THE STATE AS A BLOOD HOUSE

CAUCASUS KNOT

I'm watching a tape about the release of a hostage. A man in camouflage furiously kicks some utensils with a machine gun. Blood in the bathroom. The kidnappers - three bearded Chechens - are lined up against the wall with machine guns and prongs. In the frame is an eighteen-year-old ...

I'm watching a tape about the release of a hostage. A man in camouflage furiously kicks some utensils with a machine gun. Blood in the bathroom. The kidnappers - three bearded Chechens - are lined up against the wall with machine guns and prongs.

In the frame - an eighteen-year-old girl with a wrapped hand: her little finger was cut off. The girl is crying. What she went through, you don’t wish on anyone: bullying, rape, inhuman humiliation. When the father received a parcel with his daughter's little finger in the mail, he had a heart attack.

The footage changes: one of the Chechens shows the place where they killed an Avar accomplice. The Avar stole the girl and sold her to Chechnya, and when the neighbors told the police that he was rubbing himself near the girl, he rushed to the buyers. The buyers accused him of betrayal, killed him and took the money back.

The Chechen is interrogated by a strong young guy with a machine gun in one hand and a Makarov in the other. When the kidnapper stumbles, the guy urges him on with Makarov blows to the temple.

The organizer of the operation is Khattab.

The young bearded guy interrogating the kidnapper is Gazimagomed Gairbekov. 23-year-old Avar Gazimagomed was the only one who responded to the misfortune of his fellow villager. The police refused to open a case into the kidnapping of 18-year-old Zaira Kuramagomedova. There is a war in Chechnya. Gazimagomed went to Chechnya, recaptured the girl and grabbed the bandits. For free.

After 6 years, Gazimagomed Gairbekov will receive 2 years and 6 months for the liberation of Zaire.

Oh yes: there is another character on the tape - Shamil Basayev. He appears later, when Khattab and Gairbekov hand over Zaire to their father. The men are sitting in some courtyard, and Shamil teaches the old man that according to Sharia, Zaire should have been married immediately, and not to an institute. Then there would be no trouble. By the way: on the film, the liberators never touch the sobbing girl, who immediately wrapped herself in a hijab. It is forbidden. Haram.

The Gairbekov brothers, Gazimagomed and Magomed, were arrested in March last year for an attempt on the life of Amuchi Amutinov, chairman of the Pension Fund of Dagestan. Amutinov was blown up twice. Once - on November 3 in Makhachkala, another time - on February 18 in Kizlyar.

For the first time, Amutinov's armored Mercedes was smashed. The second time - an escort car and passers-by. The house opposite was slashed, as if during the bombing. Three were killed, seven were injured.

The Gairbekovs were taken from call records. During the week, the defendants called each other, and their route, the prosecution claimed, honeycomb to honeycomb, repeats the Amuchi route they followed.

Amutinov himself directly calls Gazi Gaziev, the head of the local railway, the customer of the assassination attempts. The reason is valid. Amutinov is a Lak and Gaziev is a Lak. After the death of the legendary Nadir Khachilaev (the one who captured the Government House in Makhachkala), both claimed the title of leader of the Lak people. Both are members of the team of the recently resigned head of Dagestan, Magomedali Magomedov.

However, despite the inhuman tortures that the Gairbekov brothers went through, they did not name Gaziev. When it was necessary to say something (after such torture, the log would speak), the cunning Gazimagomed showed that he wanted to blow up Amutinov in retaliation for the fact that he had killed his friend Nadyr Khachilaev.

Anyone in Dagestan will say that this is not true.

Although Amutinov was at enmity with the Khachilaevs. Once he even tried to fight at the State Council when Nadyr threw a paper ball at him. Such an attempt required a great deal of courage. When in the early 1990s Chechens shot Adam Khachilaev (he got into a fight at a Chechen wedding and was shot on the way back), they shot the whole family in retaliation.

The Khachilaevs were then very condemned in Dagestan. Not for shooting, of course. But there was some eighty-year-old old woman in the house who did not fall under the rules of revenge. It was for this old woman that the Khachilaevs were greatly condemned.

The chairman of the Pension Fund and the head of the railway are not the only ones in the government team who are not doing well with each other.

On January 17, the plane returning from the hajj was met at the Makhachkala airport with SOBR and armored personnel carriers. They took not a terrorist - they took the head of the Kizilyurt district, Abdurakhman Gadzhiev, for the attempt on the head of the Gergebil district, Makhach Magomedov.

Makhach Magomedov is generally a very influential person in the Kizilyurt district. He collected taxes in the area, and even before he became the head of the local tax office. And when Magomedov became the head of the tax inspectorate, the district continued to pay taxes to him.

In the end, Magomedov became the head of the Gergebil district, and he put his friend Abdurakhman Gadzhiev in the Kizilyurt district. They were very friendly.

Once, an attempt was made on Hajiyev. The bullet went through Hajiyev's temple. “After that I became wiser,” Gadzhiev boasted.

After Gadzhiev grew wiser, the property in the region gradually came under Gadzhiev's control, and soon the time came for the re-election of the head of the administration.

During the re-elections, it became clear that Hajiyev could have very strong political rivals.

One rival was a man who had already had two blood feuds.

Another opponent was a man who once, in front of everyone, put a gun to the temple of his friend and pulled the trigger.

The third opponent was the man who Gadzhiev suspected made him wiser.

Agree that with such a variety of political alignments, it was very difficult to win the elections and, for example, not grow wiser a couple more times.

In general, Hajiyev asked for help from Makhach Magomedov and again won the elections. And then they did not share some owner of a gravel pit, and on December 12, Makhach's jeep was shot at point-blank range at the entrance to Kizilyurt. Magomedov's nephew died. Gadzhiev came to the funeral in the mountains and cried on his friend's chest.

I am sitting in the office of one of the big local businessmen. On the wall is a large portrait of Imam Shamil. On the table is a smaller portrait of Putin. The businessman talks about how he was sitting in his office with the owner of a gravel pit (the poor man was also somehow involved in the assassination), and then Makhach came to him.

“He says: “Give me this man!”, My interlocutor is indignant. - I tell him: are you a highlander or not? Have you forgotten our customs? This person is my guest, how can I give him away?

In general, Big Makhach publicly grieved that the cops swept up the killer before him. “I asked not to interfere,” said the head of the Gergebil district, “but, unfortunately, we live in a secular state of law.”

Amuchi Amutinov is a builder by profession, not a karateka. In general, he does not have enough relatives to solve problems the way it is customary in Dagestan. But his brother and son work for the FSB.

On March 15, the FSB arrested the Gairbekov brothers, and on April 26, hundreds of Gairbekov relatives surrounded the FSB building in Makhachkala. Usually, when someone in Moscow surrounds the FSB building, a bunch of TV cameras come there, because the protesters want to hear about themselves in the press.

In this case, people did not want to hear about themselves in the press, but wanted to solve a specific problem: Gazimagomed Gairbekov disappeared from the pre-trial detention center. As it turned out, he was taken to Chechnya.

Apparently, the local operas were afraid to beat Gazimagomed. In Dagestan, they know well why they kill cops. It is in the Kremlin that only Wahhabis kill cops. In the 6th department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Dagestan, it was a habit to torture suspects, and the employees of the 6th department were shot like partridges. In short, there are no signs “only for Wahhabis” on the cops. In Chechnya, Gazimagomed could be tortured for as long as necessary.

After a crowd of relatives surrounded the FSB building in Makhachkala, the security forces had to negotiate with the Gairbekov family. Gazimagomed's father met with the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the republic, its prosecutor and the head of the FSB. They reported that Gazimagomed was taken to Grozny to be tried for bullying citizens of the Chechen Republic.

Then the father of Gazimagomed, according to him, asked the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs: “Tell me, if your daughter was stolen from you, raped and mocked, would you act like my son, or not?”

“Your son acted like a man,” the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs replied.

Then Gairbek Gairbekov asked the prosecutor: “Tell me, if your daughter was stolen from you, what would you do?”

“Your son acted like a man,” the prosecutor replied.

Then Gairbek asked the head of the FSB: “Tell me, if your daughter was stolen from you, what would you do?”

“Your son acted like a man,” replied the head of the FSB.

“Why did you then give the cassette to Chechnya?” asked Gairbek. “There was a mistake,” the bosses admitted, according to him.

The mistake of the chiefs cost Gazimagomed dearly. When the father was allowed to look at his son in Khankala, Gairbekov had a package with a parcel in his hands. The father saw his son from afar and dropped the package from his hands: Gazimagomed had been beaten so badly.

And some time later, a Chechen lawyer called Gairbek and said that he needed to find a car to transport his son's body, because he died under torture. The father hired a taxi and went after the corpse of his son. The lawyer entered the pre-trial detention center and said:

- He's still breathing. Let go of the car.

Another brother, Magomed, was tortured in Makhachkala. They said: "Sign the protocol." Magomed asked to remove the handcuffs in order to sign. The handcuffs were removed, and Magomed grabbed a knife from the table and cut his wrist so that he could not sign anything for a long time.

The Gairbekov brothers are natives of the remote Avar village of Kvanada, separated from Makhachkala by four hundred kilometers of mountains and as many centuries.

The late Nadyr Khachilaev distinguished Gazimagomed very much for his spirit. By the way, Gazimagomed is a hafiz, that is, he knows the Koran by heart; in the letter that his father gives me, there is an amazing clarity of wording and not a single grammatical error. “I am proud of what I have done,” writes Gazimagomed. “And if, God forbid, this happens again, I won’t think twice what to do.”

The village of Gimry, the birthplace of two imams - Gazi-Magomed and Shamil - is cut off from the flat Dagestan by a three-kilometer Gimrinsky tunnel, pierced in the thickness of mountains floating in the clouds.

Immediately after the tunnel disappear signs telling about mundane things: the speed limit or the name of the village. Whoever needs it will get there. And if a federal armored personnel carrier or a curious journalist mixes up the road, so much the better. However, there are road signs: they are green, and the names of Allah are written on them.

Vertical mountains are cut by terraces: at a height accessible to climbers, tiny gardens are arranged. The unique climate allows growing the best persimmons and apricots in Dagestan.

You drive along the road between vertical mountains and read signs from the Koran.

In the village, to which you arrive on the road with green signs, there are no non-workers, crimes and police. Federal troops surround Gimry once every two or three months, but usually do not enter the village.

In early January, eight militants of Omar Sheikhulaev were blocked in the mountains near the village. Five of them were Gimry people. Their fathers and relatives sat in the square. Nobody cried. For what? Everything will be as Allah wills.

We come to the village without a preliminary phone call: any person who is an authority on the plain, here in the mountains, is nobody. My escorts go to the mosque for Friday prayers, I stay in the square, where a small crowd quickly gathers around me. I leave my things in an unlocked car: here they would rather steal me than my bag. After discussing whose agent I am, the FSB or the CIA, the men advise me to talk to the head of the village administration.

- And how much authority is he for you? I ask.

The men are surprised.

“If he were not an authority, he would not be the head of the village,” they explain to me the elementary truth.

We talk to the imam of the mosque (aka dibir village) and the head of the administration in a small room designed for Islamic lessons. Dibir in the village of Gazi-Magomed wonders why Gimry is considered a Wahhabi village.

“I try to follow in the footsteps of the imams of the past,” he says. They understood more than me. I'm just keeping what they said.

And indeed: women in the village both walked in headscarves and walk. At Shamil's tower, as they did ziyarat, they do it. (By the way, from the point of view of pure Wahhabism, this is "shirk" - idolatry.) But the most surprising thing is that in Gimry there is not a single new mosque that is being built in Makhachkala a block away. “Why, if the old mosque of Imam Shamil accommodates everyone?” - says Gazi-Magomed.

The head of the administration is trying to convince me that the rumors about the widespread distribution of the Sharia court in Gimry are greatly exaggerated. According to him, the villagers come immediately to him, Abdullah, and to the imam.

“We explain to them,” says Abdullah, “according to religion, so, and according to secular law, so. Whoever benefits, he agrees with that. - And, thinking, he adds: - But the last word is mine. Ours is a secular state.

The idea that justice is administered by a court independent of both the imam and the head of the administration does not seem to occur to Gimry residents for a good reason: justice is harder to find in the courts on the plain than a virgin in a brothel.

Senior Lieutenant Asker Askerov, head of the criminal investigation department of the Buinaksk District Department of Internal Affairs, received the posthumous title of Hero of Russia for the battle in the Gimrinsky tunnel on May 29. Asker Askerov, at the cost of his life, prevented the explosion of the tunnel, the Irganay hydroelectric power station and the flooding of dozens of villages with twenty-seven land mines. The seasoned militants, blocked in the tunnel, were able to escape, and after the battle at the side of the road they found those same 27 land mines.

This is the official version of the death of Starley Askerov.

Back in Makhachkala, they tell me a less official version. And far less heroic. Remember, this is just a version.

Once upon a time there was a police officer who was appointed to the place of another officer. It happened so suddenly that the first employee was unable to take the savings from the office.

A little later, the first employee came to the office for money, there was no more money. Ment was offended and was beaten. He came a second time and was beaten again.

For the third time, our cop did not come alone. A dozen cars came to the disassembly. A fight started. One car - the red "ten" - took to its heels. A white "seven" rushed after her. From the "seven" they fired, from the "tens" they shot back.

So they reached the Gimrinsky tunnel, and it had to happen that at that moment a car from the Untsukulsky regional department came across to them. Bullets hit the cops, and they decided that it was a terrorist attack.

Agree that the cops had every right to think so, because the cops blow up very often. The militants have this way of passing the exam. Blew up the cop - get a membership card.

In general, the cops decided that they were again passing the course paper, fell to the side of the road and called for reinforcements. By the time the reinforcements arrived, the "ten" and "seven" had long fled. And the cops drove into the tunnel and saw something in camouflage.

And blocked the tunnel.

I ask knowledgeable Gimry residents about this story. After it turns out that I doubt the feat of the police, who saved Gimry from flooding, the ice of total distrust melts a little. Little by little, other details of the incident are coming to light.

I am told that those blocked in the tunnel were not exactly militants. It seems that one was a militant, the other was a Gimry resident, to whom he asked for an overnight stay. And the third one is just a taxi driver who took all this glorious company from Buynaksk.

When they were blocked in the tunnel, the Gimryn managed to jump out from one end and call his friends. “They were very close,” they explain to me, “and they had a rusty machine gun with them. Well, who in our time does not have such a thing?

These, with a rusty machine gun, climbed to the observation platform above the southern portal of the tunnel and with the first shot from the machine gun blew the head of 25-year-old Asker Askerov. In addition to the rusty machine gun, the support group also found a rusty grenade launcher: a shot from it also hit the target. After that, the cops did not climb into the tunnel, and the motley company that sat inside, together with the taxi driver, climbed out through the ventilation hatches to the mountain and was like that.

And then they found 27 land mines. They are always found. As they gouge a five-story building to zero, they always find untouched boxes with explosives intended to blow up the president, undermine the orbital station or flood the village of Gimry there.

So, they weren't fighters? - you ask. Not really. And it's much scarier.

The problem of the mountains is not five, ten or even a hundred militants. The problem of the mountains is in the guys with the “rusty machine gun”, who instantly come to the aid of their relative.

You can clear the militants. You can't clean up people. The people who do not go to the district court, because they take bribes in the district court, but go to the Sharia court.

Mountains cannot be defeated by tanks. Mountains can be conquered by law. If in the cities of Dagestan they stop taking bribes, the mountain villages of Dagestan will again become part of the republic. But the very idea that in order to defeat the extremists, it is necessary not to destroy the extremists, but to purify the authorities, sounds like a monstrous heresy both for the Kremlin and for Makhachkala. Much easier to find 27 land mines.

The problem of the village of Gimry is that in response to the question of a passing journalist: “Does the head of the administration enjoy authority?” the unanimous answer follows: "If I had not used it, I would not have been the head."

I know that this is Wahhabism.

Just explain to me what is democracy then?

As I said, the chairman of the Pension Fund, Amuchi Amutinov, and the head of the railway, Gazi Gaziev, are both members of the team of the head of the State Council, Magomedali Magomedov.

In practice, this meant that when one of them, in order to raise his authority among the Laks, started a topic (elections in the Novolaksky district, a storm around the coastal land), then another was sent to decide the topic.

The head of the republic can be understood. It's better for two team members to shoot each other than for one of them to become the new Khachilaev. Nobody wants the Government House to be occupied every Friday.

Amuchi Amutinov's brother is an FSB colonel. And so Gazimagomed was taken to Chechnya, where the Leninsky court of Grozny soldered him 2.6 years - for the liberation of Zaire.

And Gazi Gaziev has a friend - the chairman of the Supreme Court. And on February 9, the Supreme Court outright acquitted all the accused: for lack of evidence.

It turned out very convenient for the authorities: public squabble, and everyone is a fool, and no one is in the lead. By the way, the Chairman of the Supreme Court is the second cousin of Magomedali Magomedov.

Magomed was released from the cage immediately. And Gazimagomed remained in prison - well, for torturing citizens of the Republic of Chechnya.

That is, it turns out that for Khattab, the kidnappers of Zaire were scumbags. And for the Russian court - victims. If these guys were still alive, they would still testify at the trial.

The points of view of Russia and Khattab again did not coincide.

When the state is faced with the problem of people who rush to the aid of militants with a “rusty machine gun”, or heads of administrations who publicly regret the capture of a killer by the police, the state has two ways to solve the problem.

One is very simple. Guys, it's good that you live according to the precepts of Imam Shamil and, entering into battle, do not think about the consequences. But you live in the Russian state. And if you are caught with a machine gun, you will have to answer according to its laws: no more and no less. If you are caught for an attempt on the head of the Pension Fund, then they will check whether you attempted or not. But no one will take you apart piece by piece.

Option two: guys, do you want to live according to the laws of the mountains? Well, live. Any of the owners of the armored "Mercedes" of Dagestan is able to solve their problems without the help of the law.

However, in Dagestan, neither is happening.

Do you have a brother - an FSB colonel? The FSB will take apart the alleged killer. Does the prospective customer have a friend - the head of the Supreme Court? The court will acquit all who are needed, and neither the investigation nor the trial will have anything to do with it, except for blood relations.

I don't know the truth about the assassination attempt on Amutinov.

I would very much like to say that a guy who is able to pull hostages out of Grozny and who knows the Koran by heart cannot be a killer. But this, alas, is not an argument.

I would very much like to say that if the relatives in the FSB are looking for a killer, they will certainly find a real one. But this is also not an axiom.

I know only one thing: when the state turns from an independent arbitrator into a hired killer, people in response begin to take revenge not only on the bloodlines, but also on the state itself. When the state becomes a blood-monger, this is then called Wahhabism.