I skipped a page or two and read greedily on: "In October '43 the Stalinists had already deported the Karachays. In March '44 they took the Balkars. And in February they came for the Chechen and the Ingush ... personally, you understand? Beria and his deputies, in the flesh, came down to mastermind our resettlement. Like you take a man from California and resettle him in Antarctica—that kind of resettle ..."
I flipped a half page. CC's dry humour was beginning to assert itself, despite the banality of the transcribers. "The old ones and the sick were spared the journey. They were herded into a nice building, which was set on fire to keep them warm. Then the building was sprayed with machine gun bullets. My father was a bit luckier. Stalin's soldiers shot him in the back of the neck for not wanting his pregnant wife to be forced onto the train.... When my mother saw my father's corpse, she decided she was lonely, so she produced me. The widow woman's son was born on the cattle truck that carried him to exile...."
Here the transcribers in their prissy way indicated a natural break, while CC withdraws to the bathroom and Larry tops up their glasses.
Those who survived the journey were put to work in a gulag, planting the frozen steppes, mining gold sixteen hours a day, which is why the Ingush to this day deal in gold.... They were classed as slave labourers on account of their alleged collaboration with the Germans, but the Ingush fought well against the Germans; they just hated Stalin and the Russians more."
"And they hated the Ossetians," Larry says keenly, like a schoolboy wanting to be top.
He has touched a nerve, perhaps deliberately, for CC unlooses a tirade.
"Why should we not hate the Ossetians? They are not of our land! They are not of our blood! They are Persians who claim to be Christians and worship heathen gods in secret. They are the lackeys of Moscow. They have stolen our fields and houses. Why? Do you know why?" Larry affects not to. "Do you know why Stalin deported us and said we were criminals and enemies of the Soviet people? Because Stalin was an Ossetian! Not a Georgian, not an Abkhazian, not an Armenian, not an Azerbaijani, not a Chechen, and not an Ingushi God knows, not an Ingushi—but a foreigner, an Ossetian. Do you love the poet Osip Mandelstam?"
Carried away by the passion of CC's outburst, Larry avows his love of Mandelstam.
"You know why Stalin had the poet Mandelstam shot? For writing in one of his poems that Josef Stalin was an Ossetian! That is why Mandelstam was shot by Stalin!"
I doubted whether this was the reason Mandelstam was shot. I held the better-attested view that he died in a psychiatric hospital. And I doubted whether Stalin was really an Ossetian. And perhaps Larry did too, but in the face of such fervour, his only recorded response is a grunt, followed by a long silence while the two men drink. Eventually CC resumes his narrative. In 1953 Stalin died. Three years later Khrushchev denounced him, and shortly afterwards the Chechen–Ingush autonomous republic resumed its rightful place on the maps:
"... We come home from Kazakhstan. That's a long walk, but we make it, even if some of us arrive a bit late. My mother dies on the way, and I swear to her that I shall bury her in her homeland. But when we arrive, the doors of our houses are locked against us and Ossetian faces look out of our windows. We are beggars, sleeping in our streets, poaching in our fields. Never mind that the law says the Ossetians have got to go. They don't like the law. They don't recognise the law. They recognise guns. And Moscow has given the Ossetians many guns and taken away ours."
There had been much debate on the Top Floor, I remembered, about whether on the strength of this meeting we should make a pass at Checheyev and try to obtain him as our source. After all, he had broken half the rules in the KGB book. He had blown his own cover, vented anti-Soviet sentiments, and beaten the forbidden ethnic drum. But in the end my impassioned reasoning prevailed, and the barons reluctantly agreed that our most important asset was Larry and we should contemplate no move that might endanger him.
I was standing at the centre of my priesthole again, beneath the overhead light, studying the remnants of a folder of printed pamphlets issued by the BBC monitoring service. Key words, those that had survived, were highlighted with green marker pen. The idiosyncratic spelling of the transcribers had been left untouched.
North Osetia rela . . . calm on fl..versary of conflict.
ITAR-TASS news agency World Se ... Mosc in Russian 1106 gmt 31 Oct 93
Text of rep ...
Vladikavkaz, 31 October: The sad anni ... of the tragedy of 31 October 1992, whe ... armed confrontation
began in the zon... t . . . Oset . . . Ingush conflict . . . be
softened by a....
The tragic tally [for ... conflict]: 1,300 killed . . . sides, more than 400 . . . houses destroyed and ... homeless.
