We're all playing games, you government guys...

And finally.

The Russian army, in its complete poverty, armed a battalion of 600 men in Vedeno, consisting solely of Chechen boys.

Perhaps this is our new concept?

And although General Baranov, commander of the joint group, explained to us that this was, in principle, great and that the Ministry of Defense had only given them light weapons, I still couldn't understand why he was lying?

They were given grenade launchers and mortars. And—when the guys from the Saratov special forces tried to pass through Vedeno—they were blocked by their own Chechen colleagues. Subsequently, one of these Ministry of Defense "fighters" had a rifle confiscated, with which a murder was committed in Astrakhan, and the "fighter" himself, it turned out, had been on the wanted list since 1985.

Vedeno remains to this day a place where militant leaders find refuge.

At the expense of the Ministry of Defense budget. Under the leadership of Supyan Taramov, president of Moscow's "Stark-bank."

A strange Kvashnin idea...

That's why Chechen history is a constant continuation of Moscow history.

...I didn't recognize "Severny," Grozny's main airport.

It's no longer there. Though the runway remains. The building itself is beyond repair.

The last time I flew from here was about two years ago, having emotionally cut short negotiations with Kazbek Makhashev for the release of our prisoners of war.

I remember a young Chechen rifleman, whom they had assigned to guard me, walking me to the ramp.

We had grown accustomed to each other during those days.

"Bring me camouflage," he suddenly asked.

"What camouflage! You should be studying..."

"No... I will fight. Always fight..."

Where is he now, that boy?

Did he die in the bombings? Is he hiding somewhere in the mountains? Has he forgiven us for everything that happened? Will we forgive him too?

...Then began a peaceful Moscow week, little different from others, just like it.

It's always like this: the intensity of recent impressions from the war gradually fades, clouded by new impressions and concerns.

But something seen and heard THERE suddenly emerges from the depths of memory and makes you inwardly flinch. Oh my God! How could I have forgotten a fleeting conversation with a colonel in a half-ruined dugout near Shatoy? I remember a young battalion commander shouting into a field telephone: "Neighbors, neighbors! Give a volley at the high ground..."; I remember a burnt-out APC in which the deputy battalion commander and three other guys had died a week before our arrival; I remember a Muscovite contract soldier (just a boy) who gave his Moscow grandmother's phone number. I was finding out if the soldiers were receiving the combat pay stipulated by the presidential decree—eight hundred something rubles a day (officers nearly a thousand)? Was it disappearing into quartermaster's coffers? Was it reaching everyone who had spent at least one day of their life on the brink of death?

Yes, they told me, it reaches them... And they described the mechanism of how it's done. Soldiers aren't given money directly: it's a considerable sum after all. They aren't given it upon demobilization either—who knows what might happen to a person on the road? Come home, open an account at Sberbank, and inform your unit. Only then—go ahead.

But, it turns out, parents can receive combat money for their sons.

"That's why they keep coming to us," the colonel told me. "They come and they come..."

Then we talked about something else: there were plenty of topics in war. And that phrase—I didn't pay much attention to it then—was immediately forgotten. But then, unexpectedly, in other, Moscow, weekdays, it resurfaced in my memory:

"PARENTS KEEP COMING AND COMING..."

I see, I see, how, by various means, with transfers, in general and open-plan carriages, fathers, mothers, grandmothers, sisters of soldiers given up for bloody gain, traveled from Russian towns and villages to the distant Caucasus, to war, to their sons; how they searched for their units and how they were then painstakingly explained what a financial unit was; how unfamiliar it was for them to sign in the registers of these financial units; how carefully they hid this money—unthinkable for their meager salaries and pensions!—on their way home.

Parents come not only to visit their sons! They come to them as saviors: help me, son...