She was home in her village of Brodki in Lipetsk province that day, 550 miles from Moscow, where she works as a hired hand on a dairy farm. When a message for her arrived from Russian military authorities, she says, she nearly died. Her 20-year-old son, a senior sergeant named Vladimir, had been in Chechnya since November 1995, and she knew all too well what a charnel house for Russian soldiers the war there had become. She read the message, fearing the worst.
It wasn’t; not quite. It said that on March 8, 1996, Vladimir had been taken prisoner in Chechnya by rebel soldiers. The military believed he was alive, but did not know where. Within two weeks Vladimir’s mother had packed her bags and left for Chechnya, moving into barracks No. 10 at the Russian military base at Khankala, alongside the young soldiers of the third platoon, determined to find her son.
She is not alone. There are more than 60 mothers there now, searching for their sons. Their children are either in Chechen prison camps, have deserted and are on the run, or are dead. The Russian military, including the brass at Khankala, who sheepisshly face the mothers every day, usually don’t tell them which–because in an extraor- dinary number of cases, they don’t know.
After 21 months of ferocious fighting, there is, for the moment, peace in Chechnya. The mothers at Khankala are relieved that the fighting may be over, but for them the war most certainly is not. For many, it may never be. The precise number of Russian sons unaccounted for in Chechnya is a matter of fierce dispute: nearly 1,000, say some members of the Moscow-based Committee of the Mothers of Russian Soldiers; not even close to that, the Defense Ministry replies. NEWSWEEK learned last week that at a makeshift morgue near the train station in Rostov, where corpses from Chechnya are held in refrigerated train cars, the military has not yet been able to identify 401 of the more than 700 bodies it is now holding.
For the mothers at Khankala–some of whom have been there for more than a year–the frustration mounts daily. Many accuse the generals of hiding what they know. When a soldier is confirmed to have been killed in action, his family qualifies for a special military pension. ““They don’t have the money to pay, so that’s why they don’t tell us anything,’’ whispered one woman standing outside the Khankala gate recently. But that is probably not the problem. For one thing, even with the ceasefire, it is still not easy for Russians to comb the Chechen countryside looking for POWs and dead soldiers. But the lack of information also reflects the breakdown in morale, order and discipline that now plagues the Russian Army in the wake of the disastrous Chechen conflict. Nothing is more basic to command than knowing who has or has not come back from battle.
To mothers like Nadezhda Nesterenko, there is only one choice: to go to Chechnya and do it themselves. They tromp through villages asking questions; they have tea with rebel leaders–““we know them all by name, and they know us now,’’ says Nadezhda. ““Some are bastards, others aren’t.’’ The few fathers who show up in Chechnya rarely go to the mountains, because it is more than likely they will never return alive.
Some of the mothers, like 47-year-old Lidia Vykovanets, have been able to locate their sons in Chechen prison camps through their own detective work, relieved at least to see them alive, if not free. For others, the lonely journey ends at a makeshiftt morgue in a military hospital in Rostov, 465 miles north.
That is a trip, not surprisingly, that most resist. The mothers of Khankala ricochet cruelly between hope and despair. Since finding her 20-year-old son Oleg in February, Lidia Vykovanets and her husband, Mikhail, have heard nothing. The rebels moved Oleg and the other prisoners from his unit to another camp, and they have not been sighted since. The couple, for the last four months, has been living across the Chechen border in Dagestan, at the home of a Chechen businessman–the friend of a friend.
Earlier this month their host–a man named Alimur–decided to try to find out for himself what had happened to Oleg. He sent one of his employees, a former rebel fighter named Ruslan, into the mountains with orders not to come back until he had hard information. Alimur also knew the commander whose troops had initially seized Oleg’s regiment, and he produced a letter from him to his fellow Chechen commanders, asking that Oleg be released.
Lidia’s spirits soared. Surely the letter, she thought, would produce results. For three days, they waited anxiously. On the morning of Sept. 9, Rosa, Alimur’s wife, told Lidia and Mikhail that Ruslan had returned and would give them the news that day. But he said nothing. Rosa, unusually, made herself scarce around the house that day. The mood in Alimur’s family compound had darkened palpably, but Lidia and Mikhail didn’t notice–or pretended not to notice. Alimur himself came home very late that night, well after the Vykovanetses had retired to their room. He left the next morning without saying a word. Lidia, bravely, blindly, drew a conclusion: ““He must not have learned anything; maybe he will go back and try again.''
But he did not, and last week Lidia and Mikhail moved out of Alimur’s home, never learning what, if anything, Ruslan had discovered. Lidia is now at the base at Khankala, living with the other women; Mikhail has gone back home. Both say they believe their son will be found alive. ““What else,’’ Lidia says weakly, ““can we think?''
For many of the women of Khankala, the natural instinct to hope eventually collides with the need for certainty. When they finally accept the likelihood that their son may be dead, they take the dreaded journey, a military flight to Rostov.
Two weeks ago Nadezhda Nesteren- ko made the trip. At a military pathology lab there is an office run by Lt. Col. Vladimir Shcherbakov, who for the last 21 months has held what is surely one of the world’s worst jobs. His desk sits in the far corner of a dingy, second-floor office. To his right, against the far wall, stand a TV set and a VCR. In front of them are a white bench and a couple of wooden chairs. Shcherbakov’s job is to help those who come to him identify dead Russian soldiers. ““You always know where there is a positive identification,’’ he said wearily one day recently, ““from the hysteria of the mothers.''
After he asks a series of questions–any tattoos? scars? birthmarks?–they move from Shcherbakov’s desk to the white bench in front of the television. One of the other mothers at Khankala had been here before and thought she might have seen a body that bore a resemblance to Nadezhda’s missing son. Nadezhda told Shcherbakov she wanted to see the tape that begins at No. 480–a reference to a body, one of hundreds Russian soldiers have videotaped when they discover their fallen compatriots in Chechnya. Shcherbakov complies.
No matter how hard and how long they have tried to steel themselves, nothing can prepare the mothers for what follows: No. 480 is a corpse that has been decomposing for weeks; 481 is no better; it is laced with maggots and engulfed by flies. The images flick past relentlessly, and Nadezhda reels. No. 483 is mostly skeletal, its mouth wide open, as if screaming in terror. Her head in her hands now, Nadezhda tries to compose herself. She asks Shcherbakov’s assistant to rewind the tape; as horrific as it was, she wants to see 483 again.
She shakes her head as it rolls past once more. No. She continues to watch; 484 is a pile of bones charred black–a prisoner most likely left to die in a Chechen camp during a Russian bombing campaign in August; 485 is a decomposed body with the head completely blown off. The tape goes on for 20 more minutes, until Nadezhda has finally had enough. She is plainly in shock; her lower lip trembles, tears flow. One of these bodies could be her Vladimir, but now it is clear: there is no way to tell. There are no marks, few recognizable features. Not in this lot, anyway.
She gets up shakily and walks down the hallway to the stairs. She grasps the hand-rail with both hands on her way down, al- most falling. She walks outside, her hands trembling uncontrollably. Then Nadezhda Nesterenko closes her eyes and rests her head against a post. She stands there for a long, long time.
On Monday, Sept. 16, she returned to Khankala, to wait, and continue to search, with Lidia and the others. The closure she sought had not come, and after the fact she said that was all right. Perhaps she was not as ready to accept the possibility of her son’s death as she thought. Now she believes there is nothing else to do but go back to Chechnya. Some of the mothers wonder whether the Khankala base may close soon, if the ceasefire lasts; they wonder where they will go. Nadezhda says it doesn’t matter; she says she’ll find a place to sleep wherever she needs to, as long as her son is missing. The Russian word nadezhda means ““hope.’’ It is all the mothers of Khankala have to cling to.
title: “Mothers And Sons” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-30” author: “Amber Obregon”
When Zhadova’s neighbor in Microdistrict Number 11, Antonina Tsurkan, received a telegram on Jan. 4, she didn’t think much of it. So little, in fact, that she, a widow with five children, didn’t read it right away. Her youngest son, Andrei, 19, had been in the Army since November 1998, posted with an elite Spetsnaz unit outside Moscow. Antonina figured the telegram was from Andrei saying he was coming home for a vacation. In one of his more recent letters he said his unit had helped “pick and store vegetables” in the countryside–routine duty for Russian troops. Another letter, dated Nov. 19, arrived in early December. It said his duty “was going well–even great, if I may say it–so don’t worry.” Her son said she should continue writing letters to him addressed to his base outside Moscow, and they will be delivered “to where I am now.” Then, writing that he had “no time” to produce a longer letter, Andrei said to his mother and the two of his four siblings still living at home: “I love you all. Goodbye. See you soon. Your son, Andrei.” And then, just below: “Don’t worry about me, Mother. Bye.” They were the last words he would ever write to her. When Antonina finally opened the telegram on Jan. 4, she learned that Andrei had been killed in Chechnya on Dec. 29.
Chechnya is Vladimir Putin’s war. And now, with Russian troops bogged down in a fierce fight over control of Grozny, it is coming home. Last week, for the first time, Russian media openly questioned the military’s official casualty count. Acting President Putin’s public support has, according to one reputable polling agency, begun to erode, falling from a 54 percent approval rating to 49 percent–the first ever dip for the man who hopes to be elected president in his own right on March 26. In Arzamas–home to three young men killed so far in the Chechen war–and others towns like it across Russia, parents with soldier sons are petrified that soon they will receive the kind of telegram Antonina Tsurkan did last month. Some, in desperate response, try to find ways to get their sons back. Most fail.
Most, but not all. When Yekaterina Zhadova figured out in September that Nikolai was in Chechnya, her first stop was the nearest branch of the Soldiers’ Mothers’ Committee, one of the few effective antiwar groups in Russia. During the last war the Mothers’ Committee had effectively pressured the military to account for soldiers either missing in action or kidnapped in Chechnya. At the office in Nizhny Novgorod, about 110 kilometers north of Arzamas, the chairwoman told Zhadova to go to the committee’s Moscow headquarters for advice. She borrowed some money from friends and did–even though her husband thought it was a fool’s errand. In Moscow, another committee representative told her: go to Mozdok, the main Russian staging base for the Chechen campaign; talk to the officers in charge; do what you can.
In the early days of the war, a handful of mothers had successfully cajoled–or bribed–military officials to spring their sons from Mozdok. By the time Zhadova checked into a women’s dormitory near the base in October, the military was cracking down. She says she was routinely harassed by “political officers’’ at the base who “tried to get rid of me.’’ She persisted. “You can get rid of me,’’ she said to one official, “after I see my son. But I am not going to leave this place until I do.’’ Every day for two weeks she appeared at the office of a commander at Mozdok, a man whom Zhadova does not want to name because, in the end, he broke under her relentless persistence. One day she showed up outside his office and asked again to see him. He wasn’t in. Where was he, she asked. Gone, an assistant replied icily, “to get your son.”
On the evening of Oct. 13, a bewildered Nikolai arrived in Mozdok and was taken to see his mother; both were told he would be returning to Chechnya on the 15th. That night, Yekaterina did not tell her son what she was up to. But in her bag she had his civilian clothes and his passport. The next day, she told him. “I’ve come not just to see you, but to take you back home with me.”
The long train ride to Moscow was tense. Several times police asked passengers for identification documents; not knowing whether the military was already looking for Nikolai–now officially a deserter–“we were telling ourselves to stay calm,” Zhadova says. “But we were really nervous.” Once they got to Arzamas, the Mothers’ Committee representative in Nizhny Novgorod advised Zhadova to explain the situation to the local military prosecutor–and to ask that Nikolai be assigned anywhere other than Chechnya. Zhadova agreed, albeit warily. “Thank God,” she says, that when she and Nikolai met with the prosecutor, “he acted like a normal human being.” He asked Nikolai what he wanted. His reply: “To serve somewhere else.”
In Russia, desertion is punishable by up to seven years of prison. Not for lucky Nikolai. He was reassigned, to a base in Mulino, about 600 kilometers from Arzamas. He could, conceivably, be sent back again to Chechnya, but for now he sits at home, safe and warm, having broken his hand in late December.
About a month after Nikolai returned to Arzamas, his mother and Antonina Tsurkan met, for the first time, as they were walking to their apartments. Zhadova told Tsurkan her story. Antonina was unimpressed. She didn’t realize then that her own son was in Chechnya, and besides, she says, “I have three sons, and all served in the military. I’ve always thought it was their duty to defend the motherland. Before, when we were young, we wouldn’t even date guys who had not been to the Army.”
Andrei Tsurkan had not known Nikolai, but he did know a young man named Aleksei Spirin; they had been in the same first-grade class in Arzamas. Like Tsurkan, Spirin had also been drafted in November 1998, and less than a year later was headed for Chechnya. In contrast to Andrei, who hid the truth from his mother, Spirin gave vent to his fears in a letter his parents received on Sept. 27. “Maybe this is the last time I will write to you. We will go to Dagestan to fight… just pray that I will be OK. I don’t know what else to write, I have no words; I am really nervous… Maybe we will see each other again… Goodbye. Kisses. I love you with all my heart.”
When Sergei Spirin, Aleksei’s father, received that letter from his only child, he and his wife, Antonina, were stunned. Aleksei had a chronic blood problem, and had recently been hospitalized in Podolsk, a town outside Moscow near where his unit was stationed. He also had terrible eyesight. “He wanted to be a construction worker but his sight was so bad he wasn’t accepted to any vocational school,” his father says.
Nor, according to his father, had Aleksei received any combat training. Before going to Chechnya he was assigned to the “boiler crew” that supplies heat and hot water to the unit. “The only day he ever held a gun was the day [he was inducted],” his father says. Furious at his son’s plight, Sergei took all of Aleksei’s medical records to Podolsk and tried to convince officers there that they had made a big mistake. He did not have Yekaterina Zhadova’s luck. A master sergeant “tore up the documents” he had brought and “threw them in the toilet.” On Oct. 27, 1999, rebel fighters attacked the post in Chechnya that Aleksei Spirin was defending, and killed him.
Arzamas, says local journalist Nadezhda Atrova, is “in a state of shock.” And not just because their sons have begun to die, but because the conscipts now in Chechnya seem so pathetically unfit for battle. Aleksei Viktorovich Karpov served as a warrant officer in the Army for seven years. Now an electrician, he says he always raised his son, Roman, to “be prepared to serve in the Army.” Inducted, like Spirin and Tsurkan, on Nov. 19, 1998, Roman Karpov, the only child of Aleksei and his wife Galina, had taken target practice just twice. “And he missed the target both times,” his father says. On Christmas Eve, Roman was shot three times in the chest while manning a checkpoint in the Chechen city of Gudermes.
“I don’t understand these people who unleashed this massacre where our kids die,” Aleksei says, weeping. “They are not human. There is a political motive for this. Nobody attacked us. And we sent our sons there… Now we are left alone. Our life has stopped.” Until last week neither Aleksei nor his wife had heard of Yekaterina Zhadova’s success in spiriting her son away from the war that has claimed their son. Choking with grief, he considers her tale, and then simply says, “Well done–I support her.”
The three 19-year-old boys from Arzamas now lie next to each other in a cemetery across a shallow ravine from Microdistrict Number 11. All three graves are marked by polished black headstones bearing their likenesses. Early last Wednesday morning it was 19 below zero in Arzamas. The Spirins and Galina Karpova were tending their sons’ graves; they brought orange slices and biscuits to lay on top of them. To Orthodox Christians, the spirits are alight in the morning and need to be fed. A wisp of frost had obscured part of Roman Karpov’s image on his gravestone. His mother, Galina, bent over and rubbed at it and rubbed at it, sobbing all the while. “My son,” she cried, “my son. You got so cold, oh, God, you got so cold.”
Across the ravine from the cemetery, Nikolai Zhadov waits to report back for duty in Mulino. His mother says she will go there first to argue that he doesn’t need to return; to argue that according to the law his two months in combat plus his service before that fulfills his commitment to the Army. Her powers of persuasion are obvious enough. “Maybe we’ll know something after she goes,” Nikolai says hopefully, as his grandmother prepares him a hot lunch. As she does so, over and over she says, “We just don’t ever want him to go back.”
title: “Mothers And Sons” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-25” author: “Kathy Barcenas”
Chechnya is Vladimir Putin’s war. Even now, with Russian troops finally having seized Grozny, Russia’s acting president vows to carry the fight to rebel strongholds in the mountainous south. And that means in the run-up to the March 26 presidential election, the zinc coffins that bear the remains of Russian soldiers killed in action will continue to come home–in numbers far greater than the Kremlin acknowledges. Earlier this month, before Grozny fell, Putin’s public support had begun to slip ever so slightly, falling from a 54 percent approval rating to 49 percent. The reason is obvious. By last month, in just one small corner of Arzamas, three 19-year-old soldiers had already been buried. Towns across Russia are also now burying their sons, and wondering how much longer the carnage will continue.
The three young men lie next to each other in a graveyard just across a shallow ravine from the Zhadovs’ apartment. Nikolai is not among them–yet. And for that he has his mother to thank. When Yekaterina Zhadova figured out that Nikolai was in Chechnya, her first stop was the nearest branch of the Soldiers’ Mothers Committee, one of the few effective antiwar groups in Russia. She had read how, at the end of the last Chechen war in 1996, its representatives had tried–often successfully–to spring Russian boys held as POWs. A committee representative told her to go to Mozdok, the main Russian staging base for the Chechen campaign; talk to the officers in charge; harass them every day if she had to; tell them she wanted her son back. Period. She borrowed some money from friends and took the long train ride to the base in southwest Russia.
In the early days of the war, a handful of mothers had cajoled–or bribed–military officials into releasing their sons from Mozdok. By the time Zhadova arrived in October, the military was cracking down. She was harassed by “political officers” at the base, she says. But she stayed on. “You can get rid of me,” she said to one official, “but only after I see my son. I am not going to leave this place until I do.” Every day for two weeks she appeared before a commander at Mozdok, pleading her case. Zhadova does not want to name him publicly, because in the end, he broke under her persistence. One day she showed up outside his office. He wasn’t in. Where was he, she asked his assistant. Gone, he replied icily, “to get your son.”
On the evening of Oct. 13, a bewildered Nikolai Zhadov arrived in Mozdok and was taken to his mother. The commander told them Nikolai would return to Chechnya with a convoy of trucks on the morning of the 15th. On the 14th, Yekaterina revealed her plan, telling her son, “I’ve come not just to see you, but to take you back home.” Nikolai was incredulous. “How can you do that?” She took his civilian clothes out of her bag and told him to get dressed.
The long train ride back to Arzamas was tense. Not knowing whether the military was looking for Nikolai–now a deserter–“we were really nervous,” Yekaterina says. Once they got home, the Mothers’ Committee representative in nearby Nizhny Novgorod advised Zhadova to explain the situation to the local military prosecutor–and to ask that Nikolai be assigned anywhere other than Chechnya. Warily, Zhadova agreed. “Thank God,” she says now, that when she and Nikolai met with the military prosecutor, “he acted like a normal human being.” He asked Nikolai what he wanted. His reply: “To serve somewhere else.”
In Russia, desertion is punishable by up to seven years in prison. Not for lucky Nikolai. He was reassigned to a base about 350 miles from Arzamas. He could, conceivably, be sent back again to Chechnya, but for now he sits at home, safe and warm, having broken his hand in late December.
Not all of his neighbors in Microdistrict No. 11 were so fortunate. In early January, his mother met a woman who lives in a neighboring apartment. As they were walking to their apartments, Zhadova told Antonina Tsurkan her story. Tsurkan, a widow with five children, was disdainful. She didn’t realize then that her own son Andrei was also in Chechnya. And besides, she says, “I have three sons, and all served in the military. I always thought it was their duty to defend the Motherland. When we were young, we wouldn’t even date guys who had not been to the Army.”
On Jan. 4, Antonina Tsurkan received a telegram. She didn’t think much of it. So little, in fact, that she didn’t open it right away. Her son Andrei had been drafted in November 1998 and posted outside Moscow for training with an elite Spetsnaz unit. His mother figured the telegram was to tell her he was coming home for a scheduled short vacation. Just a month earlier she’d received a letter from Andrei saying that his service “was going well–even great, I should say–so don’t worry.” He wrote that she should continue to send him letters at his base outside Moscow, and they would be forwarded “to where I am now.” That was a little clue that Antonina did not pick up on. Andrei ended his letter: “I love you all… See you soon. Don’t worry about me, Mother. Bye.” When Antonina Tsurkan finally opened the telegram on Jan. 4, she learned that her youngest son had been killed in Chechnya on Dec. 29. “I didn’t even think about the possibility that he would have to fight in this war when it started,” she said. “Now he’s gone, and I don’t know for what reason.”
He lies next to the two others killed in Chechnya, in graves marked by black headstones bearing their likenesses. On a recent morning it was minus 2 degrees Fahrenheit, and the parents of the fallen soldiers were tending the graves. They placed orange slices and biscuits on top of them. To Orthodox Christians, spirits are alight in the morning and need to be fed. A wisp of frost had blurred the gravestone image of one of the boys, and his mother, bent over and weeping, rubbed and rubbed it. “My son,” she cried, “you got so cold. Oh God, you got so cold.”
Across the ravine from the cemetery, later that same morning, Nikolai Zhadov sat in his apartment, waiting to find out whether he had to report back to duty. His mother said she will talk to his commander, arguing that, according to the law, his two months in combat plus his service before that fulfills his Army obligation. Her powers of persuasion were obvious enough. “Maybe we will know something after she goes,” Nikolai said hopefully. In the kitchen, his grandmother prepared him a hot lunch. And as she did, she said over and over, simply, “We just don’t ever want him to go back.”
