Chechen war? President Maskhadov? Chosen by the people and therefore assumed responsibility

for his fate?... Maskhadov is in the mountains... Virtual for his people and, as a rule, keeping silent on any occasion... Maskhadov's followers? They fled around the world ... Basayev? Gelaev? Khattab?…

And Putin? He is in the Kremlin, accepting the honors of the world community as an active member of the international VIP-“anti-terrorist group”, in the sense of the “coalition of the war against terror” ... May 2002. Bush is in Moscow... Fraternization... "Historic visit"... Almost not a word about Chechnya, as if there is no war...

The flashing of world capitals before my eyes in search of support - in the spring I visited Amsterdam, Paris, Geneva, Manila, Bonn, Hamburg ... Everywhere they call "to speak about the situation in Chechnya" - and ... zero result. Only polite “Western” applause in response to the words: “Remember, people continue to die in Chechnya every day. Today too".

An obvious, albeit incredible, global betrayal of universal human values. It is already quite clear that the Declaration of Human Rights, having lasted a little more than half a century, fell in the second Chechen war ...

From Geneva, from sluggish meetings of "official human rights activists" (UN Commission on Human Rights) - on a business trip to Urus-Martan, the Chechen regional center. There is bloody stagnation: like a year ago, everything is unchanged. "Death squadrons" - federal special forces of unclear departmental affiliation, whose task is to destroy the "enemies of Russia" - are being driven back and forth around the district. All those who fought for Dudayev and Maskhadov, who sympathize with them and just happened to turn up under the arm...

May 2002 - a dull aftertaste of a dead end.

… Finally, England. Respectable hotel on an expensive street. A dignified elderly aristocratic porter in a proud burgundy livery. A gray-haired man with fixed eyes slowly rises towards him. He is wearing a baggy, light gray suit that only accentuates his tragic weariness. Relaxed shoulders dropped. The man is a Chechen, originally from Urus-Martan, where he has not been for two years. Could not be there - such a war turned out. A person looks around too often - like a homeless person. He is uncomfortable in life, despite the porter, a rich hotel and cosmopolitan England around. I'm looking for old features. The world knows the “gray-haired” in a completely different way - from photographs that have bypassed all screens, pages and agencies. Brave, zealous and passionate, in a khaki kerchief tied back, always next to Maskhadov ... The man is a legend - Akhmed Zakayev. Brigadier general of the forces of the Chechen Resistance, an associate of Dudayev and Maskhadov, an active participant in the Khasavyurt peace process at the end of the first Chechen war, brigade commander special purpose of the second Chechen war, wounded in March 2000, taken from the battlefield through the mountains to another country and never returned to Chechnya. Today Zakayev is Aslan Maskhadov's special representative abroad. Our meeting was postponed several times - from country to country. According to the laws of conspiracy, Zakayev was “submitted” by Russia to Interpol. And lives under a different name.

“I brought you presents,” he says after “hello” and shows a book and a video cassette.

- Thanks.

But Zakayev leaves me with his hand outstretched in space. He slowly turns the book upside down and shakes it vigorously.

“Look, there’s nothing,” he says casually, like it’s supposed to be. - No white powder. Do not be afraid.

I'm not afraid, but I understand that I still watch his hands - we are both very spoiled last war. Even though England is behind us, we behave like in Russia, where they are very afraid of the Chechens and Chechen terrorism, and the Chechens, in response, try to immediately dot the "i" - before they are asked about it. That is why Zakayev is shaking the book.

And he doesn't rest on it. From his trouser pocket, he pulls out a key fob and rips open a sealed video cassette.

- Nothing here either.

- Ahmed, well, why is it like that ...

He speaks without a smile...

Who am I? And why am I writing about the second Chechen war?

I am a journalist. I work as a special correspondent for the capital's Novaya Gazeta, and this is the only reason why I saw the war - I was sent to cover it. That is why I have been going to Chechnya every month since July 1999. Naturally, the whole of Chechnya came along and across ... People often ask the same thing: `Why are you writing all this? Why are you scaring us? Why do we need this?` I'm sure it should be so. For one simple reason; we are contemporaries of this war, and we still have to answer for it. And then you can’t answer with the classic Soviet ones: they say, he wasn’t, he wasn’t a member, he didn’t participate ...

So you know.

And you will be free from cynicism. And from racism, into the viscous whirlpool of which our society is increasingly slipping. And from hasty and terrible personal decisions about who is who in the Caucasus, and whether there are heroes there at all today ...

Anna Politkovskaya

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Anna Politkovskaya

Second Chechen

“... Nature breathed conciliatory beauty and strength.

Is it possible for people to live closely in this beautiful world, under this immeasurable starry sky? Can a feeling of malice, vengeance, and the passion for the extermination of one's own kind be retained in the soul of man in the midst of this charming nature? Everything unkind in the heart of a person should, it seems, disappear in contact with nature - this most direct expression of beauty and goodness.

War? What an incomprehensible phenomenon! When reason asks itself the question: is it fair, is it necessary? – the inner voice always answers: no. The mere constancy of this unnatural phenomenon makes it natural, and the sense of self-preservation makes it just.

Who will doubt that in the war between the Russians and the highlanders, justice, arising from a sense of self-preservation, is on our side? If this war had not taken place, what would have provided all the adjacent rich and enlightened Russian possessions from robberies, murders and raids of wild and warlike peoples? But let's take two individuals.

Whose side is the sense of self-preservation and, therefore, justice: on the side of that ragamuffin, some Jamie, who, having heard about the approach of the Russians, with a curse will remove an old rifle from the wall and with three or four charges in refills, which he will fire not for nothing , will run towards the giaours and, seeing that the Russians are still moving forward, move towards his sown field, which they will trample, towards his sakla, which they will burn, and towards that ravine in which, trembling with fright, his mother and wife hid and the children, he will think that everything that can only make up his happiness will be taken from him - in impotent rage, with a cry of despair, he will tear off his tattered zipunishka, throw the rifle on the ground and, pulling his hat over his eyes, will sing a dying song and with with one dagger in his hands he will rush headlong at the bayonets of the Russians?

Is justice on his side, or on the side of that officer in the retinue of the general who sings French songs so well just as he passes us? He has a family in Russia, relatives, friends, peasants and duties towards them, has no reason and desire to be at enmity with the highlanders, but came to the Caucasus ... so as to show his courage. Or on the side of my acquaintance adjutant, who only wants to get the rank of captain and a warm place as soon as possible, and on this occasion has become an enemy of the highlanders?

"Raid. Volunteer story. It was written exactly 150 years ago, in 1852, by a 24-year-old Russian military officer, Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy

Foreword

Who am I? And why am I writing about the second Chechen war?

I am a journalist. I work as a special correspondent for the capital's Novaya Gazeta, and this is the only reason why I saw the war, – I was sent to cover it. But not because I am a war correspondent and know this subject well. On the contrary: because a purely civilian person. The editor-in-chief's idea was simple: it is for me, a purely civilian person, that the experiences of other purely civilian people, residents of Chechen villages and cities, on whose heads the war has fallen, are much more understandable.

That's all.

Medieval.

For nothing that at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries and in Europe.

London. May 2002. Meeting

The eve of the summer of 2002, the 33rd month of the second Chechen war. Hopelessness and impenetrability - in everything that concerns its finale. "Cleansings" do not stop and are similar to mass auto-da-fé. Torture is the norm. Extrajudicial executions are a routine. Looting is commonplace. The kidnapping of people by the forces of federal military personnel for the purpose of subsequent work (alive) and corpse (dead) trade is a trivial Chechen life.

Ritual a 1a "37th year" - no traces of nightly disappearances of "human material".

In the mornings - shredded, mutilated bodies on the outskirts, planted at curfew.

Are there no fingers on your hands? one teenager asks casually.

“No, Alaudin has it on his feet,” the other answers apathetically.

Who is guilty? How to figure it out? And understand everything and everyone?

How do the main actors of the second Chechen war feel? President Maskhadov? Chosen by the people and therefore assumed responsibility

The flashing of world capitals before my eyes in search of support - in the spring I visited Amsterdam, Paris, Geneva, Manila, Bonn, Hamburg ... Everywhere they call "to speak about the situation in Chechnya" - and ... zero result. Only polite "Western" applause in response to the words: "Remember, in Chechnya everyday people keep dying. Today too".

May 2002 - a dull aftertaste of a dead end.

* * *

… Finally, England. Respectable hotel on an expensive street. A dignified elderly aristocratic porter in a proud burgundy livery. A gray-haired man with fixed eyes slowly rises towards him. He is wearing a baggy, light gray suit that only accentuates his tragic weariness. Relaxed shoulders dropped. The man is a Chechen, originally from Urus-Martan, where he has not been for two years. Could not be there - such a war turned out. A person looks around too often - like a homeless person. He is uncomfortable in life, despite the porter, a rich hotel and cosmopolitan England around. I'm looking for old features. The world knows the “gray-haired” in a completely different way - from photographs that have bypassed all screens, pages and agencies. Brave, zealous and passionate, in a khaki kerchief tied back, always next to Maskhadov ... The man is a legend - Akhmed Zakayev. Brigadier General of the Chechen Resistance Forces, an associate of Dudayev and Maskhadov, an active participant in the Khasavyurt peace process at the end of the first Chechen war, commander of a special forces brigade of the second Chechen war, wounded in March 2000, taken from the battlefield through the mountains to another country and more to Chechnya not returned. Today Zakayev is Aslan Maskhadov's special representative abroad. Our meeting was postponed several times - from country to country. According to the laws of conspiracy, Zakayev was “submitted” by Russia to Interpol. And lives under a different name.

“I brought you presents,” he says after “hello” and shows a book and a video cassette.

- Thanks.

But Zakayev leaves me with his hand outstretched in space. He slowly turns the book upside down and shakes it vigorously.

“Look, there’s nothing,” he says casually, like it’s supposed to be. - No white powder. Do not be afraid.

I'm not afraid, but I understand that I'm still watching his hands - we are both badly damaged by the last war. Even though England is behind us, we behave like in Russia, where they are very afraid of the Chechens and Chechen terrorism, and the Chechens, in response, try to immediately dot the "i" - before they are asked about it. That is why Zakayev is shaking the book.

And he doesn't rest on it. From his trouser pocket, he pulls out a key fob and rips open a sealed video cassette.

- Nothing here either.

- Ahmed, well, why is it like that ...

He speaks without a smile and without malice. There is a pause.

– When were you in Urus-Martan? asks Zakaev, and through the half-closed eyelids of a man driven into a corner, accustomed to constantly watching to see if he is being watched, that wetness glistens that precedes tears. This is not an interview yet - we're just talking words

you. Urus-Martan is Zakayev's native village, the most expensive, according to Chechen tradition, land for him.

- Me? ... Ten days ago. In the end of April.

Zakayev's eyes are still empty, but a tear flows out of them. Something needs to be said...

- They showed me the street where your house is ...

- You know, destroyed ...

- Not to the end ... - Zakayev leaves himself a chance. Although we both know that it is destroyed - to the foundation.

- Oh sure. Not to the end.

It's time to start the interview. About the war that is behind us.

Interview - the length of the war. Or maybe in life. Certainly - the length of our destiny.

It is not easy to understand what we are talking about, given the massive pro-war and anti-Chechen brainwashing organized in our state.

You can understand only in one case: when you know what happened in the war and around the war ...

Part one

Life at war. Ordinary. Chechen

Makka Dzhabrailova, a resident of the village of Makhkety in the Vedensky district of Chechnya, says: “As Putin said on TV:“ Wet in the toilet!– so the next morning they fired at my toilet in the garden. Now we have a secret, underground toilet.” What does 14-year-old son Mackey think of the president of his country?

How good it is to be deaf

The war began trivially: with the bombing of villages and cities. So, the war began with the flows of refugees. Thousands of people, picking up children and old people, rushed wherever they look, away ... They walked everywhere and from everywhere, a many-kilometer "tail" lined up along the main highway of Chechnya, the so-called "Rostov-Baku federal highway." But the “tail” was also bombed.

September 1999 We lie on the withered autumn grass. More precisely, we want to lie on it - but the majority gets only the dusty Chechen land. This is because there are too many of us - hundreds, and there is not enough good for everyone.

We are the people who were bombed. We were not guilty of anything, we just walked towards Ingushetia along the former highway, now plowed up and riddled with armored vehicles.

Grozny is behind us. We, huddled together in a herd, flee from war and fighting. And when the moment comes and you have to plop your nose into the ground, assuming an intrauterine pose, trying to put your head, knees and even elbows under you, this is where such false and sticky loneliness creeps in, and you start to think: why are you shrinking? what exactly are you saving? this life of yours, no longer needed by anyone but you? ...

Why false? Because you know very well that all this is not true: the house is full of relatives, and they are waiting for you, and praying for you. And sticky, because physically sweaty. When you really want to live, too much sweat comes out. Although some are lucky: when they feel death is nearby, only the hair on their heads rises like a wire ...

And yet - loneliness ... Where, where, but on the deathbed you will not find comrades. As soon as diving helicopters hover above your curled back, the earth becomes like a resting bed. Here they are - helicopters. Another entry. They descended so close that the hands and faces of the machine gunners were visible. Some assure, even the eyes. But this is an exaggeration out of fear. The main thing is their legs, carelessly lowered into open hatches. As if they did not fly in to kill, but decided to chill them, overworked, in a cool air stream. The legs are big and scary, the soles poke almost into us. The muzzle is clamped between the thighs. Scary, but everyone wants to see who your killer is. They seem to be laughing at us, at the way we crawl hilariously downstairs - overweight old aunts, young girls, children. We even hear this laughter, although this is again a lie - it's too noisy around. Automatic bursts whistle the air around our bodies, and in time with these whistles, someone is sure to start howling. Killed? Wounded?...

-Do not move. And don't raise your head. My advice,” the man next to him says. As he was, he fell to the ground in a black suit, a white shirt and a black tie.

The neighbor falls into verbosity. And thanks to him: now it is better to talk than to be silent.

The man named Vakha is a land surveyor official from Achkhoy-Martan, a large village near Ingushetia. In warring Chechnya, everyone is afraid of everything, and this morning Vakha left the house, as usual, in a suit, with a folder, so as not to attract attention - supposedly to work. In fact, he decided to run away.

“Every time,” Vakha mutters, because it’s impossible not to mutter, because our lips are pressed to the ground, “every time helicopters fly in, I pick up a folder, take out paper and pretend to write down. I think this helps a lot.

People lying nearby begin to laugh softly.

How can paper help? What are you saying? - lispingly, spitting out dust, whispers loudly a tiny, thin uncle, located on the left.

“Pilots see that I am working, that I am not a terrorist,” retorts the surveyor.

What if they think otherwise? What are you writing down their tail numbers? - the female body in front responds and very carefully slightly changes its position. - It's numb ... When will it end?

-If they think, then the end, - who says it, is not visible. He's behind. And good: the speech is harsh and sharp, like an ax, without any regret.

-It's okay for you. You are for your own, - the old man's voice cuts off the "hard" one. And he turns to Vakha: - Show me your folder, please. I will tell others.

The bodies, silent at the "hard", again clutch at straws - a piece of suddenly given fun, for someone and the last.

-Show-show...

-Let's get it all...

- Russian folders will not be left ...

-Putin will think that all Chechens go to war with folders? And they should with machine guns ...

- And then he will give out folders to the feds. There will be all Chechnya with folders ...

- Waha, dear, what color do you need a folder?

But the helicopters won't stop, writing out turn after turn, and children's crying tears apart the earth strewn with people, and machine-gun bursts - well, at least for a minute they shut up! - and the explosions of falling mines croak non-stop, bringing a touch of vulgarity to our deathbed experience. This was just not enough!

And yet people joke.

“The will of Allah,” Vakha humbly fights back from the audience. - But! Say what you want, but with this folder I was never even hurt. Not the first war, not this one. Always helped.

“So you are in the first place?… With a folder?…” someone rolls with laughter – ragged and therefore overly nervous. "Then why are you lying now?" Hey guy! I would get up!

Vakha is tired:

- So after all, everyone lies. So, am I going to stand alone? And turn into a target?

– But with the folder… already the same old man who interrupted the “hard” more, by the way, who didn’t utter a word. An old man is laughing somewhere behind us. If at all one can call laughter the movement of the body, caught by our ears, in time with the hoarse spitting of air into the ground. - Eh-ha-ha, boy! You do not know your happiness: “they” may think that you are counting us. And that means you are on their side.

Now Vakha is already silent - indeed, a bad setting for jokes, everything is good in moderation. And he begins to blow the dust off his soiled black sleeves - with his breath from somewhere under him. Because that's all he can do in the fetal position we've been forced to choose.

Vakha and his miracle folder will die a day later, blown up by a mine one and a half kilometers from the place where we are now lying. Vakha will step into the untidy, unharvested field of that first military autumn, a few meters away from the road. And the mines were already visible everywhere, and everyone without exception, including the military and militants, wandered around Chechnya without maps of minefields ... Russian roulette.

Vakha will step aside not out of necessity, but just like that, exhausted in anticipation: the queue to the checkpoint, to passport control was too long, and almost all of them consisted of “relatives” - those with whom they were preparing to die the day before, lying on another field, - of us funny ones.

And the deceased Vakha will again lie on the field, but now fearlessly - upside down with a wounded face and spread his arms as wide as it does not happen in life. Left - ten meters to the left from the black jacket torn to shreds. Right - closer, five steps. And with Waha's legs, in general, trouble will turn out: they will probably disappear, becoming dust during the explosion and flying away with the wind. The same fate will befall the folder with white blank sheets of paper. Which save from helicopters, but from mines, it turned out - no.

Then two soldiers from the checkpoint, where there was a long queue, cautiously approached Vakha. One is tiny and young, like a fifteen-year-old, in an oversized helmet and boots of someone else's number. The second one is older and more dignified, okay, hands in spotted trousers. First quiet

she will cry, smearing mud on her face and turning away, unable to look. The second one will give him a cuff on the back of the head, and he will immediately shut up, like an alarm clock that was hit from above to let him sleep in the morning. Chechens from the queue will buy from the lieutenant of these soldiers a large black plastic bag, an “emergency reserve” in case of “cargo 200”, collect Vakhina’s leftovers and decide for a long time where to take them. To mother, wife and children - to a camp in Ingushetia? Or to Achkhoy-Martan - to an empty house? Reason will win: in Achkhoy, of course. Bury all the same there, in the family cemetery. So why spend money, trudge to Ingushetia? Entry there will result in considerable bribes ... At the checkpoint "Kavkaz", on the border of this war and the rest of the world, you will have to pay twice - there and back, and for the corpses two or three times more, according to the mood of the "senior".

... But while Vakha has a whole day, he is alive and well. And we, continuing to lie on the field near Gekhi, not only hope to successfully get out from under the helicopters, but also have a little faith in our soon happy future - after all, the very beginning of the war, the first days of October 99, and it seems to us that the battles are coming not so long, and the refugees will soon return home, and we will only endure this day, and then everything will work out by itself.

And Vakha, having grown bolder at some point - after all, when the danger is too long, everything becomes dull and annoying - and so, spitting on helicopters, Vakha suddenly turns over on his side. And so normally, like a human being, without earth in his mouth, he begins to talk about his family. About six children who a week ago left Achkhoy for Ingushetia together with his mother, wife and two unmarried sisters. This is where it gets to them.

Gekhi is being bombed on the sidelines. Enthusiastically, passionately, like, probably, Koenigsberg in the Second World War. And Waha rolls up again.

“The refugees from Grozny have accumulated there - horror ...” he says, straying from the family theme, captured by the rhythm of this growing irrational bombing of his own against his own. “Thousands of refugees, probably. During the previous bombing, last week, the hospital was destroyed, the wounded and sick were taken away... Where are the new wounded going to go now?

The women howl softly, yelling at the children so they don't howl - as if children are not the same people as they are. The squelching sounds made by the weapons of destruction surround us from all sides, giving no respite to the brain. And although only half an hour has passed since the beginning of the helicopter attack, they have long seemed like half a day, containing memories of most of your life. People are gradually losing their temper, cries of madness are heard, men are crying. But not all. Among us are teenagers, 13-14 years old. They are excitedly and joyfully discussing what kind of weapon is being used at the moment. And they demonstrate thorough knowledge of the issue - how else? Their whole conscious life was spent in the study of the modern weapons dictionary: the war in Chechnya is almost ten years old.

Between teenagers and us, a small boy, probably six years old, quietly crawls. He is thin and sad. The boy does not cry, does not scream, does not grab his mother, he looks around thoughtfully and says: “How good it is to be deaf ...” With intonations simple, calm and even everyday. As if it were: “How good it is to play ball…”

This is where the “Grad” catches up with us all - the worst thing is that in this war they rape a person’s hearing and life. "Grad" - jet "Katyusha" of the late twentieth century. The “hail” salvo whistles for a long time, hisses and spins. However, if you already hear it, it means that it is past, and although death walked close, it has now chosen another. And you laugh... "Grad" turns you into an inhuman creature that has learned to rejoice in someone else's grief.

The boy draws the line, comfortably, despite the circumstances, resting his head on a hummock of a grassy bush, as if on a pillow:

Deaf people don't hear any of this. And so they are not afraid.

Waha quietly pulls him towards her, hugs him and pulls a candy from the pocket of his black jacket.

-What is your name? Waha is crying softly.

“Sharpuddin,” the boy replies, watching in surprise the tears of an adult man.

“And it would be even better now, Sharpuddin, to become blind, dumb and stupid. Waha's eyes dried up under the boy's gaze. “But we are not. And we still have to survive.

The helicopters leave in five minutes. And the City is silent. Fly end. People begin to rise at once, dust themselves off and some praise Allah. The field is alive. Women run to look for cars for the wounded. The men carry the dead to one place.

... Night and day will pass, and the boy Sharpuddin, approaching the adult men, collecting Wahu in a black bag, will silently help them. They will hit him harshly, like a dog - for his own sake - but his mother will help. She will say that her son was the last child that Vakha caressed in his life. And then Sharpuddin will be admitted.

Camp "Chiri-Yurt"

Chiri-Yurt is a very large Chechen village, once, under Soviet power, industrial, with a large cement plant, many thousands of people who worked at this plant, cultural centers, hospitals, schools, libraries, developed infrastructure and a high percentage educated people. However, civilizations tend to die, and convenient for industrial development geographical position Chiri-Yurt, with the advent of the era of “strategic heights” and “command posts”, predetermined its tragedy during the second Chechen war: the plant is now completely destroyed, people have no jobs, the infrastructure is in total decline, all the educated have left aimlessly ... But the population of Chiri-Yurt increased several times. The thing is that Chiri-Yurt is located at the exit from Argun Gorge, or "Wolf's Gate" as the Feds call it. As far as the Argun Gorge and Chiri-Yurt, if you drive from Grozny, which is twenty-two kilometers away - a plain with oil refining and oil production, in control of which both the federals and the militants are interested. After Chiri-Yurt and Argun Gorge– the mountains of Nozhai-Yurtovsky, Vedensky and Shatoysky districts - the estates of the detachments of Basayev and Khattab. It was through these places that the detachments of Basayev and Khattab went to Dagestan in the summer of 1999, which, in fact, began the second Chechen war. They returned here, which is why people living here studied modern political literacy not from television news, but directly on their own skin.

Then, in 1999, people saw how a gigantic provocation and a monstrous betrayal were being carried out: the militants of Basayev and Khattab were returning from Dagestan to Chechnya, accompanied by federal aviation, and no one touched them, but when they hid in the mountain forests, they immediately began intense bombing of the villages through which they marched to their bases. As a result, Duba-Yurt, another village with many thousands of people not far from Chiri-Yurt, but deeper in the foothills, was 98 percent destroyed, and most of its inhabitants, having lost a roof over their heads, went to “our” Chiri-Yurt ... Here , on the patch between Chiri-Yurt and Duba-Yurt, it was no coincidence that events took place that became the source and root cause of many other tragic collisions that are fundamental for the rest of Russia. In February 2000, there were fierce battles for the very "Wolf Gate". On the federal side, among others, they were led tank regiment commanded by Yuri Budanov– considered one of the best units of the Russian Armed Forces. The same Budanov, a colonel with two Orders of Courage on his chest, whose story has become more than revealing, demonstrating the "new face of Russia" - Putin's pro-militarist and neo-Soviet Russia, where the end again justifies the means with might and main. Let me remind you: it was on the field between Chiri-Yurt and Duba-Yurt in February 2000 that Budanov lost several of his officers, including his best friend Major Razmakhnin. It was here that Budanov took an oath to himself at all costs to take revenge on those snipers who destroyed his comrades-in-arms. It was from here, at the end of February 2000, from the battles, that his regiment was relocated 80 kilometers deep into Chechnya, to the outskirts of the village of Tangi-Chu (now known to the whole world in connection with the problem of the so-called "war crimes of federal military personnel in Chechnya"), where On March 26, 2000, the night after Putin was elected president of Russia, the colonel got drunk and, deciding that the hour of reckoning for those battles at the Wolf Gate had come, kidnapped, raped and strangled an 18-year-old Chechen girl, Elsa Kungaeva, whom he considered the very the guilty "sniper" in everything, on the basis of which he was subsequently acquitted by both Russian public opinion and the Russian judicial-state machine, which admitted that since the colonel had committed a "socially motivated", therefore, "correct" murder.

However, I will return to Budanov later - it was a continuation of the war, which completely plowed our whole life ... In the meantime, let's return to Chiri-Yurt. In a hot, almost 50-degree painful summer at the end of the first year of the second Chechen war. In a crowd of people driven by Budanov's regiment from their homes and turned into outcasts. Disenfranchised, humiliated, hungry, dirty.

Hazimat

And so it happened: for the first time not in the cinema I saw a grandmother swollen from hunger, and now no one will erase this picture from my memory. This happened almost a year after the start of the war, in the very center of Chiri-Yurt, among an oversaturated mass of people, in former school No. 3, eight months ago, hastily, as the bombings approached, which stopped educational process and turned into one of the five refugee camps that now exist only in this locality.

Engraving, as you know, is written in one color. Khazimat Gambiyeva is like that: a dried-up static old refugee woman with swollen joints, with a swollen belly - she seems to be written out in black on parchment, without halftones. Black pattern of wrinkles on the skin of an unnatural tone. The covered nose is another line of blackness. Dark contours of sharpened cheekbones - too. Neck, as if under a rope ... Blockade of Leningrad in the Millennium. And again - in Europe, which is now much more concerned with magnificent celebrations in honor of the new century than with Chechnya - one of the European territories.

Khazimat is very sick. And in general, no old woman. Her youngest daughter is only 13 years old, and she herself is 51. The disease that turned Khazimat into a waking engraving is simply called dystrophy. Chronic hunger.

Everything that falls to the Gambiev family of 11, the selfless Khazimat, mother and grandmother, gives to children and grandchildren. Apples for four little grandchildren, because they developed tuberculosis from hunger and cold. Flour for cakes - for daughters-brides.

At first, when they just ran to Chiri-Yurt, the Gambievs had money: the girls took turns wearing their earrings to the market. For a while, the family also rested on the fact that the eldest son Khazimat sold a small TV - the only thing saved by the Gambievs from their burned-out house. But with the sale of the TV, the money ran out.

- I don't hope for anything. We survived the day, and glory to Allah, - Hazimat answers, holding right hand at the neck, as if helping to breathe. - No help anywhere. We are dying slowly in our pen. My eldest son is barely moving - there is nothing to eat. My youngest fainted from hunger yesterday. And the camp neighbors pretended not to understand why they fainted... Although they had bread and tea that day, I could smell it... People went wild.

By the end of the first year of the war, one of its main results can no longer be concealed. Under the raging pressure of such a desperate hunger and hopeless tuberculosis, the likes of which were not even last winter in the gigantic enclaves of Ingushetia, the Chechens are rapidly losing the spirit of their people. If even in winter the majority of refugees firmly and angrily threw in your face: “We and This we will survive from you! No matter how much you put pressure on us! Because we are together and we are strong.” Now, completely different texts are in use. Somewhere in the camp back street someone grabs your hand, and you hear a quiet and depressed: “We this we won't take it anymore. We are wolves. For each other too."

The spirit of the people did not survive the pogrom and humiliation inflicted on them. And that is why - in the camps, despite the summer, "blockade" -2000. Swollen from hunger.

Symptom "G-4"

In the backyard of the former Shali food processing plant (Shali district center - thirty kilometers from Chiri-Yurt), hundreds of people are fighting fiercely and frantically bonfire each other. They came here early in the morning in order to get three cans of condensed milk and one - stews.

"G-4" - this is the official name of humanitarian aid on behalf of the Russian government to victims of the "anti-terrorist operation."

Now they give "G-4", that is, the fourth number - which means that there were four such distributions during the year of the war. In each serving - "three days", a supply of food for three days at the rate of 15 rubles a day. "D-3" - the third hand, took place a couple of months ago. Exactly the same portions will be delivered in the coming days to the Chiri-Yurt refugees, the family of Khazimat Gambiyeva... To the screams from the Kremlin that "refugees are provided with the most necessary things"... And there is "of course no" a humanitarian catastrophe in connection with the "anti-terrorist operation in the North Caucasus" ... I am standing in the backyard of the Shali food processing plant among the starving crowd, rushing to the cherished containers, and I remember the sleek appearance of Sergei Yastrzhembsky, the presidential aide and the main herald of the absence of a "humanitarian catastrophe."

Anna Politkovskaya

Second Chechen

“... Nature breathed conciliatory beauty and strength.

Is it possible for people to live closely in this beautiful world, under this immeasurable starry sky? Can a feeling of malice, vengeance, and the passion for the extermination of one's own kind be retained in the soul of man in the midst of this charming nature? Everything unkind in the heart of a person should, it seems, disappear in contact with nature - this most direct expression of beauty and goodness.

"Raid. Volunteer story. It was written exactly 150 years ago, in 1852, by a 24-year-old Russian military officer, Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy

Foreword

Who am I? And why am I writing about the second Chechen war?

That's all.

Medieval.

For nothing that at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries and in Europe.

London. May 2002. Meeting

Ritual a 1a "37th year" - no traces of nightly disappearances of "human material".

In the mornings - shredded, mutilated bodies on the outskirts, planted at curfew.

Are there no fingers on your hands? one teenager asks casually.

“No, Alaudin has it on his feet,” the other answers apathetically.

Who is guilty? How to figure it out? And understand everything and everyone?

How do the main actors of the second Chechen war feel? President Maskhadov? Chosen by the people and therefore assumed responsibility

The flashing of world capitals before my eyes in search of support - in the spring I visited Amsterdam, Paris, Geneva, Manila, Bonn, Hamburg ... Everywhere they call "to speak about the situation in Chechnya" - and ... zero result. Only polite "Western" applause in response to the words: "Remember, in Chechnya everyday people keep dying. Today too".

May 2002 - a dull aftertaste of a dead end.

… Finally, England. Respectable hotel on an expensive street. A dignified elderly aristocratic porter in a proud burgundy livery. A gray-haired man with fixed eyes slowly rises towards him. He is wearing a baggy, light gray suit that only accentuates his tragic weariness. Relaxed shoulders dropped. The man is a Chechen, originally from Urus-Martan, where he has not been for two years. Could not be there - such a war turned out. A person looks around too often - like a homeless person. He is uncomfortable in life, despite the porter, a rich hotel and cosmopolitan England around. I'm looking for old features. The world knows the “gray-haired” in a completely different way - from photographs that have bypassed all screens, pages and agencies. Brave, zealous and passionate, in a khaki kerchief tied back, always next to Maskhadov ... The man is a legend - Akhmed Zakayev. Brigadier General of the Chechen Resistance Forces, an associate of Dudayev and Maskhadov, an active participant in the Khasavyurt peace process at the end of the first Chechen war, commander of a special forces brigade of the second Chechen war, wounded in March 2000, taken from the battlefield through the mountains to another country and more to Chechnya not returned. Today Zakayev is Aslan Maskhadov's special representative abroad. Our meeting was postponed several times - from country to country. According to the laws of conspiracy, Zakayev was “submitted” by Russia to Interpol. And lives under a different name.