Let Our Fame Be Great (51 page)

‘When we arrived, they distributed us among the buildings. I lived with a family, but most people lived in the barracks with the field brigades,' Utsiev remembered.

His brother had been in prison when he was deported, while his father was dead, and his mother and sister were sent to a different town. He had no relatives to help him find his way, and could have been forgiven for dropping his head and accepting defeat.

But he did not do so. He found the support that the Chechens have always found when times are tough: from the Sufis. Akmola became the centre of a Sufi revival. More than twenty groups were active there by the mid-1950s, but the most dramatic focus of all was in Krasnaya Polyana, where a holy man worked alongside Utsiev in the fields.

‘In 1946, I managed to find my mother and sister, in Kostanay; I told them to come back with me, because there was a holy Chechen man and I had made friends with him,' he said.

‘I studied under him, and my mother and sister finally moved here in autumn 1948.'

It was the beginning of an influx of Chechens that has transformed Krasnaya Polyana and the other two collective farms that neighbour it into a little Chechnya in Kazakhstan. Gradually, as the fame of the Sufis spread, so more Chechens moved here, squeezed out the other communities and created their own sanctuary in the midst of oppression.

Now, as I walked down the dusty main street, between the sky-blue single-storey houses, children with huge dark eyes called out to me in Chechen, then turned giggling to hide their shyness from my gaze. It was just like being in a Chechen village, except for the brutal, flat horizon that overshadowed everything.

Utsiev would not say the name of the holy man; none of the villagers would, in what seemed to be a mark of respect for his sanctity. But he was called Vis Haji. He was born in 1908, and studied the way of the Sufis in a brotherhood that arrived in the Caucasus around the time of Shamil's defeat, and which took the Naqshbandis' place as the movement of choice among tens of thousands of Chechens and Dagestanis.

Initially, the Qadiri movement – as it was known – had preached non-resistance to the tsars, just like the Naqshbandis had fifty years earlier. But it was a difficult position to maintain in the face of constant oppression, and within a couple of years it too allowed its followers to resist the Russians. Less intellectual than the Naqshbandi, it employed a loud, ecstatic prayer ritual – or zikr – and spread among less educated Chechens who did not have access to the Arabic texts or scriptures. The tsarist authorities, recognizing the power of the loud zikr in welding communities together, banned it. But the Chechens did not care. By the First World War, almost every Chechen or Ingush man was a member of one of the brotherhoods.

This was an exceptional development. Elsewhere in the Muslim world, official Islam of either a liberal or a strict stripe dominated. But in the Caucasus the mystical Sufi orders absorbed and swept over all other forms.

Vis Haji was, according to the stories told today, an exceptionally kind man. He would not sanction violence of any kind, or resistance to the state authorities. Believers should do what they are told, he preached, but not initiate cooperation.

‘This man did not look for anything, he ate just a little,' said Utsiev. ‘I studied with him, and learned from him. I looked for no honours, I worked honestly. I have a garden, livestock, and this has been my life's work.'

Vis Haji died at dusk on 17 May 1973, and Utsiev assumed his role as the leader of the community. He himself was too modest to say so, but it was clear from how the other men deferred to him that he was now the first man in the village.

I have a picture of Utsiev on my desk in front of me as I type. He is old now – eighty-four years old if his birth date in his passport is correct – and has the watery eyes and white beard that age brings. His eyes are hooded, but they have an intensity and a focus that seem to bore straight through you as you look at the photograph. Strangely, I do not remember his eyes being like that in the flesh. They were kind and careful, and always checked to see that I had everything I needed.

For the photographs, he wore a white fur hat, wrapped with the white cloth of a Sufi sheikh – the same cloth that marked out Imam
Shamil as a spiritual authority. The rest of the time he wore a little velvet skullcap of the kind typical of Chechnya.

He is one of just five men left alive who were Vis Haji's disciples. They are the keepers of the teachings of the holy man, whose life story has become the basis of village legend.

Abudadar Zagayev, a pale, round 42-year-old and the holy man's oldest son, told me of a miracle his father had performed when still a child.

‘When my father was running along as a child he got a thorn in his foot. They did not have shoes in those days. This was still when they were in Alkhan Yurt [in Chechnya]. And a friend took the thorn out with his teeth. My father said to him if you live to a hundred you will not lose your teeth. This man died maybe seven or eight years ago and he still had all his teeth. That is a fact,' he said.

Lechi Birsanukayev, a local Chechen who had introduced me to the village, chipped in with a tale of his own. He said that Vis Haji had known the Koran intuitively, despite not having studied it.

‘A few mullahs got together who knew the Koran and wanted to know what his father had, how he could get all these people together. His father said he could not read the Koran, he did not know Arabic, but everything he told them was in the Koran, when translated it was the same as the Koran,' he said.

Vis Haji was not disliked by the authorities, who probably liked the non-resistance doctrine that he preached, and individual state officials even respected him, according to the Chechens in Krasnaya Polyana today.

‘There was a chairman of the collective farm, he was a Russian called Anatoly Popov who would not even smoke in front of the holy man, even though he was older than him. He earned their respect through his pure Muslim ideology. You cannot steal, you cannot cheat, you must be clean,' said Birsanukayev.

But that is not to say that Vis Haji preached collaboration with the Soviets. On the contrary, he believed everything should be approached in the same spirit of non-participation. He would not support the government, and he would not oppose it. He was indifferent to it. Perhaps his doctrine was an early expression of the Russian dissident mantra: ‘Live as if you lived in a free country'.

‘Even if a relative has been killed you have no right to interfere,' said Zagayev. ‘One time three men escaped from prison and a person here wanted to turn them in but my father said he should not do this, they are saving their own souls and it is up to them.'

Perhaps because of this incident, or perhaps just through sheer suspicion, the Soviet secret police swooped on Krasnaya Polyana in 1977, four years after the holy man's death. His grave had become a pilgrimage site and, although the Chechen nation had been allowed to return home, more and more Chechens were moving to the village to be near his burial place.

Of the inhabitants of the village today, 1,100 are Chechen, the schoolmaster told me. They make up almost the entire population, with just thirty-six Russians, two Germans and one Kazakh interrupting their dominance. Only a dozen families are not part of the brotherhood.

The KGB wanted to find evidence of polygamy, which was practised by Vis Haji – who himself had four wives, according to Zagayev – as well as by other men in the village. They came up against a blank wall of non-cooperation, and it is difficult not to admire the locals in their stubborn insistence that they would obey their own rules and no one else's.

Ansar Ibayev, for example, is now the teacher in the school but he was a seven-year-old boy when the KGB came to the village to seek evidence of law-breaking. Since his mother was apparently a single woman with children – an impossible condition in a traditional Chechen community – it was obvious that she was someone's second wife.

‘They asked me my name, I told them “Ansar”. Then they asked who had bought the television, and I said Uncle Volodya,' remembered Ibayev. Saying ‘Uncle Volodya' is a bit like saying ‘Fred Bloggs', but it so happens that Volodya is the shortened form of Vladimir, which gave the investigating officials something to work with.

‘What? Volodya? Like Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, they asked. I said yes, that's right. They said Lenin did not lie, and said he would not like it that I was lying. I said I did not know what they meant. They then asked me who bought the fuel. I said I did not know. They
asked me if my uncle came to sleep in the house. I said I did not know. I was seven years old.'

The sheer frustration of the KGB men in being stymied – in a three-on-one interview – by a headstrong Chechen child must have been something to see. The boy did not reveal who his father was and that particular investigation was stillborn. The police did arrest one man for having two wives, but the rest of the villagers carried on as before.

Polygamy is still common in Krasnaya Polyana, and does not seem to cause friction with the authorities of now independent Kazakhstan. Or if it does, the Kazakhs are sensible enough not to try to break through the villagers' wall of non-cooperation. When I asked Ibayev to introduce me to a polygamous family, he said I had already met one. Zagayev has two wives, he said, before taking me to see a neighbour – Alavdi Shakhgeriev, who, since he was born in 1930, is one of the elders of the community.

Shakhgeriev barely spoke Russian, and every word he said to me was translated from Chechen. Most of the elders do not know Russian – a legacy of both their lack of schooling and their conscious rejection of the outside world – and his was the most limited I heard.

He said he was introduced to the movement when Vis Haji visited Karaganda, the town he had been deported to. (In a bleak example of Soviet jurisprudence, the fourteen-year-old Shakhgeriev was deported to Karaganda without trial, was left with his sisters to support and no money, but was not allowed to work in a coal mine – the only work in town – since it would have been a violation of a child's labour rights.) When the Chechens were permitted to move back to the Caucasus, he moved instead to Krasnaya Polyana, where he has lived ever since with his wives.

‘I used to have three wives, but one of them died,' he said. He sat, stern, straight-backed and serious, and waited for his words to be translated. The perfect image of the patriarch that he presented was subverted by his wife Aminat, however.

She was wearing the long dress and headscarf of the dutiful woman, but had no intention of fulfilling the role of a meek and silent wife.

‘He wants another wife now,' she said, before hooting with laughter.

Shakhgeriev ignored her interjection, and attempted to maintain his stern mien. ‘The prophet allows us to have four wives, and no Muslim can disagree.'

Aminat, however, was not prepared to be quiet in the face of his disapproval. ‘I was twenty-three when we got married in 1958. His other wife was about a hundred,' she said in bad Russian to make sure I understood, adding further hoots of laughter, which were beginning to be picked up by the children and younger men who had gathered to hear the story.

Shakhgeriev manfully continued with his tale and pretended not to have heard. ‘It used to be two years in prison if you had a second wife, and they came and checked. But they asked her,' he said, gesturing to Aminat (who was now bubbling with mirth), ‘if she had any complaints, and she said she did not complain. There was no law against mistresses so they had to stop.'

Aminat contradicted her husband, however. ‘The prosecutors came and asked me if it was true that he had another wife. I should have handed him over to them so they could have imprisoned him.' The ripple of laughter took in almost the whole gathering, and I was finding it harder and harder not to join in myself.

Emboldened by the success of her joke, she then decided to take the initiative. ‘He took his third wife at the start of the 1970s. I already did not care. I went with him to fetch the bride,' she said. I asked if she had been opposed to his marrying again, which set up a joke she simply could not resist.

‘I was much less opposed than his new bride was,' she said, before dissolving into giggles, which were shared by everyone in the room. Even her husband looked at his troublesome wife and smiled fondly.

‘I always wanted another wife but two years ago my health worsened and now I have changed my mind a little,' he said.

I had been promised another chat with Utsiev that evening, so I walked through the village to the cemetery, passing a ford in the stream where women were washing rugs and clothes. The heat had become more bearable now evening was coming. That morning as
we drove through the fields, the heat haze had hemmed us in and disorientated us. Chunks of the sky broke off and floated along the fields, and combine harvesters trailed great plumes of dust – smoking islands of machine in a wavering blue sea.

Now the sun was lower, and I could walk without having to squint into the glare. As I strolled I wondered if Imam Shamil's relationship with his own wives had been as boisterous and loving and funny as the one I had just witnessed.

That evening, I returned to Utsiev's house, where he and three other old men sat and chatted in Chechen. The acoustics of the room, which was not large but seemed to have a strange resonance, made the sound run around the walls in whispers. Their words were incomprehensible to me, but the occasional mentions of the word ‘Anglia' – ‘England' in Russian – made me suspect I was the topic of conversation.

Eventually, their minds made up about something, three of them left, and Utsiev and I sat down to supper. We chatted for a while about the world, and he attempted to force food upon me with the good-natured but insistent hospitality of the Caucasus. Gradually, other men, many of them in their thirties and forties began to drift in. They were all wearing the same kind of baggy, long cotton shirts that Utsiev had worn all day, as well as skull caps. The shirts had bobbles of cotton instead of buttons, though I am not sure why.