Only the FSB
It’s 1am and I’m playing table-tennis with FSB agents after a three hour interrogation in a fortified compound somewhere near Bryanskii Rybozavod, Dagestan, while I wait to be released. Surreal doesn’t quite cover it.
It’s my fifth (or is it sixth?) encounter with the Federal Security Services, to say nothing of the dozens of stop and searches from the regular police, and from the army at the border checkpoints that delineate North Ossetia, Ingushetia, Chechnya, and now Dagestan. I’ve lost count, and that in itself is a strange realisation. In Turkey, I was stopped by police 50-60 times over three months but only arrested twice—once my own fault. Here though? I’ve lost track in ten days.
The agent’s final question had been, “Do you have any friends in Russia?”
“Only the FSB”, was my reply.
I was relieved when they laughed, and continued, “Yes, we see each other often.”
As I’m learning is always the case when arrested in Russia, once all the many rounds of questioning are done, a very specific person must be reached, an unseen official vested with the power to approve my release. This person is invariably not to be found in the same building, nor reached with any expediency at all, being either perpetually engaged or (given that many of my arrests have run through the night) off duty, at home, and fast asleep. Whatever the case, even once everyone is happy that I’m not the scheming foreign agent they first took me for, it always takes another 1-4 hours before my release is approved.
I’m not sure if the table-tennis is meant to cheer me, or just to entertain my very bored hosts, and I’m not about to ask. We start out just volleying, but once we’re both warmed up he wants to play a match and, as I win both of the first points (courtesy of some recent tutelage from Paul down in Cornwall) I get to wondering: should I play to win, or make sure to lose? I’m saved from this conflict of ego and sensibility by the arrival of a very serious, very shouty officer in one of those tall, broad-brimmed, funny looking hats that Russian army officers are forced to wear. The agent I’m playing against is called away, and an army man who just wants to volley takes his place.
An hour later I’m laying in the foot well of a truck, forbidden to look out the window as we bump along a rutted track in the dark. They’re taking me back to Kizlyar, I’ve been barred from going anywhere near the Caspian sea in the state of Dagestan. Thankfully, despite the setback, they’ll be depositing me right back on my line of footsteps, almost as though the last day and night of walking had simply been erased. Almost.
The road improves as we near Kizlyar, and my escorts permit me to sit up and look out the windows. I find myself thinking about how calm I’ve become. My first encounters were intense, my nerves electric. Now, I feel like I’m just… here.
In Chechnya, I was detained for eight and a half hours in Alkhan-Kala — held as a “precaution” because the next day was Ramzan Kadyrov’s birthday. I’ve been picked up walking through little villages and big cities, at a small hydroelectric dam, in broad daylight and the middle of the night, and seemingly everywhere in between. In Kizlyar, I’d answered a knock at my hotel room door wrapped in a towel to find a pair of police officers and the receptionist, herself somewhere between suspicion and sympathy. Thankfully they were able to reach the FSB officer who’d grilled me two nights before, but not before they’d instructed me to get dressed.
As we arrive back in Kizlyar I wonder if I’ll see Artur again, the member of parliament for the Communist Party of Dagestan who had generously put me up in the aforementioned hotel room.
I’ve learned the rhythm of it. The waiting. The good-cop/bad-cop routine (which I nearly fell for once in Chechnya). The same questions, over and over. The painstaking, arbitrary, repeated searches of my bag. The moments of genuine tension — where I’d have had difficulty standing up if I’d needed to — like an agent adamantly accusing me of Ukrainian allegiance, of being in Russia to sabotage infrastructure. The absurd farce of being fingerprinted on a ancient machine running Windows 95, whirring like a dial-up modem with every computation, only to then be taken to another such machine to repeat the protracted affair because “we must add you to other database as well.”
At times I catch myself thinking that caprice is the only real law of this land.
And yet.
We look at all the terrible things that powerful people do and we think that that is the world. But that is not the world. The world is every small act of kindness made by billions of people every day.
I say this to Imran, a man who all but pulled me into his car, drove me across the border back into Chechnya to his home; fed me and loaded me up with cucumbers and spring onions from his garden, all the while peppering me with questions about the walk, the what and the why of it, before, true to his word, dropping me back exactly where he’d picked me up. Most of all he’d wanted to know what I felt the walk had taught me. I was tired from lack of sleep, so the above was the best I could manage, but he appreciated it. Imran had only recently returned from fighting in Ukraine. He’d quit, grown sick of being on the other side of “someone else’s bloody sacrifice”, he’d said, but was struggling to piece himself back together after what he’d seen and done. Imran felt like a man torn between state and country. Just as the map appears to us more real than the land, we often co-associate state and country. But a country is not its state, a country is its people. There exists that other Russia; everything between the checkpints, after that isn’t steel tables, harsh lights, and serious questions.
This Russia is Robert, a truck driver I met on my first day, who, after I took his portrait, hopped into his cab and returned with a fistful of sweets. It’s Ramzan, who called out to me in the darkness in Nazran and bought me a shawarma. It’s Asya, the shopkeep in a tiny convenience store, who got on so well with my few Russian words that she insisted on giving me my drinks and snacks for free. It’s Hussein, in Dagestan, who took me to his doma (дома) for a massive breakfast of salmon from the Volga river with his wife and sons. It’s Nurick, a Chechen man living in Norway on a visit home who stopped his car and insisted I take a thousand roubles “for anything you might need.” It’s Ruslan, who, having heard stories of me from some locals who’d met me before, toured me around his shop, stuffing two carrier bags with every snack imaginable for my journey. It’s Artur, that eccentric politician of the communist party in Kizlyar who hailed me as “a guest of the city”, took me to a performance of Dagestani singing, bought me a feast of food in an old Soviet style canteen, a Stolovaya (столовая), and put me up in the hotel room I am writing this from.
How do you hold these two realities at once? The men with guns who wave them in my face, but/and the men with guns at checkpoints who fill up my water bottles and bring me coffee. The flinching every time a car pulls alongside — anticipating being hauled off to another brightly lit room — only to find this time it’s someone offering a place to stay, or offering food from an outstretched arm. In me the Russian state would spy a spy, but the people here have made me a guest.
I don’t yet know how to express the whole sensation of these two realites, this unrelenting unreality-meets-ur-reality, but 2 days ago — sitting in a dark recess of a compound that looked like a KGB torture kremlin at 1 a.m., waiting to be released after another 5-hour detention (hilariously, not the same occassion as at the top of this page), wondering if any of these many KGB FSB offices communicate at all — I stopped short of thinking of it all as wasted time because… where is the waste?
To have experiences like this, to live through them and be free to tap them out as best I can; to be challenged by these experiences, yes, but also to learn from them, to find the blessings in and around them. There’s something exquisitely liberating about accepting that things happen, that they are out of my control, that the only thing I can control is my reactions to them. These later interrogations have felt softer, not because my interlocutors have became more gentle, but because I have. I’ll say this much: in these republics of North Ossetia, Ingushetia, Chechnya, Dagestan, I have not been bored, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt more present.
