Yuri Shchekochikhin

Forgotten Chechnya: Pages from Wartime Notebooks

Instead of a Foreword

Yuri Shchekochikhin decided to publish his Chechen chronicles. Reports from the war, from secret negotiations, closed hearings in the State Duma. Shchekochikhin notes that a journalist cannot take up arms, because if he dies with a rifle in his hands, he won't be considered a reporter. Yet, he cannot help but intervene in life and war. He organizes operations to free prisoners and helps equip a brigade battered in battle. He negotiates with militants and raises tough questions about peace and war in the State Duma. He is unarmed, yet with his own caliber—the caliber of his personality—he influences life. The main thing is that his private politics contain the concept of shame, now considered unpragmatic. Shame for the country, for the war, for senseless жертвы. For him, all this is not geopolitics, not the state’s plump fists clenching, but human destinies. He physically, painfully feels the time slipping away: soon there may be no one left with whom to even agree on peace in the same language.

For him, the category of victory in this war is impossible: victory is the end of the war. He seems to have answered the main question of today's politics: Is it possible, while engaged in it, to remain a decent person?

He was and remains the bearer of a special, bespoke reputation. Which means—he is free.

D. Muratov, Editor-in-Chief of "Novaya Gazeta"

Prologue

We are not accustomed to loneliness,
Hint at us between the lines.
Not by name, not by patronymic,
You can just say — brother, pal.
You all wanted to live from youth,
You all wanted to be eternal…
And now ground by war,
But in churches, you became candles.[1 - Here and further, verses by A. A. Chikunov are used with the kind permission of the author, to whom Notebook 9 is dedicated. Full song texts are printed at the end of the book. — Yu. Shch.]

I drove there through an evening Moscow that still knew almost nothing...

"On Proletarsky Prospekt, where I had to turn onto Melnikov Street..."—that's how I began my notebook entry early in the morning, having just returned FROM THERE.

Yes, the sky over Moscow was already beginning to lighten. A new day was dawning, a day we hadn't had yet. 2002, October.

I almost mechanically wrote down what I had learned and seen, and suddenly realized that these notes of mine, which I had been keeping since January 1995, would not be finished for a long, long, long time.

Before, it seemed like: oh, the end of '96! One can already write a book about how IT was. But IT never ended. Not in '96, nor in '99, nor in 2002, nor now.

And then I decided: it's time to tell the story.

I chose eight events, one (rarely two) per year, that I particularly remembered. Naturally, the accounts of them are entirely subjective. Someone will certainly start arguing with me, someone will accuse me of all terrible sins, someone will be completely against me.

Please. I repeat, I chose those events that I considered watershed moments for myself in this endless nightmare.

And one more thing.

Everyone who was THERE has their own memories. I won't say that these memories bring you terrible pleasure. After all, you don't want to recall partings with loved ones, quarrels with friends, or your own mistakes that led to irreparable consequences. And what you failed to write. It's painful, which is why you don't want to.

You want to remember the courtyards of your childhood, which grew smaller, smaller, smaller, because you yourself grew up.

Some sea. Most likely - the Black Sea. Koktebel. Seventeen years old. That's when I first saw the sea in my life.

And suddenly - war. Chechnya.

In my wildest dreams, I couldn't have imagined myself sitting in an APC, gunfire erupting, corpses on the roadside... Oh my God!

I understand that I am not the main witness.

But I was THERE. I saw.

There's a strange thing about the journalistic craft.

At least, as I've observed it from my own experience: you have to write about events you've witnessed instantly.