Stalin's Children: Three Generations of Love and War

14. Crisis

When I think of it now, hearing someone mention it on the radio or seeing the dateline in a paper, Moscow conjures a sense of wilderness, of the wreckage of expended energy. I left after the great bubble of the 1990s had imploded, and the hangover was at its deepest, the pendulum back at its midway low point between an infatuation with wild capitalism and what proved to be a deeper longing for authority and order.

The unruly but free Russia which Boris Yeltsin had created began to topple in the summer of 1998. I was a correspondent for Newsweek magazine by then, doing a very different job than the one I had done at the Moscow Times. Instead of searching the city for tales of the underworld, I was driven from Duma to Ministry in a blue Volvo, and wrote wise and excruciatingly polished articles about high politics.

In my new capacity I had a grandstand view of the unravelling of the old order. Nervousness was mounting in the impeccably carpeted corridors of the White House, the seat of Russia’s government. Deputy premier Boris Nemtsov, Russia’s leading reformer, insisted that everything would be fine and scribbled spidery graphs all over my notepad to prove his point. Tax chief Boris Fyodorov, the reformers’ heavyweight bruiser, gabbled about the irreversibility of Russia’s reforms with a manic energy. But in all the government offices I visited the smiles were rigid, the confidence forced. Everyone feared, deep down, that sometime, very soon, the whole rotten edifice would come crashing down. It was time for a reckoning after all the years of asset-stripping, embezzlement and theft which the country’s new masters had unleashed – and when it came, it would be cataclysmic.

The first signs that the end was near appeared in Moscow as miners from across the country set up a picket of the White House and invaded the Duma, pounding their helmets on the pavements of the capital and the marble banisters of the parliament. You could hear the hourly tattoo of dull drumming from inside the White House. It sounded like distant thunder beyond the tinted, Swiss-made windows.

In St Petersburg Yeltsin emerged from hospital to bury the remains of the last Tsar and his family, murdered by Bolshevik revolutionaries in 1918. I sneaked into the Peter and Paul Cathedral with a group of Romanov mourners, admitted because I alone among the journalists present had thought to wear a black suit and tie. There was a moment of intense pathos as the undersized coffins containing the family’s bones were brought to the altar. Yeltsin, wooden and swaying slightly, intoned a speech which claimed that Russia had come to terms with its past. I had always been a fervent admirer of Yeltsin, but now he seemed a tragic figure, a tottering bear of a man lost in a maze of corruption and as bewildered as his people by the superhuman forces of capitalism that he had unleashed. The parallels between the mistakes that led Russia’s last monarch to his sordid death and the seismic tremors gathering under Yeltsin’s own regime were painfully clear.

Moscow’s nightlife took on a strange intensity. Like rattlesnakes who feel earthquakes brewing deep in the bowels of the earth, the party people were seized with frenzy. Wherever the doomed rich gathered, in Galereya, the Jazz Café, Titanic, you could catch a glimpse out of the corner of your eye, through the dry ice and the strobes, of a phantom hand writing on the wall – ‘You have been weighed in the balance and found wanting.’

Supernatural warnings of apocalypse came biblically, with a blight which wiped out much of Russia’s potato harvest and incessant August rains which flattened the wheat fields, spelling disaster for the huge numbers of Russians reduced to subsistence agriculture to survive while the government withheld their wages. A freak storm toppled the golden crosses from the domes of the Novodevichy Convent and broke the crenellations from the Kremlin wall. Lightning struck the Russian flag which flew from the roof of the Kremlin’s Senate Palace. Even NTV television became an unwitting mouthpiece of the Armageddon, scheduling The Omen and its sequels on successive weekends. Russia’s babushkas, the country’s pathologically pessimistic watchers of signs and portents, clucked knowingly.

Then the deluge came with the ferocity of a natural disaster. After a panic meeting on the evening of 16 August 1998, the government devalued the ruble and defaulted on all Russia’s domestic and international debt repayments, destroying the stock market and wiping two-thirds off the value of the ruble in a single, disastrous week.

The new bourgeoisie, who before the crisis were planning their winter package holidays in Antalya, scuffled in crowds outside failing banks as they scrambled to recover their savings. All the old, savage reflexes of self-preservation surged back. Moscow housewives who thought that they could at least ‘live like people’ (as the Russian saying goes) scooped expensive macaroni off the shelves of Western supermarkets in a desperate bid to spend their fast-devaluing rubles. Their poorer counterparts emptied the city’s markets of siege-goods such as matches, flour, salt and rice.

The half-forgotten mental furniture of peasant nakhodchivost, or resourcefulness, was dusted down and thrown into the breach. Newspapers began publishing home economics tips with headlines like ‘Which foods can be stored for longest?’, advising readers not to stock up on frozen meat in case of power cuts. Harassed shop assistants at the Moscow branch of British Home Stores abandoned the price tags and added up the rapidly escalating ruble prices on calculators. The luxury boutiques in Moscow’s vulgarly opulent Manezh shopping mall looked like a museum of the old regime.

Within two months, the devastation was complete. Perhaps it was my imagination, but I felt that Moscow had become darker as the autumn of 1998 set in, physically darker, underlit, as though the flashy neon heart of the city was fading away. I called my landlady to say I was going to unilaterally halve the rent on my $1,500 a month apartment. She sighed in relief that I was not leaving, and thanked me.

I went to a lot of leaving parties thrown by my expatriate friends, who suddenly found their stock portfolios had evaporated and business models imploded. One was thrown at the Starlite Diner by a glamorous, silicone-chested Californian girl who had marketed Herbalife across the Russian provinces. She had hired a troupe of tragicomically inept Russian circus performers who danced on broken glass and pushed skewers through their cheeks for our entertainment. Someone played the Beatles’ ‘Get Back’ and ‘Money’ by Abba on the jukebox.

At the turn of that year, the start of the last year of the twentieth century, I reached a dead end in myself. I felt great tiredness, but sleep came fitfully and brought no relief. The black dog of depression which had periodically stalked me throughout my life took hold. I thought often of the dead Yana, and felt mediocre and spent. I passed long, empty evenings staring out of my apartment window at the falling snow, listening to the muffled noise of passing traffic.

I met Xenia Kravchenko at a dinner party thrown by a Belgian friend in her apartment in the backstreets near the Arbat. Xenia was tall and willow-thin, with a tomboyish haircut and worn jeans. What I remember most vividly about our first meeting was not her appearance or anything we said, but an overwhelming, almost supernatural realization that Xenia was the woman I was going to marry. That sounds foolish, but I felt it, powerfully. ‘Suddenly, he realized that all his life he had loved precisely this woman’ – I quoted the line from Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita to a mutual friend that very evening. A few days later, Xenia and I kissed for the first time on a park bench on Patriarch’s Ponds, not far from where Woland, Bulgakov’s devil incarnate, first appeared in Moscow.

Xenia was intelligent and beautiful. The two words go easily together. But in fact the truly intelligent, those women who are aware of their own power over men, realize that they have something of the Medusa in them. Xenia had a great cathartic force hidden behind her calm, an uncanny ability to expel people from their old selves. I felt, after my first weeks with Xenia, that I had been purged by her Gorgon presence, undergone a profound change. It was at times cruel, but it was epiphanous.

There was no great crisis or drama to it. On the contrary, I often found Xenia maddeningly diffident about life in general, and indeed about me in particular. She seemed to drift in a cloud of invincible innocence, refusing to take the world around her seriously. Yet she became a mirror on which I found my life violently dissected. My addiction to the phantasmagoria of Moscow, the voyeuristic streak which led me to seek out all that was most putrid and sordid and corrupt – all this suddenly seemed childish, and tired, and false. Though I didn’t really realize it as it was happening, Xenia was shearing me away from my old, corrupt self, forcing me to think of myself as someone normal and whole. A potential husband and father, even.

Xenia’s looks and self-confidence cushioned her against the harshness of the reality which surrounded her. She had somehow managed to remain aloof from the swinish, grubby life of Moscow. It was as if she and her family had survived from another, gentler age of Russia. She came from a long line of artists, and lived in a magnificent apartment which had been in the family since 1914. The old place was packed with dusty antique furniture and paintings; it had a stillness and permanence to it that I had hitherto only seen in old English country houses. The family’s dacha, too, where I write these words, stood on a high bank of the Moscow River at Nikolina Gora among the country cottages of Stalin’s cultural élite, just across the road from the Prokofievs, relatives of the composer, and the Mikhalkovs and the Konchalovskys, families of writers, painters and filmmakers. Her family had known their neighbours for three generations, and they all seemed to have grown as charmingly feckless as the defenceless gentry in The Cherry Orchard. Their charm and absentmindedness was quite unlike the iron-willed Soviet generation which my mother represented. They had been among the lucky ones; their lives had, through good fortune, not been scarred by the Soviet century.

Xenia moved into my apartment. We ate our meals in my bedroom, with its blood-red walls, as my cat rolled in a pool of sunlight by the window. Xenia would stay in when I went to work, sketching and painting, and when I came back we cooked large curry dinners and drank cheap red wine. I was as happy as I have ever been.

In autumn 1999, a new war began in Russia. Its opening shots were not bullets but massive bombs placed in the basements of apartment houses on the outskirts of Moscow and Volgodonsk, in southern Russia. I stood among the smoking rubble of destroyed buildings in the Moscow suburbs of Pechatniki and on the Kashirskoye Highway as firemen dug through the wreckage of the very ordinary lives which lay strewn about. Cheap sofas were splintered to matchwood among the piles of bricks, and plastic toys crunched under my feet. In all, over three hundred were killed in the attacks.

Chechen rebels were blamed, and within weeks the Russian Army was rolling into the breakaway rebel republic. Foreign reporters were banned from travelling independently, except in Kremlin-orchestrated bus tours which carefully avoided the front lines. I spent much of the winter devising new ways of getting to Chechnya covertly, sometimes with the rebels, sometimes with pro-Moscow Chechens, and several times by attaching myself to Russian journalists and striking deals with local Russian commanders to spend time with their units.

On my last trip to Chechnya – the thirteenth – I and my friend Robert King, a photographer, found ourselves near the village of Komsomolskoye. The Russian Army had trapped the remnants of the main rebel force, which had retreated from Grozny, in the small hamlet and had been pounding it for three days with rockets and artillery. We arrived on the fourth day, just as the dawn fog was lifting, to find that the Russian battalions which had been dug in around the village for days were gone, leaving only drifts of litter and fields of mud churned by tank tracks. We drove into Komsomolskoye unchallenged.

Other Chechen towns and villages I had seen had been bombed flat, the houses replaced with deep, smoking craters. This place was different. The village had been fought over house by house, and every building was riddled with meticulous patterns of bullet holes and the walls punched through by shells. The villagers’ vegetable plots were criss-crossed with the doomed rebels’ shallow trenches and improvised fortifications. The place smelled strongly of cordite, of burned wood, of fresh-turned earth, and of death.

The rebels’ bodies lay in groups of three or four. The first we saw were in the corner of a house, piled face-up among the debris of the collapsed roof. Their hands were tied, and their chests churned into a bloody mess by bullets. Further on, we came across the corpse of another rebel, a giant of a man with a bushy red beard, his hands secured behind his back with twists of fencing wire. Buried deep in the side of his head was a Russian entrenching tool with which he had been beaten to death. In a narrow ditch were a row of bodies, tangled promiscuously together, lying where they had fallen after being machine-gunned. Robert moved among the wreckage snapping photos, his professional instincts taking over. I scribbled in my notebook as I walked, spilling the images on to the page as words as fast as I could – perhaps in order that they would not linger in my mind.

In all, we counted over eighty bodies, and this was only the edge of the village. In all, the Russians claimed to have killed eight hundred of rebel commander Ruslan Gelayev’s men in and around Komsomolskoye. I had little stomach to go further. I was also nervous of mines and booby-traps. I walked over to a breeze-block house which had been partially burned down. The corrugated concrete roof had collapsed and shattered among a jumble of iron beds and plastic picnic chairs. Among the shards of the roof I noticed a blanket, which seemed to be wrapped around a body. I picked up a piece of roofing – a foot-long fragment of tile – and began clearing the debris. I gingerly moved the blanket to reveal a man’s face, and as I did so the tile touched his cheek. The flesh was hard and unyielding, absolutely nothing like touching a human at all.

The dead man was an African, his skin deep black but with European features, perhaps a Somali. He seemed to have been one of the foreign fighters who had come to Chechnya to join the jihad, and finally made his rendezvous with his Maker in this bleak corner of the Caucasus. He looked like a decent young man: someone you would ask directions from if you were lost in a strange city, or trust with your camera to take a photograph of you.

Later – and I was to think of him often – I imagined him standing with his cheap luggage and polyester suit in an airport on his way to the holy war, nervous but excited. And I thought of a family somewhere going about its daily business, squabbling sisters and nagging mother, not knowing that their son was lying here in the wreckage of a Chechen house where he’d died fighting someone else’s war.

I had had enough of Komsomolskoye. We hurried back to our car, a battered Russian military jeep driven by a young Chechen called Beslan, who prided himself on his driving skills. We had four hours before the only Moscow flight of the day left from Nazran Airport in Ingushetia. Beslan promised to get us there in good time. He gunned the engine as we swung out on to the main road, and we careered westwards towards the border. Robert and I were jammed in the back seat with our Chechen guide, Musa, an official in the pro-Moscow government who talked us through checkpoints by waving his government ID. Two Russian policemen, whom we had hired for $50 a day as bodyguards, shared the front passenger seat. Halfway to the border, we saw a Russian Mi-24 helicopter gunship hovering menacingly over a copse, from which smoke was rising. The chopper turned slowly in the air to face us.

The next thing I remember was that the view of damp fields in the windscreen was replaced by a wall of earth. I recall bracing my arms as hard as I could against the front seats, and there was a moment of great physical stress and then relief as I felt my body yield to the overpowering laws of physics and fly forward through the windscreen. Fortunately for me the glass had been shattered seconds before by the head of one of our police escorts.

The moments that followed were filled with infinite peace. I lay on my back on the gravel of the road, spread-eagled, looking up at the douds drifting across the big Chechen sky. I was conscious of being alive in a way I have never been before or since, and though I realized that I was probably badly injured, the signals were somewhere far away, like a ringing phone which could be quietly ignored. Slowly, I flexed my fingers along the surface of the tarmac, rolling tiny stones and bits of grit back and forth. Somewhere, I could hear voices, and I breathed deeply through my nose to check for the smell of gasoline, or cordite, or burning. I smelled only the smell of clay, and the flowering grasses by the roadside.

My mind frequently wanders back to this moment, ascribing to it different meanings as the mood takes me. The only thought that I can attribute with complete honesty to that time and that place is this: I felt a deep contentment that I had someone in Moscow who was waiting for me, and an overwhelming urge to return to Xenia and to Moscow, and never leave again.

A bearded face loomed above me, and began to speak. Something like a reflex took hold of me; I began answering, quite calmly, and issuing orders. My shoulder was dislocated, and, I suspected, some ribs cracked. I told the Chechen villager to put his foot on my collarbone, pick up my useless right arm, and pull. Shock must have blocked the pain, because I continued giving instructions until the joint popped back into place. I saw Robert kneeling by my side, and he gently unwound the scarf from my neck and made a makeshift sling. As I sat up I saw that Beslan’s beloved jeep had crashed into a four-foot-deep shell hole blasted in the road. Beslan himself, I noted with some satisfaction, had smashed his head on his own steering wheel, and was dabbing away blood. The two policemen were more badly injured, lying by the roadside, concussed.

Things started to move quickly. I produced money to pay off everyone. A car was summoned from the nearest village to take Robert, Musa and myself onwards. I had only two thoughts in my mind – to get on the plane, and never to return to Chechnya. Even when our second car hit a pothole and my injured shoulder was dislocated a second time, the desire to head for home blotted out all pain, indeed everything else in the world unconnected to pushing on to Ingushetia, and safety.

Somehow, we made it. Nazran Airport was crawling with officers of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the KGB’s successor, who fingered our accreditations suspiciously and questioned us as to where we’d been. Robert and I made a suspicious pair. Both of us wore the Russian military coats and black knitted caps which were our feeble disguise against foreigner-hunting kidnappers. We were both filthy, and smelled strongly of smoke and corpses. With a superhuman effort of will, I maintained my calm, insisting that we had never left Ingushetia and never been into the forbidden territory of Chechnya. As we boarded the bus to the plane, more FSB officers rushed up, wanting to look at Robert’s undeveloped photos. I cajoled and joked with them and, after an agonizing few minutes, they went away. We walked up the steps of the old Tupolev 134 in dread that they would change their minds and haul us off the plane, and back into the world of Chechnya.

Only later that evening at the American Medical Centre in Moscow, as a doctor from Ohio cut the stinking Russian Army T-shirt off my body with a pair of cold steel scissors, did I burst into tears of pain and relief. Xenia waited for me outside the Casualty Department. Never had I felt so profoundly that I had come home.

War and memory are strange things. You see disturbing things which skitter off the surface of your mind like a pinball bouncing down the board. But once in a while some memory or image or thought suddenly lodges in a hole and penetrates right into your deepest heart. For me that memory was the dead black man in Komsomolskoye, who began to haunt my dreams. My shoulder healed quickly enough, but my mind seemed to have been infected. At Xenia’s dacha, we walked along the river, chatting. But when we found an empty meadow where the spring silence was broken only by the creaking of the pines swaying in the wind, I collapsed into a deep, damp snow bank and refused to move. ‘Just leave me here for a few minutes,’ I whispered, my eyes fixed on the grey-white sky. ‘Just leave me alone.’

I became convinced that the unquiet spirit of the dead rebel I had touched had entered me. I relived the moment of physical contact with his cold cheek, and believed that somehow, like an electric charge, the man’s spirit had jumped into my living body. I dreamed of the churned fields of Komsomolskoye, and imagined the angry souls of the dead men flapping limply along the ground, like wounded birds.

It was Xenia who pulled me out of it. She drove a reluctant Robert and me to a church near my apartment, where we both lit candles for the dead men. But more importantly, she helped me by making a home, a real family home, the first I had had since leaving London seven years before. I left my bachelor apartment and rented a dacha deep in the Moscow woods near Zvenigorod, not far from Xenia’s parents’ at Nikolina Gora. We painted the rooms bright colours. I bought Dagestani kilims and old furniture, and we dismantled the old Russian stove in the living room and used the heavy old tiles to build an open fireplace where the stove had stood. Xenia replaced the brass knobs on the grate we had bought with two small clay heads she had sculpted. One was a portrait of me, the other of her, and our little clay images faced each other across the hearth.