A Russian Diary Read online

  November 26

  It is a year now since Khodorkovsky was arrested. The authorities ignore the anniversary. In the days of the Soviet Union the mediator between society and the state was the KGB, which provided the authorities with distorted information about what was going on, and this ultimately led to the collapse of the USSR.

  Today's FSB also seriously distorts information going upstairs, but Putin distrusts all other sources. The aorta will duly be blocked again. Let's hope we don't have to wait seventy years this time.

  December 11

  What speed! The president has already signed the law abolishing the election of governors. It has been our fastest ever passage of a law, and all so that from January 1 Putin should not have to discuss matters with the governors or worry that they might be uncooperative. A tsar should have serfs, not partners. Some of the children massacred at Beslan have yet to be identified and buried, but that's not the priority. The parents are increasingly being left to sort that out themselves. What is really important is to change the structure of the state into something more amenable to Putin.

  As for Beslan, the town is quietly going out of its mind. The autumn that began on September 1 is over now, and the onset of winter certainly hasn't made anyone feel better. Certainly not the families whose children have yet to be found, who have no child, no funeral, no grave where they can mourn. Zhorik Agaev, Aslan Kisiev, Zarina Normatova, all junior pupils born in 1997, and eleven-year-old Aza Gumetsova have yet to be found. Zifa, the mother of second-year Zhorik Agaev, almost never leaves home. She stays in waiting for him.

  “What if he came back and I wasn't here! What sort of welcome would that be?” Zifa says, smiling somewhere inside herself. Her mouth is twisted: she was wounded at the school. “I know people in this town think I am crazy, but I'm not. I am just certain that my Zhorik is alive. He is being held somewhere.”

  Families whose children are listed as missing divide into two groups. Some, like Zifa, believe they are being held hostage. Others believe they are dead, and that their remains have been buried by somebody else by mistake.

  Zifa's strangeness has several causes, which God grant you may never experience. She is the hostage who let the children in the gymnasium drink from her own breast. She gave her breast to all who were sitting near her. Later she squeezed the life-giving liquid out, drop by drop, into a spoon that the children passed around.

  “Zhorik will come back and everything will be the same again. Do you know, on September 3 it was very quiet in the hall. The terrorists had gone off somewhere, there were very few of them with us. We were already crawling over the trip wires, we didn't care about anything by then. I began hallucinating, imagining I was in a coffin. Then I imagined I heard a terrorist calling, ‘Agaevs, some water has been brought for you, take it!’ I must have frightened Zhorik, because he crawled away from me.”

  Suddenly Zifa was blown out of the window by the blast of an explosion. Everybody who had been sitting near her was burned to death. Half her face was mutilated; she has had operations and there are more to come. Four pieces of shrapnel can't be removed.

  “All these scars and fragments don't matter. What matters is Zhorik. When he comes back we will celebrate his rebirth,” she says again and again. “How I'll shout, ‘Look, everybody! Zhorik has come back!’ I won't let him go away ever again … I won't let them bring any of their bags into my house. Zhorik is alive!” By now she is in desperation. “Zhorik in a bag? Never!”

  A “bag” is Beslan newspeak for human remains brought from the Rostov-on-Don military mortuary after identification. Zhorik's remains haven't been identified, although there are unclaimed remains of boys of approximately his age. What is going on?

  Zifa by now is quiet and calm, her voice just that of a mother devastated by the loss of her child: “When Zhorik comes back, I will take him to President Dzasokhov and President Putin and say, ‘Look! This is the angel you made no attempt to save!’ ”

  Then, in a whisper: “I shall never eat raspberry jam again. For those first two hours we were so afraid. When Zhorik shouted, ‘He's killed him!’ I said, ‘It's just a film they're making.’ Zhorik said, ‘But why is it so real? And what is this running toward us?’ I said, ‘It's just raspberry jam, Zhorik.’ ”

  Marina Kisieva is thirty-one and lives in the village of Khumalag, a twenty-minute drive from Beslan. She lost her husband, Artur, and her son Aslan in the atrocity. Aslan was seven and a pupil in Class 2A. Marina now has only her daughter, five-year-old Milena, who is serious beyond her years and never asks where Aslan has gone. She simply refuses to go to nursery, and she used to faint whenever the women in their apartment building began wailing.

  Aslan's teacher, Raisa Kambulatovna Dzaragasova-Kibizova, would later say that Artur “was the best father in the class.” It was he who insisted Aslan should go to the best school in Beslan, and it was he who did the driving, although he had a job and was also studying. Marina shows me his last piece of coursework, “Creating Rights,” for the Law Faculty of the Pyatigorsk campus of the Russian University of Commerce and Economics. Just one day before September 1, Artur came back from Pyatigorsk in order to take his son to school himself. Marina was intending to go too, and stayed at home quite by chance.

  “Why did I stay behind? I would have got him out of the gymnasium! Aslan was a loppy-eared, thin, funny little boy. Everybody loved him. He was very timid,” Marina says, furrowing her eyebrows, trying not to cry in front of Milena.

  Artur was killed almost immediately. They shot him on September 1 when the terrorists took the men away to work on fortifying the building and hanging out explosives. Apparently Artur said, “Do you think I'm going to kill children with my own hands?” and they killed him.

  Aslan was left in the gym without his father. He crept over to his teacher, Raisa Kambulatovna, and stayed close to her almost to the end, constantly asking, “Where is Artur?”

  Raisa Kambulatovna is sixty-two. On September 1 she had been a schoolteacher for forty years. “Could I have imagined that I would spend my anniversary not receiving flowers, but under a hail of bullets?” Like many experienced teachers, Raisa Kambulatovna sits very upright and holds her head high, even now when a campaign has started in Beslan— deliberately fomented by the intelligence services and agents from the procurator general's office—to seek “the killers” among the teachers who survived.

  “Yes, they're trying to shift the blame onto us, as if to say, ‘They can't have done their duty toward the children if they survived and the children didn't.’ Don't imagine anyone could have done anything to save anyone. There was nothing to be done, either before the explosion or after it. The duty of the teachers in there was to be an older friend, to set an example and give the children strength. That's exactly what they did until the explosion. After that there was nothing anybody could do. By September 3 everybody was completely dazed, having hallucinations. I tried so hard to protect Aslan, but at the very end I was unable to save him.

  “On September 1 we had been among the first to be herded into the gymnasium because our class, 2A, was at the front of the procession, near the school doors. I sat down in the hall in front of my class. At my back were pupils and their parents. The explosives were hanging above me. Artur Kisiev was with his son, like everyone else. The fighters said, ‘All the daddies come to the front, please.’ Five minutes later they shot them in the corridor. That's how two of my pupils lost their fathers, Misikov and Kisiev. I said to my children, ‘They won't shoot children.’

  “Aslan was lying at my feet and said he was hungry. I did everything I could to feed him. The first evening there was a young mother next to us with a little child who kept crying. She was rocking him, but he wouldn't stop. At first a fighter pointed his rifle at her as if ordering her to keep him quiet. Then he gave a deep sigh and took out a bottle of water. ‘This is my water. Give it to the child. And here are two Mars bars. Get him to suck them through a cloth.’ The mother was afraid it was poison, b
ut I said to her, ‘We're not going to get out of this alive anyway. At least let the child quieten down now’ She broke off a piece of one of the bars and gave it to the child to suck through some cloth. The remainder, one and a half of their Mars bars, I hid behind my back. I broke off a big piece for Aslan and quietly gave the rest to the children from my class.

  “The second night, when everybody was terribly thirsty and they weren't letting any of the children go to the toilet, I said, ‘Just do it on the floor.’ They relaxed and started doing as I suggested. The boys were given cut-off bottles to pee in. I told them to drink from them. The children didn't want to, so then I drank some of the urine of the oldest pupil, a boy in the sixth grade who had been in my class in the primary school. I didn't even hold my nose, so that the children should see it wasn't that bad. After that they started drinking it, Aslan too. On the morning of September 3 Karina Melikova, a girl in the fifth grade, unexpectedly asked to go to the toilet. They let her out and her mother, who teaches one of the primary classes, told her to pull some leaves off the houseplants in the office, because they let them go to the toilet in the office where they had broken a hole in the floor. Karina managed to pull off some leaves, hide them between the pages of a notebook and bring them back to the hall. We gave the leaves to the children, and Aslan ate one that second day. Karina and her mother were both killed. Whose fault is that? I lost Aslan at the very last moment.

  “Immediately before the assault many people were feeling very ill. Some were lying there unconscious and being trodden on. Taisya Khetagurova, the teacher of Ossetian language, wasn't well. I crawled over to pull her to the wall, to stop her being trodden on, and left Aslan for a moment. And that was it. I didn't hear the explosion or the shooting. The world simply disappeared. I came to when special operations troops trod on me. They just walked over our bodies and they walked over me too. I began to be able to feel again and started crawling out. There were bodies beside me, piled one on top of another. Why did I survive and not them? Why did seven of my second-grade pupils die, when I, who am already sixty-two, didn't? And where is Aslan? I see him in front of me every night, creeping toward me like a little mouse. His mother is half-dead, I know. I have met her.”

  Marina leafs through Aslan's school books. That has been her main occupation this autumn. She went to the school, rummaged through everything in the office of 2A and found Aslan's books from his first year, and those, unwritten in, that Raisa Kambulatovna had prepared for her pupils entering second grade. For hours Marina reads and rereads the five lines from the only annual dictation test her son was destined to sit: “The eighteenth of May. In the garden a wild rose is growing. It has lovely, fragrant flowers …” Behind Marina's back as she gazes at these books is a bed on which Artur's favorite things are laid out: an open pack of cigarettes, his student record, his registration card, his coursework. And his portrait. He looks very stern but has thoughtful eyes. Milena is completely silent when she moves in front of the portrait.

  “For the first two months I was completely numb. I didn't go out. I neglected the house. I wanted nothing to do with my daughter. I was completely isolated. I couldn't bear to turn the tap on, I couldn't bear to hear the sound of running water. Why didn't they let the children drink? It angered me that people went on eating and drinking after September 1. I was going crazy. I still am.”

  Marina shows me a letter that was brought to her home together with a new satchel, charity for Aslan “from the schoolchildren of St. Petersburg.”

  “Why did they have to do that, when everybody knew our son had died?”

  There is a letter “from Irusya, fourteen.” It reads, “You survived those terrible days. You are a hero!” There follows an invitation to be pen friends.

  “How could our address have got on to the wrong list?” Marina asks, crying from the hurt caused by this dreadful act of carelessness. “The satchel was unbearable. It was just the opposite of what we needed. I understand now that nobody is going to help me. Where is that Putin? Too busy with some drivel to give orders for all the bodies to be identified as soon as possible, those that can be. Then at least some of the parents could be at peace and have a grave to tend.”

  Sasha Gumetsov and Rimma Torchinova are the parents of Aza Gumetsova. Sasha is beside himself with grief and self-torment. He cannot sleep at night, blaming himself for failing to save his daughter. He has black rings under his eyes and hasn't shaved for many days. Sasha and Rimma are heroically going around Beslan from house to house, trying to persuade mothers and fathers who have buried their children to have the bodies exhumed.

  “At first, of course, we believed that Aza was being held hostage. Gradually we had to recognize that was not the case. On September 4 parents were ‘identifying’ their children by the pants they were wearing, because you couldn't identify them from anything else. They only took charred bodies for DNA identification at the forensic medical laboratory in Rostov, but there were so many that a lot were just left here, unidentified. People took them back to their homes. This is a small town, we don't have any smart boutiques, and many of the children had identical clothes from the bazaar. That's how everything got muddled up. We could see how it happened as we went around the mortuaries ourselves, looking into every bag, examining every little finger.”

  “How could you bear to do that?”

  Not a muscle flickers on Rimma's face.

  “I told myself, ‘Nothing could be worse than what the children went through in that school. I have no right to pity myself And I don't. Now the only question for us is how to bury our child, how to perform our last duty to Aza. In the mortuary there is the body of an unidentified little girl of a similar age to ours, but she is not Aza. That means that somebody else has our daughter in a grave. It might be the parents of the little girl in the mortuary. We realize, of course, that the chain of who belongs to whom could turn out to be very long. We are only too aware of that.”

  “The chain of exhumations?”

  “Of course. On the list we were given by the procurator's office there are thirty-eight addresses of people who might have buried the wrong child. Thirty-eight girls of roughly the same age and build died. The main thing is that we are on the right track: if the total number of remains in Rostov and the number of those missing are the same, then it is simply a matter of errors in identification. They have all been found, only they've been mixed up.”

  On September 1, Aza went to school alone for the first time, without her mother, without flowers, as she and her best friends from Class 6G, who were beginning to grow up, had agreed. One was Sveta Tsoy, a Korean girl, the only child of Marina Park: Sveta the dancer, Sveta the fantasist, Sveta the star of the Theater of Children's Fashion, Sveta who was identified only on September 27 by DNA analysis because her legs had been blown off and her body was unidentifiable.

  Another friend, Emma Khaeva, was brimming with energy. She would make up impromptu poems. When she was running to school in the morning, she always found time to say good morning to all the neighbors and to ask the old ladies along her route how they were feeling. Her parents were lucky. She was killed too, but could be buried in an open coffin.

  And then there was Aza, the only, adored daughter of Rimma and Sasha. Rimma didn't go out to work. She gave Aza every opportunity that Beslan had to offer: dancing, singing, languages, societies. “I used to tell myself the three of them were people of the twenty-first century,” Rimma continues. “They were not like us. They had a positive attitude toward life. They wanted a lot. Aza had her own opinion about everything. She was a philosopher.”

  All we now know is that Emma, Sveta, and Aza were at first separated in the gym, but on September 3 managed to move toward each other. They decided to celebrate the birthday of Madina Sazanova, another of their classmates, and were last seen sitting together right under the window where the wall was blown in to make an opening for the children to escape.

  “I haven't heard of anybody sitting by that part of the wall wh
o survived,” Rimma concludes. “All that is left now is for us to bury Aza. We go round the addresses, working down the list, as if it were a job. We try to talk people into agreeing.”

  What respect can anyone have for a state machine that dementedly replicates these cataclysmic events for its citizens: first Nord-Ost, then Beslan. The state refuses ever to admit responsibility for anything, and furtively shuffles off all its other duties too. Should there be exhumations? Leave it to the most vulnerable to worry about that. We will set them against each other, the families who have buried their dead and those who have no dead to bury, and everyone will forget to protest against Dzasokhov and Putin. They won't demand a genuine inquiry for a long time. They will have other things to worry about.

  The state has distanced itself from everything that happened at Beslan, abandoning the town to madness in its isolation. Nobody else in Russia wants to know.

  December 12

  In Moscow, the National Citizens’ Congress has brought together delegates from every part of Russia. There were hopes that it would turn into a front of national salvation, but that hasn't worked out. The reason is simple: Georgii Satarov and Lyudmila Alexeyeva, who organized the event, don't want to tread on the Kremlin's toes. Accordingly, sitting up there in the presidium, they quash “excessive” criticism of Putin, with the result that, by the end of the sessions, almost nobody is left in the hall. When Garry Kasparov, one opposition leader who actually is beginning to make a mark, came to the rostrum, people shouted, “Kasparov for president!” The organizers were so put out by this that they sidelined Kasparov for the rest of the congress.