"Do you know where they are now?"
"In Stavropol, even—in Moscow."
"So who are you fighting against there?"
"Not against my own... Chechen guys from Grozny don't fight."
"And who does? Mercenaries?"
"Yes... And boys from the mountains, for whom Grozny is like Moscow is for me."
This, I repeat, is the opinion of twenty-year-old Andrei.
The guys I met in the last days of this year and century are not some jackals of war: each wanted and wants to study further. But times are such... And also (I repeat almost verbatim what I heard from each): "Neither we nor our parents will have enough money to enroll..."
While they are fighting.
And his commander, Sasha, has another operation assigned. His arm hurts.
He should be persuaded to go to Moscow, to Burdenko. But he's thinking of them.
For his guys—another operation. A special operation. Now, on the eve of the outgoing year...
Hey, stay alive!
I won't forget Andrei's story.
Storming his own house... An Order—for the storm...
Swings in the yard. Mom and Dad—and him between them. Football... A fight... A girl's gaze... Ice cream...
"On Nikolka's shoulders are sergeant's epaulets with white stripes, and on his left sleeve a sharp-angled tricolor chevron..."
Nikolka's eyes grow dim...
We are storming something.
Either childhood. Or the future.
Sasha called me last in summer 2002. From near Shatoy. The connection was very poor, and I only managed to understand that his arm was moving, and the guys were alright.
Sasha was nominated for the title of Hero of Russia twice. They didn't give it to him. He was awarded another Order of Courage—his third, I think.
He was very upset and angry.
He was hinted that he should give someone something.
He couldn't give anything—he had nothing to give.
I don't know where he is now, and I'm very worried.
I constantly remember how he lay across the sofa, his aching arm resting on a pillow, barely holding back tears from the unbearable pain.
Where Vakha Arsanov is now—I also don't know. Nothing was heard of him during the second Chechen war. Perhaps he's working as a "traffic cop" in some Emirates.
Well, all right... Into the new, anxious, dramatic year of '99.
Notebook Five: Year 1999
No one is to blame,
We're simply fewer now.
Cruel war
Will take many more.
This year, 1999, proved dark and terrible...
Everyone had a premonition that it might be the last for the Yeltsin era, though no one could accurately predict how much longer it might last.
The entire year passed under the sign of a prime ministerial merry-go-round—Primakov, Stepashin, Putin, and Aksenenko, who came after Primakov. He popped out like a jack-in-the-box: I remember Seleznev's words in the Duma, when everyone was waiting for a package from the Kremlin with the name of the new appointee: "The President proposes Aksenenko." But the package contained Stepashin's name, and there was much joking in the Duma about the speaker's faulty hearing...
Well, okay—the prime ministerial merry-go-round, which showed the fragility of Yeltsin's power, his personal vacillations either from impotence or from the fatigue of an aging man.
The year 1999 brought terrible, bloody surprises to Russia, from which we still cannot recover: apartment building bombings in Moscow, Volgodonsk, and finally, the unexpected attack on Dagestan by Basayev's and Khattab's gangs.
In that August, when it hit so hard, I had to visit Dagestan twice within two weeks, so I will combine two reports from two assignments.
First:
"On the night from Friday to Thursday, a thunderstorm began. The sky thundered so loudly that ears popped, lightning flashed across half the sky, such as you can probably only see here, in the southern sky of the anxious Caucasian foothills.
The Makhachkala-Moscow flight was delayed again, for the umpteenth time that day.
"We just brought Khattab's interpreter, and two wounded more," said a dusty OMON officer I met at the airport.
"Our wounded?" I asked.
"Wounded," he muttered and walked away to his men, equally dusty and unshaven people of yet another Caucasian war.