Scavengers in the Rubble

Walk through the soot-covered entryway and up the dank stairwell, negotiate the loose rubble, pass antiwar graffiti scratched into the cinder blocks and turn a corner where a tiny flickering gas flame is the only light. Pound on the door and hear the rustle of fear inside. When it opens, carefully step across the 18-inch board blocking the sill, a barrier against the rats.

You have reached the home of Zara Zukhayrayeva and her children, the last two-legged tenants in their bombed-out, 14-story apartment building in the center of this ruined city.

Zukhayrayeva once taught Russian literature and lived in a clean, warm apartment in this building with her husband, a baker. Looking at her thin, begrimed, care-etched face, it is hard to see that far back.

Now she is a denizen of one of the strangest, saddest, most tortured places on the planet: Grozny.

In this Chechen capital, people live like cockroaches, scuttling over the debris to eke out their days, scavenging for survival and then withdrawing into the dark cavities for safety.

It’s not a life, Zukhayrayeva admits. “I go on, but only for the sake of the children.”

Grozny means “terrifying” in Russian, and it is an apt description of this city a year after its reoccupation by the Russian army following four months of aerial bombardment, artillery barrages and street-to-street fighting with troops of the republic’s separatist government.

The approximately 100,000 people who are helpless or destitute enough to remain here in the ruins look out on a nightmarish “Mad Max” cityscape. Violence and peril are written on every cratered wall, and the sky itself is obscured by a constant blanket of inky smoke from dozens of burning oil wells.

There is no electricity, running water or garbage collection. Other commonplaces of modern life, such as telephones, anesthetics and television, are almost nonexistent. News--often false--is spread by word of mouth. A rumor that it was time to move the clocks back put this whole city out of sync with the rest of Russia for two weeks--even soldiers stationed here began enforcing curfew at the wrong time.

The official line from Moscow is that the Russian government is working hard to make Grozny habitable again. But residents say that is stretching the truth.

“I see no restoration of the city at all,” said Zaindi Choltayev, former deputy chief of the city’s pro-Russian administration, speaking on the day he submitted his resignation in frustration. “Frankly, I don’t even know who on the federal level is responsible for the restoration of the city’s economy--maybe it is such a big secret that they won’t tell us.”

Especially at night, the city has an otherworldly feel. Makeshift natural gas torches provide the only light, which flares out from those buildings that are inhabited.

Chechens bore into the natural gas lines, attach a brass pipe or a garden hose to the escaping gas and light a match at the end. Voila--heat and light. A small hose yields a tiny finger of flame, like a candle. A stream of gas directed into a wheel hub stripped from a war-damaged car produces a roaring campfire, bright enough to read by.

The population’s chief activity is scavenging. Black marketeers tap an underground reservoir of spilled petroleum products that collect just below the city’s sewage system. Residents retrieve the fuel with buckets or pumps and refine this concentrate in crude Rube Goldberg contraptions to extract gasoline. The fuel is sold on almost every corner in 10-liter glass jugs that have themselves been scavenged from the state canning factory. Price varies by the fuel’s color--from transparent, the most expensive, to clear blue and then orange.

Other people strip metal from buildings or salvage bricks to sell to the people who blew up the buildings in the first place--the Russian troops--for barracks construction.

“I think daily about running away, but I don’t have a single ruble to pay for the road,” said former hospital worker-turned-brick collector Leila Akmurzaeva, 39. Salaries were not being paid at the hospital, so now she toils outdoors to put food in her children’s stomachs. She can earn about $9 for every 1,000 undamaged bricks. It takes her and a partner more than a day to clean the bricks, using hammers to chip off the mortar.

She climbs over hazardous mounds of rubble, her clothes and shoes caked in cement dust and her hands cut and calloused. “I have never done anything like this in my life,” she said. “ . . . Look at my shoes. It is humiliating. For me as a woman it is very embarrassing to wear these shoes in the street, but they are the only ones I have.”

But as bleak as her life is, it is nothing compared with that of Zoya Vizigina. The 65-year-old ethnic Russian is malnourished and living in a World War II-era bomb shelter in the destroyed park previously known as Leo Tolstoy Garden. Aid workers have urged her to move out of her cold, black world 20 feet underground, but it’s the only place she feels safe.

“I have lived down here for so long that I already see better in the dark than up there in daylight,” she told a visitor. “I lighted this candle for your sake. When I am alone, I light it very seldom.”

When it was time to say goodbye, she pleaded: “I wish somebody would offer me someplace outside Chechnya where I could live like a human being, a place where there is no shooting. . . . I have worked hard all my life, and all I have now is this damp and dark shelter. What did I do wrong? Did I deserve a life like this?”

Although Moscow has declared military operations in Chechnya over, there is little sense of peace here. Shooting and shelling are nightly occurrences. In daytime, Russian helicopters drone overhead. They occasionally let go terrifying rockets that send a shudder through the city.

Grozny has been called the Hiroshima of the Caucasus. Russian soldiers have dubbed it Stalingrad. There are no normal stores functioning, no gasoline stations or garages. A year after “liberation,” authorities have just announced plans to resume television broadcasting--though there is still no electricity. Thanks mainly to the efforts of parents and staff, many elementary schools have reopened, as has the university. But teachers and medical personnel say their pay arrives months late, if at all.

Children go to school in partially damaged buildings that are illuminated by torches and heated by gas stoves. The windows are covered with plastic sheeting. They walk to classes “through a destroyed desert,” and sometimes fired shells are literally whizzing by them, said Roza Bakayeva, a deputy school director whose own son was wounded by a shell last summer. For male teenagers, the journey is particularly terrifying: They can be intercepted and detained as alleged rebels, she said.

“Our children have changed tremendously. They are very, very nervous,” Bakayeva said. “Some are so scared that I am afraid to even look at them, to see their fear.”

Zukhayrayeva, whose seven children range in age from 26 to 11, said she does not let the younger ones attend school; she considers it too dangerous.

Dressed in a faux leopard-skin parka, she pulls a heavy trolley of soft drinks and beer each day to the street market, standing in the cold for eight or 10 hours in hopes of earning enough to feed herself and the five children still living with her. She also must buy kerosene and potable water that tanker trucks deliver. On a good day, she can net about $4.

On a bad day--for instance, when drunken soldiers are shooting nearby--she stays inside. She has put blankets over her windows to muffle the frightening sounds, and her apartment is bathed in perpetual gloom.

Zukhayrayeva had a plan to get out. In December, she sent her two eldest sons to Volgograd in southern Russia to find work and a place for the family to live.

But last month, someone who had been outside Grozny reported seeing her eldest son in a lineup on a television news broadcast. He had been arrested by Volgograd police as a suspected Chechen terrorist.

“I don’t know if I can save my children,” she said in despair. “You see, I sent them to a peaceful place and what happens? . . . Wherever we go we will always be seen as bandits and terrorists.”

Zukhayrayeva’s husband is rarely with them. As they lost their jobs, their original apartment and most of their possessions, he started to drink heavily, she explained. Now she makes the decisions.

Like other residents interviewed during a recent six-day visit, Zukhayrayeva feels she is trapped in a contradiction. Moscow has declared itself the victor over separatist guerrillas, and Russian officials constantly proclaim that life is getting back to normal. Yet Grozny residents are subjected to an apparent spirit of vengeance for the harm Russia suffered in its two wars in the republic and for kidnappings and bombings attributed to Chechens over the past decade.

The residents complain of random, seemingly senseless acts of violence from the troops who in theory are protecting them from Islamic separatist extremists.

Aslanbek Khasbulatov, a courtly historian and deputy director of the Chechen State University, fairly explodes in exasperation. “Every night, planes hover over the city and drop bombs. Who are they bombing? I ask. Who are they really punishing?”

“The main thing is the humiliation that people face every day,” echoed Choltayev, the former administrator. “People have been thrown into a tragedy, and this tragedy is going on and on and on.”

As a result of the insecurity, virtually no one goes out after dark. If a child has an appendicitis attack at midnight or a woman goes into labor at 8 p.m., they usually must wait until dawn for medical attention. Doctors, nurses and ambulance drivers say they know of lives that could have been saved if there was freer movement.

“We see people die every day,” said Dr. Saipudi Mumayev. “You go home and see a dead body in the street. People get used to it.”

Mumayev, chief of surgery at Hospital No. 9, the only one still functioning here, says he is beyond understanding it all. After he and other physicians reeled off a list of needs--a new roof, a heating system, electricity, intensive-care equipment for children, medicines, blood-screening devices--he gestured wearily toward a ward filled with patients: “That’s where we try to help people--but don’t.”

“People who predicted the apocalypse were right--at least here,” he said.

The Russian soldiers live in fear of the population and terrify civilians in turn. Contract soldiers on six-month stints are subjected to sniper fire, mine explosions and bombings. Their casualties rarely get much attention in Russian news broadcasts, even though 10 to 20 soldiers are killed each week. Understandably, the troops rarely stray far from fortified posts except for periodic “mopping-up” operations.

To avoid contact with soldiers, people detour to the “roads of life”--a network of rutted back-alley routes by which one can reach virtually any corner of Grozny, including the heavily barricaded mayor’s office, without passing through a checkpoint. These paths show how easily insurgents can move about a city supposedly under military control.

Meanwhile, foreign aid has slowed to a trickle.

“To give them credit, there are some [Russian] commandants who are trying to help us,” said perhaps the last foreign humanitarian worker left in the city, who wished not to be identified. “But there are others who are ready to cut your throat just because we want to feed people, 70% of whom are Russian.”

Following the Jan. 9 kidnapping of U.S. aid worker Kenneth Gluck outside of Grozny, which caused his organization, Doctors Without Borders, and others to suspend operations in Chechnya, hospital directors are in a panic about where they will get their next shipment of drugs. Gluck was freed Sunday, though it was not immediately clear who grabbed him in the first place.

Amid such chaos, it is hard to find any joyful place in Grozny. If there is one, it might be the makeshift, bare-bones maternity center reestablished by nurses and obstetricians after last year’s heavy fighting. Since March, 505 infants have been delivered in what was once the kitchen of the damaged center.

Showing off her current crop of nine pink newborns, veteran physician Svetlana Khubayeva said she made a conscious decision to resume work in spite of everything.

“Hope is the only thing we have,” she explained. “Otherwise, it makes no sense to live.”

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Sergei L. Loiko of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.