The Volga's door swung open... And a guy jumped out, familiar to me from Grozny, back then, in January...

The one I saw in Mozdok when he came for beds for the SOBR officers based at the dairy factory.

"What a meeting!" I exclaimed happily.

We hugged, and I started asking how the guys were? Was everyone alive? Was anyone wounded?

We stood next to the "Volga," which even a young Dzerzhinsky Pioneer wouldn't have mistaken for an "office" car (antenna on the roof, three more in the car), forgetting all rules of conspiracy.

And directly towards us, at the crossroads, a Mercedes with tinted windows sped. And without reaching us, about two meters away, it sharply turned around—and sped towards Mozhaisk Highway.

"We couldn't have picked a better place to talk. In front of everyone. Now that they've seen I didn't come alone, they won't show up for the meeting again. They're not idiots," I said, upset.

"Oh, to hell with them... If they really know something and want to tell us—they'll call again. And if not—it's even better that they saw: you're being covered... You know what life is like now..."

Then the car with the SOBR officers drove off to the side, into the shade of the trees. I wandered alone at the crossroads for another hour. That "Mercedes" never returned.

True, no one else from those people called me back...

These encounters—after that first Chechen assignment—are unrelated to what I am writing about today and what I remember, unable to forget, probably never.

But the longer I live, the more I become convinced of how intricately events intertwine in our present life, how they become a single, unified event for you, the causes of which you try to understand: who is to blame? such a time? such a person? such a country? yourself?...

Well, okay... Now, about what I didn't want to write then... Or couldn't?... No, after all—I didn't want to.

In Mozdok, at the headquarters of our group, I met a colonel of transport police from Moscow.

"You have no idea what was happening here under Dudayev. Not a single train could pass through Chechnya! Not one! Like in the Civil War, entire villages would come out, block the railway tracks, and loot. Now you can find entire warehouses in Chechen apartments!"

I remember he even showed me certificates: how many trains were attacked, how many hundreds of thousands of tons of cargo disappeared from trains, and finally, how often passenger trains were attacked.

I copied the figures into my notebook, thinking they would be useful later.

They weren't useful, although I had no reason to doubt their veracity.

More than that! Rather, I think today, I intuitively omitted it than consciously.

Then, already in January, I felt that the only argument of the propagandists of this war, to explain to soldiers and officers why they were thrown here, was one: we are fighting against a criminal state (since few could be convinced by the idea of "restoring constitutional order"). We are not beating the people, but strengthening Russia. That's why I didn't want to join this chorus.

The second episode I omitted was more serious, and I did so quite consciously.

A stone's throw from the dairy factory was a Red Cross post.

And the bells chime
Over the fields, sad birches.
Why are we not free birds?
Is it our fault that we are Russians?

Every morning, a crowd gathered near it, no longer paying attention to what was happening around them. They had no faces—only shadows of faces. They didn't run across the road under the whistle of bullets—they slowly walked through the bullets. With the same detachment in their gazes, they dragged on carts both the flour they received as humanitarian aid and the burlap-covered corpses of their relatives. These were mostly women, children, the elderly, old women. Overwhelmingly, of course, not Chechens, whose relatives had managed to take them to mountain villages—away from the war.

I approached them. They recognized me. And the first thing I heard was:

"Why didn't your Kovalev fight for human rights when we were forced to sell our apartments for next to nothing? When Russians were tormented? When our homes could be broken into every night?"