Alvi also told them that the main reason his family was in Moscow and not in Chechnya, in spite of how uncomfortable things were for them here, was to enable their children to go to school without a war taking place around them. Zulai was a math teacher, but she had to work at a market stall in Moscow, not something she was good at. They spent their evenings rolling chicken cutlets to sell in the morning. Everything he and Zulai did was for the sake of their children.
“Well, how about that! They’re worming their way right into the center of Moscow! And they expect to be given a $500 apartment!” This was the reaction of the parents’ committee to Alvi’s appeal.
“I do not want my son or my daughter to be taught in the same class as someone like that.” Such was the verdict Alvi and Zulai were given at that meeting.
“Who says we’re wrong?” the members of the parents’ committee demand.
Well, nobody, of course.
It is worth remembering an incident that began in a similar way in the twentieth century but had a different ending. When the Fascists entered Denmark, the Jews were ordered to sew yellow stars on their clothing so they could be easily recognized. The Danes promptly sewed on yellow stars, both to save the Jews and to save themselves from turning into Fascists. Their king joined with them.
In Moscow today, the situation is quite the opposite. When the authorities struck at the Chechens who are our neighbors, we did not sew on yellow stars in solidarity with them. Instead, we are making sure that Sirazhdi never loses the sense of being a pariah.
At my request, he shows me his exercise book for the Russian language. His marks range from poor 2’s to average 3’s. Sirazhdi’s handwriting is untidy, as Yelena Dmitrievna reminds him on almost every page. She is his class mistress and writes out her words of admonition in a trained calligraphic hand. She has been a teacher for thirty-five years, all of them in a primary school.
Yelena Dmitrievna did not support the parents’ committee in its campaign to get rid of the Chechen boy, but neither did she take a stand. She did not categorically refuse to be part of the group’s efforts to oust the youngster, although she could have done so, thereby halting in its tracks the Digaev family’s persecution by the notorious Russian public opinion assault being waged by the committee.
Sirazhdi is spinning like a top. He really has no wish to show me his Russian exercise book. He does his best to divert my attention to his math book, where the situation is much happier. Sirazhdi is an ordinary boy who can’t sit still. The main thing is that he very much wants to look good. Why should he be any different, a modest little boy keeping his head down as the parents’ committee would like him to, to make him less of a Chechen?
Even his math book soon bores him. Promising to draw a “sword and a man,” he goes off in a great rush. He does everything in a great rush. Soon he returns, bearing a pad with the outline of a strongman with powerful muscles from The Lord of the Rings, and a light saber represented by a smudge of yellow crayon.
“You know, we only wanted what was best for him,” the parents of Class 2b now say, realizing that the story of their campaign against a small Chechen boy in the wake of the Nord-Ost hysteria has been taken up by journalists. “Only what was best…”
Is Sirazhdi going to believe in what they think is best for him? He does fight at playtime. In art lessons he throws paint at the wall. He trips up his classmates, too, and the more often he misbehaves, the more it is made clear to him that he is the odd one out in Class 2b.
THIS IS LIFE in Russia after Nord-Ost. The months have passed, and many Russians have gradually begun to understand that this appalling tragedy has its uses. In fact, it has come in handy for lots of people, for a lot of reasons.
First in line has been the president, with his folksy cynicism. He has taken to reaping international dividends from this horror and its deadly outcome. Nor has he balked at allowing other people’s blood to be spilled for his PR purposes inside Russia.
At the bottom of the heap are the petty squabbles in a small school and the rank-and-file police officers who were only too glad to beef up their antiterrorist scores before the New Year in order to qualify for bonuses. The frantic anti-Chechen chauvinism of the days immediately following Nord-Ost have mellowed to a pragmatic, steady racism.
“Do we take up arms, then?” some of the Chechen men ask. You can hear them grinding their teeth in impotence. “I can’t take this anymore,” groan others. Their impatience and anger are a sign of weakness, of course, which does not suit them at all, especially since their children are watching. What should they do?[13]
AKAKY AKAKIEVICH PUTIN II
I have wondered a great deal about why I am so intolerant of Putin. What is it that makes me dislike him so much as to feel moved to write a book about him? I am not one of his political opponents or rivals, just a woman living in Russia. Quite simply, I am a forty-five-year-old Muscovite who observed the Soviet Union at its most disgraceful in the 1970s and 1980s. I really don’t want to find myself back there again.
I am making a point of finishing the writing of this book on May 6, 2004. There has been no miraculous challenging of the results of the March 14 presidential election. The opposition has acquiesced. Accordingly, tomorrow sees the start of Putin II, the president reelected by an unbelievable majority of more than 70 percent. Even if we knock off 20 percent as window dressing (i.e., ballot rigging), he still received enough votes to secure the presidency.
In a few hours Putin, a typical lieutenant colonel of the Soviet KGB, a soul brother of Akaky Akakievich, downtrodden hero of Gogol’s story “The Greatcoat,” will ascend to the throne of Russia once again. His outlook is the narrow, provincial one his rank would suggest; he has the unprepossessing personality of a lieutenant colonel who never made it to colonel, the manner of a Soviet secret policeman who habitually snoops on his colleagues. And he is vindictive: not a single political opponent has been invited to the inauguration ceremony, nor a single political party that is in any way out of step.
Leonid Brezhnev was a distasteful figure; Yury Andropov was bloody, although at least he had a democratic veneer. Konstantin Chernenko was dumb, and Russians disliked Mikhail Gorbachev. At times, Boris Yeltsin had us crossing ourselves at the thought of where his doings might be leading us.
Here is their apotheosis. Tomorrow their bodyguard from Unit 25—the man in the security cordon when VIP motorcades drove by—Akaky Akakievich Putin will strut down the red carpet of the Kremlin throne room as if he really were the boss there. Around him the polished czarist gold will gleam, the servants will smile submissively, his comrades in arms, a choice selection from the lower ranks of the KGB who could have risen to important posts only under Putin, will swell with self-importance.
One can imagine Lenin strutting around like a nabob when he arrived in the vanquished Kremlin in 1918 after the revolution. The official Communist histories—we have no others—assure us that, in fact, his strutting was modest, but his modesty, you can just bet, was insolent. Look at humble little me! You thought I was a nobody, but now I’ve made it. I’ve broken Russia just as I intended to. I’ve forced her to vow allegiance to me.
Tomorrow a KGB snoop, who even in that capacity did not make much of an impression, will strut through the Kremlin just as Lenin did. He will have had his revenge.
Let us, however, run the reel backward a little.
13
A wave of racism (not only against Chechens but against people of non-Slavic appearance) washed over Russia after the