December 2024 marked the thirtieth anniversary of Russia’s first war against Chechnya, begun by President Boris Yeltsin in 1994. Chechnya had been conquered by the Russian empire in the mid-nineteenth century in a decades-long and very cruel military campaign that combined the Russian colonization of the area and the genocidal removal of the indigenous population. Later, in 1944, the Chechens and the Ingush were collectively accused of collaboration and banditry and exiled to the Asian republics of the Soviet Union. The conditions of their deportation to the new regions were such that approximately every fourth or fifth one of them perished. Permission to return to the homeland was given only in 1956, and the Checheno-Ingush Soviet Socialist Republic was restored in 1957. In both the Russian empire and the Soviet Union, Chechens faced a situation that was not about maintaining their statehood but about sustaining their existence. The very being of a people hung constantly in the balance. Large nations do not have such fears or such memories. In 1994, rejecting diplomacy and bringing in troops, Russia crossed that line a third time. Encountering resistance, the Russians under Boris Yeltsin did not step back but chose once again the imperial modus operandi — violent conquest of territory accompanied by a punitive policy of subjugation. This choice changed post-Soviet Russia profoundly, blocking the emergence of a potential federalism and laying the foundation for the restoration of an authoritarian system. Dzhokhar Dudayev, Chechnya’s first president and a former general in the Soviet Army, said in an interview in 1995 that “Ichkeria has curbed [Russia’s] appetite a little, but it has not stopped it. There will be a massacre in Crimea. Ukraine will clash with Russia on irreconcilable terms. As long as Russism exists, it will never give up its ambitions. Now they call it ‘Slavic’ — under this brand they want to subdue, as in former times, Ukraine, Belarus, to get stronger, and then . . .” At that time, anyone in the Russian democratic camp who criticized the war would nevertheless have insisted that Dudayev was exaggerating. What Russism? What massacre in Crimea? What clash with Ukraine? Today Dudayev’s words sound prophetic. The Chechens, with their experience of colonial violence, saw in us what we, the Russians, failed to see. We did not see it because we did not want to see it. 
In the final years of the Soviet Union, on winter evenings, in the dim light cast by the green shade of the table lamp, my grandmother recited poetry to me, from books or from memory. Born in 1908, a former aristocrat, she worked for the publisher of political literature at the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. She was the only editor of Lenin’s collected works who was not a member of the Party. Her work, her daily bread, was the Soviet language and Soviet words: she freelanced when she retired, doing proofreading at home, and I would peek over her shoulder, amazed. But although she served the Soviet vocabulary professionally, when she spoke she rarely used official turns of phrase or words that smacked of newspeak. She spoke as if there was no Soviet Union outside the window. Even when forced to say “pioneer,” “maculature,” or “regcom” (regional committee), she pronounced them with an intonation that made clear that in her view the words were upstarts, invaders that she had to tolerate. I think she feared that I would swallow those words — children put whatever comes to hand into their mouths — and would not even notice that I had been infected, poisoned by Soviet diction, which would pop up in my speech like a chickenpox rash. The poetry that she recited to me was a practice of linguistic hygiene. Nothing written after 1917, naturally — only the classics, only the unmuddied springs of the former language: Tyutchev, Annensky, Fet, Pushkin, and of course Lermontov, the gloomy Romantic. I think my grandmother had a passion for Lermontov because — she never mentioned this — her maternal great-uncles, three young lieutenants, fought at Borodino against Napoleon in 1812, and the images in Lermontov’s poem about the battle secretly stirred her ancestral memory, which she preserved along with her dangerous aristocratic heritage. She completed the readings with a lullaby. Most frequently it was Lermontov’s “Cossack Lullaby”: Sleep, my lovely baby, Hush-a-bye. The clear moon quietly Looks into your cradle. Languor and sleepiness followed. The darkness gathered outside, turning glassy, floating in, night with all its dangerous fairytale creatures, ghosts, and evil beings, trying to break into the house, and my grandmother’s voice came in the same waves, as if from a distance or the depths of time: The Terek River flows over the rocks, Dark waves splashing; An angry Chechen crawls ashore, Sharpening his dagger. I knew what a dagger was, we had two at home, both war trophies from Germany. One was ornamental, with a dull chrome blade, the handle made from a roe deer leg with the hoof on top — a harmless trinket. But the other one was a bayonet-knife from a German carbine, sharpened, narrowed for trench warfare, for hand-to-hand combat, so that the blade could more easily penetrate layers of winter clothing. Its unpolished blade smelled of death and evil. It was this sinister dagger, a killer’s weapon, that I pictured in the Chechen’s hand. The word “Chechen” meant nothing to me. Zero, as if “Chechen” came from the universe of a different language, from beyond the Terek’s existential border. That suited me. I, too, was part of a general silent conspiracy of rejection and complacency and denial. “Chechen” was an opaque ritual name for the absolute Other, the absolute foreigner coming at night with a dagger. Grandmother, who usually liked to explain everything, clarified nothing. She just read poetry. Now, as I recall those evenings, for a moment I cannot resist that rhythm, the soundscape of her words. Grandmother put her soul into the reading, saving me
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