Caucasian,
My grandparents are from Ust'-Labinsk. After Civil War they had to move to Azerbaijan (My grandfather was in Denikin's Army) and I lived in Azerbaijan for many years.I think that we had a miscommunication about "Muslim faith".I am not talking about fanatics like Basayev&Co. They know •••• about real faith. They use it to cover their evil dids. I remember good and bad people from Caucasus, like anywere else.
Cossack
P.S.But I hate fanatics from Grozny to Sumgait. They have to be hanged like in a good old times.

Caucasian,
I have to go out. Talk to you tomorrow.
Cossack

Cossack,
My grandfather fought against Denikin due to a total mobilization by the Red Army.

Ultra Russian, is KPRF for the USSR? I wonder why it is so die hard organization.

Cossack My grandfather also fought under Denikin

armenian, kprf is for the restoration of soviet union to some and others major degrees. It is restoration of order and prosperity. Why dont you check out the site for more info. Tell your relatives to vote for them. Vote for Zyuganov.

WWW.KPRF.RU

Ultranationalist I just finished looking at the site and I agree 100%.Iam wondering ,now that Yeltsin is out and immune from prosecution will the money be returned and will any body be prosecuted.

Igor, you agree on what 100% That soviet union should be restored by KPRF?

Saturday, January 8, 2000

The Irish Times

Dirty old town

Growing up in the Chechen capital, Grozny, some years ago was an
almost idyllic experience - even for a Christian Armenian girl, writes
Zhanna Suvorova. But the seeds of discontent, which were to lead
ultimately to today's bitter conflict, had already been sown My
childhood memories of Grozny are of trams. Every 10 minutes a tram
would rumble up the hill from town, clanging its bell as it approached
our house on Pavel Musorov Street in Oktaybrsky District. I can still
hear its wheels screeching and protesting as it laboured along the
poplar-street from the junction. When one of the crowded red trams
halted, my younger sister and I always stopped playing to see who got
off.

Every summer evening our elderly Ukrainian neighbour, Polya, who kept
a silver-framed icon of the Virgin in a corner of her living room,
would return with her empty buckets, having sold her gladioli at the
market. Our Russian neighbour Olya would also arrive home, and then my
aunts and cousins and grandmother Sonya who lived next door. We would
run and greet my father Stanislav when he came in his car, a big blue
Volga sedan, with a metal deer on the bonnet, poised as if about to
leap forward. It was the only car in the street and the envy of our
neighbours. I loved sitting on the front bench seat beside my father,
licking an "Eskimo" ice cream, when we went for drives into town.

Grozny in the 1960s was a tranquil Caucasian town with boulevards and
riverside benches where one could watch the muddy waters of the Sunzha
River running by. It had a big square with grey Soviet-style buildings
that housed the local government. As children we liked the idea of our
town being called Grozny, as it means threatening or menacing; maybe
because we thought it made other people respect us. We sometimes
rhymed it with the word gryazny which means dirty. It was an oil town
with three big refineries and the air was often polluted. Sometimes we
went for outings into the hills, where the oil derricks nodded like
giant clockwork toys, and jets of burning fuel roared into the air. We
had long, pleasant picnics with shiskebab in the oak and beech groves
beside the rushing waters of the River Terek. We searched for wild
asparagus and damsons, and in spring for snow drops in the grassy
meadows. Coming back in the dusk the pillars of fire cast an unearthly
light over the fields, and I was always glad to get back home.

My father built our house in Grozny by himself, although uncles and
cousins and neighbours all came to lend a hand in putting up the red
brick walls, fitting the doors, and painting the carved window
frames. It had three bedrooms, a dining room, a bathroom and a living
room, all with shiny dark red hardwood floors. The dining room was
hung with carpets and furnished with a walnut table, always with a
dish of sweets, and a sideboard with framed photographs of my parents'
wedding. I was rarely allowed into this room, except to practise
lessons on the black "Rostov-on-Don" piano. We had a television and
washing machine and everything else we needed for a comfortable
life. The bathroom had a proper bath and a flush toilet; most
households made do with a deep pit in the furthest corner of the back
yard. My father installed a boiler in the centre of the house which
heated big rounded radiators in every room from the natural gas which
was plentiful and cheap in Grozny. We had a deep cellar, in which my
parents always had a stock of potatoes, pickled vegetables, walnuts
and fruit, and a huge garage with windows which made it more like a
big conservatory.

We actually lived outside most of the time, except in winter, in the
enclosed courtyard which was paved with tarmacadam and edged with
tulips and narcissus, and had a garden with lettuce, cucumbers,
eggplants, tomatoes, herbs, raspberries, blackberries, apricots and
plums. All these grew in profusion in Grozny with its
Mediterranean-like weather - hot, dry summers and only occasional
snowfalls in winter. We ate at a table in the shade of a leafy vine
draped over a metal trellis which produced green grapes for making
sweet wine. We always ate well. We celebrated holidays and birthdays
with friends and relatives. People would come and go, and papa would
propose numerous toasts in cognac to the women, and to health,
happiness and long life, though nobody got drunk because the glasses
were tiny.

The source of our prosperity was quite simply hard work and blat, or
good contacts. My father worked during the day as a shoe-maker at the
Grozny No 1 footwear factory, and he also made fine leather shoes on
the side. His only indulgence was to read every word of the daily
four-page newspaper, the Groznensky Rabochy (Grozny Worker). My mother
Marietta had a Singer sewing machine and worked at home as a
seamstress. Her clients would come for fittings for dresses and
blouses. People of all nationalities dropped by - Russians, Armenians,
Ukrainians, Tatars, Jews, Chechens and Ingushes - to get measured or
try on their outfits and everybody talking. My parents would think
nothing of working late to run up some men's trousers for sale. This
was the sort of bourgeois activity the Communist Party disapproved of,
but no one seemed to mind. We were Armenians. People, after all,
expected us to make shoes and clothes and sell them.

We lived in a part of town where there were quite a few outsiders like
us. Only about a third of the population of 360,000 were Chechens and
Ingushes, the native Muslim people of the region. Grozny was then the
capital of the autonomous republic of Checheno-Ingushetia within the
Russian Federation. It never felt like Russia however. They had their
own codes and laws which took precedence over Soviet political
structures and ideology. They hated the Soviet leadership and with
good reason. Stalin had deported nearly 400,000 Chechens and 100,000
Ingushes to the faraway plains of Kazakhstan on February 23rd, 1944,
in an attempt to once and for all destroy the people who had fought
Russian occupation for centuries.

IN 1957, Stalin's successor Nikita Khruschchev allowed the deportees
to return and the main square in Grozny was named after him. But many
Russian and Ukrainian families had settled in Grozny in their absence,
and relations were very tense with the native population, who gave
first loyalty to the village clan, or teip. The young Chechen and
Ingush men who came back were rootless and simmering with rage, and
some carried a hidden kinzhal, the curved Caucasian dagger. I remember
my parents talking about an incident in 1958 when a young Ingush
killed a Russian in a fight over a girl and angry Russians rioted for
three days. In Grozny if there was ever a fight, the Ingush or Chechen
always had to win against other nationalities, and if they didn't they
took revenge. We heard stories of people simply disappearing after
falling foul of Chechens or Ingushes.

The returning deportees were given grants to buy back houses from
settlers but they were denied the privileges they once had. They were
daily humiliated by a statue in the town centre to General Alexei
Yermolov, the Russian general who tried to wipe out the Chechens in
the 19th century, and about whom Pushkin wrote the famous line: "Bow
down, Caucasus, Yermolov is coming." The First Party Secretary and all
the top jobs went to ethnic Russians. Intermarriages were taboo. If a
Chechen or Ingush did marry a Russian, he or she was disinherited and
cursed. There were only a few among my classmates at School No 3, and
they kept to themselves. As an Armenian I always felt wary of them,
but generally speaking the Armenians in Grozny got on well with other
nationalities. Most, like my father's family, had lived there since
before the deportations.

In fact, my father's best friend was an Ingush whom we called Uncle
Bashir, a proud man who wore a tall grey lambskin hat called the
papakha, and had 11 children. He had a prayer room full of carpets in
his big house which felt to me like a mansion. He and his friends
worshipped there as Grozny's mosques had all been closed by the
communists. The walls of his dining room were painted with big
greenish leaves tinged with gold. When we were invited for dinner, his
wife and the children ate in the living quarters at the back, though
they came to talk after we had eaten. Uncle Bashir's wife was always
glancing out the window in case a relative dropped by and found her
talking to infidels. Like most native women she dressed in fashionable
fabrics and kept her head covered with a scarf. The children were very
respectful. When an older boy walked into the room, the younger ones
immediately got up. Most Russians had no friends among the Chechens or
Ingushes, whom they often called insultingly zveri, meaning beasts,
and indeed they also sometimes lumped all Caucasian people together,
including us Armenians, as chyornye, or blacks.

Grozny was my home town but I did not quite belong there. I was always
conscious of being Armenian. We left Grozny when I was a teenager to
live in another part of Russia, but I returned every summer to stay
with my Aunt Lena. The last time was in May 1991. By then the town was
in a political ferment and there was much talk of declaring
independence. I saw pictures of Iraq's Saddam Hussein on car
windows. The mosques had been reopened and the airport named after
Sheikh Mansur, a Chechen fighter who slaughtered Russians in 1785. On
my last day, cousins and aunts and uncles came for a big open-air
dinner in the courtyard. They spoke about moving away soon.
Traditionally Christian Armenians have no business in a Muslim
territory when trouble is brewing. That night as I lay in bed I heard
automatic gun fire in the distance. Within six months practically
every single one of the 26,000 Armenians in Grozny had packed their
belongings, sold their houses - if lucky - and fled. My Aunt Lena,
desperately unhappy, and my relatives went to start a new life in
southern Russia. Her house and the house my father built is almost
certainly smashed to pieces now, along with the tram lines and Uncle
Bashir's mansion and the lives of so many people with whom I grew up.

Zhanna Suvorova now lives in Beijing

Ultra Russian,

I have checked the site, of course. It is still unclear to me:
1. When you are back in power will be private property preserved or nationalized?
2. Will you allow other political parties to exist and compete with you or you send all of them to Solovki?
3. Is it still a doctrine of KPRF that capitalism does not work and should die or the party is more flexible on this subject now?

I appreciate your answer.

Ultra posted on Saturday, January 8, 2000 - 01:19 pm:
After Ten Years Of Yeltsin, Soviet Heritage Remains Strong
By Marielle Eudes ...

Very Good!!!

I would add: because the ruling class is still the one of the communist party prior to 1990.
That's why it will still take anothor ten or twenty years, the time they all got retired or deceded for the economy to heal up.

Chechen

did russian occupy Afghanistan for the same things.


My aswer is NO.
plaese see cossak's answer

I want to add: in fondamentalist muslim pray these two phases: A & B sung like this


A/ "AlaaaaaaaaahUAkbaaar..."

B/ Takatakatakatawhiiiiiibooomtakatakatakata

A/ "AlaaaaaaaaahUAkbaaaar..."

B/ Takatakatakatawhiiiiiibooomtakatakatakata

A/ "AlaaaaaaaaahUAkbaaar..."

B/ Takatakatakatawhiiiiiibooomtakatakatakata

Fred, what a beautiful pray. I've tried it and it helped a lot. To those who wants to try it too: Use a doormat to preserve the forehead.
Armenian+ (New improved Armenian)

Caucasien

Fantastique!

"You see rog, we all here want to help you..."

Vraiment il est tellement con...

I think you got it wrong.

AlaaaaaaaaahUAkbaaar...
BOOM chaka-laka Boom
Myyyy naaaaaaaaaaaame
Is Kiiiiiiiiiid ROCK!