Russia's Secret Heroes

Hollywood, CA, September 25, 2006. As part of the nationwide Declaration of Peace action, participants in a nonviolent action stood at the entrance to an "Armed Forces Career Center." Organizers informed the recruiting station about the action b

The essence of the ruling regime of a country is how it designates heroes. Who are the “Chechen” heroes? And what do we want in Chechnya? What are we doing there? What is our goal? Who are we rewarding for what? And what are we trying to achieve?

There

The tea got cold long ago. We’re drinking it in a café at Magas Airport in Ingushetia. I’m ashamed to look Colonel Mohammed Yandiev, an officer of the Ingush Ministry of the Interior, in the eye. It’s the third year in a row that I’m ashamed.

As a result of a criminal blunder of the Moscow bureaucracy during the storming of Grozny in December 1999, someone had to risk his life to save eighty-nine elderly people from a Grozny retirement home that was abandoned under the bombing. No one wanted to brave the firing for their sake. Colonel Yandiev was the only one of the hundreds of Russian colonels and generals gathered on this small area near Grozny to say “yes.” And with six of his officers whom he had personally asked about this, he crawled for three days — this was the only possible way — along the streets of Grozny to the neighborhood of Katayama, to Borodin Street, where the lonely, hungry elderly were dying in the care of a government that had forgotten its duty to them. Yandiev rescued all these old people from Grozny. The losses turned out to be minimal. Only one old woman died along the way; her heart couldn’t take it. But the colonel was able to save all of the others from bullets and shells flying from both sides of the crazed battle, as if each of them were his own mother or father.

“To this day, they send me letters on holidays. I don’t even remember their names. But they remember me. And they write,” Yandiev says, very quietly. And I have to drag these words from him, otherwise he would have been silent. “They thank me, and that’s the best kind of gratitude,” Yandiev insists, continuing to stir the sugar he already stirred long ago in the cold tea. “I don’t need anything else.”

But I need for there to be something else. I am a citizen, and for this reason I want to know why the colonel still has not received the title of Hero of Russia that he was nominated for early in 2000 for his deed, for the true courage he showed in saving eighty-nine citizens of his country. What do you need to do in Russia, the way things are now, to not only be a hero, but to be officially acknowledged as one?

Here

The path to answers to these questions turned out to be quite treacherous. The babbling of the high-ranking officers responsible for moving the applications higher and higher in the capital of our Motherland, toward the president’s signature, boiled down to two arguments against Colonel Yandiev’s candidacy as a Hero.

First of all, he is “one of them.” In translation from their Moscow bureaucratic language, that means that Yandiev is an Ingush, and Ingush in the army aren’t trusted much, like Chechens. Yandiev, I was told, is “practically a Chechen,” and “who knows just what was going on in Grozny then — he might have made arrangements with militants.”

And what if he did? For the sake of eighty-nine lives?

But there’s a second reason too, and this argument doesn’t only concern Vainakhs [Chechens and Ingush]. It turns out that we are only supposed to give the title of Hero if the person “killed a bandit.”

“And if they saved someone’s life?”

“That’s not quite what we’re looking for.”

“So do you give it for rescues or not?”

“Who would admit that they don’t?”

Alas, I gave my word that I would withhold the names of those who agreed to give inside information on this matter. These people, though they have big stars on their epaulettes and orders on their chests, are merely gofers in the grand scheme of things, obeying a higher authority. They know which documents the president won’t sign. And Putin won’t sign for rescues. Just a detail, you think? By no means. We’ve all observed how the word “mercy” has been swept out of the government vocabulary. The government relies on cruelty in relation to its citizens. Destruction is encouraged. The logic of murder is a logic that is understood by the government and propagated by it. The way things are, you need to kill to become a Hero.

This is Putin’s modern ideology. When capitalists can’t get it done, comrades take over again. We know very well that they never forget to line their own pockets. That’s how things stand: at the end of the seventh year of the war, and in the third year of the second campaign, Chechnya has been turned into a genuine cash cow. Here, military careers are speedily forged, long lists of awards are compiled, and ranks and titles are handed out ahead of time. And all you have to do is to kill a Chechen and submit the corpse.

So here I am, sitting across from Mohammed Yandiev. A normal hero in an abnormal country. He hasn’t robbed anyone, hasn’t raped anyone, and hasn’t stuffed any stolen women’s lingerie inside his camouflage jacket. He has simply saved lives. And therefore he’s not a general. And his Hero application is rotting in Moscow vaults.

A Perplexed Afterword

I called the Information Department of the Russian presidential administration. The head is Igor Porshnev, but it’s generally better known as the department of Sergei Yastrzhembsky, an assistant of Putin’s who is responsible for “information support for the antiterrorism operation.” I had two very simple questions. The first was, How many soldiers have received state awards for their participation in the second Chechen war? And the second was, How many of them earned the Hero of Russia title?

The Information Department sent me to the Putin administration’s Department of Government Awards, whose head is Nina Alekseevna Sivova. “That information is classified,” the assistants firmly stated, categorically refusing me any chance to talk with the bosses of their departments. “It’s not subject to disclosure.”

“But that’s absurd!” I objected.

Finally, in Yastrzhembsky’s department, which is responsible for the formation of a “proper image of the war,” they took pity and at least agreed to “examine an official inquiry on this subject,” albeit without guaranteeing a positive answer (of two numbers!) or a date by which they’d examine it (and indeed, an answer never came!).

Another conversation with Nina Sivova from the Awards Department soon took place. And she affirmed: “This information is in fact confidential, for official use only.”

Maybe some people remember this term from Soviet times. Wherever you looked, everything was “for official use only.”

“Why are the Hero of Russia and other awards confidential?” I tried to find out from Nina Alekseevna.

“For the protection of those who receive these awards,” came yet another cryptic response.

“But I’m not even asking for their last names.”

“Call back...”

“Tomorrow, again?”

“Yes, tomorrow. Maybe...”

Or maybe not. A country in which the number of heroes is information for official use only of those bureaucrats who handed out the awards, and where real heroes don’t receive the Hero title, is hopeless. It will lose all wars. Because it never encourages the right people.

Copyright notice: Excerpted from pages 146-149 of A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya by Anna Politkovskaya, translated by Alexander Burry and Tatiana Tulchinsky, University of Chicago Press. Copyright 2003 University of Chicago. All rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of US copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice is carried and provided that the University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the University of Chicago Press.