Chechens Have Little Heart for Rebuilding

It’s a timid sound, easily drowned out by the crash of demolition in Grozny, the ruined capital of rebel Chechnya. But if you listen carefully along the city’s side streets, you can hear it: the tentative tap-tap-tap of a hammer.

It’s a sound that brings hope to the Russian government. Officials in Moscow promise day after day that despite spending months bombing Grozny to the ground, now that they have captured it they are committed to building it up again.

Russians and Chechens alike have a hard time believing that. They know it will cost enormous sums, and most Russians have little love for the city. Still, if it remains in its ravaged state, it will put a lie to the government’s propaganda that the 9-month-old offensive was launched against the republic to drive out “terrorists” and restore “normal life” to the rebel region.

Most residents have long ago ceased to care whether the republic becomes independent or remains part of Russia. What they want most of all is the same thing as the Russians: the return of normal life.

It’s clear that can’t happen without the residents’ participation. But after two wars and untold death and destruction, it remains to be seen whether they have the heart and the stomach to rebuild.

Khazan Iesaitova, a 52-year-old doctor, says no. She and her husband spent all they had on restoring their home after the first war with Russia, which ended in an uneasy truce in 1996. For now, they are content to camp out in the one part of their house that is still intact: the outdoor kitchen.

“We have lost heart already and do not expect anything good from this life anymore,” Iesaitova says.

“As for Grozny,” she continues, her voice crackling with irony, “I would recommend the Russian authorities leave it as it is and turn it into some sort of an open-air museum. Grozny’s ruins can become a visual aid for governments of other countries who want to learn how to fight terrorism with ‘surgical’ precision.”

The extent of the destruction, especially of the landmark buildings in the center of town, has demoralized many. Maria F. Kozlova, 74, describes her hometown as “a cemetery of destroyed construction.”

“The previous war was just child’s play in comparison to this one,” she says bitterly. “Grozny can’t even be called a city anymore.”

It’s only outside the center, in neighborhoods once composed of single-family cottages, that a few of the brave--some would say foolhardy--have taken up hammers.

Putting a Roof Up Eases the Mind

One of them is 42-year-old Abu Nutayev. He and three friends have formed a kind of Chechen barn-raising gang, and each day they work on the roof of one of their houses. The walls, however, are beyond repair for the foreseeable future.

“Psychologically, life seems easier if you know that you and your family have a roof overhead in a city where you have lived all your life,” Nutayev says. “But we do not know what we will do next.”

The men have left their families in refugee camps in nearby Ingushetia. It is still too dangerous in Grozny, where rebel snipers and Russian troops shoot at each other every night after dark. The firefights are a steady reminder that the war is far from over. And many remember the experience of the last war, in which Chechen rebels launched a surprise attack and seized the city in August 1996, a year and a half after Russia had reoccupied it.

Grozny was founded in the early 19th century as a garrison town for Russian soldiers fighting the Chechens, who would storm out of their mountain villages to raid flatland farmers. Russians hoped the town’s name--”terrible”--would help keep the raiders at bay.

Grozny remained little more than an outpost until oil was discovered in the late 19th century, after which the Russians came in large numbers, building wells, refineries and an oil institute, and the population swelled, eventually topping 400,000--the size of Las Vegas or Sacramento.

Before Chechnya declared independence in 1991, Grozny was still largely a Russian city; only about 20% of its residents were Chechen. In fact, Chechens still have mixed feelings about the city--some still see it as Russian, while others cherish it as the republic’s capital.

“You can’t really consider Grozny a symbol of Chechnya,” says Alexander Iskandarian, director of the Caucasus Studies Center in Moscow. “As a symbol, the mountains are much more important. But it was the only city of any size, a major city with a university, oil institute, theaters. In that sense, it can’t help but be important to Chechens.”

Russians are also divided over the future of Grozny, although they are far less open about it. They worry about the costs of reconstruction and that money and materials sent to Chechnya will be stolen. After the last war, the former mayor of Grozny was jailed on corruption charges for stealing reconstruction funds, and Russian officials have been known to take their cut as well.

Many think that rebuilding Grozny will simply be too much trouble. The Kremlin’s civilian administrator for Chechnya is ruling the republic from its second-largest town, Gudermes, and rumors persist that the Russians will simply move the capital there.

Such rumors send Albert Marshev into a frenzy. He’s chairman of the government committee on rebuilding Grozny, and he insists that the city will be restored to its former provincial grandeur, with tree-lined boulevards and rows of high-rise apartment buildings. He predicts that 120,000 people will return to their homes by the end of the year.

Marshev is a high-ranking official at Gosstroi, the state construction agency. He approaches the problem like the Soviet bureaucrat he was trained to be: First they will do a painstaking survey to determine which buildings are salvageable, then they will develop a “general plan.”

He bristles when asked whether rebuilding Grozny is even possible.

“I was in Stalingrad in 1950 [after World War II]. I saw Minsk, Kiev, Novgorod, Brest. Everything was in ruins,” he says. “But it was all fully rebuilt in six years. And what have we here? Just one little town of 200,000 people. What are you talking about?”

But he acknowledges that ultimately, the Chechens hold the key to the city’s future.

Few Would Want to Live in High-Rises

About 65% of the housing in the city before the war was private, single-family homes, and only 35% was government-built apartment blocks. Chechens say they may be willing to rebuild their own homes, but few will want to live in government-built high-rises, which are prime targets during warfare and make the tenants too dependent on city services during peacetime. And no one expects former Russian residents, most of whom were apartment dwellers, to come rushing back any time soon.

The government issues bulletins nearly every day noting incremental progress: a bakery has reopened, a maternity clinic is seeing patients, the rail station is nearly completed.

All the same, to people on the ground, it seems as though Russian authorities are still working mostly to destroy what’s left of Grozny, blowing up the shells of buildings too fragile to stand.

“After the previous war, the authorities launched all sorts of activities in town, but this time they are passive,” says Musa Baskhanov, one of the roof-fixers. “You watch them and get a weird impression--maybe no one is planning to rebuild the city after all.

“In the meantime, they just continue to blow the high-rises up,” he says. “Destruction is something these people have been doing for so long, and it takes time before they learn to do something else.”

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Special correspondent Nunayev reported from Grozny and Times staff writer Reynolds from Moscow.