EL TEMPLO COMO DECISIÓN FINAL

Robert Graves once wrote that revisiting the former No Man's Land of the Somme after the First World War, and comparing what he saw with his mem-ories of fighting there, was like seeing the actual size of a hole in a tooth, com-pared with the way it feels to your tongue.9 It was just the same for me in Grozny, but with the time reversed; for I visited Grozny several times in peacetime before I saw it destroyed by war.

I felt like this for example at Minutka, a small roundabout surrounded by undistinguished eight-storey buildings, with a cafe and a food shop (gas-tronom), at the top of a gentle hill down which the main street in Grozny, Avturkhanov Prospekt (formerly of course Lenin Prospekt) slopes down to the Sunja River, the main square and the centre of town, a bare mile away.

Minutka is at the start of the main roads leading out of Grozny to the east and south. On previous visits, I must have driven through it literally dozens of times without even noticing it or asking its name. In January 1995, however, it became a place of the most intense significance; with Russian forces in the centre of town and attacking the area around the presidential palace, Minutka became the marching-off point for Chechen forces heading for the front, a meeting place for civilians seeking relatives or trying to get a ride out of town, a distribution point for food and medicine, and a gathering place for journal-ists. Looking back, of course, we must have been crazy to gather at such an obvious spot during bombardment, and the fact that we were not all blown to pieces six times over is a testimony to the incompetence of the Russian air force and artillery (though they did in the end hit it again and again, killing a great many people there).

The undistinguished, mass-produced modern architecture of Minutka and the rest of the city initially made it seem an odd backdrop for the Chechen national epic being waged there. But in January 1995 its appearance became dramatic enough, especially at night, with gas flaring from fractured pipes casting a lurid light over the scene, and fighters, civilians, stray dogs and cats, journalists and the odd homeless tramp or drug addict all huddling as close as

they dared to the flames to keep out the damp and icy chill. Before the war, I had sometimes wondered - mistakenly, of course - whether Grozny could get any more decrepit; between January 1992, when I first visited it, and Novem-ber 1994, the increase in dilapidation was extremely marked, as was the gradual collapse of most municipal services, as Dudayev's government ceased to pay for them. Roads disintegrated, enormous heaps of rubbish accumu-lated, the telephone system broke down, a foretaste of the end of modernity as we have known it.

For after all, Grozny was not some small, half-baked provincial town of the Third World; it was a large industrial city, the second biggest oil-refining centre of the world's biggest oil-producing country, and formerly the world's second biggest industrial power. The oil refineries around Grozny are them-selves whole cities, stretching for dozens of square miles. During the first days of the bombing, in December 1994, some colleagues and I went looking for the site where a bomb had fallen on one of the refineries - and ended up com-pletely lost, as comcom-pletely as if we had wandered into a steel jungle.

But this was by no means simply a collapse into barbarism; for if on the one hand the works of the Soviet state were decaying, on the other Grozny under Dudayev was characterised by a commercial vitality unmatched in any other area of provincial Russia; and if much of this activity was criminal, it was an organised criminality, shaped and regulated by tradition, and no mere ban-ditism, though in the context of a population privately armed to a degree that would render insignificant the wildest dreams of the American National Rifle Association. The potholed streets were home to a splendid assortment of Western luxury cars, and since they suffered badly from the potholes, and were driven with scant regard for their sensitive Western feelings, the business of repairing them was one of the biggest in town.

All of these aspects of Grozny came together in its bazaar. Compared to the great bazaars of the past, this was perhaps nothing very remarkable: no archi-tectural grandeur, no exotic spices or rugs, just an average Soviet street of offices and apartment blocks lined with roughly built stalls, in a sea of mud and festering rubbish. The amount of wares on sale was tremendous, but the range was not very large. Most were the standard wares of the Caucasus and southern Russia: great heaps of local fruit and vegetables, sausages and smoked chickens, fruit sauces and pickled carrots; and a mass of cheap imported goods, mainly from the Middle East - Turkish beer and jeans, scent from the Gulf, children's furry toys from Pakistan, and a seemingly end-less supply of cheap male aftershave and dubious-looking alcohols and liqueurs, including a 'Scotch' whisky with the frightening name of 'Black Willie'.

At night, the street lamps long since having failed, the bazaar was lit by heaps of burning garbage. Their wavering glare gave exoticism and romance to the scene, making me think of nomads camping amidst the crumbling architecture of a Roman provincial town sometime in the Dark Ages. The smell of course was less romantic - but then, on the basis of my former Afghan

experience, I should say that the romance of barbarian existence was always much exaggerated in Western literature.

All the same, this was a very remarkable market for Russia, if only because Russia in principle had been trying to shut it for years, with total lack of success.

It was so large and vibrant because under Dudayev, Grozny airport functioned in effect as a free port of entry into Russia, without Russian customs or border guards (for what they are worth). For whatever reason, until November 1994 Russia took no steps to close the airport, while the corruption of the Russian army and police meant that on payment ol unofficial fees, goods from there flowed into Russia, and in return goods from Russia flowed to the bazaar in Grozny.

It was in fact a market which encapsulated the weakness of the Russian state today, and the rather frightening strengths of Chechen society. This was to be seen especially at the end furthest from the government headquarters.

On this street, incongruously still named 'Rosa Luxemburg' after the mur-dered German Communist leader, stood the only entirely public arms market on the territory of the former Soviet Union. On this pavement, beside the main post office, all the collapse of the Soviet army, and the dangers this pre-sents for the world, were made manifest - everything from simple grenades to highly sophisticated snipers' rifles, all originally Soviet, most of them from the Russian army, most of them eventually to be used to kill Russian soldiers.

There they were, simply lying on tables in the street; or, if it was raining, cov-ered by plastic bags or sheeting. Next to the arms market was the patch of pavement where the money-changers did tens of thousands of dollars worth of daily business. A recipe for disaster? Not at all; this was probably the safest place in the whole of Grozny.

For while the bazaar appeared chaotic and disorderly to Western eyes, it was not a chaos but an anarchy, an absence of government, not of order. The stallholders, arms sellers and money-changers themselves cooperated freely to prevent theft, just as they did to standardise (or, if you prefer, rig) the prices of their goods. In December 1994, shortly before the end of that period of Grozny's existence, I spoke to a Russian man named Sasha, selling a strange assortment of goods, some of them brought in from Russia, others bought during a commercial shopping trip to Istanbul:

I am a Russian, but no one here gives me any trouble. In fact I like work-ing here, I prefer it to Russia - people are more decent. Here in the mar-ket for example, the Chechens have rules, and as long as you respect those rules and pay your dues, you can rely on your neighbours to pro-tect you whatever your nationality. The Chechens are very strict about these things, when they want to be. Yesterday, for example, a Chechen man tried to grab a jar of honey from a Russian trader, and you should have seen the beating the crowd gave him!

A tough and humorous-looking Chechen woman called Meriam, selling Polish-made powdered soup with American labels, said that

We are going on working here because we are not afraid of the bomb-ing, and anyway we have to live. When Russia cut off payments three years ago, the bazaar grew enormously, just because people had to buy and sell things to stay alive. The Russians thought they would starve us out, but we are intelligent and hard-working. We have survived. It's not just Chechen men who are strong, you know... There used to be an administration which ran the bazaar, but now we run it ourselves, and keep good order, as you see.

Her neighbour, a Russian named Ruslan, nodded, and said: 'We Russian traders have had no trouble from the Chechens, none. But if the Russian army comes here, they'll loot this place down to the last cigarette. They won't care who's a Russian and who's a Chechen. We'll all have to get out of here damned quick.'

On 22 December 1994, with the Russian bombardment intensifying and dozens of civilians already killed, I once again visited the much depleted bazaar. One of the few old women remaining sold me a dozen eggs, which I carried away in my helmet, and gave me a loaf of bread for free, possibly because my expression by then was probably as haggard as hers - 'You are our guest, and it's a bad time.' A few yards away, Chechen men were desperately trying to buy or barter for the last remaining weapons in the arms market. One man, who gave his name as Ahmed, was carrying a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, which he was trying to barter for four kalashnikovs. He said rather sadly that he had got hold of the RPG - to which he was obviously passion-ately attached - when the Russian army pulled out in 1992: T was keeping it for just this moment. But now, you see, all my brothers want to fight. They all have pistols, but only two have rifles. So I've been told I must give up this thing, so we can all go to fight together. But as you see, the rifles are all gone.

Today, every Chechen man wants to fight.'

The central bazaar ceased to operate towards the end of December, and in January was the scene of some of the fiercest fighting in the war, as the Rus-sians tried to move through it to attack the 'presidential headquarters'. In February 1995, when I returned, it was like a pond of viscous mud, half-filled with rubble and surrounded by jagged and blackened ruins. In the southern suburbs, however, small bazaars continued to work almost throughout the fighting - a testimony to the fact that Chechen women are indeed as tough as the men. Towards the end of the previous month, I visited a street market in Chernorechie, the southern suburb of Grozny still occupied by the separatist forces. Working there was Asya, a forty-nine-year-old Chechen woman who had formerly had a stall in the central market, and had fled from the centre with a carload of frozen chickens and Russian-made women's boots, which she was now busy selling. She said that several people had already been killed while coming to buy or sell. In her words,

I have been a refugee for a month now. Since my flat in Grozny was bombed, I have been living with relatives in Goiti, south of here - but I

can't just live off them, I want to work myself, to feed my children myself. All the rest of us feel the same. There are twenty-five of us in one room in Goiti, but we are not talking about surrender. The Russians will never beat us. I have lost everything, and I tell you that.'1"

Though of course the point was that she had not lost everything; she had kept her extended family, her business acumen, her capacity for hard work -and her chickens. When I returned in May 1995, street markets had sprung up again in many parts of the battered and Russian-occupied town. They reminded me of the high spring grass which was already growing all over the wasteland around the central square, the thrusting, twining creepers of vivid green growing over the stumps of the shattered trees, and eclipsing the grey and brown of the rubble which stood where thousands of people had suffered and died - an imposing and almost frightening sign of the vigour of nature amidst the fragility of the works of civilisation, or indeed of man."