Black Earth: A journey through Russia after the fall

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In the years that followed the crisis, Moscow’s nightlife grew serious. As Yeltsin departed and Putin entered, a new stodginess threatened to reign. Many of the landmark stops along the ex-pat map of Moscow closed. The Duck was one of the last, but it, too, shut down. The woman who ran the former House of Culture that housed the club was eighty-two-year-old Olga Lepeshinskaya, a former Bolshoi prima ballerina. Still known as Stalin’s favorite, Lepeshinskaya was not pleased her beloved building was hosting a bacchanalia. She launched a campaign to evict the foreigners. The Canadian owners had survived countless death threats and an attempted kidnapping, but eventually the police raids, even though the owners had paid out some two hundred thousand dollars in bribes, killed the business.

One of the final blows came when a clutch of Duma deputies, of the Communist and nationalist bent, checked in on ladies’ night. They arrived just as Dylan, the Duck’s six-foot male stripper from Nigeria, wearing little but gold spangles, was “dancing” on the bar, with several young Russian females, to the blasting strains of the Soviet national anthem. Weeks later one of the Duma deputies in a speech on the parliament’s floor, grew red in the face. “If this were Washington,” he screamed, “they would hang that Negro!”

EIGHT (#ulink_c560489e-6f53-54f8-9ccb-9f0fe8e8fa3d)

IN ALL THE YEARS I lived in Moscow, I never had a car. Each day I would step out onto the curb and raise an arm–“voting” the Russians call it – and almost always in an instant at least one car, sometimes an entire lane, would screech to a stop. For a journalist, few modes of transport could be more rewarding. For Muscovites, and Russians in cities across the country, turning your car into a gypsy cab is what even the most educated and skilled did – and do – to get by. Over the years I enjoyed my share of ambulances, hearses, KGB Volgas, and Kremlin Audis. In the privacy of their cars, I sat beside the dispossessed and displaced: a nuclear engineer who had helped to design the SS-20s once pointed at the United States; a Yakut wrestler who pulled off the road, opened his palm, and tried to hawk a two-carat Siberian diamond; an ex-KGB colonel who had spent his career reading dissidents’ mail and now complained that the state had abandoned him; an Armenian gas smuggler who drove an armored BMW he could no longer afford to fill with gas. Each day brought a new round of coincidental interlocutors. Rarely did they stay silent for long. Like the coachmen in the stories of Gogol or Tolstoy, they steered the talk effortlessly from the weather – the dreadful snow or the dreadful heat – to politics – the ineluctable triumph of the “den of thieves” in the Kremlin – before settling into a long disquisition on the country’s dreadful past and dreadful predicament at present. Each, above all, was certain to recite, as if by rote, his – and occasionally her – own canto of loss.

One hot and humid summer morning in the final days of Yeltsin, I was sitting with such a stranger, an out-of-work air traffic controller whose dove gray face streamed with sweat. We were stuck in his 1986 Lada on a two-lane street that divides one of Moscow’s largest cemeteries. For some unknown reason, he had turned onto this street even though it was bumper to bumper with cars. For nineteen minutes we had not moved. I watched the minutes tick off on the dashboard clock. The clear plastic cover of the clock was cracked, but the hands continued to move. I had long ago missed the interview I’d set out for when I met the man sitting next to me. He seemed a bright enough fellow, this man who once guided Aeroflot jets through the Soviet skies, but he did not realize that I was a foreigner and he had no understanding of why I could be exasperated.

He had a point. In Moscow, after all, time spent frozen in place was not without its lessons – even in a traffic jam. Soon the more enterprising drivers usurped the sidewalk. Still, they did not crawl far. Two black BMWs, their windows smoked, moved toward us, negotiating for space with the little blue migalka lights on their roofs: government cars. At the same time, a Mercedes 600, the largest model the Germans ever made, eased right to make good use of the sidewalk. In the Yeltsin years of excess the Mercedes 600 had become the chariot of choice among the Moscow elite. In one year in the 1990s, more shestsoty, as the luxury cars were known in Russian, were sold in the Russian capital than in all Germany. Others of course now tried to follow the Mercedes offroad, but almost immediately one follower, an old Zhiguli two-door, hit an asphalt crater and stalled. The sound of metal on stone hinted at axle damage.

The tension grew, but everyone stayed silent. A few men swore to themselves. No one honked. After nearly an hour we still had not seen the end of the block. I was staring at the same dozen drivers and their passengers and at the rows of tombstones that ran deep amid the lean trees. At the hour mark the honking started. It was naturally without purpose or direction. A Volga to our right gave out. The poor soul in it was forced to evacuate. There was nowhere to move the car and no one willing to help its driver. Instead, a burly fellow in a Land Cruiser read him the riot act. There is nothing as pleasing, it would seem, to a Russian driver as a stream of blue swearing. The yelling did no good. The Volga was rooted in place.

We inched forward. As the second hour approached, the driver said he did not mind the wait. When he worked the tower at the airport, he’d often have to stay awake for double shifts. Sometimes there were long stretches through the night when not one plane would land. I noticed that the gas gauge of the Lada was on empty, even to the left of empty. A young girl, perhaps fifteen or sixteen, rollerbladed through the maze of metal. She was blond and wore earphones. Three cars ahead of us, in the lane to our left, sat an army truck, with an open flatbed ringed by wooden slats. It held four or five large metal barrels. At first it was not clear what the barrels contained-until I saw the pool of liquid forming beneath the truck. Then I saw the trickle dripping from one of the barrels, the one lying on its side.

“Yes,” the former air traffic controller said. It was gas. “And in a second, when some fool drops his cigarette out the window, that truck will go up like an open oil well on fire.” We went on sitting in place. I began to smell the gas. We were in the middle of five lanes of cars. We could not move anywhere. I looked left and right. On all sides drivers and passengers and passersby were smoking. I counted nine lit cigarettes.

The scene became Felliniesque in its absurdity. Another car broke down. A young woman emerged from it. She had light brown hair and was wearing a white tank top and oversize sunglasses. Two volunteers abandoned their cars to come to her rescue. At the top of the second hour a crane, unattended and parked, appeared up ahead in the right lane. Nearby stood a truck with a green canvas roof On the back of the truck a small yellow sign stenciled in black announced LYUDI (“PEOPLE”). The truck was filled with conscripts. Inside the heat of the canvas, the soldiers were sweating. They did not, as is the usual practice, extend a hand to cadge cigarettes.

We inched again. Up ahead a new obstacle, a parked trolleybus. Its power lines unstuck, it was forced from its lane by the cars that had occupied the sidewalk. At last we reached an intersection. In the sea of cars, the roads, two central arteries in the middle of the Russian capital, were unrecognizable. The traffic lights changed colors overhead, but no one paid them any heed. Only one lone Mercedes 600, big and black, tacked against traffic to the far side of the road and managed to move ahead. “A whale,” the former air traffic controller said of the Mercedes as he and I sat in silence and watched it move slowly out of sight.

NINE (#ulink_3eb327a7-fe34-5612-807d-ec7ec8e51b52)

AN ADVENTUROUS documentary filmmaker, a friend informed me, spent a year touring the Russian outback as the last century closed. He visited dozens of small out-of-the-way towns and villages, everywhere asking the local children the same single question: “Who was Lenin?” Somewhere in his travels a little girl in an audience far from Moscow grew excited. “I know!” she exclaimed. “Lenin was the first amphibian who came ashore. He was the one who crawled from the water, learned how to walk, climbed atop an iron tank, and called for everybody to follow him.”

DESPITE THE END OF the empire, the Seventh of November, Revolution Day, remained a holiday in Russia. In 1996, Yeltsin, having failed to bury the Party back in 1991, decided to try something different. He gave it a new name, the Day of Accord and Reconciliation. Like most of Yeltsin’s grand gestures, the rechristening was a failure. Sergei Kovalyov, the Duma deputy who spent ten years in the Gulag and served as Andrei Sakharov’s closest protégé after Gorbachev freed the physicist from his internal exile in Gorky, called it yet another foolhardy try at a top-down purification of the nation, the state’s attempt to relegate the old way of life to history.

“What does this mean, ‘Accord and Reconciliation’?” Kovalyov asked me one afternoon in his cramped Duma office. “These are empty words when people still carry Stalin portraits in parades. A day of national mourning would be a bit more appropriate. We don’t need a new holiday. We need to teach our children that Lenin and Stalin were the progenitors of a criminal regime, that they were mass murderers.”

Kovalyov, a shy, soft-spoken man who wore the same thick Soviet-style glasses as when I met him a decade earlier, was the first to say he had never wielded the clout of Sakharov. But amid the din of the Duma his voice resounded with moral sobriety. He shared a story that had stunned him. A student had come to see him. At one point in their conversation Kovalyov mentioned the passing of the writer Andrei Sinyavsky, once best known in the West by his pseudonym, Abram Tertz, who, along with another young Soviet writer, Yuli Daniel, was arrested in 1966 and imprisoned for publishing abroad.

As Kovalyov recounted for the student the saga of the Sinyavsky and Daniel trial that attracted worldwide outcry, the student had laughed. “How can you laugh at a writer who was arrested?” Kovalyov had asked him. The student said he’d imagined the story was a joke. “He just couldn’t believe,” Kovalyov said, “it was ever possible to be sent to jail for writing literature!”

Five years after Yeltsin renamed November 7, a poll in 2001 found 43 percent of those queried yearned for the return of Revolution Day. Another pollster asked: “Imagine that the October Revolution is happening before your eyes. What would you do?” Of the respondents, 22 percent said they would support the Bolsheviks; 19 percent said they would cooperate with them in part; 13 percent said they would leave the country. Just 6 percent said they would fight Lenin and company.

IN 1990S MOSCOW the remnants of the Soviet intelligentsia liked to talk about expiating guilt. The villains of Soviet power, the forlorn and graying dissidents liked to say, needed their own Nuremberg. They knew there never would be one. Russians have not embraced any attempt at a Vergangenheitsbewältigung, what Germans, true professionals in matters of national repentance, call the process of coming to terms with the past. It is said to be cathartic, offering a kind of deliverance. Russian has no such word.

In Russia, no attempt on a social scale has been made to examine the totalitarian past, to learn not simply how the Soviet state functioned but how Russians themselves formed that state, to concede the crimes of the past.

One afternoon I stopped by a roundtable discussion held by several former KGB chiefs. Vladimir Kryuchkov, the true believer who had run the Lubyanka under Gorbachev until he turned against him in the coup of August 1991, went blank when a reporter, a Russian woman in her twenties, asked his opinion of the virtues of repentance. “What is there to repent?” Kryuchkov replied. He seemed more puzzled than angered. “We have nothing to regret; we only tried to save the Union. It’s those who unleashed the present chaos who should think about repentance.” History, I feared, had made a stunning return, only to be forgotten just as quickly.

IN SEARCH OF LEVITY in matters of remembrance, I learned to seek the gentle counsel of Semyon Samuelovich Vilensky. Semyon was in his early seventies when we first met, but his handshake, I was reminded each time I entered his two-room apartment on Moscow’s northwestern edge, remained a nutcracker. A short, stocky man with a white curly mane, Semyon had bushy white brows and soft blue eyes that flashed when he smiled. His face, expressive and animated, invariably reminded visitors of Einstein.

Semyon established the ritual of our visits: first tea, strong tea; then a beloved cigarette; lastly crackers or cake, whatever the kitchen held. Only then did we get down to business. The apartment seemed sparse, but it was crowded. The wall of cabinets in the living room was filled with manuscripts. For more than four decades he had collected the works-memoirs, short stories, poems, plays, novels, diaries-of the zeks, the prisoners who suffered in Stalin’s labor camps. “Zek” was camp slang, a word that grew out of the Gulag architects’ bureaucratic shorthand; z/k stood for zaklyuchennyi, a prisoner.

By now Semyon had thousands of manuscripts. It was a miracle they had survived. With a wide grin, Semyon liked to share his secret. “The babushkas,” he said. The grannies. “It’s all thanks to the babushkas.” For twenty-five years, from Khrushchev to Gorbachev, he traveled the country. He spent six months in Moscow, six months on the road. He was not wandering, though he said the warmth of rural Russia saved him. He was slowly, quietly saving the literary heritage of the camps.

“In those days where could you keep manuscripts written by zeks? Only in villages, far from Moscow, in the hands of old ladies. So I’d take to the roads of the countryside and walk. I’d go from village to village. And the babushkas took me in, and without fear or doubt, they took the manuscripts and hid them.”

He did not think his archive a great achievement. “Camp survivors like to write,” he said. “And by now their relatives know I will take anything and lose nothing.” Moreover, he was not happy merely to have rescued the manuscripts. He had vowed to put them into print. In the late 1980s, once glasnost began to free Moscow’s printing presses, Semyon started to reel in his scattered manuscripts. In 1989 he founded a group known as Vozvrashchenie (The Return), and although he was the sole full-time staffer, began steadily to publish the manuscripts. In 1990 he got a copying machine, a gift from George Soros. By 2001 he had published more than fifty volumes, but the copier remained his primary press. For a decade a repairman had fixed it gratis. “His father,” he joked, “must have been in the camps.”

Semyon of course was a survivor himself He served on the Kremlin’s Rehabilitation Commission, a body established by Yeltsin and chaired by Aleksandr Yakovlev, Gorbachev’s former ideologist, that attempted to restore the good names of the victims of Stalinism. He was the commission’s sole Gulag veteran. He did not, however, like to speak of his own experience. Only bit by bit did I piece it together. He had been arrested just after his twentieth birthday–“For poetry,” he said. It was in 1948. He had been an eager student of literature at Moscow State, and he had done a stupid thing. He recited one of his poems to a circle of friends. One of his lines–“Agents surround us and the first among them is Stalin” – caught the ears of an informer. He was accused of “anti-Soviet agitation” and “terrorist intentions” and jailed first in the Lubyanka, then in a transit prison before being sent off to the dreaded mines of the Kolyma camps in the Far East. As Zek No. I-1620 he spent more than six years in Kolyma.

In 1955 Semyon got out. In 1962 he tried to get his first anthology of camp literature published – by the Kolyma regional government. “It would have been an important beginning,” he said. He even secured a story from Varlam Shalamov, the camp survivor whose Kolyma Tales had earned Solzhenitsyn’s envy. The book was typeset in 1963, but “at the last minute Moscow ordered all writers not officially residing in Kolyma excluded.” They printed a collection of Kolyma works, but not any by camp writers, many of whom lay buried in the local cemeteries. Semyon vowed to right that wrong, a vow he had spent the next quarter of a century fighting to fulfill.

Tea at Semyon’s lasted for hours. He took his time. His anarchic brows danced, his hands flew through the smoky air. As he braided old stories for a new audience, a smile coiled up and flashed. His conversation sounded Socratic, his tales almost rabbinical. He liked to end his discourses with a moral. He dispensed them like benedictions. But he always arrived at the same destination, the tragic conclusion that these first years after the Soviet fall were no exception. Russians had never come to terms with their past. “We barely had enough time to ask the right questions,” he said, “let alone try to answer them.”

TEN (#ulink_2770899a-993d-514f-a3c3-9b3935e3bd36)

“I JUST FLEW IN from Seoul,” announced the voice on the phone, waking me at 4:17 A.M. “And from the height of thirty-five thousand feet, it suddenly made sense: This place was not intended for habitation.” I hung up and soon fell back into a deep sleep. In the morning it seemed like a dream. But I knew who had called.

Viktor Pelevin, whom by then I had helped label “the voice of the new generation,” had grown into a friend. Since the fall of the USSR, Russians have bemoaned the flood of pulp fiction as how-to manuals on everything from the Internet to the Kama Sutra filled their bookstores. But just as Moscow critics were ready to pronounce Russian literature dead, Pelevin came of age. His modern satires, laced with ontological meditations and wild flights of a psychedelic imagination, soared to the top of the best-seller lists. By his early thirties Pelevin had become the literary celebrity of the post-Soviet generation.

With a degree from the Moscow Institute of Power Engineering and a passion for Zen Buddhism, he did not seem the top candidate for the title. But in 1993 his first book of stories, The Blue Lantern, won an immediate audience and Russia’s “Little Booker” prize. His first novel, Omon Ra, won high praise. Moscow’s critics, never particularly cordial to newcomers, hailed it as the first landmark of post-Soviet literature. Ever since, Pelevin has proved spectacularly prolific, cranking out roughly a novel a year.

But it was his novella The Yellow Arrow that I kept close. In under fifty pages, Pelevin creates a metaphoric world that reveals Russia’s predicament, a train bound for a broken bridge that neither stops nor arrives anywhere. The admixture of satire and mysticism is heady. The train’s passengers, stranded in an iron coffin hurtling into infinite darkness, mimic the desperate last resorts of Russians, devolving into hunter-gatherers, swindlers, and madmen.

Pelevin soon gained a cult of envy. He was, rivals said, too clever by half. “But I’m not doing anything new,” he pleaded. “I’m just writing what I see in my head.” His works were sold in bookstores and kiosks across Russia. But his influence extended far beyond his readership. Pelevin changed the lexicon of Russia’s hip urban youth, many of whom never read his books. By the time Generation “P,” a novel about the travails of a Russian copywriter, came out, it was hard to exaggerate his reach. The title was meant as a pun on Generation X and the Pepsi Generation. P stands for pizdets, a crude, but beloved, swearword that ends the sentences of young Russians everywhere. It means, alternately, “the absolute best” or “the absolute worst.” Yet given the book’s, reach, the P might as well have stood for Pelevin.

On RuNet, the Russian Internet, Pelevin Web sites sprouted. Girls carried his novels in nightclubs and pored over them in the metro. In my travels I found Pelevin everywhere: a Pelevin band (heavy metal) in Pskov, a Pelevin disco (techno) in Samara, even a Pelevin movie (a bootleg film of a novel) in the works in Yaroslavl. In the West, meanwhile, his works became the focus of academic symposia. Pelevin had a constructive response to celebrity. He hid. He adopted the pose of a Slavic Pynchon or Salinger. He refused to be photographed or appear on television. Naturally, his fame only grew.

One night well into my last summer in Moscow, Pelevin and I met up at Justo, a sushi restaurant/nightclub high on the high end of the market. Justo was opened by the son of Iosif Kobzon, an aging crooner with a bad wig who was known as the Russian Frank Sinatra. For decades Kobzon has been the king of Estrada, the Soviet equivalent of a national lounge singer. For a time Kobzon was not able to visit the United States, thanks to the State Department’s suspicions that he had mob connections, a charge he strongly denies.

His son’s place attracted the city’s most-traveled and, no matter the season, best-tanned crowd.

Viktor ordered sushi and tea. He had a fabled reputation as a chemical experimenter on a par with Jim Morrison. But he does not smoke or drink. He meditates. He is a devout Buddhist. He now shuttled among Moscow, Tibet, and South Korea, where he went for extended Zen retreats. In his work Pelevin spoke to Russia’s bedlam, but he never preached. Too many generations of Russian writers, he said, had been priests of the state’s propaganda. Stalin had demanded that writers be “architects of the soul.” Too many Russian novelists had lived off “the literary collective farm.” The reality of Russia, now more than ever, was too surreal, he said, to explain away in black and white.

Pelevin had just returned from a South Korean monastery. For a month he had eaten only rice and seaweed. For hours each day he had sat and stared at a blank wall. It didn’t sound like fun, I ventured. It wasn’t, he said. “But it’s the best therapy I’ve found for living in this place.”

Once he had asked advice on an English title for a novel. Now I returned the favor. He pushed for something that rang of Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy but echoed the new era as well: “Something Putinian.”

“Crime and Immunity,” I suggested.

“Crime and Deportation,” he countered. “More in keeping with the times.”

“War and Crime?” I offered.

“Too timely,” he said. “What about War and Piss? Or even better, Vor and Piss.” He was on to something. Vor is Russian for “thief” and to a Russian ear, “peace” and “piss” are hard to distinguish. And on it went for hours.

One of our best efforts was Golaya Pravda (The Naked Truth). We had met at the time of the Kremlin’s attack on NTV, and as Putin drove Russia’s first private network into friendly hands, freedom of speech, or the lack thereof, had dominated public discourse. Putin and his men tried to argue that Russia’s airwaves were free and open. They had a point. The television channels were closed to political opponents, but they were certainly not straitlaced. The Naked Truth proved that.

Saturday nights at eleven a comely young brunette named Svetlana Pesotskaya appeared on a Moscow channel to read the news. She began the broadcast fully clothed, and then, as she ran through the news of the day, she slipped off her clothes. Soon she was topless. Svetlana did not let nudity get in the way of a good interview. Communist parliamentarians were her most frequent interlocutors. They sat next to her and, trying their best not to stare at her breasts, plowed on about the dire state of agriculture, the defense forces, or Russian-Japanese relations. The Naked Truth, at least among a press corps in search of a story, was a hit.

As a full moon rose and the club reached capacity, Viktor and I left. The street outside had become a parking lot of black German sedans and American Jeeps. The interior lights of the cars illuminated faces engrossed in crime thrillers, chauffeurs keeping warm. We walked for blocks, past the Tretyakov Gallery, past MinAtom, the Ministry of Atomic Energy, past the Central Bank, before we parted. I walked on alone toward St. Basil’s and Red Square, across the broad stone bridge that spans the Moscow River. It was nearly two in the morning, and the streets were empty. Only the river churned darkly below.

Once, years before, Viktor and I had sat on a bench on the edge of Pushkin Square. The city seemed to stream before us. It was a chill spring day, and the sun had brought out the crowds. Zhirinovsky had commandeered a truck and turned it into a soapbox. He was hectoring a crowd to defend Saddam Hussein against the Satan in Washington. A man stopped to ask us the time. He also asked if we knew that Yeltsin was a war criminal. I told Viktor that day how lucky he was. As a writer in Russia, a hip young writer who wore black leather and dark sunglasses and protected his persona as religiously as Pynchon, he would find it hard to fail. The West was dying to discover a new voice in the Soviet rubble. “You’ll be big,” I predicted.

“You’re the lucky one,” he replied. “The old is over here, and the new has yet to begin.”

We agreed; few people get to experience zero gravity on earth.

ELEVEN (#ulink_d9b4e804-9f9a-5ad7-bc76-e34c5bd50abb)

HOW DO YOU EXPLAIN a state in decay? How do you explain a country where the death of an ideology has displaced millions? How do you explain a government that announces a 50 percent increase in defense spending when the poverty line cuts through a third of its households and its poor souls face new epidemics of HIV and TB, suicide and drug abuse and, most pervasive of all, the old scourge of alcoholism? Where people do not fear the future, they fear – with good reason – the past.

In Russia nothing political stays unchanged for long. Kremlin intrigues, however transfixing they may be, do not suffice to draw a faithful portrait of Russia a decade after the Soviet fall. Russia of course has changed. But for far too many of its inhabitants it remains an Old Testament land, a place of plagues and floods, of locusts and blizzards and power outages without end. I knew I would have to go far from Moscow, as far as the points of the compass could lead me, to chart a deep map of the country, to learn how Russians not only survive but struggle to find meaning in the ruins of empire.

“The death of the contemporary forms of social order ought to gladden rather than trouble the soul,” writes Aleksandr Herzen, the Russian political philosopher, in From the Other Shore. “But what is frightening is that the departing world leaves behind it not an heir, but a pregnant widow.” Herzen was writing of the European revolutions of 1848, but his words echo across Russia today. “Between the death of one and the birth of the other,” he concludes, “much water will flow, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass.”

I stared at the huge map on our wall at home and plotted my route. I would travel to the country’s extremes, to the corners where no “Kremlin insiders” dwelt and few oligarchs set foot. I wanted to go to the Russian lands where no one had dined with Berezovsky or vied for an audience with Luzhkov, where few cared about the Byzantine struggles that entranced Moscow and fewer still fretted about the price of Siberian crude on the world exchange. I wanted to go to the regions where Russians had seen little of the rewards of the new era but felt much of its pain. I wanted to listen to the land’s survivors and survivalists, to those who lived in its far-flung corners without the slightest expectation that anything good should ever come to a people who deserved so much better.

II. SOUTH TO THE ZONE (#ulink_6dfb48ed-17a4-5e95-9219-7b92bb908101)

ONE (#ulink_c97a57cd-8413-5e34-9eea-9d6e3bb85e49)

WE WERE, AT LONG LAST, on the outskirts of Aldy, an ancient village of overgrown fruit trees and low-slung tin roofs on the southern edge of Grozny, the Chechen capital, and Issa was singing, “Moi gorod Groooozny, ya po tebe skuchaaayu … no ya k tebe vernuuus, moi gorod Grozny moi.”

He was an imposing figure, just over six feet, his chest and shoulders so broad he appeared taller. Issa liked to keep his silvering hair shaved on the sides of his head and at the back of his neck. The cut lent him the stern air of a military man or a Soviet bureaucrat of stature, an image, as was no doubt the intent, to intimidate at the checkpoints. More often silent, Issa broke into song when the air around him grew too quiet. Now, just as the roadblock, the last one before Aldy, rose into view, Issa was singing at the top of his lungs.

“Moi gorod Groooozny,” he wailed. “My city, the city of Grozny, oh, how I miss you, but I shall return to you …”

There were four of us in the rattling Soviet Army jeep, known endearingly as a UAZik, pronounced wahzik, in the common parlance. Lord knows what image we projected to the well-muscled, sunburned, and deeply suspicious Russian soldiers at the checkpoints. Sometimes they were drunk. Nearly always they were scared. In Chechnya, I’d learned, checkpoints were the measure of one’s day. People did not ask, “How far it is?” but “How many checkpoints are there?” Each day we crossed at least a dozen.

On this sweltering morning in July, we had already passed seventeen. The posts were the center of activity amid the ruins of the city. Conscripts maintained the constant vigil, checking the cars and their passengers, while their officers, hands on radios, sat in shaded huts off the road. But this post was nearly empty, and the OMON officer who stopped us, a pit bull from Irkutsk, was not in a good mood. His arms and neck glowed with the burned pink skin of a new arrival. He wore wraparound sunglasses and a bandanna over his shaved head. Tattoos, the proud emblems of Russian soldiers and prisoners, covered his biceps. “Slava” (“glory”) adorned the right one. It could be a name or a desire. He wore no shirt, only a green vest fitted with grenades, a knife, and magazine clips to feed the Kalashnikov he held firmly in both hands. His fingers seemed soldered to it.

We may have looked legit, but we were a fraud. Issa ostensibly was a ranking member of the wartime administration in Chechnya, the Russians’ desperate attempt at governance in the restive republic of Muslims, however lapsed, Sovietized, and secularized. He had the documents to prove it, but the man who signed them had since been fired. Issa knew the life span of his documents was limited. At any checkpoint his “client,” as he had taken to calling me, could be pulled from the jeep, detained, interrogated, and packed off on the next flight to Moscow.

At fifty-one, Issa boasted a résumé that revealed the successful climb of a Chechen apparatchik. Born in Central Asian exile, in Kyrgyzstan, five years after Stalin had deported the Chechens in 1944, he had graduated from the Grozny Oil Institute in 1971. For twenty-one years he worked at Grozneft, the Chechen arm of the Soviet Oil and Gas Ministry. He spent the last Soviet years, until Yeltsin clambored onto the tank in 1991, in western Siberia, overseeing the drilling of oil wells in Tyumen. He spoke a smattering of French, a bit of Arabic, and a dozen words in English – all learned, he liked to tease, during stints in Iraq and Syria.

As the Soviet Union collapsed, life went sour fast. Djokhar Dudayev – the Soviet Air Force general who was to lead the stand against Moscow – returned to Grozny, and the fever for independence seized the capital. Issa, then a director of one of Chechnya’s biggest chemical plants, took up arms against the insurgents. In the fall of 1993, more than a year before Yeltsin first sent troops into Chechnya, with Moscow’s backing Issa and his fellow partisans rallied around a former Soviet petrochemicals minister and staged a pathetic attempt to overthrow Dudayev.

He was careful not to dispense details, but the scars were hard to hide. His right forearm had a golf ball-size hole, remnants of a bullet taken on the opposition’s line north of Grozny in September 1993. The bullet had pierced his arm and lodged in his left shoulder. A few months later Dudayev’s freedom fighters got him again. Kalashnikov fire had ripped his stomach, intestine, and lungs, leaving a horrific gnarl of tissue in the center of his body. He’d moved his family-a wife, two boys, and a girl – to Moscow. But he wanted to be clear: He never wanted to fight. “We never loved the Russians,” he said. “We just hated that corrupt little mafiya shit.” He was speaking of Dudayev, the fallen independence leader, the man many Chechens, much younger and more devout, now called the founding martyr of the separatist Islamic state, the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, as Dudayev had ordered his native land rechristened.

In front of me, behind the wheel, sat Yura. Projecting a genuine sweetness, he was a good-looking kid with blue-green eyes and blond hair that his mother cut short each week with a straight razor. He had thin cheeks, covered with freckles and shaded by the beginnings of a beard. Just twenty-two, he was lucky to have made it this far. He belonged to one of the world’s most unfortunate species; he was an ethnic Russian born in Chechnya. “Our Mowgli,” Issa had jibed, equating Yura with Kipling’s jungle boy. Everyone laughed. There was no need to explain. Mowgli was raised by wolves. The Chechens, centuries ago, had made the wolf their mascot, the embodiment of their struggle.

The last of the crew, bouncing beside me in the back seat of the car, was Shvedov. It was a last name – few ever learned his first – that meant “the Swede.” There was nothing, however, Swedish about him. He had a tanned bald head and a scruffy dirty brown beard and mustache. He carried an ID from the magazine the Motherland, but his paid vocation was what is known in the field as a fixer. For decades he earned a living, or something approximating it, by getting reporters in and out of places they had no business being in. Usually genial and often hilarious, he could be brilliant. But Shvedov’s greatest attribute was that he did not drink. I had known him for years but never traveled with him. After only three days I discovered my own heretofore unknown homicidal urges coming on strong. Somehow I had missed Shvedov’s worst sin: He talked without pause. (When he did not talk, he clacked his upper dentures incessantly on a set of lower teeth blackened by a lifetime of unfiltered Russian tobacco.) A colleague who traveled with him often had offered a tip: “Keep a cigarette in his mouth.” But even smoking, Shvedov talked.

THE SIBERIAN PIT BULL barked at Yura. “Turn off the car,” he instructed. Issa politely tried to ply his documents, but the soldier would have none of it. “Forget your papers, old man,” he shouted. Shvedov, seeing the worst coming, proffered his press card from the Motherland. The OMON officer from Irkutsk had never heard of the honored Soviet monthly, which Shvedov insisted still existed, even though its readership could no longer afford to subscribe. “Stay in the car,” the officer yelled at the insistent bald man in front of him, before turning his sights on me.

“Get out,” he then commanded me.

One thing I’d learned about checkpoints long ago was it was best not to get out – ever. By now we had been stopped so often a routine had formed. A soldier would approach, profanities would rain, we would offer documents, another soldier would lean closer, we would wait, and then, the formalities exhausted, we would be waved through. Silence, I had learned, was the best policy. But this fellow wanted me out of the UAZik. He yelled again. He wanted to frisk the car, search its innards, rummage our bags. I tried to demur. I offered to help.

Undeterred, he opened the door and, with his Kalashnikov, nudged me aside. He lifted the seats, opened the metal canisters underneath, and, maintaining his silence, rifled our bags. When he was done, he grunted and jumped from the UAZik. Yura sat frozen until Issa ordered him, through his teeth, to turn the key, turn the goddamned key. As we moved on, I watched the soldier retreat to his roadside squalor, half a tent strung to a tree and a broken chair posted in the hot sun. With his back to us, he flicked his left hand sharply through the air, as if to swat an insect. We were beneath him.

We drove on, numb to everything but the sun, the dust, the bumps. Issa had stopped singing. Only the roar of the helicopters overhead accompanied us, and then, suddenly, as we turned off the road, the silence returned. We had entered a village without discernible life. No cars, no people. The first trees were tall, bare stumps, their branches shorn long ago. Then yards, all untended, their green veils grown too thick or too thin. Everywhere the branches, heavy with fruit, hung low. The season had come, but no one was picking. Everywhere there was only the weight of the still air. We had arrived.

I had marked Aldy, this Chechen village, on the map of Chechnya I had bought on a Moscow street corner months earlier. Aldy was the destination I’d set myself and shared with no one when I began the journey to the south. Something horrific, unspeakable, had happened here five months before. On a cold Saturday in midwinter, Russian forces had committed one of the bloodiest of the Chechnya massacres in this village. No one will ever know the true body count, but in Aldy on February 5, 2000, Russian soldiers had summarily executed at least sixty civilians.

A half circle of a dozen Chechen men, some lean and strong, others gray and bent over, huddled in a caucus as we drove in. Yura parked the UAZik across the road from them. They did not move from the lonely shade. One man, young, fit, and prominently armed, gripped the Kalashnikov on his shoulder. He wore full camouflage and tiny sunglasses. He could have been on either side, a fighter loyal to the rebels or a Chechen police officer in the Russians’ employ. Issa didn’t like the look of the sunglasses.

I got out, alone, and walked toward the men. One of the older men was separating leaves from a thin branch in his hands. As I approached, the young Chechen stepped forward. In his hands was the AK-47, shiny and new. Strapped across his chest was a leather bandolier, bulging with clips, grenades, and a pair of wooden-handled knives. A century and a half earlier Alexandre Dumas père had noted the Chechens’ love of weaponry during a romantic romp across the Caucasus in 1858, a time when the Chechens struggled against the tsar. “All these mountain fighters are fanatically brave,” wrote the creator of The Three Musketeers, “and whatever money they acquire is spent on weapons. A Chechen … may be literally in rags, but his sword, dagger and gun are of the finest quality.”

I told the armed man that I was a journalist, an American. I’d come to talk to people who were here the day “they” came. We did not shake hands, but he nodded and shifted the rifle from his hands to his shoulder. “Walk with me,” he said. The sunglasses, their gold frame catching the sun, covered his eyes. Slowly we crossed the dirt road and headed away from the jeep, away from my guides, away from the Chechen men standing against the wall of metal gates and fences.

Oddly, a calm enveloped me. I kept walking, afraid to lose pace. Three options formed in my mind. This fellow is taking you around the corner, just out of sight of your companions, where you’ll be summarily executed; or he’s intent on kidnapping you, leading you to a house nearby to be sold on down the road from there; or he’s bringing you to see someone – an elder? – who will listen to your best introduction and then either bless your presence in the village or send you away.

I had come to Aldy prepared. By March an amateur video, forty-six minutes long, made by the villagers had surfaced in Moscow. It featured corpses and widows. I had interviewed the lucky ones; the survivors who’d made it out. I had studied the reports, detailed and methodical, of the human rights activists. But I wanted to learn more than the extent of the massacre. I wanted to understand the motivation behind the horror. Aldy was not, as an American diplomat, a man of high rank and expertise in Russia, had tried to convince me, “just another case of Russian heavy-handedness.” It was a conspicuous illustration, in miniature, of Russia’s military onslaught in Chechnya.

The young Chechen led me on. But even before we reached the gate of the house, a wave of relief hit, and my shoulders settled. I knew where we were going. I had memorized a hand-drawn map of Aldy’s long streets. We were calling on the man the fortunate ones had told me to see first, Shamkhan, the village mullah.