We drove to the regiment...

Passing Novogroznenskoye, we ran into concrete barriers and a barrier blocking the highway.

Only our "Lincoln" was allowed through...

It turned out the regiment was located to the right and left of the road: mud up to the knees, grey tents, tanks almost buried up to their turrets in the mud...

Nadyr remained in his exotic car, I stood, smoked with the officers, waiting for them to find the commander...

"And which faction are you from?" some captain asked me.

I replied that I was from "Yabloko."

"Too bad... It would be better if you were from Terekhov... He's a decent guy..."

But — completely unexpectedly for me — the others did not support him. Moreover! Two officers said they voted for "Yabloko"...

"So what happens next?" I asked.

"What, what? Do we know? Nothing's clear... Their headquarters is in Novogroznenskoye: Dudayev is there, Maskhadov is there... We are here, they are there. We command by day. They—by night..." explained a major with eyes inflamed from eternal insomnia, and then asked: "What's the news from your end? When will all this mess end?.."

The commander appeared. I explained to him too that those green-flagged trucks had nothing to do with us.

"Well, okay... If not, then not... Go wherever you're going..."

As we turned back towards Novogroznenskoye, a helicopter flew threateningly low overhead: once, a second time, a third... Someone even managed to photograph it. At least, someone gave me that photograph.

Why the helicopter hovered above us, I still can't understand. Maybe it was launched by that captain, the fan of the dressed-up Terekhov?

We waited quite a long time for Maskhadov to arrive. We chatted peacefully with the field commanders. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Kostya passionately explaining something to the Chechens. Bagautdin approached, pulled me aside, whispered: "You can't do that... you can't... Tell him not to say that..."

It turned out that Konstantin was telling the Chechens about his past as a KGB agent...

(Later, Nadyr told me that because of Kostya, I was also mistaken for a KGB agent, and some Chechen even remembered seeing me in Moscow in a colonel's uniform.)

I barely managed to calm Konstantin: "You came to film, so film. Don't put us in a difficult position, do you hear?"

Maskhadov struck me by not once raising his eyes during the entire conversation; it seemed as if I was talking not to a person, but to empty space.

I remember how he said:

"I could give you two or three prisoners. But you are not Zhirinovsky, to make a TV show out of it! Yes, I will release them, I will release them... As I already said, I will hand them over to their parents..."

How did I see Maskhadov then? No, not the chief of Dudayev's staff—but a man, by fate's will, who found himself on the other side of barricades built by unknown hands.

Maskhadov was a model Soviet colonel. I am convinced: if, when his division was stationed in Vilnius, he had been ordered to lead it to storm the TV tower, he would have carried it out without hesitation.

Just as Dzhokhar Dudayev was a model Soviet general (I met many who served with him before—I heard nothing but good about him).

Look how everything turned out for us!

But then, and now, Aslan Maskhadov is a hostage of circumstances. And he couldn't, as he promised me, bring Raduyev to trial for Pervomaysk, not because he didn't want to. He couldn't. He simply couldn't.

Still remembered.

A UAZ pulled up, a bearded guy jumped out, hung with machine gun belts like in some old movie. People rushed to embrace him... I don't know who he was, but there was something very touching about that scene...

In the evening, back in Makhachkala, Konstantin disappeared. He returned at night. It turned out that at Nadyr's house, he had spent a long time recounting his past as an agent and beating his chest: "Look what a scoundrel I was."

I was genuinely angry by then. That anger hasn't subsided to this day...

We flew to Moscow in a ridiculous way.