SIRAZHDI, YAKHA, AND THEIR FRIENDS
Only a madman could envy the Chechens who live in Russia now. In years gone by, their situation was unenviable, but since the Nord-Ost siege, the machinery of racially based state retribution has been in overdrive. Racial attacks and purges supervised by the police have become commonplace. In a single moment people’s lives are ruined, they lose their home, their jobs, any sort of social support, and for just one reason: they are Chechens. Their lives in Moscow and many other cities are intolerable: drugs are slipped into their pockets, cartridges are pressed into their hands, and they are promptly sentenced to several years in prison. They have been quite openly made into pariahs and find themselves at a dead end, with no chance of escape. It is a way of life that leaves nobody unscathed, regardless of age.
“When they started speaking in Chechen and interrupted the second act, I realized that things were serious, and that they were going to get worse. I somehow saw that very clearly straight away.” Yakha Neserhaeva is a forty-three-year-old Muscovite, an economist by profession. She is a Chechen born in Grozny, but she moved to the capital long ago. On October 23 she went to see Nord-Ost. Her friend Galya, whom she has known for many years, is from the northern Russian town of Ukhta. She bought tickets for the thirteenth row of the stalls, and, although Yakha was not that keen on musicals, Galya begged her to come along.
“Did you tell them you were a Chechen?”
“No. I was frightened. I did not know whether it was better to tell them or not. They might have shot me for being a Chechen at a musical.”
Yakha did not see the gas, although many of the hostages noticed white clouds of something in the air. From where she was sitting, she just heard people shouting, “They’ve released gas!” and a few seconds later, she blacked out.
She came to in No. 13 Hospital, to which many victims were taken, including Irina Fadeeva, mother of Yaroslav, the boy who was shot. Feeling sick, Yakha didn’t have much idea of what was going on. Soon an investigator appeared.
“He asked my name, surname, where I live, where I was born, and what I was doing at Nord-Ost. Then two women came, took my fingerprints and took my clothing away for forensic examination. The investigator came back in the evening and said, ‘I have bad news for you.’ The first thing I thought was that the friend I had gone to the musical with had died, but he said, ‘You are being arrested as an accomplice of the terrorists.’ It was a shock, but I got up and walked after the investigator in hospital slippers and a dressing gown. I was first taken for two days to No. 20 Hospital [a special-purpose, secure hospital], where nobody asked me anything or gave me any treatment. In fact, I received no treatment at any time. At the end of the second day, the investigator came again. I was photographed, and they recorded a sample of my voice. A few minutes later, they brought me a coat and a pair of men’s half-boots, put me in handcuffs, and said, ‘You need treatment in a different hospital.’ They put me in a police car, took me to the prosecutor’s office for ten minutes or so, and then to the Mariino Prison [a women’s isolation holding facility in Moscow]. So there I was, with boots three sizes too big for me on my bare feet, in a dirty man’s overcoat, unwashed and unkempt for a week. They took me to a cell, and all the woman supervisor said was, ‘Well now, you plague virus…”’
“Did they question you frequently while you were in solitary confinement?”
“I wasn’t questioned at all. I just sat there and asked the wardress for a meeting with the investigator.”
Yakha speaks quietly, slowly, without emotion. She seems barely to be present. Her face is that of a dead person, her eyes dilated, her gaze fixed, her muscles immobile. The photograph in her passport seems to show someone else; the face is that of a proud and beautiful woman.
Yakha does sometimes attempt a smile, but it is as if in the two weeks she spent in prison her muscles forgot how to respond. She thought she was done for and that nothing could save her. The situation was as bad as it could be. The police officers who transferred her from No. 20 Hospital, the only people who had had anything to tell her about her future, had informed her that she would “answer for all of them,” since all the other terrorists had been exterminated and she was the only one left.
As normally happens in musicals, however, Yakha’s story had a happy ending.
Her friends rallied around and swiftly engaged a lawyer who managed by a miracle to break through the seemingly impenetrable wall surrounding Yakha Neserhaeva. After ten days she was released from prison. Surprisingly, in these racist times, the investigators of the prosecutor’s office who were working on the team investigating the Nord-Ost incident, finding nothing that remotely incriminated Yakha, simply did the decent thing. They did not set about trying to frame her, or tailor the charge to the individual, plant evidence, abuse or mock her. They made no attempt to take revenge on a Chechen woman purely because she was Chechen. Nowadays that is quite something.
They went even further. When they advised Yakha that she was free to go, they apologized and had her driven home. For that, she has senior investigator and lawyer first class V. Prikhozhikh to thank. She also has the officials of the Bogorodskoe Department of Internal Affairs to thank. They issued Yakha’s elder sister Malika, who had rushed from Grozny to Moscow to help Yakha get back on her feet, a special permit to remain in the capital because a relative was in need of constant care. They issued the permit in the knowledge that without it, any Chechen in Moscow today cannot go out of the front door without being arrested immediately.
AELITA SHIDAEVA, THIRTY-ONE, is a Chechen, too. Since the beginning of the present war, she has been living with her parents and daughter, Hadizhat, in Moscow. Aelita was arrested where she worked, in a café by the Mariino underground station. She tells me her story in a calm and restrained manner, without tears or hysteria, smiling politely. You might suppose she had experienced nothing out of the ordinary, if you didn’t know that when she was finally released from the Mariino Park police station after seven hours of relentless interrogation, she promptly collapsed.
“It was all pretty weird. First there was this one policeman having his dinner in our café. Nothing unusual, they often eat with us. The police station is one hundred meters from our front door. I’ve never hidden from them that I am a Chechen who fled Grozny to get away from the war. Anyway, this policeman finished his meal and went out, and suddenly the rest of them came rushing in. About fifteen of them, headed by our local policeman, Vasiliev. He knows me very well, too. They stood us all up against the wall, searched us, and took me in.”
“And what questions did they ask you?”
“‘What were my relations with the terrorists?’ I said to them, ‘You all saw me yourselves. I’ve been right in front of you for twelve hours every day, from eleven in the morning until eleven at night.”’
“What did they reply?”
“‘Which of the terrorists did you go to a restaurant with?’ I have never even been to a restaurant in Moscow. It isn’t something I do. They said if I did not confess to links with the terrorists, they would plant drugs or weapons on me. They took turns interrogating me. Some suspicious-looking men in uniform were passing by and staring at me. The investigator said that if I did not confess to links with the terrorists, he would give me to these guys and they would ‘eat me alive.’ He said they were just waiting to get at me because they could make anyone talk.”