The first has an Order of Courage, the second—an Order of Courage and a Medal "For Valor," the third, the youngest, twenty-year-old—an Order of Courage.
And the commander, Sasha, in his thirties—with an iconostasis of his awards.
I'm telling you how it all was.
How they took off their jackets in the parliamentary lounge at Vnukovo airport. How, embarrassed by their medals, they walked past officials and generals to drink coffee and beer. How I introduced them to Maxim Likholetov, their peer from MGIMO, who had just finished his internship with us in the State Duma's Security Committee and rushed to Vnukovo. How we then showed them Moscow: "Here's Leninsky Gory... Here's Kutuzovsky... Here's the Kremlin... Here's the Duma... Here's the former Central Committee, Voloshin... Here's our newspaper..." How then Aunt Lyusya, the savior of our not-so-wealthy correspondents, fed them in our canteen... How then we went to my dacha in Peredelkino, where my friends, Irina Sabova and Vladislav Teplenko, prepared dinner for the guys... How in the evening Maxim and his MGIMO classmate Sergey took the guys on a tour of night Moscow, while their commander Sasha lulled his wounded arm... What the next day was like, the official one, at the "Meridian" Cultural Center, where, at the call of the younger Govorukhin, gathered those who fought in Chechnya by someone's will and who remember those who remained there forever, eternally. And how our fighting guys turned away from the TV cameras... And there was one more day in Moscow, an evening in Moscow, when we sat in Peredelkino... Pavel Gutiontov (for readers, Secretary of the Union of Journalists), Anatoly Golovkov, a wonderful journalist and bard (for listeners), Dima Muratov, editor-in-chief of our newspaper (for thinkers) arrived. The youngest of the four soldiers, the twenty-year-old decorated Andrei, turned out to be from Grozny.
In January '95—yes, in that very January, when I sped in an APC through the destroyed center, already used to seeing bodies, former people, lying on the roadsides—he was studying at a school in the Staropromyslovsky district.
"Didn't you know there were battles going on in the city center?" I asked Andrei.
"We still thought we could finish school..."
In the school, windows were already shattered by bombing raids, and teachers—both Chechen and Russian—took class registers home so they wouldn't be destroyed by the bombings. There, on the outskirts of Grozny, everyone still thought it would pass, that the war wouldn't touch them. After all, they were still children.
"Were there only Russians in your class, or Russians and Chechens?"
"Half and half. And what, is that important to you?" Andrei asked me.
"No... And then what? It's war..."
"Then my father told me: 'It will probably be very difficult here. Your uncle is coming for you. You'll finish school in Stavropol Krai.'"
"And why did your father stay?"
"He's an oilman. He thought things would get better..."
Andrei finished school there, at his uncle's. He could no longer enter the Grozny Oil Institute, which his father had graduated from: neither the institute nor Grozny itself existed. Then his parents also had to leave Grozny. Then Andrei was drafted into the army. Then—he ended up in a small unit commanded by Sasha, where courage was not valor, but a job. That's how life turned out.
Well, and then...
Then, then... In January 2000, twenty-year-old Andrei stormed his own house. And—for taking his own house—he received the Order of Courage.
"Tell me, young man, could it have happened that your classmates, Chechens, would have been shooting at you from your own house?"
"No... No... I know all my friends. Their parents also took them out of Grozny then, in early ninety-five..."
"Do you know where they are now?"
"In Stavropol, even—in Moscow."
"So who are you fighting against there?"
"Not against my own... Chechen guys from Grozny don't fight."
"And who does? Mercenaries?"
"Yes... And boys from the mountains, for whom Grozny is like Moscow is for me."
This, I repeat, is the opinion of twenty-year-old Andrei.