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.

At night, if you returned from a business trip in the evening. In the daytime, if you returned in the morning, in the evening, if you returned in the afternoon.

No event you try to describe, if you consider it worthy of public concern, can be allowed to sit in your mind. Then it loses the intonation of the event.

That's why the articles from Chechnya, which I first published in "Literaturnaya Gazeta" and then, after leaving there, in "Novaya Gazeta," were written on the fly, for the current issue.

I don't want to change anything in the text now, although, of course, my understanding of this monstrous tragedy of Russia and Chechnya changed from one trip to the next. It would be dishonest to correct them now. I will only allow myself to tell what accompanied these trips and what I couldn't write about then.

Each time I returned FROM THERE, I tried to understand: did anything strike you this time? Did you gasp at something new you saw and learned? Did you feel yourself standing again at the edge of an abyss, whose depths you couldn't make out, no matter how hard you tried?

Notebook One

Year 1995

The wild Cherkesses are intimidated: their ancient audacity vanishes. The roads become safer by the hour, numerous convoys – superfluous… I rode in sight of the hostile fields of free mountain peoples. Around us rode 60 Cossacks, behind us trailed a loaded cannon with a lit fuse… You understand how this shadow of danger pleases the dreaming imagination…

Alexander Pushkin to his brother Lev,
September 24, 1820

Authorities, Stop Lying!

From Grozny—from that hell of death, dirt, blood, fear, from that city (or rather, from what used to be a city), where political vileness and human courage were so intertwined, the provincial Mozdok seems like a shining Paris: light is just light, water is just water, silence is just silence...

So, authorities, if only you had heard how people, finding themselves in the Mozdok paradise after the Grozny hell, cursed your latest statements on the "Vremya" program about the "second phase of the operation" which supposedly had already begun, about the "replacement of army units with MVD units," and about the "transfer of power to the opposition."

Before leaving Mozdok, I coincidentally ran into some guys from the Yaroslavl OMON: after fighting their battle here, they returned to transport the body of a killed comrade back home. They asked how long it had been since I was in Grozny. I answered: just now. "So, how is it there now?" they asked me. I told them what I had witnessed. "Understood," one of the guys sighed grimly. "And we barely got our rifles... They kept telling us that it was terribly quiet in Grozny now: 'pistols will do'..."

And I won't forget how, in Grozny itself, I heard from a captain, as unshaven as everyone else there: "Some newspaper fell into my hands... I read that children in Grozny went to school..." And, after a pause, he threw out angrily: "Bastards... I'll never read your newspapers again..."

War in Grozny... A real war...

Day and night heavy artillery shells city districts controlled by Dudayev (by various estimates, he controls 40 to 50 percent of the city's territory). But internal troops don't have heavy artillery! There are constant movements of tank columns in the city. But internal troops don't have tanks either! Aircraft launch bombing raids—those are army planes too.

I'm talking about what I saw last week, that is, ten days after Boris Yeltsin publicly declared that "the first phase of the operation is complete" and internal troops had replaced the army...

Here, in Grozny, is a real front line. Here are ours, and nearby, where the next nine-story building stands, are "they"—ours, who by the will of incompetent politicians have become not ours, but strangers, opponents, enemies.