Aslan does not even smoke cigarettes. On October 30 he spent his twenty-second birthday in the Matrosskaya Tishina Prison.
ON THE MORNING of October 25, 2002, police officers burst into the Moscow apartment of the Chechen Gelagoev family. Alihan, the owner of the flat, was handcuffed and taken away. His wife, Marek, rushed for help to the Rostokino police station but was told that no officers had gone out from there. She called Radio Liberty, which reported Alihan Gelagoev’s abduction, and by evening he was released. She had pressed the right buttons.
Alihan told me that in the car the police had put a sack over his head and beaten him for a long time as they were going to Petrovka, the street where the Moscow Central Police Department is located. They shouted, “You hate us and we hate you. You kill us and we will kill you.”
When they arrived at Petrovka, however, they stopped beating him and tried for many hours to persuade him to sign a confession saying that he was the ideological mastermind behind the terrorist attack on Nord-Ost. This is the sort of thing that used to happen in the Stalin years. The confession had even been written in advance, as was the practice in the earlier period. All Alihan had to do was sign at the bottom.
He refused, but to obtain his freedom he had no option but to sign a statement to the effect that he had come voluntarily to the Central Police Department and had no complaints to make against its officers.
Racism? Yes. Appalling behavior? Of course. It is also a travesty of a war against terrorism. I do not believe a single statistic produced by the police authorities on the progress of the antiterrorist “Operation Whirlwind,” telling the world how many “terrorists’ accomplices” they have caught. The figures are bogus. The police are bogus officers churning out bogus reports based on bogus investigations.
In the meantime, where are the terrorists? What are they up to? Who knows? The police have no time to think about that. Putin is presiding over a return to the Soviet methods of bogus activity in place of real work.
THE POLICE INTERROGATORS were very reassuring, thirty-six-year-old Zelimhan Nasaev tells me. “Don’t worry,” they said, “you’ll get three or four years and then you’ll be out. They may give you a suspended sentence. Just sign here. Make it easy on yourself.”
Zelimhan has been living in Moscow for many years. His family, following his elder sister Inna, moved here to escape the second Chechen war.
“Were you beaten at the police station?”
“Of course. They woke me up at three in the morning and said, ‘Time for the pressure.’ They beat me through a hard surface [evidently a technique to leave no external sign of injury] on the kidneys and liver, to make me sign a confession, but I wouldn’t. I said, ‘Pressure me, then. Even if you shoot me, I’m not going to let you pin anything on me.’ They kept saying, ‘What’s a Chechen like you doing here? Your country is Chechnya. Go back there and get on with your war.’ I told them, ‘My country is Russia, and I am in my own capital city.’ They got very angry about that. To make me lose control of myself, one of the policemen said, ‘Well, I’ve just come from fucking your mother.”’
If only that agent in the Nizhegorodsky police station had known whose mother he was claiming to have raped, whom he was beating up and trying to coerce into admitting to a crime he never committed, in order to boost the policeman’s rating in the post-Nord-Ost campaign to “crack down on Chechen criminals in Moscow”! But perhaps it’s just as well he didn’t know.
Roza Nasaeva is the granddaughter, and Zelimhan the great-grandson, of the legendary Russian beauty Maria-Mariam of the Romanov family, a relative of Emperor Nicholas II who fell passionately in love with Vakhu, a Chechen officer of the czarist army. She eloped with him to the Caucasus, converted to Islam, took the name Mariam, bore Vakhu five children, was deported with him to Kazakhstan and, after his death there, returned to Chechnya. She died there in the 1960s, regarded almost as a Chechen saint. This lovely story of Russo-Chechen friendship and love, known throughout the Caucasus, is of little help at the moment, however, because nothing could save Zelimhan from the Moscow police. Even if he had the blood of ten emperors flowing in his veins, they would treat Zelimhan exactly as they treat any other Chechen.
There are parts of Moscow you really do not want to go to, grim places behind factories, within industrial zones, or beneath high-voltage electricity lines, and they are where you will find the Chechens who are still trying to survive in the capital city. Frezer Road is one such location, a dour strip of asphalt leading from Ryazan Prospekt out past barely habitable five-story brick buildings to industrial slums very remote from the life of the metropolis.
Actually, they weren’t ever intended for human habitation. Officially, they are still the workshops of a milling factory that ceased to exist long ago, a victim of perestroika. Its workers departed, and today the factory bosses make a living by renting out the derelict workshops and other premises. In one such dirty, looted, former factory building, the first Chechen refugees appeared, in 1997. They had fled the criminal anarchy that reigned between the first and the second Chechen wars and were mainly members of families opposed to the Chechens Maskhadov and Basaev. The directors of the milling factory allowed the refugees to refurbish the workshops, convert them into living accommodations, and then pay tribute to the bosses.
The Chechens live there to this day, the Nasaevs among them, one of twenty-six families. The local police know them all perfectly well. Nobody is on the run or in hiding because nobody has any wish to do so, or indeed anywhere to run to.
When the Nord-Ost hostage taking occurred, the police from the Nizhegorodsky station headed straight here, explaining that they had orders to arrest a quota of fifteen Chechens “in every precinct.” All the men of the twenty-six families were arrested and taken away in buses for fingerprinting.
It was Zelimhan Nasaev-Romanov’s bad luck that he wasn’t at home at the time. He had gone to deliver a batch of the pens the family assembles at home and to collect the components for the next assignment.
The police soon came back to the industrial shack where the imperial family’s descendant lives. They needed his fingerprints, they said, and Roza let him go without a fuss. The parents began to worry only several hours later, when their son had not returned. Finally his mother and father set off to the police station, where they were told, in typically inane fashion, “Your son had a grenade and a fuse in his pocket. We have arrested him.”
“I shouted, ‘You have no right to do this! You took him away yourselves. He left the house with you and there was nothing in his pockets. There were plenty of witnesses,’” Roza tells me. “The policeman just said, ‘Here Chechens don’t count as witnesses.’ I was so offended. Are we no longer citizens, then?”
When Zelimhan’s mother returned to the police station the next morning, they told her, “Your son is also dealing in marijuana. You can’t help him.”
“We got there and they took me to an office,” Zelimhan tells me. “They said, ‘You are dealing in heroin.’ The more senior officer was holding a small packet in his hand and announced, ‘This is yours now.’ I was handcuffed. They put the packet into my pocket. I began to protest. Then they said, ‘All right, then, we’ll add a fuse from a”lemon.“’ I saw the senior policeman was already wiping a fuse with a rag to remove other people’s fingerprints. He shoved it in my hand and made a note. I again shouted, ‘You have no right to do this!’ And they told me, ‘We have our orders. We have every right, and if you aren’t a good boy and don’t agree to help us by admitting to the crime, your relatives will follow you. We are going back to your house now to search, and we’re going to find another part of the same grenade. Sign the confession.”’