Strongman, The

to the cries of pain that the Kremlin wished to stifle.
    The authorities maintained that the campaign in Chechnya was a ‘security operation’, aimed solely at eliminating terrorists. Politkovskaya spoke to eyewitnesses of Russian ‘security sweeps’, men like 45-year-old Sultan Shuaipov, a refugee from the Grozny suburb of Novaya Katayama. He told Politkovskaya how he had personally gathered up 51 bodies from his street and buried them. Here is just part of his story.
    When 74-year-old Said Zubayev came out of No. 36 on Line [street] 5 he ran into the federals and the soldiers made him dance, firing their rifles at his feet to make him jump. When the old man got tired, they shot him. Thanks be to Allah! Said never knew what they did to his family.
    At about nine at night, an infantry fighting vehicle broke into the Zubayevs’ courtyard, taking the gates off their hinges. Very efficiently and without wasting words the soldiers brought out of the house and lined up by the steps 64-year-old Zainab, the old man’s wife, their 45-year-old daughter, Malika (the wife of a colonel in the Russian militia); Malika’s little daughter, Amina, aged eight; Mariet, another daughter of Said and Zainab, 40 years old; their 44-year-old nephew, Said Saidakhmed Zubayev; 35-year-old Ruslan, the son of Said and Zainab; his pregnant wife Luiza; and their eight-year-old daughter Eliza. There were several bursts of machine-gun fire and they were all left dead in front of the family home. None of the Zubayevs survived except for Inessa, Ruslan’s 14-year-old daughter. She was very pretty, and before the massacre the soldiers carefully set her to one side, then dragged her off with them.
    We looked desperately for Inessa but it was as if she had vanished into thin air [Sultan says]. We think they must have raped her and then buried her somewhere. Otherwise she would have come back to bury her dead. That same night Idris, the headmaster of School No. 55, was killed. First they battered him against a wall for a long time, and broke all his bones, then they shot him in the head. In another house we found, side by side, an 84-year-old Russian woman and her 35-year-old daughter, Larisa, a well-known lawyer in Grozny. They had both been raped and shot. The body of 42-year-old Adlan Akayev, a Professor of Physics at the Chechen State University, was sprawled in the courtyard of his house. He had been tortured. The beheaded body of 47-year-old Demilkhan Akhmadov had had its arms cut off too. It was one of the features of the operation in Novaya Katayama that they cut people’s heads off. I saw several bloodstained chopping blocks. On Shevskaya Street there was a block with an axe stuck in it, and a woman’s head in a red scarf on the block. Alongside, on the ground, also headless, was a man’s body. I found the body of a woman who had been beheaded and had her stomach ripped open. They had stuffed a head into it. Was it hers? Someone else’s? 3
    Despite all the documented cases of brutality, only one senior officer has ever been brought to justice. Colonel Yuri Budanov was accused of kidnapping, raping and murdering an 18-year-old Chechen woman, Kheda Kungayeva, in a drunken rampage. She was dragged from her home by soldiers and abducted in an armoured personnel carrier, allegedly because they thought she was a sniper. The rape charge was eventually dropped, and in court Budanov admitted strangling the woman, though he claimed to have been temporarily insane at the time, enraged while interrogating her. At first he was found not guilty, but then, after a retrial, was sentenced to ten years in prison. He was released in January 2009, 15 months early, and then murdered in a Moscow street in June 2011.
    The payback for the Russian campaign was a decade of Chechen terrorist attacks across Russia – in aeroplanes, underground trains, schools and streets. On 18 April 2002, in his annual state-of-the-nation speech, President Putin declared the war over. But six months later terror struck right at the heart of the Russian capital. In October 2002, up to 50 armed Chechens, many of them women, strode into the Dubrovka Theatre during a performance of a musical called Nord-Ost , and took the players and the 850-strong audience hostage. They were armed with guns and explosives and the women put on suicide belts. They demanded the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya – within one week, otherwise they would start