CIRCUNSTANCIAS PARA UN PROYECTO MODERNO La reconstrucción de Berlín en la década de los 50 llevaba asociada

Before its destruction, there was nothing about the city of Grozny to suggest that it was the capital of an extraordinary people - the reason, of course, being

that it was not in fact a Chechen city. It was founded on 10 June 1818 by Gen-eral Alexei ^ermolov as one of the fortresses of the Cossack line, and served as the Russian headquarters in the campaigns first to contain, and then to con-quer and suppress the Chechens. It was named Grozny, meaning 'Terrible', or more accurately 'Formidable', though a longstanding pun, which needs no explanation, renders it as 'Gryazny', or 'Dirty'.2

Originally Grozny was simply an earthen fort, a knot of earthen roads and a cluster of wooden or plaster houses, of a kind familiar in the writings of nine-teenth-century Russian officers who served in the Caucasus. It is set between low hills in the rolling plain between the main Caucasus range and the much lower hills which run a few miles south of the Terek River. Until the mid-nineteenth century, the whole region was covered with thick forests of beech, oak and nut - until the Russians cut them down as part of their campaign against Shamil and his Chechen followers, who used them as their chief ally.

Today, the forests have been pushed back into the foothills of the Cauca-sus, where they cling to the mountainsides, deeply shaded, spiny, secretive and tenacious. Most of lowland Chechnya has come to be covered with wide, bare fields, glaringly hot in summer, grey and desolate in winter - and since the population explosion of the past forty years, thickly sprinkled with villages and small towns, endless sprawls of one-storey houses and compounds, with the odd drab Soviet official building; and now, towering over them, the minarets of the new great mosques.

It is no longer a particularly interesting landscape; but to the south, across the plain, are the fantastically shaped peaks of the Caucasus, white and blue, hung like a curtain across the sky; and to the north, the bare hills of the Terek range bloom in spring and autumn with a range of wild flowers, gorse and grasses, and as the sky changes above them, the colours shift like a kaleido-scope, the rolling hills seeming to stretch themselves and lift their breasts to the sun. It is hardly surprising that this country had such a romantic and inspiring effect on all those nineteenth-century Russian writers who saw it, and took time off from fighting the Chechens to describe its charms.

Grozny's day really dawned, however, not in the military and romantic, but in the new industrial age of the 1890s with the beginnings of oil extraction.

The British historian and traveller John Baddeley, visiting it during that decade, wrote that it was clearly destined to become a major industrial centre, but:

At this time, however, it was chiefly remarkable for streets which with-out exaggeration might be set down as among the worst in the world. In dry weather they were ankle deep in dust, in wet they were quagmires of mud, with ponds of green filth here and there, in which ducks and geese paddled, pigs wallowed, and frogs swam.3

Thanks to the decay of services and repair under Dudayev's rule, coming on top of decades of slow Soviet decrepitude, Grozny by 1994 had once again

become rather like this, even before the war smashed it to pieces. There are, however, no longer any pigs - for Grozny when Baddeley was there was still overwhelmingly Russian, not Muslim.

But in the intervening decades Grozny was a major industrial metropolis first of the Russian and then of the Soviet empire, and already by 1917 was second only to Baku as an oil producing centre of Russia and indeed the world. Oil brought in both a flood of mainly Russian migrant workers, and a smaller flow of Western entrepreneurs and engineers. An undistinguished, vaguely neo-Gothic brick house on Victory Prospect in Grozny (now in ruins) is often pointed out as having been built for the 'English engineers' who came to work in the oilfields.

The Chechens, however, remained largely peripheral to this development at least until the 1920s, when the rapid development of the oilfields under Soviet rule, together with the Soviet onslaught on the economic and social life of the Chechen villages, began to draw or drive many Chechens into the city.

Even so, it was not until the 1970s that Grozny really became a Chechen city;

and since this development took place under Soviet rule, there were no archi-tectural signs of it. Not a single mosque was allowed to be built or rebuilt anywhere in Checheno-Ingushetia until 1978. No mosques were allowed in Grozny until 1988, and at first services had to be held in sanctified railway wagons.

When the Chechen national revolution began at the end of the 1980s, the sole formal place of worship in the city, and the only symbol of the old Rus-sian empire, was one ochre-painted Orthodox church - later wrecked by Russian bombardment. As usual on the ethnic frontiers of Russia, an Ortho-dox church was left in place by the atheist Soviet regime, when in much of the Russian heartland it would have been demolished or turned into something else.

By the eve of the war, in 1994, the church had been joined by a number of mosques, notably a soaring but unfinished one dedicated to the eighteenth-century religious and military leader Sheikh Mansur (strangely enough, begun with ten tons of bricks donated in 1991 by the Mayor of Petersburg, Anatoly Sobchak, as a gesture of national reconciliation). After 1991, the Chechens threw themselves into mosque-building, and it became one of the chief ways in which Chechen 'businessmen', whether from Grozny or Moscow, displayed their wealth and their attachment to their communities, and boosted their prestige.

Architecturally, these new mosques are to my eyes often very beautiful, but also rather curious, in a style 1 have seen nowhere else in the Muslim world.

To judge by old pictures, they bear little resemblance to the old, simple white-washed Chechen mosques which existed before they were all demolished after Stalin's deportation of the Chechen people in 1944. The difference is a sign of a deepening transformation in Chechnya's traditionally extremely egal-itarian, clan-based society. The new ones are often enormous, and almost all made of red brick. Rather than traditional minarets, many of these mosques

have soaring towers, sometimes equipped with battlements, and sometimes with a clock. The exterior decoration, and the shape of the windows is usually more or less 'Islamic', but the overall effect is more neo-Gothic - appropri-ately, perhaps, for mosques built by 'businessmen' whose character and role can to an extent be described as 'bastard feudal'.

It may be in fact that this was also, unconsciously at least, the effect the architects were thinking of. The architecture of the mosques is closely related to that of the castle-like, battlemented and terraced houses, with their great arched loggias, which before the war the 'businessmen' were building in every Chechen town and village. I asked a Chechen friend whether their style was neo-Chechen. 'No, more neo-English,' he replied, quite seriously. 'Isn't that the kind of house English lords live in? At least, that's the impression of Eng-land we were always given in Soviet days.'

If so, this would surely be one of the odder footnotes to architectural his-tory: that a style pioneered for nineteenth-century English Christian churches and public monuments, picked up as a cliche of England by Russians before the Bolshevik Revolution, fossilised by Russian Communists cut off from the outside world and intent on showing England as a class-ridden neo-feudalism, should have ended after many transmogrifications as a symbol of the national pride and Islamic loyalty of a small people of the North Caucasus.

A curious feature of the new Chechen mosques is that relatively few were built in Grozny under Dudayev, despite the fact that by the 1991 it was by far the biggest Chechen population centre. The mosque of Sheikh Mansur, like another one planned for the central square but never begun, were initiatives of the Chechen government. The wealthy Chechens who have paid for the great majority of mosques have built them not in the capital, but in the villages and small towns from which their families and clans originated. For that mat-ter, this has also been true of many of the palatial residences. A familiar sight in Chechnya is to enter some small village of straggling one-storey houses, and suddenly to come up against a towering, half-finished three-storey mansion behind high walls, and to be told that it was being built by a businessman in Moscow, whose mother and other relatives had remained in the village.

But above all, this is true of the graves. The overwhelming majority of Chechens who die in Grozny, in peace and war alike, have been buried by their relatives not in the city cemeteries, but in those of their ancestral villages, often near the shrine of an ancestral saint. The bodies in Grozny's cemeteries are usually local Russians, while the mass graves contain unidentified and unrecoverable Chechens who were buried in the ruins and dug out later by the Russian army. This was one of the things which made accurate assessment of the numbers killed in the battle for Grozny so extremely difficult.

In appearance, until it became a surrealist nightmare, central Grozny was entirely Soviet Russian. It had a certain southern cast, but of the kind you see from the Ukraine to Central Asia. The centre was dominated by the usual pompous, ugly official buildings, the same from Minsk to Magadan. These are occasionally relieved by a neo-classical official building from imperial times,

equally standardised but far more attractive. Beyond that, and clustered in half a dozen mikro-rayony (micro-districts, or housing estates) in the suburbs, are the dreary 'Khrushchevka', the shoddy high-rises of the 1950s and 1960s, which at first represented liberation and luxury for so many wretched inhabi-tants of overcrowded communal flats.

But beyond and around them the true North Caucasian town begins: hun-dreds of streets, roughly asphalted or sometimes still of earth, with one-storey, whitewashed houses. The Russian ones open directly on to the street, and often have carved wooden window-frames with designs from the villages of Great Russia, the former Cossack provinces and the Ukraine. The Chechen houses, as commonly throughout the Muslim world, are generally hidden behind high walls and painted steel gates. These give on to enclosed yards, often inhabited by a mixed population highly characteristic of prewar Chech-nya - children, chickens, ferocious dogs, a tractor, and a luxury Volvo or BMV(^ sometimes with German number plates still attached. Since it was mainly the centre of Grozny which was shattered in the bombing of Decem-ber 1994 and the fighting of January and February 1995 and August 1996, while the suburbs were largely spared, it is this Caucasian Grozny which has endured.

Still, except in its inhabitants, the modern capital of Chechnya was never very Chechen; and I have sometimes wondered if the willingness of the Chechen independence forces to stand and fight in central Grozny, even at the cost of its destruction, was not unconsciously at least partly due to the fact that it had been built and developed not by Chechens, but as the local military outpost of their oppressors, from whom its very name derives - or did, before it was renamed Djokhar-Ghala in honour of Dudayev. But whatever its name, the Chechen blood shed there in its defence has now made it a Chechen city forever.4