Chechnya’s Songs of Faith, Defiance Now Sung in Open

Picking their way through the crowded market past peacetime election banners, the homemakers of this Chechen town are singing along with songs of war.

“Why do you Russians tell untruths?” one Mideastern-sounding ditty blares from a stall selling unlabeled cassettes. “The whole world knows you’ll never conquer Chechnya. You won’t make your homes here; that was ordained long ago. Come here and you’ll die like a dog, and you’ll die when you’re drunk. The Chechens have always lived here, and they’ll go on living here, and there’s nothing you ugly boozers can do about it.”

These songs embody the spirit of resistance that has kept the Chechens, a Muslim people of the Caucasus mountains, endlessly fighting a Russian empire that first sent troops to conquer them two centuries ago.

Now that Chechens have won the latest war and are preparing to vote Monday for a peacetime president, they are bringing out into the open a traditional, clannish warrior culture--from music and art to their Muslim faith and its laws--that Russian repression failed to destroy and only drove underground.

“Now the singers aren’t scared to put their names on the tapes. There would have been all kinds of trouble before, but now we can do what we like. We’re just beginning to sell named tapes,” said Bek Khan, boss of a tiny studio that turns out copies of wartime tapes from behind a bullet-scarred basement door in the capital, Grozny.

Cassettes like the ones Khan reproduces have circulated clandestinely since the 1970s, along with ones of religious teachings banned by the Soviet KGB, question-and-answer tapes about Muslim morality and recordings of the traditional prayer dance, the zikr.

Now every market sells them. Every car is packed with cassettes, in series named “Chechnya in Flames-95,” “Chechnya in Flames-96” or “Along Wolf Trails,” the latter in recognition of the Chechens’ frequent comparison of themselves with wolves, howling at the moon and dreaming of freedom.

The songs of pain and defiance drift out of every window in the towns and villages of this mountainous region left in ruins after nearly two years of warfare that claimed between 30,000 and 80,000 lives and left a third of the 1 million surviving Chechens homeless.

Last August, Chechen fighters chased the Russian army out of their capital. They have since made the first peace deal in two centuries that offers them hope, after a five-year breathing space, that Russia might give them the independence for which they have fought.

“I like to think my songs had an influence on our winning the war,” said singer Khasmagomed Khadzhimuradov, who wrote the most famous Chechen nationalist song, “Freedom or Death,” when the Russian troops arrived in December 1994. “I like to think it kept people’s morale up and gave them a focus for their beliefs. You heard people everywhere humming my song.”

Khadzhimuradov, a handsome man with sad eyes, has been recording freedom songs with friends since 1974. The gramophone recording booths where they cut their first discs were quickly shut down by the KGB, and the home studio they later set up was repeatedly searched, but nothing stopped the singers of the late Soviet period from circulating their songs.

During the war, Chechens being interrogated by Russian soldiers at roadblocks would hum these resistance tunes under their breath, with wicked grins on their faces. Even before the war, Chechens flagged down by Russian traffic police would put on a mocking, morale-boosting tape before being subjected to the searches and humiliations that were their usual lot.

The open sale of freedom cassettes is just one example of how the Chechens’ confidence that freedom is within their grasp is showing up in open displays of the customs that they preserved under the czars and commissars--and from which they drew the will to resist Russification.

Sharia courts, dispensing traditional Muslim law, also have emerged in the urban limelight from the traditional world of the villages, where they always operated underground. Their judges--elders whose knowledge of religious Arabic was passed down clandestinely from an earlier generation of czarist-era scholars, in defiance of Soviet policy--are practicing law for the first time in public offices whose function is advertised by plaques on the door.

For the moment, these religious courts work in tandem with Soviet-style civil courts. Khussein Baturkayev, deputy president of Sharia Court No. 1 in central Grozny, said prisoners have the right to choose the legal system under which they want to be tried.

Chechnya’s new leaders believe there is a need for strict law among a people who have grown up thinking that disobeying Russian authorities was a sign of conformity to their own culture and community, and whose homeland still bristles with guns after the war.

A spirit of mischief persists: People chuckle slyly at stories of Russians hoodwinked by Chechens and were delighted recently when presidential candidate Shamil Basayev’s name appeared on a Russian television broadcast, thanks to a sleight of hand at a local transmission station.

To combat crime, Chechen authorities have banned the public sale of alcohol and introduced floggings for those found drunk on the street. But they are hesitant about how far to implement the Sharia. The mufti of Chechnya, Akhmed-Khodzha Kadyrov, said it is impossible to impose strict Islamic law at once, “cutting things off or whatever, because our people were brought up under lax Soviet ideology and a new generation must be educated to see Islam in all its beauty.”

One experimental sentence that provoked much mockery in the Russian media was later canceled in embarrassment. A judge who had just finished a two-month course in Islamic law taught by a Jordanian-born judge ordered Ali Khasiyev to pay 63 camels to the family of a person whom he killed in a traffic accident. There are no camels in Chechnya, so Khasiyev was later let off with a fine of $360.

In another case before Court No. 1, a man found guilty of torturing and murdering three people after the war was sentenced to be killed in the same way his victims had died: by being hit on the head with an ax handle, stabbed in the back with scissors and having his throat cut. Relatives of the victims agreed to carry out the first two punishments and hired a professional killer from outside Chechnya to slit the prisoner’s throat. But the judges rethought the punishment at the last minute and are now working out a milder sentence.

“We don’t know how it will be after the election,” said Baturkayev of Court No. 1. “It will be up to the new president to decide whether to maintain the parallel [legal] system or move closer to Islamic law.”

For the Chechens, nationalist aspirations to be rid of the Russians have always gone hand-in-hand with the Muslim faith they converted to at the time of their first clashes with Christian czarist forces.

Even after Soviet authorities knocked down their mosques, Chechens made illegal pilgrimages to the shrines of “Sufi saints,” religious leaders killed for resisting Russian rule during the 19th and 20th centuries and buried in inconspicuous roadside graveyards.

Paradoxically, Soviet attempts to wipe out Islam in the mountains--most notably by deporting the entire Chechen people from their homeland in 1944 and only allowing them back 13 years later, after the death of dictator Josef Stalin--strengthened the Chechens’ religious rebellion.

The religious groups that returned from exile “were once more subjected to systematic, relentless persecution about which the Soviet press itself provides abundant information,” Western academics Alexandre Bennigsen and S. Enders Wimbush wrote in their 1985 analysis, “Mystics and Commissars.”

“Members of Sufi brotherhoods were hunted as ‘criminals,’ . . . they were accused of immutable hostility toward the Soviet regime, of economic sabotage, ‘banditism,’ ‘terrorism’ and ‘armed rebellion.’ Soviet sociologists classify them as ‘extreme fanatics,’ ” Bennigsen and Wimbush added.

Treating the religious and intellectual communities of their southern frontier as criminals overlapped in Russians’ minds with considering the south as a criminal lair. Russia’s justification for starting the war with Chechnya in 1994 was that it had to “restore constitutional order” and stop Chechens from exporting crime into the rest of Russia.

But Chechens see the whole 200-year period of Russian domination as a long-drawn-out attempt to destroy them by destroying their national heritage.

Between 1991, when Chechnya made its independence bid, and the start of the war in 1994, Chechens reorganized Soviet-era museums and libraries and set up new cultural centers. A Chechen-language theater and national Vaikakhk dance troupe began work.

When Russian forces first seized Grozny in 1995 after a two-month offensive that destroyed much of the historic center of the city, “they went round systematically finishing off any cultural centers still standing,” said acting Culture Minister Makkal Z. Sabdullayev. “Anywhere connected with our history was destroyed, deliberately, as a primary objective.”

“We have set up a commission to handle restoring the pictures which we reclaimed from the Russian military bases in town after the troops pulled out,” Sabdullayev said. “They have been slashed and burned and damaged beyond belief. They’re waiting for restoration, although there’s no money for their repair yet.”

He is collecting money from other minority regions in southern Russia to rebuild Chechnya’s heritage. Although the theater’s main hall is beyond repair, a building team hopes to finish repairs to the 100-seat Small Hall by the end of the month, the first postwar restoration of a public building.

Sabdullayev’s eyes flashed with anger as he finished his mournful litany of wartime destruction: “To destroy the culture of another people is to destroy their nation. It’s Russification.

“Every empire lives through three stages. It develops, it flourishes, and then it declines. Our victory in this war against Russia shows the Russian empire is in that third stage of decline. I hope I live to see its final collapse,” he added.