Johnson's Russia List
#8035
27 January 2004
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A CDI Project
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#7
Chronicle of Higher Education
January 30, 2004
http://chronicle.com/
Against All Odds
Students and professors find reasons to persevere in bombed-out Chechnya
By BRYON MACWILLIAMS
Grozny, Russia

White buses with fogged windows lumber along the dirt road like pack
animals, lurching over craters filled with rainwater. Branches of overgrown
shrubs slap at their sides as they pass the rubble of what were once
houses, where orange flames burn dirty from rags stuffed into the open ends
of broken gas pipelines.

Signs in the corner of each windshield say "STUDENTS" in black block letters.

The buses come to a stop at odd angles in a dirt parking lot. Their doors
swing open. Carefully polished black high-heeled and dress shoes step down
into a slick of light brown mud, spattering the backs of stockings and
pants cuffs.

Classes begin at 9 a.m. at Chechen State University. Some students have
been traveling for two-and-a-half hours to make the first bell. Each has
risked his life to get here.

Federal forces and separatist guerrillas are fighting the second war in a
decade in the republic of Chechnya. Open combat and aerial bombardment have
subsided. But occasionally there is gunplay on the campus. And on the ride
to and from the university, students are at risk from land mines, stray
bullets, and random bombings, as well as shakedowns and harassment at
federal checkpoints.

"They stop us, check our documents," says Milana, a third-year linguistics
major who, like most students here, asks that her last name be withheld for
fear of retaliation. "Sometimes they put us on our knees, or beat us."
Sometimes, she and others say, they detain a young man or woman, who is
never heard from again.

"We're all in the same position, unsure if we'll make it to work or back
home," says the dean of the history department, Tamara Elbusdikaeva.

Yet for more than a decade, students and those who educate them have
refused to let die a university that, by all measures, should no longer be
alive. Although the most experienced professors have fled, a small
collection of scholars, young and old, continues to lecture in war-ravaged
buildings for determined, if nervous, students. They say that a heightened
demand for a university education has been an unexpected consequence of the
wars, as young men and women study subjects such as law and social work in
the hope that they will be able to help rebuild the tiny, 6,000-square-mile
republic.

Students have "changed their values," says Bela Tsugaeva, a former English
instructor at Chechen State, now a relief worker in nearby Ingushetiya, who
returns to Grozny for visits. "Now they understand they could lose their
relatives, their lives, at any time. They've become more serious."

Chechen State has survived despite a complete loss of government financing
immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and only
sporadic support since. Its rector was abducted, then killed by unknown
assailants. The most esteemed professors left the republic for better jobs
elsewhere. Most of those who remained fled in 1994, when federal forces
bombed the university's campus into oblivion.

Classes were suspended while residents hid in their basements. Days grew
into weeks, weeks into months. Lectures resumed regularly during a period
of de facto independence beginning in 1996, but real financial support did not.

Classes again were suspended when fighting resumed in 1999. This time it
was more ruthless. The university's makeshift campus in a former orphanage
in the Olympiisky district was the scene of intense early battles, and
frequently came under fire from forces on both sides of the conflict. It
also was the target of zachistki, or violent mop-up operations by federal
forces.

Broadcasts on Kremlin-controlled television in Russia report little that is
unfavorable to the national government and its effects on Chechen State and
the republic's two other institutions of higher learning, the Chechen State
Pedagogical Institute and the Grozny Oil Institute. President Vladimir
Putin has proclaimed the second war over. Indeed, his administration has
even pointed to the revival of Chechen State as a sign of a return to normalcy.

But life is anything but normal here in the northern Caucasus Mountains.
Elsewhere in Russia people are astounded to learn that Chechen State still
exists. "They ask, 'Is there really a university?' We're incrementally
getting things back in order. It's not to the point that we'd like, but,
among these ruins ... ," Ms. Elbusdikaeva, the dean of the history
department, says, trailing off.

Society Needs Us

It is still dark and cold on a Wednesday morning in October. Students
linger, scattered, in the courtyard of dirt, concrete, and sour-plum trees
on the grounds of the new campus, former state Orphanage No. 2. Lectures
are being conducted in the low buildings that frame the quadrangle, even in
the four-story building that houses the department of economics, which is
wedged into a shell without windows, plumbing, or a roof.

Classes fill six periods each weekday from 9 a.m. to 4:05 p.m., allowing
for 10-minute breaks. A glossy poster of a bouquet of daisies, and the
phrase, "Have a Nice Day!" hangs in an anteroom of the history department.

"For me, a friend is he who knows something; my enemy is he who doesn't,"
Vakhid Akaev is telling first-year students of logic in Room 16 of the law
department.

The professor wears a tan overcoat over his light gray suit with gold
buttons, crisp white shirt, and maroon tie. The room has no heat, no door
handle, and no artificial light; four wires hang from the ceiling without
light fixtures.

Mr. Akaev is teaching 11 young men and 8 young women a subject that has
never been offered before in Chechnya. Logic is now required for those
majoring in social work or political science.

A student illustrates relationships by way of concentric and overlapping
circles on the green chalkboard as Mr. Akaev explains, in whispers, how he
is one of only several professors who are more than 40 years old. He and
his colleagues remained, he says, simply because "someone is needed to
teach the next generation, the future of Chechnya."

In the presence of a Western reporter, Mr. Akaev begins to digress from his
lecture. In a university, he tells his students, one should always endeavor
to speak freely. It is, he says, one's responsibility. The students, heads
bowed, scrawl in small notebooks of cross-hatched paper with colorful
covers of Western cartoon and TV characters, such as Xena the Warrior Princess.

Timur, a lanky, dark-haired teenager from Grozny, is the first one in class
who appears to get the hint. "Society needs the kinds of specialists like
us," he says. "Social work is the most necessary foundation right now."

Like Dresden

Akhmad Kadyrov, the Chechen leader chosen by the Kremlin and installed last
fall in elections widely reported as rigged, has pledged to rebuild the
capital. At the university, salaries and students' stipends are being paid
regularly for the first time in a long time. Book orders from the library
are being filled. But Mr. Kadyrov's word means little to students, who are
awaiting significant improvements in a territory that approximates Dresden
after World War II.

"What the federal government is trying to depict is the absolute opposite
of what's happening in the street," says Adam, a first-year journalism
student.

"Yes. Everything, actually, is the other way around," adds his friend,
Fatima, a law student from Grozny who says she waits an hour and a half for
the bus every day because the 15-minute walk home is too dangerous.

The students are drinking sweet coffee in the campus cafeteria, where large
posters display a lush tropical island and thermal hot springs. Both are
bothered by the lack of entertainment and the absence of Internet and
cellular-telephone access. Most students have never used the Internet, for
which the campus is not wired.

"We're cut off entirely from the world," Adam says.

Outside, on a concrete patio, students sit and talk at circular picnic
tables. "Look," says a law major, Yusup Yaraleev, "there are lots of people
standing around, but not all of them are students. They're just young
people without any place else to hang out. ... There's nowhere to go,
nothing to see."

The lack of options for young people has resulted in a steady climb in
enrolment at Chechen State and the pedagogical and oil institutes,
according to state education officials, although they are unable to provide
any statistics.

What is known is that some 17,000 students are enrolled full time at the
republic's three institutions; the figure nearly doubles when part-time
students are counted. About 1,500 young people enrolled in Chechen State
last year, increasing to 8,000 the total number of full- and part-time
students.

"You'd expect people to lose hope, not to come to class, or study," says
Fatima, the law student. "But that's not the case."

Tuition is officially free for the least popular subjects, while finance
and law, the subjects in higher demand, cost 6,000 rubles and 18,000 rubles
(about $208 and $625, respectively). Students receive monthly stipends of
between 200 and 300 rubles (about $7 and $10). The money is just enough to
pay for public transport.

Disappearing Students

English and journalism have become more popular as majors because of the
presence of foreign reporters. Denilbek Kiloyev, a geography professor,
says that law degrees are increasingly in demand because students want to
help prevent further human-rights abuses. Economics is also growing in
popularity, he says, because students hope that degree will help them
combat the poverty they see all around them.

Professors note that students now appear to value knowledge even more than
a diploma. "When I was a kid, ages ago, we didn't really want to study,"
says Khazmat Kurbanov, a former French instructor at Chechen State. "But
right now there are no places to be young. Even the worst student wants to
become learned."

The buses home leave at 3 p.m. Only local students stay for the last class.
Professors, too, leave before dusk. They are not alone. Federal forces slip
away from behind the walls of sandbags that constitute their bases and
checkpoints. After all, the fighting in Chechnya is largely classic
partisan warfare: Russian forces rule the ground during the day, and
Chechen guerrillas tend to rule it by night.

The word "disappear" is used as it was in Latin America in the 1980s. But
instead of death squads in jeeps with tinted windows, the perpetrators are
guerrillas on foot or, more often, Russian soldiers in armored personnel
carriers.

"It's really unpleasant for us to remember even two years ago," says Mr.
Yaraleev, the law student, who initially declines to have his photograph
taken because, he says, they preserve memories. "Then, students were
disappearing practically every month."

The last known disappearance occurred in early October when a female
student, Alina Gakaeva, was abducted by soldiers from the campus of the
Pedagogical Institute. She has not been seen since.

Human-rights organizations, along with the European Union, continue to
report severe and widespread atrocities and violations of individuals'
rights by Russian federal forces. The Chechen State campus is just down the
road from Kalyonaya Balka, the ravine where the corpses of detainees --
often bearing signs of torture or desecration -- are regularly discovered.

No one knows how many students have suffered the fate of Ms. Gakaeva. The
university does not keep records of the names of students and professors
who have died, or disappeared, since 1994.

Longing to Return

Many of the faculty members who fled Chechnya now live in Nazran, the
sprawling capital of one-story buildings in the neighboring republic of
Ingushetiya. Chechnya and Ingushetiya constituted the Chechen-Ingush
republic until 1992, when the prevailing Muslim leadership in Chechnya
began to break away from the Russian Federation.

Ingushetiya is crowded with refugee camps and foreign-aid organizations.
Nazran, as such, houses something of an ad hoc Chechen State alumni
association.

"To our great misfortune, about 98 percent of [former faculty members] now
work in humanitarian organizations," says Mr. Kurbanov, the former French
instructor, who is now the field technical co-ordinator for a Belgian
division of Doctors Without Borders.

His small but steady income has enabled him to partially repair his heavily
damaged apartment in Grozny, and to support his widowed sisters and their
children. He wears a ring on his right thumb, a gift from one of his two
dead brothers.

"Right now, I am doing what everyone is doing: simply trying to survive,"
he says. "But I think that, next semester, I'll be back at the university.
... I built my life around foreign languages, and I don't want to lose what
I have spent 30 years building. It's better at the university. I'm like a
fish in the ocean there."

There, as a professor, he will earn no more than $70 a month. He will not
have enough chalk, let alone books. The library is a reading room fronting
a storage room that holds about 70,000 volumes. Biology professors must
take students to neighboring republics to conduct field- work, because
bombs and land mines killed more people in Chechnya than anywhere else in
the world in 2002.

Ms. Tsugaeva, the former English instructor at Chechen State, is also now
in Nazran. She was a gifted, fifth-year English major at Chechen State when
she first began to teach. Her former professors either fled or died. "To
teach there was a major privilege," she says." Earlier it would have been
impossible, especially because the department was so strong."

She and her six family members lived as refugees in the tent camps and
train cars in Ingushetiya until she began to work for aid organizations.
Now she helps support her family with her modest salary as a manager at
World Vision International, a Christian relief organization. "All faculty
members understand that what we're doing now is just temporary," says Ms.
Tsugaeva. Her former boss, for one, is counting on it.

Yakha Umatkereyeva, dean of the department of foreign languages, still runs
one of the most popular programs at Chechen State. Three students vie for
each of the 520 places. But the department is flat broke: Students raised
the money to buy a lone cassette deck in lieu of language labs. And she
laments the condition of the republic's elementary and secondary schools,
which largely weathered the first war, but not the second. Students who
enroll at Chechen State are woefully unprepared.

"One day I'd like for the university to stand on its own legs again," Ms.
Umatkereyeva says. "I'd like for students from Chechnya to be accepted like
all other normal children. I'd like it if other institutions weren't scared
to reach out to us, to work with us, because when things normalize here we
will be contacting them."

In the meantime, qualified faculty members are still in short supply. One
professor, Tatyana Jerebilo, advises graduate students on Wednesdays and
Thursdays. She is also dean of the Russian-language department at the
Pedagogical Institute, as well as a professor at Ingush State University,
in Nazran, where she now lives.

"Sometimes I ask myself, What is the point of sitting here and suffering
and hanging on when I could go away and live and work where, at least,
there isn't war?" says Ms. Jerebilo. "But I can't let go completely. I
can't ever fully explain why. Another person could just wave his hand and
go. I can't, even though Grozny sometimes seems like a city of horrors."
She wrote three reference books on language studies for first-year students
during heavy bombing while she was living, for several months, in a basement.

"You know," she says, "I think the system of education, in contrast to
everything else, has shown itself to be the sturdiest thing in the entire
Chechen republic."

*******