LITERARY | Russia: Music for the Road
March 2010 | Archive | Written by Daniel J. Gerstle
Photo by Daniel J. Gerstle while on mission with IMC in Chechnya in 2006.
Humanitarian Bazaar (aka HELO Magazine)
The wake-up is the easy part. You’re groggy and full of hunger but alive and know you’ve got a gripping road trip ahead. Starting line Moscow, negative forty fucking degrees. Snow, ice, and a wicked, whipping wind. But you’re flying south to the city of Vladikavkaz, driving from there by road to Nazran, and then full-throttle to a little mountain town full of lore and passion called, Grozny, Chechnya.
It’s your first time. Although everyone and everything warns you the place is two bloody wars through a three-war cycle, you’re not afraid. Not yet anyway. Knowing full well it is a place where millions of people live normal lives despite the politics you don’t over-dramatize the trip. You’re going to work on a few post-war, sometimes bureaucratic humanitarian aid projects, after all. But for now, you just want to hit the road, think about your faraway lover, and set your headphones on “stun.”
The Who in their later years crafted the perfect song for getting psyched for the road: “Eminence Front.” They ignited the disc in 1982 with a drum beat that sounds like little Tommy playing a synthesizer he found in the attic. Sampled piano chords then chime in on the high octaves. The guitarist tickles the beat then hits his stride. The bass suddenly strikes your heart, hard, and the quartet conducts an army of sound into the night. The song builds and accelerates toward dawn on the urban landscape, conquering all as you begin your journey over the curve of the Earth.
We’ve all taken those cross-country road trips. Doesn’t matter whether you were heading to Louisville or Mazar-e-Sharif, the first time was an adventure for anyone with curiosity. For you, the first trips your family took from Cincinnati to Louisville when you were little were such drama that your parents brought survival supplies. Dad found a short-wave radio with a four-foot antenna at a garage sale.
He squelched the bastard so that the low crackling voices of truck drivers calling to each other, laughing, and squawking was sure to keep you irritated in the backseat. Then he’d turn on a smooth jazz station which played low-grade melodies that sounded like rodents weeping over Christmas carols and trucker static. You’d stare out the window at the snowy farms rolling by, holding your hands over your ears, and dreaming of a day when you could choose your own road trip playlist.
When you got your own wheels, a $700 Volkswagen Scirocco at age fifteen, you could fall in love with any girl with that new girl smell, so your cassette tapes were loaded with sweet cheese—the music of Boston, “More Than a Feeling…;” Journey, “Don’t Stop Believing…;” and barely approaching rebellion with a little Motley Crue, “Kick Start My Heart…” Soon the “nos” came in from the Jennys and the Julies you thought you loved and you threw that cassette of cheesy hope songs into the back of your closet and replaced it proudly with Ozzy Osborne’s allegedly-evil “Shot in the Dark” and “Bark at the Moon.”
Road trips back then were all about crossing the Indiana state line to investigate rumors about a haunted bridge or about that Satanic cult which chased your brother’s friends out of Whitewater Township. As a teenager riding through rural Ohio, hill-hopping—getting your car in the air off the low rise hills at fifty-miles-per-hour—was worthy of Metallica’s thunderous “Master of Puppets”–Fear is living on…–or Guns ‘n’ Roses’ “Night Train”—Ready to crash and burn I never learn…
After running off the road and nearly killing yourself at seventeen, you retreat to roller coasters. The Beast at Cincinnati’s King’s Island was the biggest, baddest wooden coaster in the world for years, hurling you through the forest out of eyeshot of the rest of the park.
You plunged down two steep slopes rocketing seventy-five miles per hour before being forced through a corkscrew so mad you always, always thought the railcars were going to break through the wooden railing and drop all of the passengers into the bog. It was like riding Black Sabbath’s Paranoid Album, the lightning bolts of “War Pigs” second half striking your adolescent mind with fantasies that saw you—with balls of steel—surviving what everyone in the 80’s feared, the war without end.
It wasn’t until you moved to college in Cincinnati that your older brother, John, lounging upstairs in his gargantuan mountain of compact discs, turned you on to the hallowed Indie CD shop on Short Vine Street where Sonic Youth, Yo La Tengo, and Smashing Pumpkins were lurking as rookies in the CD files, not yet thumbed through.
Eventually, you’d find out what was so great about independent music, like the reinvention of sixties rock by The Brian Jonestown Massacre. Their song, “Going to Hell,” was like a chorus of positive vibes, major chords celebrating the hope of the damned—that Hell was where all the fun is. “Anemone,” rang out a little darker, like discovering a lusty lover in a city’s shadowy back passages.
You realized back then that the greatest music evolved out of a combination of passion, striving for a new sound, and the roll of the dice. Once bands got picked up by a corporate giant, they often lost their edge. What would happen in a region without a corporate label, where all music was independent, full of passion, new, and risky?
You wondered aloud many times what music was like in the Soviet Union. You studied Russian, but all you could predict was a little bit of that insanely regimented marching music you’d later identify with Bulat Okudzava or the sentimental violins of that soundtrack LP you found for the film, Doctor Zhivago. You never would have guessed that thirteen years later you would drive across southern Russia into troubled Chechnya for work.
Zaur, the Abkhaz-Georgian aid agency driver, meets you next to the flat by Kursk Station on the east side of Moscow. You drive fast rubbing your frozen knuckles together while soaring around the suburban loop highway across the wastelands. He ribs you. Would you like to meet a nice Russian Natasha before you get kidnapped by rebels, beheaded, and deposited across six counties of Dagestan? You scoff, snicker, and then zone out contemplating this on all levels. You think of A. waiting for you back in New York.
He drops you at Domodedovo Airport and you hop Siberian Air flying toward the snow-caps which mark Russian’s southern border with Georgia. By now, you should be crippled by cowardice, curled into a little ball and asking the brutish man with the fat mustache drowning in vodka beside you to change your diaper. But no, the music keeps you together. It makes the whole journey an interactive dream.
Stepping off the plane onto the tarmac at Vladikavkaz airport, you catch a blade of sun on your face and it fills you with optimism. From here, it’s a three-part journey. First, a nice-guy agency fixer will drive you from Vladikavkaz, the capitol of North Ossetia, to the heavily-fortified border of neighboring Ingushetia.
There, three armed Interior Ministry soldiers and your colleague, Bashir will ferry you past Russian armored personnel carriers and pill boxes into the local capitol Nazran, to the fortress subdivision of Targim where the UN and aid agencies stayed. Once you get acclimatized to the team’s humanitarian and reconstruction programs—basically spending a couple million to bring well-trained doctors, nurses and agriculturalists to areas hardest hit by the Chechen Wars—you get your chance to drive into Chechnya and finally meet all those people you’ve heard so much about.
Not ironically, the Chechens who were outliving Russian artillery bombardments or running with rebels through minefields while you were back in the States wiping soda off your dashboard rarely took to the indie milk of Western alternative tunes. For Chechen, Dagestani, and Ingush women, in general, the vibe was found in local singers on the grand stage like Marina Mustafaeva or Patimat Kagirova. Either that or world music. Rarely, a Russian pop band like the two soprano beauties in t.a.T.u. would post rank on the local chart or on the hand-written tallies of local cassette tape sellers.
For Chechen men your age and younger, living the life, driving in and out of Chechnya was better set to nubile gangsta hip-hop, a Vainakh blend, if not the legendary Chechen folk crooners like Imam Alisultanov or Timur Mutsuraev. These were mean streets.
Just imagine one of these otherwise diminutive white guys with chin beards showing up in New York’s Washington Heights or Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine—and with stories and scars from the 1999 New Year Battle of Grozny scaring the living shit out of some 9mm-packing gangsta. Or at least that’s the façade of the conservative Muslim men in southern Russia.
Deep down, even some of the militants were sweet hearts who loved their moms. It was the unrelenting fighting and disappearances and brutal, tense silences which led some of them into cultural isolation, knowing only war, and looking simply to die for something rather than live at home with their parents, no job, and nothing to offer a girl but bills.
Along the way, those young men tended to like music that was either violent or hallowed. The tragedy was that many—blasting DJ Vainakh or 50 Cent or Tupac—were otherwise lost. Their teachers, their parents, and in many cases God, had disappeared from their lives. There was nothing left but legend, or escape.
While you’re in Ingushetia keeping the medical and agricultural project going, you hear a few bullets fired off in the night, learn your co-worker’s neighbor was killed by a roadside bomb just outside your office, and have to freeze work when a huge car bomb killed a local politician and his guards on a main road. On another occasion, you manage to help arrange for a new roof for a family whose shack was bombed by a Russian counter-insurgent team trying to “arrest” a suspected militant hiding inside. What more could be gained by the drive to see our work in Chechnya now?
Anyone who’s been in a war zone knows that, although it’s hard not to dramatize the vibe when re-telling a story, the reality on the ground could often be dull and, in some quadrants, safer than expected. Most alarming for you riding into the region was not the guard with the sub-machine gun blocking out customers from a shop while you ran in to grab a box of pasta, it was the vague normalcy.
Gas stations there crack you up. Pulling in, you could be in Cleveland or Manchester. Pulling out, you notice the three policeman staring right back at you, right into your eyes. There is even a Nazran mall. The local market has been absorbed by a building full of Russian and Chinese-made toys, goods, and DVDs. There are shops full of salty Caucasian halal cheeses and dried meats, even salty fish.
Your morning wake-up arrives. Nazran, oh boy. The snow has melted. You should have been making excuses not to go, having loving, long-distance phone cuddles with you faraway lover A., who was still sleeping back in New York. But instead, despite the likelihood that it would be a boring trip and that everyone wanted it to be so, you’re turned on. B, your driver up to the Chechen border, has a good sense of soundtrack. He pulls his CD of Chechen country music out of the deck then slides in a CD of Los Angeles hip-hop devastation.
You’re the only foreigner riding with your co-manager, T, and resilient and empathetic assistant, Z. The guards, drivers, and you took two cars out of Targim then added one for T and Z. Three cars with drivers and four armed guards just to get you to the Chechen border.
Your convoy flies in tight formation—a subject of dispute as tight keeps other cars out but adds risk of car accident and roadside bomb damage—with stereos blaring louder than they should be. The guards are on walkies. You can’t understand a word, so you soak in the music and watch the Ingush countryside fly by; it’s like Pennsylvania, with mosques. You reach a gas station where a deadly battle broke out two years earlier. It’s named for Dwight Eisenhauer. In no time, your team slows into a minor traffic jam funneled between two fruit farms.
Your three divers pull over, the three of you making the visit ditch the Ingush ferry in exchange for four new cars with drivers, eight armed Chechen Interior Ministry guards—yes, the notorious Kadyrovtsi– and a fuzzy tree air freshener on the rear view. The added guards were not simply to scare away rebels but were a high-priced requirement of the Chechen authorities for any foreigner travelling in.
The shocking, sad truth that makes you want to plead absolution through an absurdist song by the Chechen Weird Al Yankovich was that your mission is hardly to save lives. It’s to evaluate a few new businesses including a crumby bakery and dairy farm projects, if not to encourage quality and confidence among the project participants.
Madmax on the outside, you’re all Mad Martha Stewart on the downlow. Kidnapped, you might get a cow for ransom. The bleeding, screaming out loud irony, of course, was that the rebels were not kidnapping foreigners as much anymore. These days everybody was pretty certain it was the Kadyrovtsi doing it, the same guys driving you in. Like an idiot, you run around vigorously shaking hands with your new chaperones with one hand over your heart.
T shrugs. He’d already started moving back into his flat in Grozny, so he’s more than used to his gauntlet of security though he doesn’t require escort on his own. As long as he made absolutely no political statements out loud, he figured he would be fine. Z, on the other hand, is incredibly genuine and empathetic. And she hadn’t been to neighboring Chechnya since she was a small child. It would be her first time to see the visible evidence of battle left all over the neighboring republic.
You soar through Achkoy-Martan, past leagues of old women wading into the abandoned state farm looking for the beginnings of an apple or pear. By Shaamiyurt, you begin to see whole villages under reconstruction, only the road signs remain full of bullet holes.
Then you see a unique mosque, repaired but with patches of cement covering the many rocket holes like a dripping salve. You stop to meet men and mothers and rambunctious kids there, every one of them a portrait of sleeplessness, yet stocked with perseverance and vitality.
Four cars, you start up again and power finally past the “Grozny” welcome sign. There is a huge forest park. The mountains disappear below the horizon. Then bombarded factories, shells of buildings, rows and rows of them, appear out of the post-apocalyptic Western suburb.
You saw entire buildings gutted by rockets in Sarajevo. But in Grozny the explosives were not only employed to strike snipers and empty the buildings. The Russians had brought out the heavy bombers to literally knock the buildings to the ground.
You pull up to a traffic light outside the notorious village of Noviye Atagi, made known to the West in Andrew Meier’s book, Black Earth, which exposed war crimes committed there. Now the edge of the village is marked by a row of newly-rebuilt houses and a pond lined with fishermen.
There is no city on earth which has ever been completely destroyed in war. There are always survivors to tell the tale, if not the conquerors. There will always be seeds sprouting in ashes. Grozny had survived as much as Berlin and yet huge numbers of people lasted, painfully, through the storm. The site of crowded streets amid godawful, ash-filled devastation startles your soul.
The most extreme human dualities run splattered across the road. One is compelled to laugh and cry, to be proud and ashamed, cheered and chilled. Yet you are compelled to look in, undeterred, to try to help whoever is left to rebuild what they lost. You are compelled to turn up the volume.
*****
YOUR HELO PLAYLIST #3:
MUSIC FOR THE ROAD [Click Here for Sound]
1. UK: The Who – “Eminence Front”
2. USA: The Brian Jonestown Massacre – “Going to Hell”
3. USA: The Brian Jonestown Massacre— “Anemone”
4. UK: Kasabian – “Fire”
5. USA: Sonic Youth – “Silver Rocket”
6. UK: Stereophonic – “Mr. Writer”
7. RUSSIA: Lumen – “Skol’ko? (How much?)”
8. RUSSIA: Vladimir Visotsky – “Lektsiya o mezhdunarodnom polezhenye (Lecture on International Relations)”
9. GEORGIAN/ARMENIAN: Bulat Okudzava – “Ballad of Soldier’s Boots”
10. UK: Pink Floyd – “One of These Days”
11. USA: Apocalyptica – “Harvester of Sorrow”
12. TURKEY: Musa Eroglu – “Telli Turnam”
13. CHECHEN DAGISTAN: Imam Alimsultanov – “Kavkaz (Caucasus)”
14. CHECHNYA: Timur Mutsuraev – “Veter (The Wind)”
15. DAGESTAN: Marina Mustafaeva – “Schaste”
16. DAGESTAN: Marina Mustafaeva – “Mo edinctvenniy (My only one)”
17. DAGESTAN: Patimat Kagirova – “Pogovori so mnoy (Speak with me)”
18. USA: Apocalyptica – “Ruska”
19. YUGOSLAVIA: Djordje Balasevic – “Prica o vasi ladackom (The Story of Vasa Ladachki)”
20. CHECHNYA: Timur Mutsuraev – “Grozny”
21. CHECHNYA: Borzlife –“Chechen Rap”
22. CHECHNYA: Djamlay – “Zarima”
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