In the Ruins of Grozny

Jus

t before nine every morning Anna Vasilikhina leaves the fourth-floor apartment where she has lived for more than 30 years — and where her husband was murdered by looters 14 months ago — and walks to her job as head nurse in a nearby children's clinic. Like nearly every other building in Grozny, her five-story block was largely destroyed during the Russian assault in January 2000, and only one other family still lives on her staircase. The hall, however, is neatly swept, and chalked in an authoritative hand on the door of each empty apartment is a notice: "Checked 26.12.00."

This is Anna's work. After the last Russian military zachistka, or house-to-house search, when front doors were kicked in and remaining property disappeared, she paid a carpenter to wedge the doors shut, and she wrote the inscriptions in the hopes of warding off more raids. As Anna leaves the building, she worries about the stench from the two corpses that have lain in an adjoining apartment for the past year: a bed-ridden woman and her adult son who were killed during the Russian offensive. Neither the Russian military nor the Moscow-appointed Chechen administration has responded to appeals to remove the remains, and local people worry that the horrible odor that haunted them last summer will return when the cold weather ends. Outside another foul smell assaults her nostrils: the cellars of the buildings are filled with raw sewage that has gathered there over the last year.

She makes her way through the bombed-out courtyard with the water pump in the middle — Grozny has no running water and no electricity — to the end of the block, then turns left toward the clinic, which stands in a patch of open ground. There she passes a fresh grave amid the garbage. It contains two bodies, burned beyond recognition, that locals discovered recently in the grounds of a nearby kindergarten. The residents buried them there and surmise they were killed during a military raid. No one was surprised by the discovery: as another resident of the courtyard, a pretty teenager named Luiza Israilova, put it: "everyone has got used to killings." The district where Anna lives, Mikrorayon, is pretty much a safe area for anti-Russian guerrillas, who recently detonated two remote-controlled mines and killed a soldier in the space of a couple of days.

The only things atypical about Anna are that she is an ethnic Russian — she came here with her family as a small girl in 1946 — and she has a job. The clinic's staff has not been paid since August, and it survives without any appreciable help from the Russians or their Chechen allies. But work there probably keeps Anna sane. And as she and a colleague talk about their lives these days, she pauses and says what nearly everyone here says sooner or later: "What a great city this was."

Until the beginning of the 1990s, when the Soviet Union began to disintegrate, Grozny was one of the most livable places in the Caucasus. The climate was mild, the surrounding countryside spectacular, and fruit, grapes, wine and dairy products abundant. There was a cosmopolitan population of over half a million: Russians, Chechens, Armenians, Azeris, Jews and other peoples of the Caucasus. Now Grozny is more like a post-nuclear nightmare, a city systematically leveled by the Russian military campaign that propelled Vladimir Putin to the presidency a year ago, where gunfire and explosions are still so common that they blend into the normal sounds of the city.

These days 200,000 people live here. There are no shops, just muddy, improvised bazaars. There is little work. Some residents scavenge bricks from ruins for resale, others sell the crude oil that bubbles up in many backyards — oil is one of the main prizes being fought over in this war. Many thousands depend on handouts from the few international agencies working in the city. Grozny's mayor, Beslan Gantemirov — amnestied in 1999 from a Russian prison where he was serving six years for embezzling municipal reconstruction funds after the last Chechen war in the mid-'90s — is highly visible. Thanks to his fast cars and retinue of heavies with nicknames like King Kong, he can hardly be missed. But local people say he does little to help, and official salaries are paid only intermittently. At 6 p.m., when darkness starts to fall, the city freezes in fear. A shoot-on-sight curfew comes into effect that lasts until around 7:30 the next morning. The only people who move around the streets at night are guerrillas and élite Russian ambush teams known as "secrets." Meanwhile the city is in almost total darkness, and the only permanent light comes from gas torches — hoses run from natural gas lines, propped against a brick and lit to give a flickering light — in courtyards and apartments.

Moscow insists that it is winning the war, that the Chechens are rallying to its side, and that the situation in Grozny is almost normal. Many Western critics of Russia's operations in Chechnya, Putin said during an Internet conference earlier this month, just do not understand what is happening. "We feel that the actions of the Russian army are aimed at liberating the Chechen people from the terrorists who seized power and who compromise Islam and the Chechen people," Putin said reassuringly. He may well believe that. Yet as a visit to Grozny makes evident, the Russians are not only failing to win new friends in the city, they are losing old ones — the Chechens who fought alongside the advancing Russians last year, the city policemen who warn locals away from improvised checkpoints and the professionals Chechnya desperately needs if it is ever to re-emerge from the ruins.

At the city's Teachers Training Institute, for example, pro-rector Makhmud Kerimov says attendance is down. Until December it was around 80%. Then one morning, apparently in retaliation for an attack on a Russian armored personnel carrier 2 km away, Russian forces opened fire on the college. On and off for two and half hours they strafed the building — targeting kids who tried to make a break for safety, Kerimov says, and killing five outstanding students. An investigation was opened, which then lapsed. Now he and his colleagues no longer feel they can urge students to come to class. Without pausing for breath, Kerimov describes other cases of military abuse, including the way he, an invalid, was forced to stand spread-eagled against a wall for four hours during one raid. Then he suddenly stops. "This is no anti-terrorist operation," he says, using the official name for the Russian operation in Chechnya. "What's happening here is the extermination of our people."

Kerimov is, like Putin, a graduate of Leningrad University. He and his colleagues are hardly wild-eyed secessionists. "I hated Maskhadov, Basayev, Khattab," he said, referring to Aslan Maskhadov, the President of independent Chechnya, and his most controversial commanders. "Now I am ready to pray to them." Other lecturers just want to leave. In 1944 the Soviets deported all Chechens to Central Asia. Thousands died, and the survivors were allowed home only in 1957. This time, said Kerimov's colleague Said Yushaev, the Russians want to force Chechens to go, "like the [Jewish] diaspora."