JOST A MON

For the Chechens, the fall of the Soviet Union turned out to be a disaster of unmitigated proportions. For centuries since they were first defeated by the Imperial Russians, they had - along among the tribes of the Caucasus - waged off and on rebellions against authority. During the occasional ceasefire, their martial prowess was absorbed into the Russian army, where, despite their obstreperous natures, they served with iron discipline. Few of them gained the full trust of their ostensible masters, and, like all their fellow highlanders, they were always discriminated against. And so in the brave new world of the Imperium, they were forced to continue in their age-old rhythms of life - loyalty to the clan, a rigid class system, and a deep suspicion of all outsiders.

When the Soviet Union imploded, the Chechens found themselves with a freedom they suddenly couldn't handle. Without an external force to throttle their exuberance, they returned to their traditional pastimes of raiding and pillaging. The elders of the major clans made it clear to the minions that class divisions would continue. Some clans created a Russia-wide network of smugglers, carting across the porous borders all manner of commodities. Everything was fair game: women, drugs, oil, medicines, food. The gun-runners made money off both sides of the internecine wars that erupted all around the Caucasus. The loyalty to clans and the fall of civic authority led to establishment of Mafia families with long reaches deep into every region of the old USSR.

Along with every major republic, the Chechens declared independence in 1991. Immediately, the Russians invaded. They couldn't just stand around, they said, while their country was eviscerated. Sending callow conscripts into battle with scarcely a strategy, the Red Army was savagely crushed by the dzhigits.

Interestingly, throughout this first war, the Chechens maintained their smuggling networks. The Russian soldiers were so badly off that they sold their fuel and weaponry and even each other to obtain food and security. Corruption ruled absolutely. For a price, anybody in the old USSR could be kidnapped or sold. Chechnya became a kidnapper's paradise, a hiding place for kidnappers and their victims.

The Chechens, a proud and manly people, have also been known for their black sarcastic humour. They told a joke about the Russians, who, troubled by all the kidnapping and violent crime going on in Moscow and St Petersburg, decided to send their best spy, Stirlitz, to find out who was responsible in Chechnya for it all.

Stirlitz ponders his move, lying in a ditch after having parachuted from an airplane. "Should I go to the government to find out if they are the villains?" he thinks. "Or should I go to their rivals first? Bah. I'll go to the government."

As he steps out of the ditch, a Chechen warrior appears and fires his machine gun into the air, shouting, "Where are you going?"

Stirlitz says, "To the government."

The dzhigit says, "Better not. You know what they do to people like you? They beat you, they strip you, they take everything you've got, and release you naked as a jaybird."

Stirlitz thinks, "Good to know", and heads off in the opposite direction. Again, the dzhigit fires into the air.

"Don't go that way either! Over there, they'll beat you, strip you, take everything you've got, and release you naked as a jaybird as well."

"So where am I supposed to go?" says Stirlitz, spreading his arms apart.

"You're not going anywhere," yells the dzhigit. "You'll strip right here!"

During the years of 'independence', the Chechens did little to organise their state. Clans fought each other and raised ruckus in neighbouring lands. Some of the Chechens had gotten religion, something that had been pretty much purged out of them during the long years of Communism. Newly returning mujahideen from the Afghan war, seething with nascent Wahhabism, began to exercise their muscle. They derided the old clan loyalties as spurious. Islam alone, they said, was the unifying force. They also revolted against the class system that had ensured the supremacy of the senior clans. People at the bottom of Chechen society found that this egalitarianism appealed to them. Finally, their voices could be heard.

For the old guard, whose faith was somewhat suspect (at the best of times, the Chechens had mixed Islam with old folk beliefs), this two-pronged attack against them came as a considerable surprise. To disdain the new-fangled faith would be suicidal. They began to tout their own religious credentials, hoping to co-opt the bearded men.

Dzhokhar Dudayev, the Chechen president, suddenly becomes pious.

"We are the most devout Muslims in the world," he declares to his people. "We are so pious that we pray thrice a day!"

His deputy, embarrassed by his clear lack of understanding of the tenets of Islam prompts him, "No, Dzhokhar. Not three times, but five."

Completely unabashed, Dzhokhar yells,"And if you like, you can even pray five times a day. That's the kind of freedom we have here."

Pleased by the new egalitarianism, all sorts of ruffians raised private armies. A mighty convict, Ruslan Labazanov, skilled in the martial arts and leader of a prison revolt, decided that he would serve the new Chechen state. For a time he even became Captain of the Presidential Guard. After some slight from Dudayev, Ruslan rushed off to form a party of his own, which he called Justice. He would rob the rich, he said, and pay the poor.

Among the Chechens, he was considered a dim-wit, a clown of majestic proportions. They told this anecdote to each other:

Ruslan raids a rich farmstead and lines up the owners to be shot. "Before I shoot you," he says, "Tell me your names so I know who it is I am killing." He points his gun at the woman.

"Maliha," says the woman, and Ruslan bursts into tears.

"That's my mother's name," he blubbers. "I can't kill someone with the same name as my mother. You may go."

He then points the gun at the husband. "What's your name?" he says.

"Well," says the man. "My passport says Suleyman, but everyone calls me Maliha."

References

1. Wojciech Jagielski, Towers of Stone: The Battle of Wills in Chechnya

[Via Neeka, yet another moving tale from the Russian journal Bolshoi Gorod. I have loosely translated it.]

Polina Zherebtsova was born in 1985 at Grozny. Her mother had arrived in Chechnya from Rostov-on-Don, and prior to the war had worked at a local factory called Red Hammer.

In 1994, the first Chechen war began. During the bombardment of a hospital on Pervomaisky street, Polina's grandfather, Anatoly Zherebtsov, a journalist and cameraman well-known in Chechnya was killed. Scant months later, School №55 where Polina studied, was bombed. In the ensuing ten years, she transferred from school to school as each one fell victim to the crossfire. At the time of the assault on Grozny, the district Polina dwelt in was fired upon by tanks. Her house was partially wrecked.

At the age of nine, Polina began to keep a diary where she wrote down everything that she saw and heard. Throughout the first Chechen war, she and her mother remained in Grozny, several times escaping death only by a miracle. In her diary of the time, she described regular explosions on the streets, and how people were being buried in pits and by the entrances to their houses.

When the second Chechen war commenced, Polina and her mother were traders in the central market. Polina continued to mantain her diary. On October 21, a missile fell on the market. Polina's mother was wounded in the thigh, while her own right leg was peppered with shrapnel, both small and large.

It was dangerous to travel out of the city. There were hardly any free shuttlebuses; those carrying refugees were periodically hit by artillery. In January 2000, members of the Russian forces led Polina, her mother and some neighbours out of their houses, arranged them by a trench and fired into the air, and said later that they were only joking.

Having finished school in 2002, Polina was admitted to a Teaching institute. She published poetry and tales of the war in various newspapers. She was accosted by various people who did not introduce themselves, but bore hints of association with the government. They told her they were unhappy with her publications, threatened her with unpleasantness if she continued. She and her mother were forced to move from place to place; their own apartment was in a dilapidated condition, with the floor having collapsed into the basement.

At the end of 2004, an explosion occurred near the 9^th Grozny Hospital. Polina and her mother decided to leave Grozny, and began to look for shelter in Stavropol. In a year, they changed apartments nine times. Her mother fell seriously ill.

By chance having seen a book published by the Solzhenitsyn Fund, Polina wrote to the author about her life and asked for help finding a job. Several months later, she received a reply, and on Solzhenitsyn's request, his contacts helped her move to Moscow.

Below are extracts from Polina's diary from the autumn of 1999. Daud and several others remembered here perished several months after the events described. Kusum and Maryam survived. Vandam and family managed to escape to a refugee camp. The man who is addressed in the diary as Aladdin also survived, having escaped to Ingushetia.

Polina Zherebtsova is planning to publish a book based on her diaries, and produce an anti-war film.

(Names of people in the diary have been changed. The text of the diary entries has been abridged.)

Part I appears here.

Check out the rivetting photographs by Christopher Herwig. Here's one from his Turkey-Caucasus collection.

It appears as though the Caucasus is as much a hot-bed of linquistic diversity as Papua New Guinea. I remember reading in the Guinness Book of Records about the sixty-two case endings of Tabasaran (Arrey yaar, I have trouble with genders in Hindi only). This article expounds a bit more.


Russian mountains cradle hoard of ancient languages
Stephen Boykewich
AFP April 11, 2007

KUBACHI, Russia -- Life is not bad in this North Caucasus mountain town. The air is pure, the view is magnificent, and the centuries-old tradition of silver handiwork guarantees jobs for all. There is one downside for the 2,000 residents of Kubachi, however. Their neighbors, a short donkey ride down the road, cannot understand a word that they say.

"What we speak here, the Kubachinsky language, people in Darginsk don't understand at all," said Magomed Akhmedov, 35, director of the village's silverworks factory. "That's literally five or six kilometers away."

The extraordinary linguistic diversity preserved amid these snow-capped peaks is what led a 10th-century geographer to name the Caucasus "the mountain of tongues." The rocky, mostly rural region of Dagestan has one of the highest concentrations of languages in the world, between 30 and 70 in an area smaller than Scotland. Its 2.3 million residents are divided into 34 ethnic groups and nearly all speak Russian, as the territory fell to Russia's imperial advance in 1859.

Besides Russia are local languages that would strike fear into the heart of any student who has ever wrestled with case endings. Lak, the native tongue of about 5 percent of the Dagestani population, has 56 cases - compared to six in Russian and a mere four in German - language specialist Yunusov Abdul-Raman said. But even Lak is beaten by Tabasaran, which is spoken by 95,000 in southern Dagestan and has 62 cases.

"It was in the Guinness Book of World Records! These are extremely difficult languages," Abdul-Raman said.

Like many Dagestani tongues, Kubachinsky in not a written language and is not taught in schools, but was preserved through the Soviet era by the same combination of geography and tight social bonds that has preserved Kubachi's tradition of silver-working for centuries.

"We only marry among ourselves. There are exceptions, but you can count them on the fingers of one hand," said Akhmedov, who has directed the village's silverworks factory since 2001. "Everyone here is related in one way or another."

Unlike in neighboring Chechnya, which was devastated when Joseph Stalin deported its entire population in 1944, Dagestan's mountain towns were largely spared from Soviet social engineering. Aside from the total number of languages here - which depends on where lines are drawn between dialect and language - the diversity of their origins also amazes scholars. Aside from the native Caucasian languages, linguists have identified Turkic, Mongol, Greek, and other language families here. The Tats, an ethnic group of about 18,000 people living near the southern coastal city of Derbent, still speak a dialect of Persian that is over 1,000 years old. But what seven decades of Soviet rule could not erode, the creep of Western culture is beginning to. Children in Kubachi learn their native language only at home, since it has no written form and is not taught in schools. The related language of Darginsky is, but has to jostle for position with Russian and, increasingly, English.

"To tell you the truth, we teach English better than our own language," said Darzhi Kurvan, the director of a village school. "As much as we talk about patriotism, beyond our region it's more convenient and more profitable to know English."

And though children usually speak Kubachinsky in the home, "we've noticed that in the schoolyard, most of the children speak Russian. They even bawl each other out in Russian," Kurvan said, his wizened face breaking into a smile.

"There's a battle for these languages going on now," said journalist and opposition activist Magomed Shamilyev, a member of Dagestan's majority Avar ethnic group in the regional capital Makhachkala. Radio and television programs are broadcast here in 14 languages, but as more of the region's 60-percent rural population moves to cities in search of work, the smaller languages are at risk of vanishing, Shamilyev said. And while there is a regional law reinforcing the status of Russian as an official language, "there is no law on national languages, no law to protect and develop the languages that are disappearing," he said.

Factory director Akhmedov is living proof of how times are changing. Asked how a simple welcome would sound in Kubachinsky, he hesitated, then let a few words of Russian slip in while he spoke. "He spends too much time in the city," laughed one of the factory's workers. After an embarrassed smile, Magomedov repeated the phrase fluently. "There is a risk these languages will disappear," he said, "but we preserve them in our hearts."

The Caucasus, exemplified by its mountains and the hardy folk that dwell in them, is intrinsically a schizophrenic condition. Assertions and contradictions abound in it. Famously it is supposed to divide Europe from Asia, but nobody is quite sure where it itself belongs. Its people are riven by religion, language, tribal mores, and yet they subscribe to the same sacred creed of hospitality to all guests. Blood feuds extend across countries and time. Ancient hatreds consume the present. And casting a dark shadow over it all is the humiliation and loss, and the piecemeal degradation of its character caused by the long arm of Russia.

You see some of this schizophrenia reflected in its literature. One of the most famous works to come out of the region is Ali And Nino: A Love Story by Gurban Said. It is a beautiful novel set in a romantic early 20th century Baku, and tells the ultimately tragic tale of the love of Ali Khan Shirvanshir, an Azerbaijani Muslim, and Nino, a beautiful Georgian Christian. Many commentators have called this book a wonderful evocation of the pre-revolutionary cosmopolitan Caucasus, and extolled the accuracy of the writer's observations of the customs and culture of the period. This review, written by an Azerbaijani, calls it a glimpse into the soul of his homeland. And yet, nobody knows who Gurban Said was. There's some evidence that he might have been Lev Nussimbaum, a scion of a prominent Jewish family from Baku. Others claim that Nussimbaum was a fraudster copying stories from better writers, and that the book was really penned by Yousif Chamanzaminli, a famous Azeri writer.

Fascinatingly, this tale asserts a series of stereotypes common in the region. From an Azeri perspective, Ali Khan is a hero of staggering manliness and grace. He wins the heart of the lovely princess Nino and marries her despite opposition from all sides. Nino loves Ali, but she is not blind to the problems facing an inter-faith marriage. She can see the evident hypocrisy that promises death for Ali's sister who wants to marry out of the faith. Still, she marries Ali and is then slowly sapped of vitality by the restrictions placed on her by his family. Perhaps in succumbing to the muscular Ali, Nino represents Georgia in Azeri eyes - beautiful, yes, but ultimately a push-over.

Mediating between the two is Ali's Armenian friend, Nachararyan. Initially he claims that only intermarriage between the Muslims and the Christians could sow peace between them; later, stricken by the slaughter of his compatriots by the Turks, he decides that there is no hope, and acts in a manner most perfidious towards his old friend. The calumny here is obvious - the Armenians are to the Caucasus as the Jews are to Europe: the butt of cruelty, envy and hatred. Furthermore, Armenians and Azeris are ancient enemies, and clearly the latter see the former as treacherous, no matter how many protestations of friendship they might make.

Now this may be pointing out a superficiality in the novel. After all, the warring tribes in the Caucasus had been forced into mutual accommodation by a brutal overlord, which could have led to occasional bursts of friendship and possibly even love. Still, one can't escape the feeling that they basically hate each others guts. Gurban Said may have only meant the stereotypes ironically; possibly, overall, his narrative is accurate and representative of the times. As Wendell Steavenson, a former reporter for Time, who spent two years immersing herself in Georgia, points out in her wonderful Stories I Stole, most of the details are right, but the incidents and characters are all taken from local legend, almost as if it were a guidebook in disguise. Everything is at its most obvious, almost Caucasian cliches.

For instance, Steavenson points out that Ali's name Shirvanshir arises from the Khanate of Shirvan that ruled in Baku at the time. Nino's name is the traditional Georgian one, after St. Nino. The stories recounted by Ali are all available in 19th century travel guides, especially the ones about Imam Shamil. On the other hand, there are startling errors - Nino declares herself a Greek Orthodox Christian, which coming from a Georgian is peculiar, to say the least; Ali is said to speak Tartar, whereas his language would have been Azeri, a dialect of Turkish.