Resurfacing in Grozny to Search for Signs of Life

The ground here in Chechnya’s capital is literally scorched. It stretches, black and tender, between piles of concrete too shapeless even to be called ruins.

For weeks, this ground has offered the city’s only shelter. As Russian bombs and shells rained from above, citizens too feeble or frightened to flee buried themselves underneath it in basements and makeshift bunkers.

A week ago, the Russians declared the city liberated. And since then, the basement dwellers have slowly emerged to search amid the rubble for signs of life.

On Sunday, 73-year-old Viktoria Kudradzhyan left her 65-year-old crippled sister in the cellar of what remains of their former home and went looking for food. Bent in half by osteoporosis, she picked her way along the dusty, smoky road, her red head scarf the only dot of color in the landscape.

She approached a feeding station set up just the day before by Russia’s Capital Emergencies Ministry but was told the food was gone. So she meekly turned around, lifted her head to get her bearings, then lowered it and headed home.

A passerby stopped and offered her a loaf of bread, which she placed carefully in a grimy cloth bag. Then, unable to contain herself, she sputtered: “Just look at me. I wasn’t always poor. I used to have a big apartment full of nice things. But the Russians burned down my house. Now all I have is this.”

She gestured to her filthy coat, which once had been either beige or gray. Soot lined the deep creases of her face. “Because of the war,” she said, “I am now ashamed to show myself.”

As many as 40,000 of the sick, injured and frightened were trapped in Grozny through one of the heaviest aerial bombardments since World War II. Indeed, Russian officials moving in to begin the slow jobs of clearing the destruction and healing the victims find themselves debating whether the landscape looks more like Dresden or Stalingrad.

“They said they would bomb Grozny to the ground. Well, they bombed Grozny to the ground,” said Alexander Kudryashov, an emergencies ministry driver arriving in the city with food and medicine.

In central Grozny, it is hard to find a wall that is worth saving, let alone an entire building. Apartment blocks that remain standing are desecrated honeycombs of concrete.

Looking for a site for a field hospital, the emergencies ministry resorted to an old bus depot on the edge of town: Only half of the roof was missing.

“In a couple of days, I think we’ll be seeing about 300 people a day,” said Serge Goncharov, the doctor running the hospital, which treated its first patients Saturday. “Children will be coming back, and they will pick up anything. They pick up grenades and get their hands blown off. It happens to adults too.”

During the day, soldiers prowl the streets in armored vehicles, weaving through barricades and timid pedestrians. Dogs climb over the debris, occasionally finding and feeding on pieces of corpses.

At night, the war returns. Fires light the sky from soldiers’ “mopping-up operations,” in which they burn houses--either for security or for spite. The sound of gunfire fills in the streets--residents blame drunk or rowdy soldiers looking for trouble or shooting stray dogs. No one dares shine a light after the 6 p.m. curfew.

“They are burning, burning everything, burning everyone. We sit in the basement all night, afraid to budge,” said 47-year-old Ima Khakach.

But with the dawn, some evidence of hope emerges, like green shoots through charred earth.

A handful of makeshift stores have appeared. Chechen women sit behind displays of cooking oil, tea and candy bars they carried in from Znamenskoye, a town 30 miles away near Chechnya’s border with the rest of Russia.

The emergencies ministry has set up four feeding stations offering hot meals once a day. At the station in the Staropromyslovsky region on Sunday, more than 100 people waited at least three hours for a serving of porridge made from boiled rice and tinned beef. At a side table, half a dozen women bided their time by picking rocks and chaff from red beans donated by the Turkish Red Crescent.

Their war stories tended to be similar. Most stayed in the city through the bombardments because they had a relative, usually a parent, too frail or too ill to move. Most stayed in basements with three or four other families. In the basement where Zoya Malekova hid, there were 20 adults and 16 children. Two of the latter were hers: a 6-year-old daughter and a son, 7.

“Entire days went by when we ate nothing,” she said, her dark eyes welling with tears. “My children cried from hunger.” They are still so scared from the fighting, she said, that she locked them into a friend’s apartment before setting out for food.

Malekova, 37, said Chechnya’s separatist rebels offered no help when they controlled the city. But she hardly considers the Russians saviors. Like dozens of others in the food line, she told of arriving Russian soldiers--whom the locals call “federals”--lobbing grenades or rockets into basements, killing civilians hiding there.

“The federals are not fighting rebels. There are no rebels left. The people they are fighting are peaceful civilians,” she said.

Malekova is afraid her husband is one of the victims. She was separated from him and his parents four months ago, and she has searched fruitlessly for him since. She fears the worst.

“I think the Russians shot into their basement and they were just sitting there,” she said. Her contempt for both sides was not containable. “It makes no difference who’s in charge. The Chechens, the Russians. Only their colors are different.”

The damage done to the city makes it clear that in the end, neither army really wanted it. For the Russians, who retreated from Grozny in defeat when the 1994-96 war in Chechnya ended, the city was mostly a symbol of Chechen defiance. Even before they began to storm it, they announced plans to move the republic’s capital to another city. There was no reason to restrain their fire.

“The city has been reduced to rubble, this is true,” said Supyan Makhchayev, whom the Russians appointed mayor Thursday. “My eyes fill with tears when I drive through it. But the fighters are not here anymore, and that is what is most important.”

For the Chechens, Grozny was a Russian city, founded by Cossacks in the early 19th century as a garrison to protect them against the Chechen tribes in the mountains to the south. They see the conflict with Russia as a war of attrition, so they laced Grozny with mines and booby traps and tried to turn it into little more than a killing ground for Russian soldiers.

“In the first war, we ripped you up. Now we’ll eat you up,” reads a snatch of defiant graffiti that Chechen rebels left behind.

Those caught in the middle were the civilians who now have no homes--and no love for either side.

“Who of us here is to blame?” asked Sulumbek Maluyev, who has volunteered to manage a temporary shower facility until running water returns to the city. “Are those women to blame? Those children? Who of us left here? All we wanted to do is raise our children peacefully.

“Do you know what’s most painful?” he continued. “It’s that I don’t believe that life can ever be restored here. Everything’s been destroyed. Nothing of the living is left. Who would rebuild it? Who could rebuild it?”

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Alexei V. Kuznetsov of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report from Grozny.