Thomas Goltz Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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As I listen to you -- and I knew a little about you because we had been on a trip together in Germany with a group of academics and politicians -- one of the things that I didn't know was this theatrical background, which we've touched upon. It strikes me that in addition to your knowledge of languages, your being in the right place, that this is very important because it sensitized you to the drama of war -- the theater of reality, as you've just said -- and to see, also, to intuit the different characters at play in this drama that was unfolding before you. Do you have any comments on that? As I listen to you and read the book, this theatrical background -- in a positive way, I'm not being cynical here -- is an important contributor to your ability to tell the story, and put it in a philosophical and intellectual context that transcends the story of this individual village.
I hope what you say is accurate.
Comment on it.
Of course, you bring to the table everything that you are and everything that you have been. If you are a nuclear physicist who decides to go and write about war, presumably, what you will find most interesting are the things that have to do with nuclear physics. If you have a theatrical background, as it were, this is going to somehow play a role in the writing or the approach. I haven't thought of it in those terms, but when you express it like that, I find it undeniable. Was I constructing a play? No. Was I constructing a novel? No. Was I constructing a fictional movie script? No. But if I've managed to infuse this story with an element of drama because of everything that I am and have been, how happy am I.
Does that background allow you to take the story to a higher level? Because in the end, the book becomes a search for the commandant, the telling of his story, and the telling of the story of how your coverage of the story changed the story [itself]. That's a higher level than you get from a [mere] historical account of a village lost.
It is what it is, with all the twists and turns. Maybe when I ... not "maybe." When I embarked upon this particular project, I didn't even know that I was writing a book. Often, one understands this at a certain point, "Ah, I'm writing a book." But I was there as a videographer, pure and simple. It was only when the story began to become something more than just the story of the nature of Chechen resistance and the "Chechen spirit," and the paradoxes and contradictions began to manifest themselves, that I realized that I was riding a tiger, or something that was taking me to places that I had no intention of going when I had embarked upon the thing.
In fact, I didn't even know I was going to be writing this book until after the second war began (in 1999). And then, only obscurely. There was a telephone message left on my folks' answering machine in Montana, with a [telephone] codex that I didn't recognized. But I called up and then somebody was speaking Russian on the other end of the telephone. I said, "This is Thomas Goltz. With whom am I speaking?" And suddenly a voice said, "I'll get him," in Russian. It was the brother of Commander Hussein. This would be the year 2001. From the other side of the phone, this voice began to speak to me, and that's when I realized that I had to tell his story, which is also my story, our story, which is the story of Chechnya, and in quite a different manner than others have told it before.
So what did you learn from this odyssey which you record in your Chechnya diary?
I am still learning from it. The value of friendship. I mean, the profound
value. The value of loyalty. The story is still not completely at an end. I
have to go back to Kazakhstan and find Hussein again to deliver this book to
him, to have it translated for him. I don't know ... 
So
that he can respond and say that this is a thing of great beauty, or this is
a thing of nothing but your fantasies and lies. The story is not over yet for
me like that. But I think it's, once again, it is a story about a profound sense
of responsibility to one's subject. [A story about the idea] that there's no
"wham-bam, thank-you-ma'am" that is acceptable in journalism today
or maybe even in life today. You have to take responsibility for your actions.
If that sounds like a newer concept, I'd be very surprised. I think that is
the overriding lesson of this; that the journalist must take responsibility
for having been there.
If students watch or read this interview -- I'm sure a lot of them think about going to these places, covering them as journalists, winning awards -- what advice would you give them about how to prepare for that kind of future, especially if they read your book and say, "I want to do that?"
I would start with language, right out of the gate. And then history, of course. Read and write, and write and write, and write. And live, and live and live. But without direct intimate association with one's subject matter, I don't see what the point is. The idea of traveling around with translators, I don't see what the point is. To travel around with the so-called "hack-pack," I don't see what the point is. Maybe I'm just a throwback at this point, but the pre-email, pre - cell phone, pre - satellite phone, pre-videophone era of reporting --not what they're now doing from Afghanistan and elsewhere -- seems to be the Golden-but-now-gone Age of journalism, especially electronic journalism. Print has still got a couple of little things happening for it.
One final point in your story, that is, the story of this book and the story of the village, is the extent to which you come to see the world differently. The relationship, for example, of fundamentalist Islam to what was going on in that village is very different than the perception we might have, that it's all being driven by fundamentalism. What you're telling us is that by going this route that you went, you come to see the complexity of the situation and that it does vary over time.
Yes. At this point, the Chechens have left themselves open to the charge of al Qaeda - like associations, because they did allow that element to creep into the Chechen war between '94 and today. There's just no denying this. Is that the overwhelming majority of Chechens? Absolutely not. Is that the story that most in the media want to seize on right now? Absolutely.
One of the most bizarre elements that happened (I relate this in the book as well) is that when the war began again in 1999 under Vladimir Putin -- Yeltsin was out, or actually he was still there but on his way out -- I attempted to go back to Samashki to spend my birthday, which is October 11. On October 10, I was up at the most remote Georgian pass into Chechnya, where there were some Georgian guards. It was basically a goat path that you could negotiate a truck down. A friend of mine who was the regional boss of the de-mining HALO Trust organization -- they're active everywhere: Cambodia, Afghanistan, Bosnia, you name it -- they also had their operation happening in Chechnya. The name of my friend was Tom Dibb, a former British marine, probably an ex-saper. Anyway, we had made arrangements that he would pick me up at the frontier to bring me to Chechnya-at-war, and then I would go and spend my birthday in Samashki. You might call that romantic and ridiculous, but that's just the way it happened.
So on the evening of October 10, two white Mitsubishi Land Cruisers pull up at this hopelessly remote area, but the Georgians stopped them. Tom says, "It's because they think you are media. Just go and spend the night someplace. There's a little shack over here; meet us here at first light and we will then cross."
Well, I got back there at dawn, but the vehicles were already gone. The Georgian guards said they had gone back to Tbilisi (the Georgian capital), but I saw trails going down to the riverbed, and then I thought I saw them emerge on the other side. Gone into Chechnya-at-war and out of history ....
Well, not quite.
Two years later, after September 11, on December 9, 2001, there was a front-page story in The New York Times which I could just sum up as this: they had found "evidence" of al Qaeda and foreign fighters by interviewing a guy who, two years before, on a drizzly October day -- sounds like October 10, 1999, to me -- had been picked up hitchhiking by two white Mitsubishi Land Cruisers filled with foreigners, including two Brits who had gone to join a fundamentalist Muslim group associated with al Qaeda in Chechnya. What? This is Tom Dibb and his friend, working for the HALO Trust. But there it is on the front page of The New York Times. And so it's become that first little building block of somebody's article, which will become somebody else's book, which will become the historical record. There you go. The Chechens, sadly, have left themselves open to this, and they suffer from it to this day.
Tom, on that note, thank you very much for joining us today and sharing with us this story of your odyssey to Chechnya. We hope everybody will go out and buy your book.
Thank you, sir.
Thank you. And thank you very much for joining us for this Conversation with History.
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