Let Our Fame Be Great (52 page)

There was an air of excitement in the house now, as more people piled in. I asked Utsiev what was happening, and he told me they were going to have a prayer ceremony – the ecstatic zikr that had been banned by the tsars and distrusted by the Soviets – for me to observe. I was overjoyed, since it is a rare privilege to see it, and I felt increasingly impatient as we waited for the participants to drift in.

Eventually, we rose and passed into the prayer room, and the men reached up to take drums down from the walls. The drums looked a little like Irish bodhráns, but were smaller and with a looser skin. The men sat down cross-legged on the wooden floor, and chatted and laughed with each other as they waited for latecomers to arrive. At this stage there were eight men in a circle, and one woman – Utsiev's daughter – sat outside it.

Utsiev suddenly – and unexpectedly, considering the spiritual air that had filled the room – addressed me in Russian. The language sounded harsh in this context, as if it was too large for his mouth, but he was keen to make sure I understood what he said.

‘Allah is listening, he is speaking but not like people speak. This is his attribute. Allah never sleeps, Allah never forgets, he loves his slaves, he has fed them with everything alive. This world is not held in a balance, it is held up by his strength, by his will. And we are strengthless in this,' he said. ‘But we believe in him and love him and appeal to him. This people has nothing else. They work with their hands honestly, and earn what they eat with their own labour. The sacrifices they make don't earn them any favours. This is all for the sake of Allah, for the sake of Allah.'

He stopped there, checked I had understood what he said, then looked around at his comrades. They exchanged a few words in Chechen, then he threw back his head and began to sing. He started with the single word ‘Allah', then expanded it with more Arabic words. The other chanters added a complex harmony beneath his words, giving his old man's voice a purity it would not otherwise have possessed.

The song grew from nothing into a thrilling and full crescendo, full of spiritual longing and loneliness. It was, although delicate, imbued with a confidence that carried itself gently. There was no swagger here, but the irresistible power of a force of nature.

The chanters rose up onto their knees, and began to rock back and forth a little. The chant had not yet gained a rhythm, but it was clear one was on its way, and the men were feeling their way towards it. Three more men joined the circle after a minute or so, adding their voice to the swelling and intensely spiritual sound.

Two more women entered the room at this point, sitting outside the circle. I noticed to my astonishment that they were weeping, the tears clinging to their eyelashes. One woman's shoulders heaved with sobs. Utsiev slowly rose to his feet, raised his hands to the side of his face and chanted upwards. The change was immediate. The other chanters stood too, and the tempo began to become more insistent. More cries rose up above the background of the chant, and the men swayed back and forth.

When the first clapping came in after five minutes, it felt like an obvious progression. From a simple moan to an insistent rhythm had been a movement as natural as breathing. Within a minute of the clapping starting, the circle had unwound itself and re-formed in the neighbouring room. All the women now joined the circle, as the dancers started to follow each other round and round. Faster and faster they danced, and the rhythm became irresistible. Utsiev's hesitant old legs had become spry and nimble under the influence of the dance. Despite myself, I found my foot tapping along by itself, and had to deliberately stop it since it seemed somehow sacrilegious.

I noticed four children in the far corner of the room watching with wide-eyed amazement, and the circle moved faster still. The women were taking a full part in the ceremony – there were twelve men and four women – although one woman's shoulders heaved with sobs and she hid her face behind her hands. Her high female screams rose above the deep, bass chant, with the fierce urgency of childbirth or terror.

The clapping became faster, and faster, the dancers raised hands above their heads. And then they just stopped. The chanting slowed, swelled, subsided, coiled round itself, and came to a halt.

‘Allah-h-h-h-h,' called out Utsiev once more, in a cry echoed around the circle. The sound gradually died away, and was replaced by silence disturbed only by sobs. The men and women turned to face each other, breathing heavily.

Utsiev talked to the group in Chechen, while the hysterical tears of one of the women too faded away of themselves.

The children, who had been watching the dancing, became bored by the talking and started to whisper to each other. Perhaps they had seen this ritual too many times for it to be interesting. One of the dancers surreptitiously handed one of them a telephone to play with, and turned his attention back to Utsiev.

For the next part of the ceremony, they returned to the first room, where they sat on the floor once more and chanted to the tunes of stringed instruments, which they called ‘fiddles' and played with bows, but which looked nothing like any violin I've even seen.

As they played, I wondered to myself what chance a Soviet bureaucrat – raised on the certainties of Marxism and dialectical
materialism, sure of the progression of history towards a future when the state would wither away, happy to take a bribe to make someone's life easier in the meantime – would have had if faced with these people.

They lived in a different world to the people who made the rules. They had no interest in imposing their values on anyone else, which might have made them seem soft. But they had survived torment, and emerged vibrant and strong, which is something the Soviet Union itself failed to do.

They worked, and they loved, and they danced. That was their life, and it was wonderful.

The ceremony over, I bid them farewell fondly and drove slowly back to my hotel in Balkashino with Birsanukayev. The stars were bright and huge overhead as we picked our way along the dust roads between the wheat fields. We turned off the headlights for a while, and sat just looking at the stars, which were peaceful and calm after the emotions of the evening.

I was overawed by what I had seen, at the little world that the Chechens had built for themselves in the midst of desolation, and struggled to answer Birsunukayev's good-natured questions about my impressions of his home village.

I thought back to supper, to a question Utsiev had asked me.

‘Do you think I am wise?' he had asked.

Strong? Maybe. Kind? Definitely. But wise? It did not seem the right word somehow. I think perhaps English does not have the word to describe him.

The Chechens were obviously not the only people deported to Kazakhstan. Aside from the North Caucasus nations they were united in exile with ethnic minority deportees from Crimea, from Georgia, from the Far East and elsewhere. Political deportees joined them too, as the barren steppes of Central Asia became a giant dumping ground for those people that Stalin wanted to simply get rid of.

Among them was Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was to become legendary as a dissident writer and would even win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970. As a young officer, he was caught making slightly facetious comments about Stalin, which was enough to condemn him to the camps.

In March 1953, at the end of his sentence – and, coincidentally, in the same month that Stalin died – he was exiled for life to the southern Kazakh village of Kok-Terek. There he taught in a school and observed first-hand how the Chechens lived in Central Asia – observations he wove into his giant indictment of Soviet rule
The Gulag Archipelago
. According to his account, the Chechens just refused en masse to compromise.

‘After they were treacherously thrown out of their home, they believed in nothing ever again. They built themselves huts – low, dark, sad, such that you could almost destroy them with one kick. And all their life in exile was like that – for a day, a month, a year, without accumulating property, or reserves, without plans. They ate, drank, they clothed their young. Years went past, and they still had nothing like at the beginning,' Solzhenitsyn wrote.

‘No Chechens ever tried to please or ingratiate themselves with the bosses. They were always haughty before them and even openly hostile.'

He recounted a story from his time in Kok-Terek which demonstrates the Chechens' sheer refusal to surrender better than any other
I have ever seen. His star pupil was a Chechen boy called Abdul Khudaev, who was in the ninth year of school – hence, aged between thirteen and fifteen. Abdul did not ingratiate himself with anyone, being too proud, but he was respected for his sheer intelligence.

The boy lived with his elderly mother, and had no other close relatives except an uncle and an older brother. The brother had been imprisoned as a thief and a murderer, but had been released under amnesty. He returned to the village and got drunk for two days, then quarrelled with a local Chechen and attacked him with a knife. Before he could do his drinking partner any damage, however, an elderly Chechen woman stepped in to stop him.

By tradition, the brother would have stopped at this point, since no Chechen could ever harm an older woman. But he was too drunk and too fractious, and he killed her. He was not drunk enough to fail to realize what awaited him when the other Chechens heard what he had done, however, so he fled the village, turned himself in to the police and was sent to prison.

The Soviet legal system might have considered that to be an end to the affair, but the rules of blood had not been satisfied. In the absence of the brother, someone else from the family would have to pay for the murder. So Abdul, his mother and his uncle stocked up with food and water and barricaded themselves in their house, which was besieged by Chechens.

The whole community knew what was happening, but no one – not the Young Communist League, not the Party, not the police, not the teachers, not anyone – went to save this child from the threat of violent death.

‘Before the revival of blood revenge these formidable organizations like the regional committee of the Party, and the regional executive committee, and the Interior Ministry komendatura and the police hid away like cowards. The barbaric savage ancient law had taken breath, and it seemed there was no Soviet rule in Kok-Terek,' Solzhenitsyn wrote.

The Chechen elders went to the police and asked them to hand over the brother, but the police refused. They left, discussed among themselves, and returned to the police to ask for there to be an open
court case and that the brother be shot in their presence. Again, the police refused. So the elders summoned more elders – the most respected in the nation – from Almaty. They held a council and condemned the brother to death. Any Chechen, anywhere, was instructed to kill him on sight.

Honour was satisfied. Abdul was allowed to return to school, and everyone in the school hid their shame, and pretended nothing had happened.

It was an episode guaranteed to make sure that young Abdul realized the extent of his exile. He might be expected to conform with the Soviet laws, to join the institutions, but he would never receive the assistance from the law that he should have been given in return. From that day forth, if he did not realize it already, he would know that no matter how hard he worked, the Chechens lived outside the law.

It was a lesson drummed in throughout the exiled nation. In the 1950s, in the years after Stalin's death, the Soviet government initiated a project to try to increase food production by ploughing up the Kazakh steppes. They created the vast fields I saw on my trip to Krasnaya Polyana, and they brought in hundreds of thousands of idealistic young citizens keen to participate in what was called the Virgin Lands campaign.

These young settlers had been brought up to see the Chechens and other deportees as the worst kind of traitors, and when they realized they would be living next door to them, they reacted in fury. There were dozens of fights between the settlers and the deportees, often involving fifty or a hundred people.

Party officials and police paid little attention to these small battles, and once more the Chechens were cast back into defending themselves. Every cancelled police investigation, every biased court decision, was one step further to making the Chechens live outside the law.

Solzhenitsyn said the Chechens were not unique in being treated this way. Other nations had been deported too, and millions of people were imprisoned in the worst imaginable conditions for invented or insignificant crimes.

But, he said, the Chechens did not react like the others. Some, like the community at Krasnaya Polyana, retreated within themselves.
But most did the opposite. They refused to cooperate like the Sufis refused to cooperate, but they also fought back.

‘There was one nation which completely refused to resign itself to its fate – not as individuals, not as rebels, but the whole nation as one. This was the Chechens,' Solzhenitsyn wrote. ‘And the wonder is that everyone was scared of them. No one could stop them living like that. The government, which had already ruled this country for thirty years, could not force them to respect its laws.'

Every time I read those words I am irresistibly reminded of one of the Chechen men I became closest to on my travels.

His name was Khasan Bibulatov, but everyone called him ‘Dedushka' (grandfather), since he was such a kindly old man. I spent many hours talking to Dedushka, who was sixty-five, in his ramshackle house in a refugee camp in Istanbul, and it did not take me long to realize he was not a kindly old man at all, but an outrageous rogue, and he could easily have been the murdering, drunk brother in Solzhenitsyn's story, if only things had turned out differently.