Some Chechens Won’t Go Home Again

MOSCOW — They have hacking coughs after two weeks of hiding in the cellar, and the children still scream when they hear approaching airplanes.

But Luiza Autarkhanov and her family count themselves lucky. Last week, they escaped the horror of Grozny, leaving their mansion half-ruined in the wake of a two-week battle between separatist Chechen fighters and Russian soldiers for control of the town center.

Only one of Luiza’s sisters is still missing in the burning wasteland of the Chechen capital, among tens of thousands of other Chechens struggling to get away through shell-shattered courtyards, burning factories and streets patrolled by Russian helicopter gunships.

The rest of the family is safe. A panicky odyssey across half of Russia--by car, on foot, by taxi and plane--has brought Luiza to a tiny apartment in Moscow, where she is sharing two rooms with her four children, her mother, another sister and a brother-in-law.

The edgy laughter of relief echoes through the rooms. This is the second time Luiza’s family has escaped death in two sieges of Grozny, and she has decided there will be no more dramatic escapes.

“I’ll never go back to Grozny,” Luiza says, hoarse-voiced, fingers plucking nervously at a borrowed dress of cheap floral fabric. She and her husband, Musa, have decided to cut their losses, abandon what is left of their wealth and property in Chechnya and start again from scratch in a new place.

Typical Story

The war, which began when Russia sent troops into Chechnya to crush a 3-year-old separatist regime there, has not just destroyed the fabric of the capital and killed thousands of soldiers and separatist fighters. The heaviest penalty has been paid by the silent majority of peaceful civilians--who want nothing more than a quiet life and the chance to bring up their children decently, and to whom the passions of war mean little.

Their wishes are ignored by both warring sides, and the riches-to-rags story of the Autarkhanovs is typical.

Before the war, the Autarkhanovs’ house on Red Veterans’ Street was a gracious place of airy rooms, rich carpets and chandeliers. The silvery roof was edged with filigree work and crescent moons. A long veranda ran around the edge of the enclosed courtyard, leaving plenty of space for Musa’s white BMW and an endless flow of his friends’ Toyotas and Suzukis.

Musa, a young lawyer impatient with the separatists then in power, had given up his job in a state-run raw-materials enterprise and started a private business, busting a Russian economic blockade against Chechnya and smuggling in food. The separatists were provoking Moscow, he said, but not bothering to feed their dependents when Moscow struck back.

“It makes me laugh when I turn on the television and see some [Chechen] government official boasting about how he’s organized five trucks of potatoes to feed Grozny,” Musa said in 1993. “I bring in 30 trucks practically every week. I and people like me have wasted months of our lives buying food for the people here. But someone has to do it.”

Such post-Soviet political chaos in Moscow and Grozny made Musa rich. In those days, he paid for his purchases from a wad of $100 bills as thick as a brick. His son Magomed videotaped dinner parties with the latest hand-held camera. Luiza’s kitchen bristled with Western gadgets.

First Flight

But then the tension between Moscow and Grozny turned into war. The first full-scale onslaught on Grozny by the Russian army, at the beginning of the war, ended the Autarkhanovs’ carefree life.

A shell blew half the roof off their house, leaving the interior exposed to the elements. The Autarkhanovs fled to Moscow to wait out the siege. Back home, their carpets and furniture were looted.

Musa took as much of the family’s money as he could to set himself up with work and a new home in Vologda, in northern Russia, while Luiza went back to Grozny with the children to patch up the damaged house and sell it.

There were new bursts of fighting--notably a three-day assault on the Russian-held city by rebel fighters in March--but Luiza’s neighbors slowly regained confidence and began repairing their shattered homes, sifting out whole bricks from the rubble, finding wood and cement and paint in a bid to restart normal life.

Then another full-scale onslaught on Grozny began.

Russian planes broke a cease-fire by bombing Chechen villages in July. On Aug. 6, rebel fighters swarmed back into the city with green velvet berets on their heads, bandoleers of bullets over their chests and grenade launchers in their hands.

“My mother told me two days running about rumors that the fighters were coming back and said we should be very careful or perhaps leave town altogether,” Luiza says. “But I thought they’d just whisk in and out, like they did in March. I never imagined that the city would be subjected to complete destruction a second time.”

At first, Luiza and her children--Magomed, 13, Liza, 9, Saida, 7, and 2-year-old Umar--were not too worried. The sounds of shelling and shooting were distant. It was only on the second or third day, when the Russian helicopters began to fly overhead and the house next door was destroyed, that they crept down into the relative safety of their cellar.

“It was fun in the cellar at first. The neighbors all came down. We played games. We had food--flour, sugar, bread--and we dragged down boards and mattresses to make a bedroom for the children in one corner.

“We would even go up into the courtyard whenever the shooting stopped and cook in the open air. It only got really scary when we realized that this time it wasn’t going to stop.”

Luiza’s tiny, wizened and grimly cheery mother, Belila Anzorov, adds: “And then the shells started going right over our heads, whistling, ‘Whooo!’ and you’d just sit in the cellar and bow your head--as if that would help if they blew your head off.”

For days, it was impossible to escape. The shelling was too heavy. The fighters were all around, and helicopters filled the skies.

Then Russia’s security chief, Alexander I. Lebed, began an attempt to end the battle. A cease-fire was declared, which never stopped the fighting altogether but did bring a few hours of relative calm every day.

Luiza’s neighbors realized the time had come to escape. Bringing only extra clothes for the children, seven families packed themselves into nine cars and set off over broken bridges and potholed roads to safety. The separatist fighters who held most of Grozny turned out to be both friends and foes.

“The fighters showed us a way out through the back roads of Factory District,” Luiza says. “I’d never even seen it before. They were incredibly calm--they don’t seem to know the meaning of fear--and they warned us against stopping. They said the Russians would shell any crowd they saw gathering.”

Luiza’s mother fixes her with a beady gaze.

“And once we got out of town, the fighters took our cars, so we had no transport to get out of Chechnya,” she reminds her tartly.

The families walked west until they found cars whose drivers were willing to take them to the nearest safe airport, about 60 miles away.

It is not easy for Chechens to set up home in other parts of Russia. Racial animosity toward the dark-skinned people of the south--especially the Chechens--is rife. Many Russians openly call the Chechens derogatory names and suspect them of being innately violent and criminally minded. In defiance of official police figures, many Russians persist in thinking that Chechens run Russia’s biggest organized crime rings.

But Luiza is philosophical about her own prospects in Vologda, where her husband is waiting for the family to rejoin him. Musa went to college there, she says, and had plenty of friends.

As a lawyer, Musa has also been punctilious about complying with Russia’s bureaucratic procedures for keeping Chechens under control, registering the family as refugees and reporting to the police every 45 days.

“Problems do crop up, but I think they can all be sorted out,” she says. The worst thing for her, she adds, will be adapting to life in a cramped apartment after the space and freedom of her Grozny home.

“That’s why I didn’t want to leave too quickly after the first siege,” she says. “I just couldn’t face the idea of being cooped up. Of course, it’s better to live the way we used to, but now--since we have to--we’ll get used to living this way.”

Luiza’s family shies away from apportioning blame for the havoc wrought in their lives by the years of political upheaval and then war.

But every member of the family agrees on this: Anyone pursuing the war--Chechens as much as Russians--is no friend of theirs.

“If they want to fight, why don’t they find some open ground and go off and fight to their hearts’ content--only not near me?” Anzorov asks determinedly.

“That’s what I kept telling those Chechen fighter lads when they were hanging around the house: ‘Go ahead and fight each other if you want, one on one, but stop all this sneaking round shooting from behind other people’s backs. We’ve had enough of you. We should get the police on you.’ ”

Loss of Faith

If pressed, Luiza says she is disappointed by everyone--by Dzhokar M. Dudayev, the slain Chechen rebel leader who tried to take the republic out of Russia; by Doku Zavgayev, the puppet Chechen leader who has kowtowed to the Russian army since Moscow installed him in power; and by Boris N. Yeltsin, the Russian president who started the war.

“At the moment, all our neighbors and everyone we know places great faith in Lebed and thinks perhaps he can do something to sort out the situation in Chechnya,” Luiza says sadly. “But personally, I have no real faith that anyone can help.

“The Russian troops have got to be withdrawn. That’s the only answer, because while both sides are still here, they’ll never stop attacking each other. If the troops don’t go, it will mean the extinction of every last Chechen life.”