'Good luck!' said the Azeri colonel, with a leer. 'And when you see Dudayev, tell him that I drink to him as a hero not just of Chechnya, but for every true Muslim of the Caucasus!' Upon which he downed a large glass of Russian vodka.
The date was January 1992, the place a shabby but well-stocked black-mar-ket restaurant in the grim Azerbaijani industrial town of Sumgait, north of Baku on the Caspian Sea. From the distance - a pretty long distance - Sum-gait, like Baku, can look rather grand, in an archaic kind of way. Especially at sunset, the gold-grey stone of its buildings seems to glow from within, and flows upwards from the golden dust of the surrounding semi-desert, until it meets the azure sea. Close to, the big picture disappears, and what is left is the grimly repetitive boredom of run-down Soviet provincial architecture.
Sumgait is poor, but even in 1992 some of its people were already rich. The restaurant was a curious pseudo-Moorish affair — 'built in the traditional Azeri style' - raw with newness, in the middle of a courtyard walled in grey concrete.
It was richly stocked with the simple but pleasant food of Azerbaijan: sturgeon kebabs, lamb kebabs, herb salads and so on.
My host, a leading Soviet Azeri intellectual and Communist Party official, 17
was a man of three worlds, all of which he disliked. The Soviet Union he had served not just from opportunism but also from the same motives as many Asian former colonial servants, because it represented 'modernity' and 'progress'; yet he also hated it, because it meant the rule of crude and alien Russians. But Turkey he feared because pan-Turkic nationalism was a threat to the dominance of his own Soviet elite class, and indeed to his Azeri iden-tity. As he put it, "The love of Turkey you hear so many people expressing is the new religion of the village schoolteacher. He was brought up to be absolutely Communist, and now he is looking for a new identity, something simple and above all given from outside.'
In his disdain for the Turks was something of the attitude of his third world, his ancestors from the old Azeri elites of Baku and Shirvanshir, older by far than the powerful vulgarities of Soviet Moscow or Kemalist Ankara. Though of Turkic blood, they spoke Persian and looked for cultural inspiration to Iran, 'the greatest kingdom of this world'. But Iran's new rulers, the Ayatollahs, would have put him in gaol at once - and well he knew it. For he was a com-mitted secularist - albeit one who would also never allow a stranger to meet his womenfolk. Whether because of his tradition or his confusion, he was the most interesting and detached person I met in Azerbaijan. He was even detached and objective about the growing war with the Armenians - detached enough at least to have no desire to see his relatives fight in it.
As for the colonel who offered the toast, he was made of simpler stuff. He was the police chief of the town, and reportedly deeply implicated in the infa-mous anti-Armenian pogrom there four years before - a pogrom which according to him had never occurred, or if it had, was the work of the Arme-nians themselves, instigated by the KGB.
His law enforcement record aside, the colonel's speech contained a variety of ironies. A 'true Muslim' drinking Russian vodka has become a cliche of the newly independent Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union, and hardly needs elaboration. The colonel's admiration for the Chechens was also ambiguous. Moments earlier, he had been warning me that 'they are all ban-dits, dangerous people,' and advising me strongly not to go to Grozny. Hence the 'Good luck!' - and the leer.
A further irony was that far from preparing himself to go and help the Chechen cause, the colonel had so far shown no apparent desire to go and fight for his own Muslim country of Azerbaijan, in its own backyard of Karabakh. This behaviour was highly characteristic of most Azeri colonels of my acquaintance; it helps explain the equal unwillingness of most Azeri pri-vates to risk their lives. A single month in Azerbaijan had already been enough to give an impression of a deeply demoralised society, for reasons that appeared to go deeper than Soviet rule alone; or rather, as I noted at the time, 'unlike the Baits or the Georgians, Sovietism is a disease to which the Azeris have proved especially susceptible.'
Although the Chechen victory, and the humiliation of the Russian army, has greatly strengthened the hands of Azeris and Georgians in dealing with
Moscow, curiously enough it has been a humiliation for them as well. This is because for years these peoples comforted themselves for their defeats at the hands of the Armenians and the Abkhaz by saying that behind these peoples stood Russia, 'and who can win against Russia?'
Repeated Chechen victories have proved the hollowness of this excuse. The Azeris and Georgians were defeated fair and square - and still more, they defeated themselves. The Chechens played a leading part in the defeat of the Georgians (see below), and as for the military failure of the Azeris, the Chechens would never have predicted anything else. Their contempt for their Caucasian neighbours, Muslim as well as Christian, is deep and generally unconcealed. In Moscow, a Chechen mafia leader once told me that 'the Azeri groups here are just about up to bullying fruit-sellers in the market; but for real protection, they themselves have to come to us, the Chechens. On their own they're nothing.' This kind of attitude, however justified, has not made the Chechens much loved among their neighbours, and it has been partly responsible for the overwhelming absence of real support for them in the region since their struggle against Russia began.
The Azeris in my train compartment during the eighteen-hour journey to Grozny, through northern Azerbaijan and Daghestan, made no attempt to hide their hostility to the Chechens, an attitude of fear mixed with unwilling respect. They had some reason: the next three years saw repeated attacks by armed Chechen criminals on that particular train as it made its laborious way from Baku through Chechnya and north into Russia.
The passengers were by turns tragic, pitiable and disgusting, human flotsam from the wreck of the Soviet Union, which had finally sunk barely a month earlier. There were 'Russians' (some of whom looked Armenian to me, which would explain their flight) leaving their homes in Baku for an uncertain future in Russia, with relatives who, as one old woman, Lyudmilla Alexandrovna, told me, 'probably don't want us at all. I've lived in Baku for thirty years, my husband is buried there, I'll be a foreigner in Russia. But my son and his family are in Rostov, and he said to join them while I still can.' There were engineers fleeing Azerbaijan's collapsing economy for the slightly brighter prospects of Russia; many ordinary Azeris who had taken jobs elsewhere in the Union when it still was a Union, and were trying to rejoin their jobs or their families; some Soviet servicemen unsure of whether they still had a state, an army or even a country - as one teenage conscript said, T am half Russian and half Ukrainian, and one grandfather was a Tatar. I was a Soviet citizen.
Now what am I, you tell me?' He had a look I was to find characteristic of many Russian conscripts, a strange mixture of extreme youth and vulnerabil-ity overlain with cynicism and coarseness, which in turn barely concealed a deep misery; like so many Soviet-made things, shiny with newness yet already scarred and battered - perhaps even broken for good.
And everywhere were the petty traders, former black marketeers now enjoying a still precarious legality, and swelling and oozing almost visibly before our eyes. There were fat ones, bulging in odd places like their own
sacks of fruit and vegetables; there were leaner, younger ones, all with hard faces, some with heavily scarred ones. When travelling, they were not, I noticed, wearing the heavy gold jewellery which that class already liked to sport on its home turf; but one of them was wearing a suit apparently made entirely from imitation silver thread, which shone faintly in the dim light as he made undulating lunges in my direction, hinting at various things he could sell me, including the mercenary favours of the conductress, a plump, heavily made-up, resilient-looking Russian woman in her mid-thirties.
The train itself was close to being a wreck, icily cold, filthy, enveloped in a fug of cigarette smoke, urine, sweat, alcohol and cheap scent. As evening drew on, it crawled clanking through a hellish landscape - the oilfields of northern Azerbaijan, perhaps the ugliest post-industrial environment in the world.
Hundreds, no thousands of abandoned, stunted, archaic-looking derricks sit amidst pools of oil and fragments of rusted machinery. In summer, the stench can make you physically ill; in winter, grey sky, black oil and brown desert merge into a symphony of gloom.
The whole tragedy of Soviet 'development' was in that scene. There in those countless lakes of oil was the potential wealth of Azerbaijan, pumped out to power the Soviet Union's megalomaniac visions, much of it lost on the spot through leaks and wastage, and as far as the people of Azerbaijan were concerned, almost all of it ultimately thrown away. Scattered among the oil-fields are shanty-towns of mud-brick, the roofs covered with corrugated iron and plastic sheeting. Since 1992, these have been swelled by tens of thou-sands of refugees from the areas of Azerbaijan lost in the war with Armenia, then already gathering pace.
To complete the picture and my mood, all that was lacking was an albatross.
Instead I had a whole trainload of ancient mariners. On the subject of their own countries they were bad enough. All expected civil war; the Azeris thought, quite rightly as it turned out, that they would soon be fighting each other as well as the Armenians, and several said with conviction that inde-pendence would not last, that Moscow would soon restore its rule. There was only one Azeri optimist, and he was very optimistic indeed. Breathing beer into my face, he began cursing the West for its backing of the Armenians -'\bu always hated us Muslims, and wanted to destroy us! But you wait! "You wait! The next century will be Turkish! First we will destroy the Armenians and then we will conquer you, and rule the world!' - until others in his group pulled him away.
As for the Russians, they seemed numbed and bewildered. Most of all they were afraid of famine - which in that bleak and chaotic winter of 1992 seemed a real possibility. Food was desperately short in many places, and queues were appalling even by past Soviet standards. 'I lived through the war and the hun-gry years afterwards,' Lyudmilla Alexandrovna told me. 'Now it looks as if we shall have to bear hunger again. But still, if you are to starve, it is better to starve among your own people.'
If the picture of Russia in the 1990s that I draw in this book is a grim one,
it is worth remembering that things could have been a great deal worse. Yegor Gaidar's freeing of prices, which took place a few weeks after this journey, was as much an emergency response to the collapse in the supply of essential goods to the cities as it was the planned basis for free-market reform.
The sheer spiritual confusion and physical misery of that winter of the Soviet Union's death may hold part of the explanation for the central theme of this book: the subsequent apathy of ordinary Russians in the face of loss of empire, military defeat, international humiliation and unparalleled thieving by their own rulers. Psychologically, they had already touched bottom. During the presidential election campaign of 1996, the pro-Yeltsin media's harping on the famines and sufferings under Communist rule was so effective partly because in 1991-2 many Russians had felt they were once more facing famine and mass violence between Russians themselves. They recognised that how-ever awful Yeltsin's rule had been, it had at least spared them that.
But the Baku-Grozny train, although it felt like the bottom of the pit, also symbolised something else: the way in which the Soviet infrastructure has continued to function, and so to support the population, partly because of the resilience and residual sense of duty of some of the people serving that infra-structure. This also was part of the explanation why the former Soviet Union did not in fact become like parts of Africa. The train groaned, it stank, it prob-ably left pieces of itself behind on the rails - but it moved, and carried its passengers with it, even if few of them had any real idea where they were going. Epursimuove.
As this miniature Soviet world approached the borders of Chechnya, the Soviet nations aboard seemed to draw together in the face of a common threat. I can't remember which worried me more - the drunken Azeri 'busi-nessman' who drew his hand over various parts of his anatomy, laughing uproariously, to indicate which bits of me the Chechens would cut off first; or the motherly Azeri woman, pushing a piece of bread into my hand and implor-ing me not to get off in Grozny: 'You are so young! You must think of your family!' Their news on Chechnya came exclusively from the former Soviet, now Russian television in Moscow, which painted a picture of Grozny in the grip of chaos, with looting and murder running rife.
The train halted in Grozny, five hours late, shortly before 4 a.m. Everything was dark. From the distance came an occasional shot. It may have been my own feelings which made me think that the train stopped for an unusually short time, and lumbered off again with more than its habitual speed. The handful of other people who had got out disappeared into the night. And I -as a good member of the British middle cl-asses on unfamiliar ground -1 went to find a policeman; or rather a group of heavily armed Chechen policemen and their friends, who refused as a matter of hospitality even to look at the passport I offered them, shared their meagre breakfast with me, and delivered me, through the curfew, to a sort of hotel, the Kavkaz.
This stood opposite a large white Soviet official building then at the begin-ning of its confused series of transmogrifications from Central Committee of
the Communist Party of the Soviet Socialist Autonomous Republic of Checheno-Ingushetia, to the Parliament of the Sovereign Republic of Chech-nya-Ichkeria, to the Presidential headquarters, to a shattered wreck and world-famous symbol of Chechen resistance, to an empty space, a clearing in
a forest of ruins.
But looking at it from my window that morning I noted the following in my diary 'more like a babbling travel writer at a new resort than a supposedly serious correspondent in the middle of a revolution':1 'A delightful first impres-sion. Open, cheerful, friendly without the odious oily familiarity of the Azeris.
Also not subservient, either to me or their own officers. Self-respect and per-sonal dignity. And none of the Soviet surliness. What a change from Baku!
Chechen contempt for the A2eris - "all bandits", of course. But also cowards, weaklings, corrupt, Soviet slaves etc. Interesting: the Azeris and Russians dis-like the Chechens, but also obviously fear and respect them; the Chechens don't respect anyone else at all. The police captain stresses the unity, pride and egalitarianism of the Chechens: "From millionaire to tractor driver, the impor-tant thing is to be a Chechen. We have very strict rules about how we behave to each other. Everyone has a gun here now, but you will see for yourself that we never shoot each other. But against our enemies, we will fight to the end'".
Parts of the captain's speech were of course an exaggeration - but an exag-geration of the truth. Visually, the journey from Baku to Grozny had been simply a trip from an interesting Soviet oil town, intermittently hideous and strangely beautiful, on a lovely bay, to a banal and ugly one amidst nondescript rolling hills. Culturally and spiritually, it turned out to be a journey between worlds. And irritating, and sometimes terrifying, as I often subsequently found the Chechens, and terrible as has been the Chechen War, I never wholly lost the sense that to go among the Chechens is to go into a certain kind of morning, cold and stormy, but bright and somehow transcending the normal run of existence.
The longer I knew them, the more the Chechens seemed to me a people who had rejected not just much of the Soviet version of modernisation and the modern state - with all its works and all its empty promises - but mod-ernisation in general. In this they reminded me somewhat of the Afghan Mujahidin, but with many times the latter's capacity for self-discipline, organ-isation and solidarity. This may make them remarkably suited for the postmodern age; but whether for the good or the bane of mankind remains to be seen. Perhaps it doesn't matter. Since December 1994,1 have come to look on the Chechen people almost as on the face of Courage herself - with no necessary relation to justice or morality, but beautiful to see.