Raduev, tells Misha, writes in prison a book about his Kizliar operation. Raduev has a rosary, consisting of 99 little bones and he prays to Allah three times a day. In the morning, after the get-up, before food intake at noon and before the retreat call. Before the praying Raduev washes himself, three times the nose, three times the ears, neck, feet. (Even before the prayer Raduev goes to the toilet and also makes ablutions from a plastic bottle. In this sense Muslims are cleaner than our people). Then Raduev gets up on the bed, where he has already unfolded a green mat. He gets on his knees, makes bows to Allah and reads prayers, running his fingers over the rosary. Each time he prays about ten minutes. (I recalled that Geydar Dzhemal said to me in Kazan, for a Muslim the prayer is like the raising of the flag and the uniting of the armed community in precisely indicated hours of the day. Uniting.) During the reading of prayers Raduev exclaims “Allah akbar!” All of this happens in cell No 101. However he eats prison food without restraint.
Raduev has a wife and two children. According to Kuskov’s stories, Raduev’s book begins from the moment when he captured Kizlyar with his people and called Mashadov and asked: what do we have to do? Mashadov responded: “Salman, you are Allah’s warriors, go and receive death!” A great beginning for a book.
According to Kuskov, Raduev writes documentarily: such and such document number, such directive. Raduev was blown up eight times. Regardless of the fact that he had a dozen of completely exact-looking “Volgas” and he chose himself each time in which to sit. Once a fortuneteller told him not to go anywhere in a car. Raduev pushed her aside, the Chechens, supposedly are not used to believe in fortune telling. His body guard, a relative, said: “Salman, let me sit on the right today.” And sat. The bomb exploded under the seat. Raduev has his sport suit burned.
Raduev sleeps with a large band on his eyes, a glass eye, a remade nose, a beard all over the face. He became friends with Misha and even went to the isolation ward chief to ask that they don’t transfer him from the cell. Raduev lost his eye in the following way: He was driving a little UAZ with his staff, six persons in all. They were shot at by the OMON. They shot from the right. The bullet entered by the nose, then in the left eye and came out behind, breaking off a little piece of the skull and continued its motion.
The Chechen who sat behind Raduev was killed by the same bullet. On a high speed the little UAZ turned over. Those who remained alive ran away into the village. Raduev remained seated, holding the falling off part of the head. Only three hours later he was brought to the hospital. The doctor said: “he’s a cadaver!” But he did the operation. Meanwhile they buried someone, saying that Raduev died. On the funerals ceremony only Raduev’s wife knew that he was alive and that they bury the body of another person. As for Raduev he went to Germany. Where they assembled from pieces, put a titanium plate in the skull, a glass eye. In Lefortovo Raduev is taken every morning around ten o’clock to the investigator where he reads all the 126 volumes of his judiciary case on the attack on Kizlyar. Around lunch he is taken to the cell. After lunch they take him to the investigator again where he reads the case’s materials again. In the bath, Kuskov says, one can see that there is not a living spot left on Salman’s body. Raduev does not lose his heart, he even, to a certain degree, relaxes in prison. As outside his day began with him being brought a pile of requests from his subordinates – fighters from “Dudaev’s army”. “I request to allocate me 50 dollars for the replacement of the carburetor”, “I request to allocate me 10 thousand dollars because I want to get married”, and if you don’t, tomorrow half-Chechnya will know that this Raduev does not support his heroes-soldiers.
These sometimes-anecdotic details, give in actual fact an idea about the kind of people whom the Russian Army fights in Chechnya. Basaev, who gave the instruction to film on video the amputation of his foot, Raduev who spent several hours seated, supporting his skull’s top, have a high-quality fighting instinct. “Salman, you are warriors of Allah, go and receive death!” is a heroic sentence, notwithstanding that they went to receive death from our Russian soldiers. And they brought death and they bring it to Russian soldiers.
The mass media are not able to understand anything in guys like Raduev, Basaev, captain Dragan, like Arcan (recently died), like Kostenko (died in 1992) because the journalists live among commoners, are themselves commoners and they write for commoners. For the commoner, Raduev is a crackpot.
The Chechens are a small people, who made fighting instinct the principal platform of their national character. This is why among them fighting instinct is more often present. Their warriors are not only those who were born warriors, but Chechen society also educates warriors, produces them. Our society on the contrary tramples even those who were born with a fighting instinct. The society of the future, the civilization that we want to set in place of the sticky disgusting disgrace that happens on Russia’s territory would have to preach, propagandize, prefer and educate fighting instinct. Not to maintain a huge, lazy, sweating army, running for vodka across fences, but to create a possibility for the use of fighting instinct for those who were born warriors. How did I write it in the number 151 of “Limonka” in “I have a dream…?” That’s how I wrote it:
“Will we produce weapons? Of course, we will. We will wage wars. But not those like before, not front on front. Our people will infiltrate their territories, familiarize their people with our way of living and ideas and the healthiest and strongest among them will become our people, our nation. And afterwards our forces will invade and finish off those who disagree. We will need land. The frozen Russia was captured by the claws of uncreative stupid administrators, poor of spirit. We will have to leave Russia, to build a nest on the fresh central lands, conquer them and there put the start of a new unseen civilization of free warriors, united in an armed community. Roaming across steppes and mountains, fighting in southern States.”
And for that we will need in abundance people with fighting instinct. Those who don’t have it will do other things, perhaps less honorable.
The existence of such unordinary people like the Chechens or the suddenly broken out Iran revolution (that refuted in 1980 all the theories of “progress” and a united civilization) or the Taliban movement, or the suddenly armed forces of “God’s children” appeared in Burma, where the tiny twins Johnny and Luther – leaders of this children’s crusade – all this phenomena shout and scream: the world doesn’t want to be homogenous! It is not homogenous. The world was forcibly driven into shackles and blocks of the western civilization. Victories over the civilization of the greedy protestant ascetics (I just see these vampires in suits and hypertrophied Adam’s apples) are possible. There are victories, there will be more of them. We will demolish this ant-like cold world of submission, people with fighting instinct didn’t stop to appear on this planet.