INSIDE AND OUT OF CHECHNYA VIA UKRAINE by Scott Alixander Sonders (unputdownable books TXT) 📖

of the USSR. Free flow of commerce and people was the norm. Then the so-called rebel extremists in Chechnya (situated between northern Georgia and southern Russia) began hijacking everything in sight. The hijackings turned to murder. Five local policemen (boys of 17 and 18 and barely out of the Academy) were found dead, decapitated and gutted like cattle.

Then came the apartment bombings in Moscow where people died just like those in the World Trade Center in Manhattan. The Russian people were outraged. Muslim extremists in Chechnya were getting bolder. The Georgian government, at risk of a coup, asked the Russian government to send more troops. They did.

Here’s a literary sidebar: Lermontov, the 19th century acclaimed Russian poet and contemporary of Pushkin, once commented in "Prisoner of the Caucasus" that “they were singularly useless bandits who for a thousand years never grew a crop or created anything of value.” Writing in a literary style similar to the English Romantic poet Lord Byron, Lermontov was opinionated but not racist. He died a stone’s throw from the Chechnya of today in the city of Pyatigorsk.

I asked Anzhela if she could tell me why the Russian consensus of those people seemed contradictory to that expounded by most Western media.

She said, “Sure. It’s always different. Everyone has an agenda. When my father’s brother died in Afghanistan, the Russians were the bad guys. But when the Americans invade the same place, suddenly it’s about freedom for Afghan women and because of 911. I feel terrible about what these Muslim terrorists have done to America. Everyone here feels terrible. We don’t dislike America. We never have. Such things are only propaganda. And sure I also feel terrible about what’s being done to the Muslims. No one deserves it. But please, maybe some sympathy. Russians didn’t start it. But why no one will finish it; this I don’t know about. And these bandits have been here, selling heroin and guns and stealing women to sell as prostitutes for much longer than the world knows about Chechnya. Tell me please, can your colleagues find this place on a map? “

For me her last question was rhetorical. A few years before and when I’d left for a visiting professorship to Estonia, most of my college educated peers thought that maybe it was, not on the Baltic Sea next to Finland, but somewhere in South America. And I did already know about the heroin trade. But this hers was a new angle on the prostitution business. I told her that I’d heard it was Russian mafiosi who operated an exclusive franchise on this ugly business.

Her mouth trembled as she spoke. “Sure, there are Russian mafiosi. Sure, sure. But where did they learn this? My best friend from school, stupid girl, got involved with a boyfriend who is drug addict. She begins heroin. She becomes addict. Boyfriend has heroin very cheap. He was in army in Afghanistan. He gets it from source – Muslim drug lords. My girlfriend is very beautiful. But she and he owe lots of money. One night she does not come home. Everyone knows where she is but can do nothing. She is in big house in small town, after the border of Moldova. She can not leave. Her boyfriend sold her for drugs. The trafficker took her by truck, through Ukraine to Moldova or Romania. Sure it’s true. Everyone knows it. Go to Prague. In Czech they pay most money for pretty Russian girls. But their mothers can only cry. And if she cries to many people, the traffickers will threaten her.”

“Why do you stay?” I asked.

“Not stay,” she said tersely. I will go to Moscow. I will be safer there. Western men have come here for beauty tours,” she said. They would come to meet our beautiful Russian women. Western men come here for brides. They have told me they don’t like their own girls with bad attitudes. But now these men go to Ukraine or Sankt Petersburg where it is safer. Tourism has dropped by a third. If I stay, where is my future?” She paused then said again, “I will go to Moscow. All the money is in Moscow. And I will be safer.”

Anzhela introduced me to the local police chief. Vladimir spoke barely more English than I speak Russian. Both Anzhela and Yana sat in for the interview.
I don’t need to repeat his story because it’s already been said. The only thing he added were the horrific details of how he had to examine the bodies of those boys whose parents he knew well.

I told him I wanted to see the border. To see the “crash sites.” Dima (his “short name” as they call “nickname”) shook his head. “Why do you want to see death,” he asked. “It comes to all of us even when we are not looking for it.”

After some insistence and for my own safety, he arranged an “escort” for us. Anzhela didn’t want to but came anyway and Yana, still naïve, insisted that she come – or else how could she “earn the money I was paying to her.”

The mountains there are green and serene, even mystical. You can feel the ghosts of our original ancestors. The anthropologists tell us that our prehistoric parents spread from these and similar mountains and germinated our first civilizations. Those were the first “Caucasians.”
They were the founders of the first cities in Mesopotamia and maybe the sailors on Noah’s Ark. Some believe that Adam and Eve were their children. The Armenians, also from these highlands, believe that they were the first civilization. And so this name refers not so much to ethnicity or the color of skin, but to the Caucasus Mountains that generated those beings.

It didn’t make the journey any more comfortable feeling those ghosts. I don’t like it when I can’t solve a problem. Even as a boy I would take my toys apart and then try to reassemble them, just to see how they worked. But the problem of lighter and darker complected Caucasians, at odds for centuries and with no end in sight, remains unsolvable for me.

Before taking the bus back to Nezinomysk (“Mineral Water”) where I would catch a flight for Moscow, for helping me I bought two dozen roses and gave twelve to Anzhela and twelve to Yana. They both became angry. Stupidly I had forgotten another of many cultural differences: you don’t shake hands or kiss in a doorway – and you only give even numbers of flowers at funerals!

I went other places. I talked to other people. As with anybody anywhere there is a difference of opinion. But there really is some sense of consensus here. And that’s especially difficult to find when it’s a cultural given that “women don’t like to talk about politics; it’s boring, it’s what men talk about.”

“So what do Russian women like to talk about,” I asked Yana.

“I’m Ukrainian,” she said. But mostly we talk about the normal things that women talk about. Clothes, food, our children, our men. And about love. We like very much to talk about love.”

I’m back in Kyiv. I won’t spell that name K-I-E-V ever again. I’m writing this draft on a computer with less than a gig of hard drive and Cyrillic letters on the keyboard. My back is hurting like the dickens because I’ve no where to stretch my feet as the computer is perched atop the kitchen counter.

One piece of luck, when I was twelve years young, I learned “touch typing” on the old manual Smith-Corona typewriter in my father’s office. Sometimes old skills come in handy. But it seems that Negotiation is one of the oldest skills known to human kind. And that’s a skill that doesn’t seem to be working right now. People who speak essentially the same language and come from the same ethnic stock will inevitably insist they are either Ukrainian or Russian. People whose ancestors came from the same mountains ten thousand years ago are still killing each other.

Natasha is looking over my shoulder now and reading this. She has said before that one thing that gets us both in trouble is our habit of being “too direct.” And Russian ethnic types prefer more room to maneuver in verbal communication. But with that, she has just asked me, “Why are you writing this?”

I say somewhat darkly, “Because some people are convinced, however foolishly, that I have some expertise and skills which they are willing to pay for. It’s my free working vacation.”

“No,” she says. “I don’t mean why are you getting paid. I mean why are you bothering to write this? Will anyone read it? Will anything change?”

Maybe she is partly referring to the anti-Kuchma demonstrations of the past day. The President of Ukraine is not a popular political figure and is a significant reason for the lack of influx of Western capital investment. Although Kuchma has beautified Kyiv, he’s also seen as a risk, as a future minor despot. I saw a portion of the ten thousand police, garrisoned across from my flat that he’d called up to quell the political demonstrations. I also came inches from crossing paths with a police truncheon and my Internet server was down for 36 hours while Kuchma vainly tried to suppress the westward egress of information about his efforts.

“Well, in that way,” I answer Natasha, “not enough will read this to ever matter. And those with the power are rarely concerned with the best interests of the public. Enron exists everywhere. So, I guess I’m writing this just because I need to. In the end, only the names change and most people will continue to believe whatever their hegemonic system markets. So, Tasha, I’m guessing that what I write probably will not matter.”

Natasha has never heard of Enron. The metaphor escapes her. Despite this, she responds with an “Aha,” said with that typically throaty inflection on the letter H. “Now,” she says, “you are starting to think like a Russian.

Endnotes: After the events at the Moscow Theatre, I received an email from the hotel manager in Stavropol. She said she will not now relocate to Moscow and that, “No longer is anyone anywhere safe from terrorists and gangsters.” She added, “I am sorry to tell you that Dima, the police captain, tells that more of his young boys have been murdered.” She then concluded, “I don’t know why there is everywhere such evil and violence. But I believe there is good in love and nature. I really believe this.” – I hope hers is not just youthful naiveté. I hope she is right. ◊◊
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Publication Date: 11-04-2009

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