The wasteland called Grozny

Long avenues of Soviet apartment blocks stand empty, gutted by fire and pitted by remorseless artillery rounds...

The wasteland called Grozny

21 February 2002

Seven years of war have left the capital of Chechnya devastated. Only those too poor, too old or too stubborn to flee remain in the ruins, trying to survive with no electricity or running water.

A long finger of oily black smoke rises above Grozny, drawing us towards the city like a terminally ill patient beckoning a reluctant visitor to the sickbed. Helicopter gunships hover above like giant insects over an open wound, and a pimply-faced Russian soldier manning a ramshackle checkpoint asks with genuine surprise why anyone would want to enter this forsaken place unless they had to.

Cities have been wiped out by earthquakes and volcanoes, but it is hard to find a recent comparison of man-made destruction on the scale that has blighted this corner of the Caucasus. Beirut, Sarajevo and Kabul have all suffered similar fates, but their wars are over, reconstruction has begun and eventually the scars may heal.

Grozny, which means "terrible" in Russian and was founded as a Russian military outpost nearly 200 years ago, has no such prospects. The city has changed hands four times in the past seven years and on each occasion more destruction was visited on the Chechen capital and more of its dwindling citizenry was killed or forced to flee. The fighting may have subsided but the war continues to claim lives daily, with no end in sight to the conflict and no hope of ever seeing the city rebuilt.

It is not an exaggeration to say that every building in this once quiet Soviet industrial town of half a million people has been damaged by fighting, most of it beyond repair. The scale of destruction is staggering. Long avenues of Soviet apartment blocks stand empty, gutted by fire and pitted by remorseless artillery rounds, which in some cases ripped away whole floors and in others left neat circular holes where the shells penetrated the outside walls before exploding inside.

The sprawling oil refinery, once the city's main employer, is a jungle of rusted metal and disfigured pipes where trees and shrubs are slowly reclaiming the land. The neat residential areas were not spared either. Street after street of bungalows lies in ruins, inhabited only by packs of wild dogs and the odd family or old woman too stubborn or too poor to flee.

As a visitor who witnessed the first war, when Russians laid siege to the city in a bitter battle in the winter of 1994-95 and then followed Chechen rebels when they recaptured it 18 months later, the biggest shock for me is to see the city centre. Huge swaths of Grozny's skyline have disappeared. The office blocks and the presidential palace, once an urban battleground to rival Stalingrad, are now a large tract of waste ground that look like a developer's preparation for a new parking lot. No Russian or Chechen commander ever uttered the phrase "bombed back to the Stone Age", but that is exactly what their war achieved.

Zara Zuhareva greets visitors to her immaculate second-storey flat with a smile and the offer of a cup of tea, but her hospitality is distinctly out of place in the setting of her home. She and six other women relatives inhabit the last four rooms in the 12-floor block of flats where 72 families once lived. Located next to the "Youth Cinema" on Leninsky Road, the area was once popular with families on warm summer evenings. Now no one dares to set foot in the street and Zara drags me back inside the flat when I venture out on her balcony for a look at the view. "Snipers!" she says, pointing nervously at a Russian position on an adjacent rooftop. She has good cause to be worried. Her husband died at the beginning of the war and her son was arrested last year by Russian forces, who later dumped his bullet-riddled body in a wood outside the city. She and her daughters and relatives have no running water and no electricity. They are also virtually cut off from the outside world.

The telephones do not work and Russian troops enforce strict control on who can enter and leave Grozny. The airport is for military use only, and the weekly 56-hour train service to Moscow is one of the few escape routes left. Even staying clean is an effort. The streets become huge lakes of dirty water after rainfall and residents resort to makeshift bathhouses once a week, as their ancestors would have done a century ago.

The one utility that still operates is the natural-gas supply, so Zara's flat is heated by a live flame in the sitting room fed by a hazardous-looking rubber pipe that snakes along the floor and feeds into a home-made heater.

Other residents have learnt from bitter experience not to take any chances. Across town in what was once a public garden, an elderly Russian couple have colonised a deep underground bunker originally built by the Soviet authorities to withstand nuclear attack during the Cold War. With a defiant hand-written sign at the entrance declaring in Russian that "People Live Here!" the couple have swapped their uncertain existence on the surface for a new subterranean life. They have rigged up a stove and chimney, and their new home spreads from one dark, cavernous bunker to another. They want nothing to do with the world on the outside and the latter-day hermits refuse to come out when I knock on the steel doors of their hide-out.

While their instinct for survival consumes their lives, other residents of Grozny have displayed a more enterprising spirit, by exploiting the area's natural resources. The city sits above crude oil deposits and was once a major conduit for oil pumped from the Caspian Sea to the Black Sea. Peering over a garden fence, I spotted one elderly Chechen woman who appeared to be toiling over a well in her garden. On closer inspection, she was actually pumping oil into a neighbour's shed where they had rigged up a primitive but effective mini-refinery, producing four-star petrol. The gasoline is then poured into large glass jars and sold by the side of the road for about 15p a litre, the cheapest prices in the Russian Federation.

Others still hope to make enough money to get out of the city and start life anew, like the majority of Grozny's residents who are either living as refugees in neighbouring Ingushetia, or have moved to other Russian cities or abroad. "House for Sale" is scrawled on the walls of many properties, even some where the roof is missing. Inquiring about the asking price for a house in Grozny, I'm offered a four-bedroom home for $10,000 (£7,000). When I turn to leave, the price starts falling fast and desperately. I'm later assured that I could probably pick up a house for £1,000 if I shopped around.

But most people still in the city are resigned to their fate and try to make the best of life in a dislocated and relentlessly ugly environment. Grozny's central street market is a lively example of the city's will to survive. Hardy women wrapped up against the cold offer everything from a dozen different types of vodka to fluffy pink toys, which appeared briefly for St Valentine's Day. Four enterprising women have even opened a little café, where they serve a Chechen version of ravioli cooked on a home-made oven fed by pieces of wood scavenged from the debris of destroyed homes.

By early evening, however, the streets clear of any sign of life. There is no need for a curfew in Grozny; most Russian troops do not dare to leave their heavily fortified positions, and the local residents venture out only in an emergency. At the house where I stayed, Abdul Hamid, my host, made a point of starting every evening meal with a toast to our survival of one more day in Grozny.

Others were less fortunate. One man was ambushed earlier this month while driving at 8 o'clock at night. His Mercedes, peppered with machine-gun fire and stained with his blood, was returned to the family the following day, but his fate was unknown. He is thought to have been killed by the army, but his relatives will probably never know for sure.

The only other people on the streets are looters searching abandoned buildings and Chechen fighters preparing to lay ambushes for the Russian forces the next day. Zaor Beg, the bodyguard of one local official, recently had a narrow escape when his car was blown off the road by a remote-controlled bomb one morning. He survived with a few scratches, but did not hold a grudge. "I doubt that they were even after us, but we were unlucky and drove past at the wrong time," he says. "That can happen here."

This fatalistic approach to life in a city where tens of thousands have died is probably inevitable. Salman Yandarev, the head of traumatology at Grozny's main hospital, recalls that before the war there was hardly any crime. "If there was a pistol shot at night, there would be a huge police investigation the following morning. The only gunshot wounds we ever treated were from hunting accidents," he says with a smile. Now he has lost count of how many injured have passed through his casualty ward, and no one takes much notice when gunfire erupts in the early hours.

"To be honest, people are not even frightened any more. We are just bored by the whole wretched thing and want to know when it will come to an end."