Eight Pieces of Empire by Lawrence Scott Sheets

Author:Lawrence Scott Sheets [Sheets, Lawrence Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-88885-3
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2011-10-31T16:00:00+00:00

GRENADE, LIGHTLY TOSSED

It was a sultry summer day in 1993. Two old men in a Moskvich sedan picked us up at the side of the road after we crossed the “frontier.” This was my first foray into Chechnya, a tiny (the size of Connecticut) place it took the czars’ armies longer than any other to “pacify” in the nineteenth century. As the empire reeled, Chechen activists wasted no time in declaring independence from the Russian Federation.

Despite the searing heat, our two driving hosts wore Chicago 1930s–style black fedora hats, popular in Chechnya at the time, but totally incongruous with the surrounding countryside, dotted with flocks of sheep and newly constructed mosques. I sat in the back along with my traveling companion, Liam McDowall of the Associated Press, studying the fedoras. I couldn’t escape the feeling that we were being driven to Grozny by members of the rap group RUN-DMC or some Prohibition-era gangsters. In the ex–Soviet Union, the fedora was a strictly Chechen accoutrement, the favored headgear of the renegade former Soviet nuclear bomber squadron commander General Dzhokhar Dudayev, president of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, a state recognized at the time by no other country on earth.

We entered Grozny and asked the two fedora-topped gentlemen to drop us at the best hotel in town.

“There’s only one hotel—the Kavkaz,” they laughed, and brought us to a menacingly rundown shack across from Dudayev’s presidential palace on Grozny’s massive central square, which would later assume a legendary role as the heart of the resistance during the war.

The hotel lobby was teeming with armed men milling around. One was lightly tossing a live hand grenade, detonation ring intact, into the air repeatedly, as if it were a lemon or a small ball. “Hey, which room are you guys in here?” he asked. We answered that we hadn’t checked in yet. We inquired about rooms. A rail-thin man at the front desk said that he had only two left, and that the door lock on one was broken. After no deliberation we deposited our things in the room with the lock and left the grenade-tossing young man and his companions behind.

The city was tense, but in the then-jovial, chaotic Chechen way. The Russian-backed opposition had tried to stage a referendum on Dudayev’s rule, but not through diplomatic negotiations. An armed clash erupted down the street at the state drama theater. Several people were killed in a melee a couple of hours before our arrival. Dudayev’s forces celebrated their “victory” by discharging every type of weapon they had into the cloudless sky and performing a zikr, a Sufi dance of remembrance for the dead.

So loud was the volley of fire that my editor in Moscow couldn’t make out what I was dictating when I tried to file a dispatch from the press center of the presidential palace. I finally got off a few stock quotes and told him not to worry—the gunfire was only a celebration. He laughed, hanging up the phone, evidently getting more “color” than he bargained for from the nonstop gunfire than I could give him in a million words.

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