"Sorry... Our fault. I ordered our soldiers to meet them, and they carried out a whole special operation... Well, you know what they say: give a fool a task and he'll screw it up..."
And we had that too.
Yes, and one more story, funny but typical for that (and our) time.
When I returned from Novogroznenskoye, Vladlen Maksimov (his father, a famous Soviet intelligence officer, managed to name his son both Vladimir and Lenin simultaneously, but we all just called him Vladik) asked to go to Chechnya. "Go ahead!" I agreed and started calling various local officials to help our guy or—if necessary—to protect him from any adventures.
He flew out. He arrived. He started working there. And suddenly—he disappeared.
You can imagine what I must have felt: an old fool sent a young boy to where he should have gone himself. And I also imagined what my friends from Ruslan Aushev's presidential administration, primarily Ingushetia's Vice President Boris Agapov, whom I had asked to cover our guy, were feeling.
Now, honestly, I don't remember the details: who did I call? whom did I ask? with whom did I argue? from whom did I expect help?—but suddenly the phone rang at my place in Peredelkino:
"It's me, Vladik. I'm flying out of Ingushetia today."
"Where have you been? What happened to you? Why did you disappear?"
"Well, I was taken hostage... It was very funny," he replied.
I asked Mumin Shakirov (then he worked in the investigation department of "LG," and later literally chose "Svoboda"—the radio station of the same name) to meet Vladik.
Late that evening, the guys drove to Peredelkino, and Vladik, still nervous but already laughing, told me what had happened to him.
Yes, he was met. Boris Agapov took him under his wing. Vladik settled in the house of the brother of the field commander, the commandant of Bamut. So, he should have been completely safe on all sides. More than that! He managed (and honestly, I was proud that the guy on his first wartime assignment did what a journalist can and should be able to do) to get to the outskirts of Novogroznenskoye and witness how "Grads" destroyed what had been peace just two weeks earlier.
And then he crossed the border between Chechnya and Ingushetia.
"I went to the market in Sleptsovsk... Just for nothing... Suddenly, three Chechens approach me, ask who I am? I answer: a journalist from 'Litgazeta.' They tell me: 'You will be our hostage. You will answer for Chechnya!'"
"And what did you do?"
"I was overjoyed!"
Do you understand?
Journalism is such a profession, and I understood Vladik's reaction.
I myself dream of that—even now that I'm grown up—of flying in a plane, and suddenly terrorists hijack it. In my youth, I even had a phrase prepared for such an eventuality: "I agree to be a hostage." No, now I wouldn't utter that phrase so idly, but then I thought—how much joy there would be when I suddenly appeared in my editorial office with a sensational piece.
Yes, but Vladik was let down.
These three guys, fighters for Chechen freedom (I repeat, that's how they introduced themselves to Vladik), turned out to be ordinary bandits. After talking about freedom, they asked Vladik for his leather jacket and wedding ring, the putting on of which at his wedding with Nastya I witnessed (a terribly convoluted sentence, forgive me).
And then (as Vladik told me) a complete phantasmagoria began.
He—without a jacket—called the vice-president. The latter mobilized all the police at his disposal. Two of the three were arrested. A sad Vladik, who never became a hostage, was giving testimony to the police when the brother of the Bamut commandant rushed in (and it should be noted that for kidnapping a guest in the Caucasus, according to normal Caucasian laws, the penalty is more severe than arrest, trial, or Lefortovo) and asked him:
"We'll shoot them in front of your eyes, do you want that?"
Vladik, of course, did not want that...
I could never have imagined that two years later, this story would continue.
That was a completely different time: there was a small and fragile peace in Chechnya.