Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya by Anna Politkovskaya

Author:Anna Politkovskaya
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press

What Are the Rules of the Game?

I’m at another Goity house, in the evening. The corpse of a person kidnapped by soldiers has just been handed over to them. I’m speaking with the twenty-year-old Salambek, a nephew of the dead. We’re talking about what to do now, the meaning of everything that has happened, and what young Chechens think about all this. Life has taught Salambek to be silent—always, under any circumstances. And he’s as taciturn as a concentration camp prisoner of many years.

“What do young people in Goity do these days, besides hiding from the Feds? Eighteen- to twenty-five-year-old guys can’t stay at home for three years in a row every day just so everyone knows that they’re not militants, can they?” I ask.

“What can we do besides dying?” answers Salambek.

I hope that Salambek is just joking. But he isn’t. In general, young people here rarely laugh—they’ve gotten out of the habit. Look how many fresh graves there are in the Goity cemetery. Salambek is perfectly serious. His impassive, motionless face shows a grimace of tortured hopelessness, and his large eyes, above wide, frozen cheekbones, stare stubbornly and reproachfully.

Most of the people in Chechnya who have survived up to this moment are full of despair. They live in this despair, this sheer hell, like in a dreary starless night. This is the main result of the total lawlessness imposed on the population in the course of the second Chechen war. You take your life into your hands if you leave the village, or even if you just walk around the village. Either way, you could be arrested. The Federal “broom” sweeps young people away every day. Visiting Urus-Martan is even more out of the question; the road is filled with checkpoints, and any one of them can become the last in your life. Examples abound.

Before the war, approximately forty thousand people lived in Goity. Now there are no more than fifteen thousand. Everyone left if they could, to save their children. And there’s nothing here for those who remained, except for the infamous Chechen “package”: Federal raids, night purges, marauding, morning discussions of who was taken away this time and what was stolen along with them, regular burials, stories about the ways those who survived were tortured, and whose corpses looked like what.

There is no library or movie theater, although the buildings remain.

“When was the last time a movie was shown here?”

“When I was little, before the first war.”

Imran Janbekov’s mother is worn out and ravaged by grief. With what little decisiveness she has left, she bursts out:

“Russia has turned us into cattle. It is driving our youth into the arms of whoever comes along first and says, ‘Go with us.’ I even think like this now: I’d rather the bearded ones, the Wahhabis, beat us with sticks for vodka. A stick is still better than an exploding bullet. Sticks and stones won’t break your bones. Most of all now, we want to know the rules of the game. We want to understand which of us you don’t like.

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