Early in Putin’s War, Moscow had again turned to Issa. The Russians made him an aide to Koshman, with the promise of his old job back at Grozneft. By then he had made the rebels’ blacklist, an honor bestowed on him by Movladi Udugov, Dudayev’s onetime minister of ideology who had long since gone underground and now ran Basayev’s and Khattab’s multilingual Web site, Kavkaz.org. The rebels, Issa explained, had sentenced their enemies to death under Shari’a. With pride he proffered the list of names. Yeltsin topped it, but there, just a few lines below Putin, was Issa. He had few socially acceptable things to say about Udugov, Basayev, and Khattab. However, after six months of Putin’s War, and hopeless attempts to work with his generals – Vladimir Shamanov, Ivan Babichev, Viktor Kazantsev, and Gennadi Troshev – he had even fewer nice things to say about the Russians.
Early one morning before the heat of the sun started to fill the apartment, we rose and, without tea, climbed into the UAZik. We drove slowly through Gudermes on its rutted roads. Scattering stray dogs, we creaked past the half-guarded officers’ headquarters, beside the string of forlorn stalls that now pretended to be the local bazaar, and through the first checkpoints of the morning. We left town and headed west, following the old asphalt through brown fields, until at the eastern edge of Grozny, we came to Khankala, the Russian military headquarters in Chechnya. Journalists who had covered the war in Vietnam said Khankala reminded them of Da Nang. The base seemed like a small town. Everywhere tents and helicopters stretched as far as you could see.
We continued on, coming again to the ruins of Minutka Square, then on into the center of Grozny. The streets were as empty as before. In the concrete remains nothing stirred. Not cats, not dogs. Every so often, among the burned shells of the apartment houses, flecks of color flashed. Clothes dried on a line strung between two walls that a shell had opened to the street. The city’s water supply was tainted with disease. There was no plumbing and no electricity, no shops and no transport, but someone did, after all, live here. Chechens, men, women, and their children, were coming home.
At a barren corner, near where the old Presidential Palace once stood, young girls sold candy, gum, and glass jars filled with home-distilled kerosene. They stood by their wares but didn’t smile or wave. They had no customers. The only people moving among them were soldiers. They did not walk. They traveled on top of their tanks, trucks, and APCs. Only at the checkpoints did the soldiers, bare-chested in the hot sun, stand.
Issa hated taking lip from young Russians with Kalashnikovs. But they were becoming harder to avoid. “You take the same route twice in one day,” he said. “If there’s no checkpoint the first time, it’s there the next time you go by.” Amid the ruins the checkpoints often marked what had once been city blocks. The Russians stopped each car, scoured the occupants’ papers and searched the trunk. They feared the suicide bombers who had taken to blowing up their checkpoints and barracks with regularity. The tactic of turning your body into a bomb may have come from the Middle East, but the Chechens made a significant advancement in the technique. Long before Palestinian women and girls joined the bombers’ ranks, Chechen women had done so. Issa was never happy at the checkpoints. But the worst, he would later say, had been the last one we’d negotiated that morning, the final checkpoint before Aldy.
OFFICIALLY IT IS A district of Grozny, but to its residents Aldy is a village. Once it had its own bakery, clinic, library, and bazaar, where the locals sold vegetables. In those days, at School No. 39, nearly a thousand children studied each day. That was all before the first war in Chechnya, back when nearly ten thousand people lived in Aldy. The village lies in the Zavodskoi (factory) district of Grozny. Whoever worked back then, hardly the majority, worked at the plants across the way, producing petroleum and chemicals, cement and bricks. Now, under banners of black clouds, the factories nearly blended into the surrounding ruins. Some stood out. They were still burning.
Aldy sits above a dam, across from Grozny’s largest reservoir. The village comprises a broad rectangle of a dozen streets lined with squat single-story houses, each with its own sheltered courtyard. In the middle of thick greenery, the branches of old trees – apricot, pear, cherry, peach, apple, walnut – twist above the low roofs. Bound together by fences of metal and wood taller than a man, the yards appear linked in a line against the world outside.
Inside, on the other side of the fences, the survivors of the massacre were still numb. Bislan Ismailov, a soft-spoken Chechen in his forty-second year, spoke in a detached monotone. His eyes were fixed on me, but his mind was not here. He was there. For him, February 5, 2000, was not fixed in time. When he spoke of it, he switched tenses without cause. Bislan had not left Aldy. He had been here throughout. Once he’d worked at the fuel plant across the way. Back in the days of Brezhnevian slumber he’d become an engineer. But throughout Russia’s second war in Chechnya, he had collected, washed, and helped bury the dead.
“For months that’s all I did,” he said. “Whoever they bring in, we bury them. Eight, ten, twelve people a day. They brought in fighters and left them. Have to bury them? Have to. They bring them in beat-up, shot-up cars from the center of town … and we buried them, right here by our house, in the yard of the clinic. Right here, sixty-three people – all before February.”
Bislan was thin but not frail. He had dark almond-shaped eyes and long black lashes. His thin black mustache was neatly trimmed. His appearance was impeccable. In fact he struck me, given the words that poured from his mouth, as inordinately clean.
In the last days of January 2000, a few weeks after the New Year’s Day when the Western world breathed with relief at having survived the millennial turn without catastrophe and Putin, in his first hours as acting president, flew to Chechnya to award hunting knives to the troops and tell them their task was to keep the Russian Federation intact, the Chechen fighters had abandoned Grozny. In Aldy, life by then had taken on a strange, brutal routine as it had in nearly every other corner of the city. The nights were filled with shelling, and the mornings brought only more of the encroaching thunder.
“They fired everything they could,” Bislan said. “Bombs, missiles, grenades. They shot from all sides. There were times when we could not collect the dead. We would bury them days later.”
On the morning of February 3 nearly a hundred of the men in Aldy decided to take action. They left their homes and cellars and walked to the neighboring district of Grozny, District 20. They carried torn bits of white sheets as flags and went in search of the commander of the Russian troops, the ones closest to Aldy. They wanted to plead with him to stop the shelling, to assure him they were sheltering no fighters. As the group crossed the field of frozen mud where the Russians had dug their positions, shots were fired. One of the villagers fell to the ground. His name was Nikolai. He happened to be an ethnic Russian.
Until then the villagers had not seen a single Russian soldier during the second war, but in the middle of the afternoon on February 4 the first troops arrived. They were not friendly, but they were “businesslike.” The first group of soldiers came to warn them. They were srochniki, conscripts, drafted into the war. They were young, the villagers recalled, almost polite. “So young the beards were barely on their cheeks,” said Bislan. They wore dirty uniforms, and their faces were covered with mud. They were exhausted. They went house to house, telling the men and women of Aldy to get prepared. “Get out of your cellars,” they said. “Don’t hide and don’t go out in the street. Get your passports ready,” they said. For the next soldiers to check. “Because we’re not the bad guys,” they said. “The bad guys come after us.”
On the next morning, the morning