Zelimhan refused to sign anything. The officers beat him and said they would continue to beat him until he couldn’t be seen by any lawyer. They released him only because journalists and Aslambek Aslahanov, a deputy of the Duma, interceded. Now Zelimhan sits at home in his shack in a deep depression. He is afraid of every knock at the door. Depression is the characteristic mood of all the Chechens living among us. Not a single optimist is to be found among the young or the old. At least, I haven’t found any. Everybody dreams of emigrating so as to have a chance to merge into the cosmopolitan background somewhere and never have to reveal one’s nationality.
“There is an orgy of systematic police harassment of Chechens in Russia,” claims Svetlana Gannushkina, director of the Citizens’ Aid Committee for Assistance to Refugees and Displaced Persons. This is the organization to which people turn in their distress: Chechens whose relatives have been arrested, fingerprinted, and had drugs or cartridges planted on them; Chechens who have been fired from their jobs or threatened with deportation. (For heaven’s sake, where do you deport Russian citizens to from the capital of Russia?) They come to Svetlana Gannushkina because there is nowhere else for them to go.
“The signal for this new wave of frenzied state racism, officially called Antiterrorist Operation Whirlwind,” Svetlana continues, “was given immediately after the storming of the Dubrovka theater complex. Chechens are being expelled everywhere. The main problem is when they are fired from their jobs or driven out of their flats. This is a settling of scores with an entire group in retaliation for the acts of particular individuals. The main method used to discredit them as a nation is the false creation of criminal cases by planting drugs or cartridges. The policemen think they look cool when they mockingly ask their victims, ‘Which would you like: drugs or a cartridge?’ The only ones who get rescued are those with mothers like Makka Shidaeva. But what about all the others?”
And what sort of a nation are we, the Russian people?
One Chechen family has three daughters. One has passed the entrance exam and gotten into music school while the other two haven’t. The parents have asked their successful daughter’s teacher to give private piano lessons to her sisters. The teacher has refused. The head of the music school—where, of course, everyone knows everybody else’s business—will not allow the teacher to continue, saying she has received orders to that effect from the Department of Culture. If the teacher continues to teach the Chechens, the security services will start taking an interest in her.
Playing fast and loose with people’s livelihoods—and sometimes even their lives—is something that we, the Russian people, must own up to. The majority of us go along with the state’s xenophobia and feel no need to protest. Why not? Official propaganda is highly effective, and the majority share Putin’s belief that an entire people must shoulder collective responsibility for the crimes committed by a few.
The upshot, nevertheless, is that nobody yet knows, despite a war that has been going on for years, despite acts of terrorism, catastrophes, and torrents of refugees, what the authorities actually want from the Chechens. Do they want them to live within the Russian Federation or not?
IN CONCLUSION, HERE’S a straightforward story of ordinary people living in Russia and suffering from state-induced hysteria.
“Do you often get told off at school?”
“Yes.” Sirazhdi sighs.
“And is there a good reason?”
“Yes.” He sighs again.
“What do you do that is naughty?”
“I’m running down the corridor and somebody bashes into me and I always give them something back so they don’t think they can hurt me, and then the teachers ask me, ‘Did you hit them?’ and I always tell the truth and say, ‘Yes,’ but the others don’t and I get told off.”
“Perhaps you shouldn’t tell the truth either? You might not get into trouble.”
“I can’t.” He sighs heavily. “I’m not a girl. If I did it, I say, ‘I did it.”’
“You know, he tries to trip our children up so the little ones will hit their heads and die….”
Great heavens above! This is not Sirazhdi talking about himself now; grown-ups are talking about him. Not about a special operations agent trained to destroy terrorists but about a seven-year-old Chechen boy named Sirazhdi Digaev. The words represent the publicly expressed view of a certain woman member of the parents’ committee of Class 2b of No. 155 School, Moscow, which Sirazhdi attends.
“Well, do you know, my child complains, ‘Sirazhdi never has anything, and I have and I have to lend it to him.”’ This from another mother on the committee.
Why is this child complaining? Surely if the person next to you hasn’t got something and you do, you should bloody well lend it to him.
“He’s a nuisance to everyone. You have to understand that. My son told me he didn’t write down his homework in the class because Sirazhdi was making so much noise that he couldn’t hear the teacher. Sirazhdi is uncontrollable. Like all Chechens. You have to understand that,” opines another mother.
The conversation continues as we sit in an empty classroom. The second-grade children have gone home, and now the parents’ committee is discussing how to purge the school of a small Chechen so that “our children don’t learn bad things from a possible future terrorist.”
You think I must be making this up. Unfortunately I’m not.
“Don’t get us wrong. Even though he is a Chechen, we don’t discriminate between nationalities. No. We just want to protect our children….”
From what? In November the parents’ committee of Class 2b convened a meeting to warn Sirazhdi’s mother and father that, if they did not take him in hand by the New Year, and unless, “in spite of being a Chechen,” he started acting in accordance with the parents’ committee’s understanding of good behavior, they would demand that the head of No. 155 School expel him.
“Well, just tell me, why are they all piling into Moscow?” The real reason emerges when, one or two weeks later, a member of the parents’ committee tries to explain why they adopted the resolution.
Well, why should “they” not come to Moscow? Are the inhabitants of the capital so special that being brought into proximity with other citizens of Russia might have a negative effect on their sensibilities?
“Why is it you say they are having a hard time?” another parent almost shrieks. “Who asks if we are having a hard time? What makes you think our children are having it any easier than he is?”
Why? Well, Sirazhdi was born in Chechnya in 1995. When his mother, Zulai, was pregnant, there was shelling and bombing all around her. She fled because when the first Chechen war started, she had no option. Today Zulai has complicated feelings when she sees that, even though they moved to Moscow in 1996 and her youngest son has been a Muscovite for most of his life, he is still terrified by fireworks and thunderstorms. He hides and cries but doesn’t know why.
“Oh, so it’s because they don’t feel at home here yet,” floats up the ratty voice of another member of the parents’ committee. “They think they can impose their ways on us? No, thank you very much!”
The irritation has arisen because Alvi, Sirazhdi’s father, came to the meeting, listening to everything the parents had to say to him, and then took the floor himself and dared to explain his problems—that in front of his children he had been cursed at by a policeman who marched into their room in his jackboots, and that he, a father, had been unable to do anything about it. The children had seen it all.