The Russian literary revelations of the glasnost era were marked above all by a preoccupation with the crimes and socio-psychological ramifications of Stalinism. Issues whose serious exploration in the official Soviet press had come to a near halt with the collapse of the Thaw in the mid-1960s – the nature of the labor camp experience, the extent of Joseph Stalin’s personal responsibility for the excesses that occurred while he was dictator of the Soviet Union, and the quality of societal relationships in the 1930s and 1940s – were treated in exhaustive detail in works such as Anatolii Rybakov’s Deti Arbata (Children of the Arbat, 1987), Vladimir Dudintsev’s Belye odezhdy (White Robes, 1987), and Iurii Trifonov’s Ischeznovenie (The Disappearance, 1987). A special position among such hard-hitting literary exposes of the evils of the Stalinist era was occupied by Anatolii Pristavkin’s Nochevala tuchka zolotaia (A Golden Cloud Spent the Night, 1987), a work devoted to the previously unmentionable deportation of entire nationalities, the largest of which was the Chechens, from the Caucasus in early 1944. Pristavkin offers a horrific perspective on both the removal itself and the activities of those few Chechens who escaped the clutches of the Soviet authorities and remained in their mountain fastnesses. Literary allusions abound in the novel, the title itself taken from a well-known poem by Mikhail Lermontov. This paper focuses on Pristavkin’s sensitive representation of Russo-Chechen relations and the critical that Russian literary and cultural patrimony plays in his narrative. A powerful indictment of ethnic cleansing, A Golden Cloud Spent the Night attests to both the persistence of prejudice and the necessity for transcending the patterns of the past.

THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO THE DEPORTATIONS

The surrender of Imam Shamyl to the Russians in 1859 was followed by the uneasy incorporation of Chechnya and neighboring regions into the Russian empire. Sporadic uprisings against tsarist power occurred for several years and were often associated with the activity of radical Islamic orders. In the mid-1860s, social disruption in Chechnya was aggravated by the departure under duress of several thousand families for Turkey, often viewed as a tsarist precursor of the Soviet deportations. Hostilities increased dramatically in 1877, at the time of the Russo-Turkish War, when Russian military leaders offered a bounty of twenty-five rubles apiece for Chechen insurgents – brought in dead or alive – and Russian troops forced the inhabitants of many mountain villages to resettle in the lowlands where they were easier to control. In 1878, a brief period of relative quiet ensued after the uprising had been crushed and its leaders and executed in Groznyi.
There were widespread uprisings in Chechen villages during the 1905 Revolution, which affected workers in Groznyi’s budding petroleum industry as well as railroad employees and other proletarians, many of them ethnically Russian. For several years both before and after 1905, better-organized Chechen insurgents carried out acts of terrorism against Russian authorities and banking institutions. With the revolutions of 1917, Chechnya rapidly became the site of conflicting interests; Russian Communist and anti-Communist forces struggled to gain control of the North Caucasus, while conservative Islamic groups sought independence from both. By 1921 the Soviet Red Army was in control of the area and Chechnya, which had initially been part of the North Caucasian Soviet Republic established in 1918, became instead part of the Mountain Republic and then the Chechen Autonomous Region. In 1934 it was merged with the Ingush Autonomous Region and returned to republic status.
In a remarkably ill-considered move given the volatility of the area, Soviet authorities soon decided that the North Caucasus should be the first area of the country where agriculture would be completely collectivized. The outraged Chechen opposition that arose when this policy was implemented at the end of the 1920s was repressed by Soviet military intervention. Subsequently, the NKVD carried out mass arrests of insubordinate Chechen nationalists. In the late 1930s more arrests were made, this time in connection with nationwide political purges. The Chechens continued their active and often violent resistance to the Soviet government, killing Communist Party activists and carrying out armed raids against state property.^[1]
It is painfully obvious why Soviet-Chechen relations were so strained by 1944. Subject to massive dislocation and cultural instability during the late imperial period, the Chechens were poorly prepared to weather gracefully the upheavals of collectivization and Soviet administrative encroachment. Largely illiterate, isolated, and conservative, this was not a population likely to inspire confidence in Soviet authorities terrified by the German advance toward the oilfields of Groznyi and Baku in the Caucasus. The periodic acts of terrorism against Soviet authority in which Chechen insurgents had been engaged throughout the 1920s and 1930s reached a peak during the Second World War when Chechen and Ingush guerrillas regularly attacked Russian Communists in the Chechen-Ingush Republic.^[2]
In August 1942 the Germans invaded and occupied the northwest corner of the Chechen-Ingush Republic. They were unable to advance further and were expelled by Soviet forces in early 1943. North Caucasian guerrilla groups, some of whose members were deserters from the Red Army, enjoyed the chaos of war both before and after the invasion and its defeat, while the NKVD continued to wage a fierce struggle against banditry and terrorism. The Soviet government assumed the existence of a link between the Chechen-Ingush opposition and the German invaders, although there generally seems to have been no direct connection between the Germans and specific Chechen-Ingush groups.^[3] In this regard, the behavior of indigenous insurgents seems to have been opportunistic rather than conspiratorial.
The Soviet decision to put a definitive end to the decades-long Chechen resistance to Russian domination by deporting the entire population was not without precedent or parallel. In the mid-nineteenth century tsarist authorities had adopted a similar strategy in regard to Caucasian peoples like the Circassians and the Karabulaks. By 1944 the Soviet government had already dissolved the Volga German Republic and removed its population to the east. The Ingush, the Karachay, and the Balkars – all the North Caucasian nationalities – and the nearby Crimean Tatars and Kalmyks were deported at roughly the same time as the Chechens. Nikita Khrushchev later claimed that a similar fate had been briefly contemplated for the Ukrainians, but that they were simply too numerous for this to be a practicable option. In all of these instances, the actual or potential culpability of a few was metonymically extended to a whole people.
The deportations were authorized by Stalin and organized and carried out by the NKVD under the ultimate supervision of its director, Lavrentii Beria. Close to 500,000 Chechens and and a further 400,000 Ingush (many of whom were also Chechen) were rounded up by more than 100,000 members of various Soviet security forces in the course of a week in late February 1944. This, they were informed, was the consequence of betraying the Soviet Union to the Germans. The deportees were taken to assembly points and loaded onto trains bound for the east, for Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, their intended places of exile. The conditions under which the Chechens and Ingush traveled for three weeks were appalling and large numbers died en route due to inadequate food supplies, poor hygienic conditions, and isolated acts of violence by Soviet security forces. On their arrival in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, the North Caucasian peoples were also exposed to harrowing conditions: malnutrition, substandard housing, epidemic disease, inadequate medical care, and numerous forms of prejudicial treatment. By 1949, more than a quarter of the Chechen population had died.^[4]
Despite the organization and numbers of NKVD personnel involved in the operation, more than 2,000 Chechens and Ingush initially evaded deportation by hiding in the mountains. Subsequently, a few also managed to escape from exile and return to the Caucasus. The majority were apprehended by the NKVD and sent into exile by late 1948, but a few Chechens avoided detection and capture until at least 1951.^[5]
The Chechen-Ingush Republic was dissolved in 1944 and the Chechens, like their fellow deportees, rapidly assumed the status of a non-people. Multiple Chechen-sounding place names were changed to Russian ones and tens of thousands of new settlers were moved into what was now called the Groznyi Region. There was a remarkable paucity of explicit references in the official press to the purported crimes of the Chechens. In June 1946, the newspaper Izvestiia published a brief denunciation by the Kremlin of the Chechens and the Crimean Tatars for their alleged active and extensive collaboration with the Germans. At the same time, the Chechens and Chechnya virtually vanished from Soviet encyclopedias and maps until the late 1950s.
Chechen accounts of the deportations return repeatedly to the theme of Chechen courage in times of hardship. In an excerpt from Magomet Sulaev’s novel, Gory molchat, no pomniat (The Mountains are Silent, but Remember), published in Russian translation in the multi-volume collection Tak eto bylo: Natsional'nye repressii v SSSR 1919-1952 gody (That’s How It Was: National Repressions in the USSR 1919-1952, 1993), young Chechen deportees defiantly sing and dance at a an isolated train stop on the way to their place of exile. One shouts, “Let whoever shows himself to be faint-hearted on this day suck the udder of a pig”. Observing the proceedings, an older Chechen confidently exclaims, “No, the Chechen race will not vanish”.^[6] A self-image of themselves as irrepressibly bold and free-spirited helped sustain the Chechens both during and after their exile.
Russian assessments of Stalin-era Chechen courage were sometimes influenced by traditional ethnic perceptions. For many Russians, the best-known endorsement of Chechen indomitability under duress is found in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, the relevant section of which was finally published in Russia in 1989 and republished in That’s How It Was. Solzhenitsyn’s detailed appraisal, which is often cited in Western accounts of the deportations, warrants discussion, in part because of its curious blend of prejudice and admiration. The Chechens are granted a unique status by Solzhenitsyn: “There was one nation which did not give itself up at all to the psychology of submissiveness – not just isolated individuals or rebels, but the entire nation as a whole. That was the Chechens”.^[7] According to Solzhenitsyn, the Chechens refused to try to please the authorities, remaining proud, even overtly hostile. They would not allow any of their daughters and only some of their sons to be exposed to the potential corruption of Soviet education, and Chechen women could not work on the collective farms. Chechen men did not deign to labor in the fields, but tried most energetically to secure positions as drivers. For this unyielding stance, says Solzhenitsyn, the Chechens were universally feared. As in the preceding decades, Soviet power proved incapable of repressing them.
When Solzhenitsyn speaks of the Chechen fondness for automobiles, he employs imagery immediately evocative of nineteenth-century stereotypes. “In the constant motion of the automobile they found the satisfaction of their passion for trick riding, in the opportunities open to drivers the satisfaction of their passion for thieving”.^[8] He concludes a lengthy account of a Chechen vendetta with the observation: “In our books and schools we Europeans read and pronounce only words of scorn for this savage law, this cruel and senseless slaughter. But it seems that this slaughter is not so senseless: it does not stop but strengthens the mountain nations”.^[9] The terms in which the writer speaks – the use of phrases like “we Europeans” in conjunction with admiration for the cohesive power of the blood feud, the easy assumption of a Chechen proclivity for banditry and innate gift for horsemanship – result in a twentieth-century variation on the theme of the noble savage. In Solzhenitsyn’s eyes, Chechen mores are readily reducible to a simple code that evades “European” complexity. Solzhenitsyn’s Chechens are heroic figures, but they remain firmly possessed of their alterior status. There is thus an ironic component to the frequency with which Solzhenitsyn’s appraisal is mentioned in the West.
The companion to the image of the noble savage is of course the construct of the ignoble savage, the incorrigible primitive being whose bestial ways make him a danger to “civilized” man. Russians were often quick to endorse this characterization of the Chechens. When in the 1950s Khrushchev began to argue for a relaxation of the strictures against the deported peoples, an enraged Politburo member declared, “The return of the repressed peoples to their primordial homeland would mean to let the wolves into the mountains.”^[10] Such rhetoric continues to resonate today in frequent Russian assumptions of widespread Chechen collaboration with the Germans.
In keeping with the logic of the belief that the Chechens were indeed guilty of mass treachery during World War II, it is sometimes claimed that the horrors of the deportation have been grossly exaggerated. Writing in 1999, a Russian commentator paints a rosy picture of exile conditions, contrasting them unfavorably with the wartime situation of other ethnic groups:

“By the time of the arrival of the special trains in Kazakhstan and Kygyzstan 75,000 places of accommodation, and flour and groats, had been prepared. The agricultural bank received a directive to issue grants to the special settlers for the construction of homes... . each family could receive one head of cattle as compensation for livestock left in their native land.
Meanwhile other special trains with Russians, Dagestanis, Ossetians, and Kalmyks were headed West, where they gave up their lives while still in their prime in difficult battles for the Homeland.”^[11]

Other Russian commentators echo these sentiments:

“The Chechens lived through the war without participating in the common cause of the defense of the Fatherland... .Within the confines of wartime resources, the resettlement ensured transport, foodstuffs, and medical service. In Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, the settlers became the owners of homes (at the expense of new construction and the purchase of empty accommodations from the local population).”^[12]

Given such obvious advantages, one wonders why the Chechens did not requeste resettlement themselves.
Ironically, what deportation and thirteen years of exile may have given the Chechens for the first time was a keen sense of national identity.^[13] Chechen society was and still is to some extent structured in terms of clan affiliation. Today there are roughly 150 clans, or teips, subsumed under larger groupings called tukhums. Dedication to the teip is complemented by dedication to other entities, for example, the international Islamic community, specific religious societies like the Naqshbandis and the Quadiris, and the family. How important a role is played by the teips in Chechen politics today is a matter of controversy. The journalist and analyst Anatol Lieven suggests that Russian experts have been inclined to overemphasize the importance of the teips as the result of a typically colonialist tendency to exaggerate the static, traditional nature of colonized societies.^[14] Another Western observer, Robert Seely, argues that the Chechens are indeed “remarkably conservative – in some senses quasi-medieval,” and suggests that the teips still have a great deal of political power.^[15] However this complex question is resolved, the events of the past decade have demonstrated that a profound nationalism does now exist among the Chechens, a consciousness directly linked to the forced perception of themselves as a national group imposed by the experience of deportation and exile.
The Chechens began attempting to return to Chechnya soon after Stalin’s death, but were not officially allowed to return until the late 1950s. In all 384,000 Chechens and 84,000 Ingush made their way back to the Caucasus from Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.^[16] The Chechen-Ingush Republic was revived, although with somewhat different borders, possibly in order to permit the inclusion of a greater number of ethnic Russians within the republic. The re-absorption of the Chechens and Ingush was far from smooth and was marked by periodic ethnic clashes with the local Russian population, the worst of which occurred in Groznyi in 1958 and led to a five-day race riot.
For more than two decades virtually no mention was made of the deportations or of possible Chechen resentment of Russian domination. Instead, the governing narrative in post-Stalinist Soviet assessments of the Russian presence in the Caucasus referred to the friendship of the Russian and Caucasian peoples and fostered the notion that Russian activity had been and remained largely benevolent. This myth remains alive today and may now encompass not only “progressive” Russia, but the entire tsarist colonizing project:

“Soviet historiography, which strove to justify the barbarism of the Bolsheviks, tried to justify as well the tribal barbarism of little peoples... .the meaning and results of the Caucasian war were seriously distorted... .In reality the mountaineers fought chiefly among themselves, and Russia brought peace to the North Caucasus. The Chechen people were guaranteed forgiveness for war against the Russians, freedom of professions and trade, freedom of religion, and local self-government.”^[17]

Pristavkin’s efforts at presenting a very different picture of the Chechens' experience should be considered in the context of such chauvinistic attitudes.

PRISTAVKIN AND SOVIET HISTORY

Born in 1931 near Moscow, Pristavkin was one of the Soviet Union’s millions of war orphans. He spent much of his childhood in countless children’s homes and “colonies” in central Russia, Siberia, and the Caucasus, experiencing the continual hunger endemic to Soviet orphanages of the time as well as the often despotic behavior of many orphanage administrators. As a teenager, Pristavkin worked at a variety of jobs before performing his military service. The love of reading and writing that he acquired along the way inspired him to enroll at the prestigious Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow where he was initially drawn to the composition of poetry. After graduation from the institute, Pristavkin turned to journalism and prose fiction, producing for many years both stories – some devoted to the war and the lives of children at the time – and documentary pieces about massive Soviet construction projects in Siberia. In the 1960s, Pristavkin became a member of the Communist Party. In the 1970s, he received the annual prize granted by the Soviet Writers' Union for perhaps the best known of his documentary writings, Na Angare (On the Angara River, 1975).
In the 1970s, Pristavkin also began to explore in greater depth the wartime experience of orphaned children in his writings. By his own acknowledgment, this was a wrenching process, “I wasn't only afraid to write about those terrible wartime days, I was afraid even to touch them with my memory: it was painful. Not just painful, I didn't have the strength even to reread my short stories written earlier.” Pristavkin overcame his fears and hesitation in part because “the theme of the wartime children’s home gave [him] no peace, like a splinter lodged in the heart.”^[18] Having written the first of these stories “Soldat i mal'chik” (“The Soldier and the Boy,” 1977), Pristavkin went on to write A Golden Cloud Spent the Night and several other fictional accounts involving homeless children during the war and the ethical dilemmas that might arise for them in the midst of terrible physical and emotional deprivation.
A Golden Cloud Spent the Night was completed in 1981, but remained unpublished until 1987 when the relaxation of censorship under glasnost permitted its publication. Pristavkin, who had occupied a relatively minor position in Russian literature prior to the publication of his pathbreaking novel, gained a great deal of attention for A Golden Cloud Spent the Night, which won a government-sponsored literary prize for its author and was subsequently translated into many languages. Pristavkin went on to play a major role in the literary politics of the glasnost era, helping to encourage both bureaucratic reform of the Writers' Union and greater honesty about its longtime compliancy in regard to official ideological pressure.
Like many of Pristavkin’s works, A Golden Cloud Spent the Night is highly autobiographical in character, focusing on the experience of the young Kuz'min twins, Sashka and Kol'ka, who are sent in the spring of 1944 with a large group of their homeless peers from an orphanage in Moscow to form a colony in the Caucasus. There they are expected to perform factory labor and to occupy abandoned buildings that turn out to have belonged to dispossessed Chechens, not all of whom have left the area. In the course of the novel, attacks on the unprotected colony by Chechen guerrillas culminate in the brutal murder of Sashka and Kol'ka’s own flight through the Caucasian countryside. Kol'ka survives only through the intervention of a young Chechen boy, Alkhuzur, who in turn survives only because Kol'ka adopts him as his new “brother.”
While most of the novel is written in the third person, but from the perspective of the ten-year-old “Kuzmenyshi” (little Kuzmins), several passages are presented from the point of view of various first-person narrators – an anonymous orphanage inmate, the adult Kol'ka, and apparently the author himself. The inclusion of these passages allows Pristavkin to provide mature commentary on the psychology of the twins, residual stereotype-driven Russian perceptions of the deportation of the Chechens, and his own sense of responsibility as a writer. Thus in addition to its powerful retrospective dimension, the novel acquires an enhanced contemporaneity for the period twenty-five years after the end of World War II when it was actually written. Tragically, in the 1990s A Golden Cloud Spent the Night gained another level of significance when the Russo-Chechen Wars rapidly brought to the surface many of the prejudiced attitudes to which the novel bears eloquent and painful testimony.

THE LURE OF THE CAUCASUS

A Golden Cloud Spent the Night begins with rumors among suburban Muscovite orphans of their impending transfer to the Caucasus. The rumors are fueled by impressions of the region derived, first and foremost, from a mishmash of nineteenth-century Russian literary accounts and simplistic historiography:

“What a strange fantasy it was to talk in dirty little suburban Moscow about some sort of Caucasus about which the orphanage riffraff knew only from reading aloud at school (there were no textbooks!) – that it existed or rather had existed in some distant incomprehensible times, when the black-bearded, eccentric mountaineer Hadzhi Murat fired on his enemies, when the leader of the murids, Imam Shamyl, defended himself in a besieged fortress, and the Russian soldiers Zhilin and Kostylin languished in a deep pit.
There was Pechorin, too, of the superfluous men who also traveled around the Caucasus (13).”^[19]

The literary works alluded to here include Leo Tolstoy’s Hadzhi Murat (1904) and “Kavkazskii plennik” (Prisoner of the Caucasus, 1873) and Lermontov’s Geroi nashego vremeni (Hero of Our Time, 1840). The narrative and thematic complexities of these works have been overlooked in favor of stylized and easily absorbed images – the violent, exotic mountaineer, the victimized Russian prisoners, and the impotent aristocrat. It is significant that no contemporary Caucasus can be imagined; the fictional landscape of the past is more easily evoked and contained.
The complete lack of nuance in the impression that the Kuz'min twins, and by implication, their peers, have of the Caucasus is underscored by the final, formative component of their fantasy, a Caucasian scene pictured on a cigarette package: “On a background of tortuous, snow-white mountains gallops, gallops a rider in a black felt cloak on a wild horse. But no, he doesn't gallop, but flies through the air. Below him in an uneven, angular type was the name: 'Kazbek' [one of the highest mountains in the Caucasus]” (13). The very script on the package is defamiliarized, while the figure of the rider constitutes a pictorial cliche of the daring horseman dressed in an exotic and ominous black cloak set against a landscape whose wildness matches his own. It is noteworthy that this landscape too recalls the nineteenth, and not the twentieth, century.
Soon after the rumors have begun to fly the twins engage in desultory conversation about the impending move to the Caucasus while attempting to tunnel into the orphanage bread-cutting pantry. Sashka vaguely wonders what the mountains in the Caucasus look like and recites for Kol'ka, truant from classes that day, the two lines he remembers from part of the day’s lessons, a poem by Lermontov: “A golden cloud spent the night/ On the breast of a giant cliff” (21). Kol'ka expresses casual interest in the fate of the cloud and the cliff, and is unimpressed by what Sashka can recall. The poem had inspired Sashka, it appears, to daydream and had not paid attention to the teacher’s explanations. The content of his daydream reflects a notion of a mythic Caucasus construed as an exotic and welcoming land of plenty:

“In class he had suddenly imagined the Caucasus, where everything was not at all the way it was in their foul Tomilino.
Mountains were the size of their orphanage and everywhere among them were stuck bread-cutting pantries. And not a single one was locked... .And the people were all in long, collarless Circassian coats, with mustaches, so cheerful. They watched Sashka enjoy the food, they smiled, and they slapped him on the shoulder. 'Iakshi,'--they said... .the meaning was clear: 'Eat more, we have many breadcutting pantries'” (21-22)!

The stereotype of the exotic Caucasian has been supplemented here by the image, also popularized during the Soviet era, largely through film, of the jolly mountaineer. Sashka’s Caucasian is a thoroughly domesticated “other” who fulfills the boy’s deepest longings, in this case, the desire for all the bread he can eat.
The complete poem of which Sashka can recall only two lines, “Utes” (The Cliff, 1841), is in fact very short:

A golden cloud spent the night
On the breast of a giant cliff;
In the morning it flew off early on its way,
Merrily playing in the azure;

But a moist trace remained in a wrinkle
Of the old cliff. It stands alone,
Deep in thought,
And quietly weeps in the wilderness.^[20]

The atmosphere of melancholy projected here is typical of Lermontov’s lyric poetry. In the longing of the cliff for the carefree cloud there is a sense of missed, but also unrealizable opportunity. The Caucasian landscape is a locus of loss and isolation, not a land of plenty. In the context of Pristavkin’s novel, the full text of Lermontov’s poem points to the disillusionment, loneliness, and abandonment to which the Kuz'min twins' journey to the Caucasus will actually lead them.
Much later in the novel, after Sashka’s violent death, Kol'ka carefully places his brother’s body in a small compartment beneath a departing train. Previously unaware of even having memorized it, he suddenly remembers Lermontov’s entire poem. He now identifies himself with the cliff and the departing spirit of Sashka with the cloud. The Promised Land has been transformed into a scene of poignant loss. When Kol'ka tries some months later to recite the poem to an audience of other children, he cannot complete the poem, unable to pronounce the word “alone” and on the verge of tears. The loss of his brother has been internalized and Kol'ka suddenly understands that “his Caucasian life has ended” (184); harsh reality has swamped pathetic fantasy.
Another well-known poem with a Caucasian setting that plays an important symbolic role in A Golden Cloud Spent the Night is Pushkin’s “Kavkaz podo mnoiu” (The Caucasus is Below Me, 1829). Early in their abortive attempt at settling in the rural Caucasus, the orphans stage an amateur performance for the local kolkhoz workers, themselves also recent immigrants to the area. The recitation of Pushkin’s poem is one of the entries. The audience interprets the stanzas, which reiterate received notions about the Caucasus, in the light of contemporary events. Pushkin’s lyric narrator describes a beauteous landscape in which deer gallop and birds twitter, where “people roost in the mountains,” and “a shepherd descends to the happy valleys,/ Where the Aragva rushes along between shady shores,/ And a destitute horseman lurks in a ravine” (110). At the mention of people lodged in the mountains the audience suddenly grows very silent, but the reference to the lurking horseman brings it to life. “The poem is about the Chechens! About them! About the vermin!” (110), they whisper to one another, so caught up in their shared interpretation that they forget even to applaud the adolescent reciter of the poem. This popular sense that the Chechens have remained as they were, and that what they were brutal bandits, is central to adult Russian perceptions as represented in Pristavkin’s novel.

ONCE AND FUTURE BRIGANDS

The Kuz'mins first learn about the Chechens and their invidious reputation from Auntie Zina, a middle-aged collective farm worker from near Kursk. Afraid at first even to identify the Chechens by name, Zina attempts to characterize them by making a gesture with her hand as if she were waving a sword. When the twins are still perplexed, she explains:

“Why, the damned Chechens! They're called Chechens. Haven't you heard? When the fascists were here they betrayed us!... So they scooped them up, just like us, into freight trains... But some of them didn't want to go... So they hid in the mountains! And they're making a nuisance of themselves! They're carrying on like bandits” (92).

Zina’s representation of the Chechens is an amalgam of generalized treachery (all Chechens are traitors) and conventional behavior (banditry and waving of swords).
The sense that the Chechens have reverted to type, that they are essentially evil, is expressed by several of the adult characters in A Golden Cloud Spent the Night. The twins' acquaintance Il'ia, also a recent immigrant, confuses the Chechen word “churt,” meaning cemetery, with the Russian word “chert,” meaning devil, and proceeds to call the Chechens “devils.” A soldier wounded in a skirmish with Chechen outlaws denounces them as incorrigible criminals:

“Basmachi, scum! Up against the wall with them! They've been bandits for a hundred years, and they've stayed cutthroats!... We need to cleanse the entire Caucasus! They're traitors to the homeland! They sold themselves to Hitler!” (116)

In a move of conflation typical of stereotyping, the soldier lumps together here the Chechens and the Basmachi, anti-Soviet guerrillas active in Central Asia in the 1920s. The familiar image of the bandit occurs together with uncritical acceptance of the claim that the Chechens as a people embraced the German invaders. What is implicit in this scenario is the notion that the Russians act from a position of victimized innocence, while the Chechens are inveterate evildoers. The ex-soldier Dem'ian confirms this impression when he explains the murders committed by the Chechen outlaws as their inescapable mode of behavior: “They can't act any other way. They sold themselves to Hitler!... With them slaughtering Russians is some kind of national sickness” (147).
Near the end of A Golden Cloud Spent the Night, the first-person narrator describes an encounter at a Moscow bath with the war veteran Viktor Ivanovich, who proudly recounts his experiences with rounding up “the blacks” (171) for deportation and introduces the narrator to likeminded former comrades.^[21] Viktor Ivanovich still has no doubts that the criminalization of entire peoples was justified and remains vindictive in his prejudice, “They should all be put up against the wall!” (171). “I remember those vermin as if it were now” (172), he declares and the narrator realizes that these men do not feel even a trace of remorse.
For the narrator, the ultimate blame for the deportations can be clearly assigned to Stalin. When Viktor Ivanovich proudly recalls the official decoration he received “personally from Comrade Stalin” (172) and his friends toast his accomplishment, the narrator remarks, “The thought couldn't help but arise that all those people who did his will in His name are alive, exist somewhere” (172). The capitalization of the pronoun referring to Stalin and the use of a quasi-biblical formulation ironically emphasizes the dictator’s baleful influence. Stalin’s malign status is suggested earlier in the novel as well, at the time of the recitation of Pushkin’s poem, when Sashka naively assumes that the first-person speaker in “The Caucasus is Below Me” is Stalin. Sashka’s anachronistic assumption is simultaneously laughable and frightening in its suggestion of a persistent Russian intention to dominate and possess the Caucasus.

AN END TO REVENGE

The initial appearance of Chechen outlaws in A Golden Cloud Spent the Night is linked to a curious act of violation. Regina Petrovna, the most sympathetic of the adults accompanying the orphans to the Caucasus and a special friend to the Kuz'min twins, is cutting up a papakha, a high Caucasian fur hat she has found at their new residence, in order to make hats for both twins. Unbeknownst to Regina Petrovna, three Chechen men intently observe “her hands carelessly cutting up the papakha” (81). Observation yields to action and the three men, accompanied by a boy, break into the room. One of the men puts a rifle to Regina Petrovna’s head, but is prevented from shooting her by the boy, and the man confines himself to telling her in broken Russian to get out of the room. The same night another Russian woman is killed and several buildings burned by guttural-voiced men on horseback. Later Regina Petrovna wonders why the Chechen guerrillas spared her, but does dimly understand the symbolic role played by the papakha, “I shouldn't have touched the papakha... They were looking at it... So strangely... As if I were cutting something alive” (122). The refashioning of the papakha has become a symbol for the attempted Russian destruction of Chechen culture, indeed of Chechen identity.
The effect of this image, and others that will be mentioned below, is to create certain sympathy for the displaced Chechens and their desire to exact revenge. When the novel’s final act of vengeance takes place, however, its horror evokes above all the need for reconciliation. The Kuz'min twins are trapped and separated in a cornfield by Chechen horsemen. Kol'ka manages to escape, but Sashka is caught and killed. Kol'ka finds his brother’s dead body hanging chained to a fence in a pose reminiscent of crucifixion, with a bundle of corn stuck into his stomach and another ear of corn shoved into his mouth.^[22] Crows have already further mutilated the boy’s body. Kol'ka drives away the crows and carefully removes his brother’s body from the fence.
The precise details of Sashka’s death suggest a gruesome reversal of his fantasy earlier in the novel of a Caucasian landscape dotted with bread-cutting pantries and cheerful highlanders who invite him to eat his fill. The land of plenty has been revealed as a killing field and Sashka a sacrificial victim of interethnic strife. It remains for Kol'ka to recognize and articulate an alternate approach to longstanding prejudice and antipathy.
Kol'ka’s potential role as a voice for tolerance and humanity is suggested early in A Golden Cloud Spent the Night when the twins are still on their way to the Caucasus. At an isolated train station Kol'ka has an encounter he is reluctant to share, even with his brother:

“He kept quiet about one thing that he saw there at the station. About the strange train cars at the distant siding behind the water tower. He happened upon those cars by chance... and heard someone call him from a heated goods van, from a little grate-covered window above. He lifted his head and saw eyes, at first only eyes... then a mouth, tongue, and lips. This mouth stretched out and pronounced only one strange sound: 'Khi.' Kol'ka was surprised and showed his palm with the hard bluish-gray berries: 'This?'. . .
'Khi! Khi!' the voice began to shout, and suddenly the wooden interior of the train car came to life. Children’s hands grabbed at the grating, then there were other eyes, other mouths, and they changed, as if they were pushing each other aside. At the same time the strange rumble of voices grew” (40-41).

This disturbing scene comes to an abrupt halt at the appearance of a Soviet soldier who harshly tells Kol'ka to leave and the unseen children to be quiet. Kol'ka returns later to look at the train and witnesses its departure from the station, but he learns no more about its passengers. Narrator commentary, however, reflects an adult understanding of the situation:

“Our trains stood side by side for a bit, like twin brothers who didn't recognize each other. They parted forever and it didn't mean anything at all that some were headed north and others south.
We were bound together by a single fate” (43).

The metaphor of the twins points toward a possible resolution of Russian-Chechen conflict that is literally realized later in the novel when Kol'ka insists to everyone that the Chechen Alkhuzur is his brother. It is Alkhuzur who makes clear to Kol'ka, and the reader, the meaning of the monosyllable repeated by the unknown children by urging him to drink water, “khi,” when he is recuperating from trauma and exhaustion. Alkhuzur, who had earlier prevented an adult Chechen from shooting Regina Petrovna and later saved Kol'ka from the same fate, is rescued in turn by Kol'ka who prevents ethnic-based reprisals against Alkhazur through his stubborn and obviously incredible claim that the boy is his twin.
While the majority of the adult characters in A Golden Cloud Spent the Night express stereotyped condemnation of the entire Chechen people, Regina Petrovna tells Kol'ka and Sashka at one point: “There are no bad peoples, only bad people” (129). Sashka immediately asks if that includes the Chechens. Regina Petrovna does not reply, but her silence suggests a refusal to subscribe to sweeping ethnic denunciation. After Sashka’s death, Kol'ka far exceeds Regina Petrovna in his arguments for reconciliation and peace. Even before his encounter with Alkhuzur, Kol'ka muses to himself about the cycle of violence that has erupted in the Caucasus and wonders why the Russians and the Chechens cannot simply live together in harmony. Later, when an adult Chechen threatens to kill Kol'ka, the latter fantasizes about dying and turning into a cloud and rejoining his dead brother. He imagines a conversation with Sashka in which he tells his twin how he has become friends with Alkhuzur, who is also their “brother.” Sashka sympathetically responds: “I think that all people are brothers” (176). When Kol'ka regains consciousness, he proposes to Alkhuzur that they become blood brothers and the two boys carry out this ritual. Their subsequent loyalty to one another provides an implicit alternative to the irrational interethnic strife carried on by the adults.
While the conclusion of A Golden Cloud Spent the Night argues for the practice of brotherhood, the novel also very obviously assigns the greater share of the blame for the events of 1944 to the Russians, not the Chechens. The reader is never privy to the thoughts of the novel’s Chechen characters, but their few utterances in broken Russian convey a sense of outrage that their homeland has been seized and an understandable fear of further Soviet reprisals. At no point in the novel does the narrator support the Soviet allegations of treachery by the Chechens. Instead, the emphasis is on the crimes committed against them. Alkhuzur expresses particular sorrow at the sight of a ransacked Chechen cemetery whose gravestones have been used to construct a makeshift road. The narrators imagines a time when the children and grandchildren of those whose names are written on the gravestones “will return in the name of justice to their own land” (173) and restore the gravestones to their proper places. Pristavkin’s overall message is very clear – the deportation represents a great wrong done to the Chechen people, an unjustified act of prejudice.
Pristavkin does of course acknowledge the retaliatory violence committed by Chechen guerrillas, but it is significant that he shows the consequences of that violence and not its actual commission. For example, while the appearance of the dead Sashka is described in graphic detail, his actual murder is not. The specific perpetrators of the crime are in fact never identified and it is thus easier for the reader to maintain a sense of sympathy for the dispossessed Chechens. Rather than evoking condemnation of the Chechens for their barbarity, the sight of the crucified Sashka invites more generalized recognition of the tragic conflict that has led to this act and the need for its resolution.
An important imagological consequence of Pristavkin’s narrative method, that is, of the description of events almost exclusively from the viewpoint of one or both of the Kuz'min twins, is that the Chechens remain highly abstract figures, virtually mute because of linguistic barriers, their consciousness an almost complete mystery. With the exception of Alkhuzur, who is represented primarily as a child in contradistinction to all of the adults in the novel, the Chechen characters in A Golden Cloud Spent the Night materialize and disappear almost instantaneously from the Caucasian landscape, evoking much sympathy, but no real empathy. As static representations of the dispossessed “other,” they suggest the injustice of Soviet wartime policy, but do not foster real understanding of Chechen ways of life. Pristavkin’s novel is above all an account of the loss of childhood innocence and a plea for brotherly love. Its attention to unjust historical events previously generally ignored by Russian readers gives the work great moral authority. However, the novel’s ultimately distanced stance in regard to Chechen culture prevents it from transcending the longstanding Russian resistance to acknowledging the Chechens as psychologically rounded individuals.

SOVIET CRITICAL RESPONSES TO A GOLDEN CLOUD SPENT THE NIGHT

In an article on the immediate critical response to Pristavkin’s novel, Frank Gobler suggests that Soviet reviewers tended to focus on questions of artistic implementation rather than author’s intentions and subject matter.^[23] Gobler’s suggestion is borne out by the remarks of the prominent liberal critic Alla Latynina, who was concerned with distinguishing between the novel’s “natural finale,” Kol'ka’s dispatch of his brother’s body on the train, and its “literary-romantic finale,” the mutual salvation of Kol'ka and Alkhuzur.^[24] Recognizing Pristavkin’s moralistic inclinations, Latynina laconically comments, “Why not?” Another well-known literary analyst, V. Kardin, praises Pristavkin for not succumbing to the very human temptation of overlooking the victimization of those responsible for one’s own misfortunes. Kardin is especially interested in the question that some readers raised as to why Pristavkin felt it necessary to make Sashka’s death so horrific and thus risk evoking further hatred of the Chechens. He argues that Kol'ka’s unconventional reaction to his brother’s death, his conviction that only a sense of brotherhood can end interethnic conflict, represents a spiritual truth inaccessible to logical reasoning, a kind of holy foolishness.^[25]
Soviet reviewers in the late 1980s were already keenly aware that the problems described by Pristavkin in A Golden Cloud Spent the Night were by no means consigned to history. Kardin, for example, observes that not only the memory, but also the moods and attitudes of the past still exist and argues for the need for moral purification and repentance. In another review that appeared shortly after the publication of A Golden Cloud Spent the Night, Nina Loshkareva analyzes the novel’s depiction of a spiraling cycle of violence that leads to a sense of sanctioned cruelty in regard to the Chechens, a blind hatred and lack of concern for the lives of others. In much the same spirit as Kardin, Loshkareva concludes her review with the remark: “No, this story is not only a lesson about the past.”^[26]

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In the history of Russian literary representations of the Chechens, A Golden Cloud Spent the Night constitutes an important stage. By acknowledging both the horrors of the deportations and related events and the prevalence and persistence of Russian prejudice, both during and long after the Second World War, Pristavkin offers his audience the opportunity to reflect upon the pernicious dynamics of attempts at ethnic cleansing. Equally importantly, the novel provides repeated examples of the insidious role played by literature in fostering stereotyping and vindictiveness. The terms of Pristavkin’s argument for brotherhood and compassion remain relatively abstract and he does not create fully rounded non-Russian characters, but he moves his readers closer to relinquishing the construct of the evil Chechen.