Leonid Ruzov. To the death of a poet

The poet died...

...everything seems, but what if all this is prose, and bad?

Even snakes can be people with the power of songs,
The power of song can make snakes out of people.

P arenek from the village studied at a vocational school. He worked as a mason - in his poor region all the men were involved in covens. At the age of twenty he joined the army. After demobilization, he worked for two years as a pombour at a drilling rig. At the same time, he entered the correspondence department of the local philological department. At the first opportunity, he moved to a local book publishing house as a proofreader, and within ten years he rose to the position of head of the production department. In those same years, a romantic young man from among the workers composed poetry and prose and managed to publish the collections “Plant a Tree, People” and “Signs of the Zodiac” and the story “Time of Reckoning.” He joined the writers' unions - first the local one, then the USSR. In 1985-1986 - Chairman of the Committee for Propaganda of Fiction of the USSR Writers' Union. In 1986 he became editor-in-chief of the children's magazine "Rainbow". In 1987-1989 he studied in Moscow at the Higher Literary Courses.

And then the empire began to collapse, perestroika began. His fate changed dramatically - but even here the profile looks typical and average. Vigorous social activity. First in democratic circles and associations. The confrontation with local communist bosses reached its climax in August 1991 - then he was even briefly arrested by the KGB - and ended with the overthrow of the nomenklatura. Then - going to power. Deputation. In 1993, there was a confrontation between the legislative and executive powers, which escalated into an armed conflict, the local version of “Black October”. He again takes the correct position, becomes the local “second person”, and when space becomes available, the first. He was either received in the Kremlin or accused of serious crimes.

Then everything got mixed up, the wheel of fortune turned - and luck abandoned our hero. He lost the elections. And on Friday the thirteenth he was blown up in his own white jeep.

It would seem like a sample. An example of what kind of career a moderately modest, moderately ambitious person from the outback could make in the Soviet empire during its decline. What heights could he reach during the years of collapse and turmoil? And - sic transit gloria mundi.

Everything would be fine, but our hero’s name was Zelimkhan. Yandarbiev Zelimkhan Abdul-Muslimovich died as a result of an assassination attempt on February 13, 2004 in the capital of Qatar, Doha. In fact, this is the only thing we know about him for sure today.

We do not know who blew up Yandarbiev's jeep . That is, many versions have been expressed in the Russian media, boiling down to one thing - what happened is a consequence of the conflict among Chechen extremists. For some reason this choir does not inspire confidence. Either because among the speakers there are many former opponents - what is it, enemies - of the Qatari prisoner. Either because after the death of another president, Dzhokhar Dudayev , on April 21, 1996, they also talked about showdowns in the separatist camp - and then it turned out who fired what and where and what order they received for it...

We do not know what role this ex-president played in his last years in the Arab East. “He washes his clothes there!” - one of my Chechen interlocutors swore. It turns out that the deceased usually gave television interviews near his home, against the backdrop of hanging sheets...

That is, the same media more than once spoke about the role of Yandarbiev as a representative of the Chechen separatists, who collected money for the needs of the soldiers of Allah... and immediately used it for some other purposes. However, “compromising evidence” of this kind has already become a standard dish. Another question arises - who exactly could he represent, besides himself? There are many such emissaries scattered around the world. Some only represent themselves personally. Those who are truly authorized by Aslan Maskhadov - Ilyas Akhmadov and Akhmed Zakaev - are under serious pressure. Suffice it to recall the attempts to achieve the extradition of the latter , accusing him, among other things, of complicity in the terrorist attack on Dubrovka. This charge was dropped by the Russian side itself; a dozen more charges did not stand up to scrutiny in court. What to do - the object was selected unsuccessfully. But now - thanks to the Russian prosecutor's office! - we have a verdict on the Chechen war handed down by a London judge. Yandarbiev was an ideal target for attack - after all, his negotiations with Movsar Baraev , it seems, was actually detected by Russian special services. But no, no press campaign, no visible diplomatic moves...

* * *

In the late 1980s, Zelimkhan Yandarbiev abandoned his career in the Writers' Union and plunged into the Chechen national movement. The problem was that there was virtually no alternative elite in Chechnya. There was no dissident activity - as, for example, in Lithuania or among the Crimean Tatars. There was, as in the rest of Russia, a Soviet service “intelligentsia” - people who were both “bosses” and opposed to “bosses.” However, in the 1980s, many Chechens became acquainted with the work of the famous fellow tribesman Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov in samizdat .

But here, unlike the rest of Russia, there was a different dimension - the structures of traditional society, family and religious ties and hierarchies. They were suitable for escaping and resisting Soviet reality, and not for changing it (however, corruption allowed the authorities to adapt some elements of this archaism). The "national movement" in the provinces could appeal to these traditional structures... or to compatriots who had achieved fame in the service of the mother country.

Walkers reached out to the latter. Alla Dudayeva, Dzhokhar's widow, writes about Yandarbiev's visits to their home in Tartu. It seems that these conversations were not in vain - in November 1990, a major general of Soviet strategic aviation headed the National Congress of the Chechen People. He seemed to sincerely want to "get back to his roots." When Dudayev spoke Chechen on television, viewers did not always understand him. In fact, Dzhokhar did not really know Chechen; he began to learn the language only after returning to Grozny. And the now well-known symbol of Ichkeria - the wolf - was copied by the officer’s wife Alla Dudayeva, who spent her entire life drawing something in garrison clubs, from the familiar Akela from a Soviet cartoon. Dudayev was a neophyte. In the same way, artillery colonel Aslan Maskhadov was a neophyte. However, in the late 1990s, this latter conscientiously tried to establish Sharia order ...

But these serious people sincerely set out to build an independent state, believing that someone knows how to do it. Zelimkhan Yandarbiev became such an ideologist. wrote sympathetically As Valeria Novodvorskaya , “Yandarbiev is a poet, he poetically formulated the idea of ​​national independence of Chechnya even before Dzhokhar Dudayev, and he could hardly really imagine what the independence of a tiny country, which is actually located inside a country like Russia,” was . The sympathy is understandable: he was a poet of the same high caliber as Valeria Ilyinichna herself.

Sergei Kovalev was skeptical about this combination of the ideal and the real, noting that “not the most creative representatives of the national intelligentsia” join such movements , and added: “Have you read the poems of the poet Yandarbiev? I have!”

One could get some idea of ​​this phenomenon by opening some issue of “Young Guard”, “Our Contemporary”, etc. We can only be glad that in Russia, at the time of popular upsurge, such nationally concerned writers were on the margins. It may be objected that in these examples the “national” was intertwined with the “Soviet”. But returning to Chechnya, we can find a correspondence: Dudayev’s second, and perhaps closest, ideological assistant was the adviser he inherited from the last party boss of Chechnya, Doku Zavgaev .

* * *

So, in the early nineties, it was possible to unite both of these forces - a largely traditional society and “service people” striving for traditions. After the “Chechen revolution,” many Grozny residents noted that intelligent people disappeared from the streets. But a layer of “people with guns” appeared. In 1992-1993, Yandarbiev participated in negotiations on the settlement of relations with Russian delegations. The negotiations were unsuccessful. War became at first possible, then inevitable.

Fighting began, interspersed with attempts at a peaceful settlement. And - a strange thing - with such contacts, the military, Dudayev and Maskhadov, showed a greater desire for peace. Perhaps because they knew well the value of human blood and life. It seems that such knowledge was inaccessible to our poet... However, this also happened in Moscow - in 1991 and 1993, the KGB special forces and Pavel Grachev desperately did not want to fight, and the politicians of the last conscription were thirsty for battle...

Quite civilian people - Akhmet Zakaev and Usman Imaev - also turned out to be good commanders and good diplomats. Zakaev is an actor, but, as Shakespeare noted, the world is a theater, and we are all actors in it. It’s just that Akhmet and Usman played seriously, getting into the role to the end. It was enough to look at Yandarbiev’s absurd movements during negotiations with Yeltsin to say: “I don’t believe it!”

At the same time, it was hardly possible to call our hero a cruel person, and his deeds - evil. For example, when Yandarbiev replaced the murdered Dzhokhar Dudayev, several dozen construction worker hostages were immediately released from a terrible concentration camp in the mountains.

But the main purpose of the poet is to awaken human souls. The slogans of the “Islamic state” thrown by Yandarbiev were picked up by “true Muslims,” “Wahhabists,” and bandits who were looking for ideological cover for their crafts. Among those "awakened" by Yandarbiev was his personal security guard Arbi Barayev, one of the most famous kidnappers.

It was the “Wahhabists” who brought the second war to Chechnya in 1999. In January 2000, another Sharia ideologist, Movladi Udugov , sent Yandarbiev to Afghanistan to visit the Taliban to establish diplomatic relations. It is known that Maskhadov, having learned about this separate venture, was furious. It is difficult to say who our poet has represented since then away from his homeland. It is also not easy to assess his successes in the diplomatic field. Upon his arrival from Kandahar to Islamabad, he was arrested by Pakistani security forces. And then Yandarbiev settled in Arabia... until last Friday the thirteenth.

* * *

There was a poet in Chechnya at the beginning of the twentieth century, to whom monuments were erected, and streets, villages and factories were named after him. And not as a poet, but as a hero of the revolution and civil war. “Aslambek Sheripov is our Mayakovsky: he joined the revolution and died on time . ”