Thomas Goltz - Chechnya Diary

“I don’t understand you,” said Isa, as he sat down to a meat-and-potatoes meal at his grieving sister’s house. “First you get in a fight with those ladies because you were trying to take their picture, and then when you have permission to do so, you don’t want to!”

I tried to explain the ethical problem of using posed material, as well as the concept of spontaneity—and was surprised when Isa seemed to understand.

“Look,” he said, after slurping down a bowl of broth. “I understand what you are trying to do. You want to make a program. But you can’t do it helter-skelter on the street. Everyone’s paranoid and ready to shoot suspected spies on sight!”

“The old ladies, anyway.”

“Others, too, believe me,” said Isa. “What we need is a long-term base of operations, and I think I know the perfect place. It’s about a half hour down the road. My family has a house there. One of my brothers stays in it, and we can too. But I should warn you that it is a small town. It may not be as interesting as Achkoi or Urus Martan, and certainly not as exciting, war-wise, as Grozny, or even Shali. But for the short term, until we get our feet on the ground, it is a perfect place.”

“What’s it called?”

“Samashki.”

No car. Isa hit me up for five hundred dollars for expenses in the smuggle job; God knows how much more will eventually be due. Then we waited for another vehicle to go to this place called Sharmalsheikh or Shamalsi or something. It’s a dump and I wonder why the fuck I am here. Am I kidnapped and do not know it? My flak jacket and power supply got left in Isa’s sister’s house in that other town, she being the mother of the recently martyred Zaur and the town being whatever the hell they call it—one of the many “martans” around here anyway. Lesson learned: Never, ever leave anything anywhere, again! When I went back to collect my kit, I found some drunk fighting with people in the street. Action? asks camera-eye I. But then Isa steps in and forbids me to film the event. “Why not?” asks I. “Security,” says he. What the fuck is going on here? Back at his place, or his sister’s, the new car to transport us to Sharmalsheikh (with payment from me) turns out to be that of Isa’s brother, Musa. Surprise, surprise! At least any kidnapping is a family affair. So we drive the thirty kilometers or so through several checkpoints manned by kids with loose looking guns until we cross some muddy creek that the sign declares to be the Assa River and enter the S—or Sh—town (whatever it is called) and turn down a mud road to the left into a mud road to the right and another mud path to the left to pull up in front of some nondescript place with a mud front yard filled with chickens and turkey, the latter squatting in the lower branches of the courtyard’s pathetic trees. Then another brother, Muhammad, emerges and waves salutations, or something. No sooner are we inside the place than Isa informs me that driver brother Musa and he are going back to the funeral of their sister’s son in that other place called Something Martan. I just got conned into forking out five hundred bucks to some guy who plucks up the dough and drives off leaving me with his half-idiot brother who keeps hand grenades on the kitchen table like salt and pepper shakers, but lives nowhere near the front and looks nothing like any soldier I ever saw. What the hell have I got myself involved in?

That graph, dated February 18, 1995, was my first response to Samashki— Samashk, as the Chechens call the town, meaning “the place of deer.” My “Sharmalsheikh” is apparently a distortion inspired by the Egyptian Red Sea resort town I once stayed in, famous for diving and windsurfing.

Samashki was not a tourist town. It was my new dungeon, with a new minder—Isa’s brother Muhammad. To the extent he would allow me to see anything at all outside the house, what I saw was not much more than an overgrown, Soviet-style urban center of a collectivized agricultural zone. “Unprepossessing” was way too kind.

The High Street, as it were, was a stretch of asphalt so plastered with sludge that it did not even seem to be paved. It meandered through town like a weak spine, with smaller and muddier roads shooting off like ribs, leading to and through uniformly gray and drab rows of one- and two-story farmhouses, set cheek-to-jowl along the muddy lanes. A couple of gray, unfinished red brick and cement block apartment buildings broke up the visual monotony. Yes, Samashki was a dump, and I was not happy to be there.

Nor did it appear to be of any significance in the war. Muhammad mentioned something about a short battle that had taken place a few weeks before, when a column of Russian soldiers had decided to drive through town in search of vodka.

Vodka!

“There was an agreement with the elders that Samashki would stay neutral if the Russians would just stay away,” Muhammad related. “But a group of thirsty lads were unable to restrain themselves, and drove their armor down the main road….”

It was almost as if Muhammad were chiding children for some amusing quality or behavioral trait. Those darn Ruskies!

Others were less amused by the liquor raid. A group of residents attacked the armored personnel carriers with shotguns and pistols to drive them away.

“It was funny for awhile,” said Muhammad. “But then the Russians started firing back blindly from their machines, and it wasn’t funny anymore. ”

Shattered windows, exterior and interior walls raked by heavy machine-gun fire—and then the entire town (or at least a lot more people than the first assault group) descended on the column and literally tore it apart.

“Some of the lads threw blankets over the view-portals of the tanks,” said Muhammad, almost wistfully. “The Russians crashed into each other or drove off the road, and that is when we went in and got ’em.”

The results of the action were scattered around Samashki like so many new relics of war. Here were the blown-off turrets of the standard Soviet-style armored personnel carriers, known as BMPs and BTRs, stripped of their mounted machine guns, leaning crazily on edge in a parking lot, the body and the engine nowhere to be seen. There, a small battle tank with an anti-mine plough attached to the front, completely burnt out and stranded where it was stopped, wedged between two houses down a muddy lane.

Take on an armored column with shotguns and bottles filled with gasoline? It was difficult to imagine—and even more difficult attempting to understand why the Russians, after having effectively pacified Samashki through negotiations, had thrown away the loyalty of the town on the basis of needing another drink.

From the area of the battle, Muhammad and I continued on through the muddy streets of the town to the market. It consisted of six or seven (maybe it was a dozen) tacked-together stalls that sold L&M cigarettes, unwashed vegetables (mostly wild garlic greens), and Snickers bars. Perhaps the mohair shawls and socks being woven by the stoic women running said establishments were also on sale; I did not ask. I could not ask. As my personal minder in Isa’s absence, Muhammad consistently prevented me from making any contact with anyone. And he had forced me to leave my camera at home for reason of “security.”

“Folks here do not like foreigners,” he said. “Most think they are spies. Are you?”

“Ask your brother Isa, if he ever returns,” I shot back. “He brought me here.”

“There are many people here who wonder about Isa, too.”

Great , Isa’s own brother does not trust him… and certainly not me.

Where the hell was I? What the hell was I doing?