Once again about Russia. Russians always come back

Two Russian women of post-Balzac age very accurately described the queue to check in for my Turkish Airlines flight: “Guys, Turkish wives, and you and I, damn it...” Somehow it was like that. Plus I’m on a business trip: to see what they say about us in Antalya and Istanbul.

Passport control employees, stern women in uniform:

—Where are you flying?

- To Turkey.

— Purpose of the trip?

- Tourism.

- Ah, tourism... Well, well. Lenk, did you see? These Russians don't care where to fly!

What has fundamentally changed is the sharp stratification (however, it was felt before). Antalya looks at everything that happens completely differently from Istanbul.

Antalya is a desert. From a rocky cliff in Ataturk Park under a peach sky there is a breathtaking view of completely deserted beaches. The alley stretching along the shore is surrounded by beach cafes. The view is post-apocalyptic: boarded up doors, broken glass, plastic chairs piled up in heaps, garbage in refrigerators... Nobody here understands either Russian or English, except for the abundance of stray dogs and cats lying on the pebbles. Such a Sharik led me to the only open cafe on the entire beach.

Elena, a Russian Moldavian from St. Petersburg, who has an apartment in Antalya, immediately told me: “Oh, the first Russian face in three days. So strange! The season is over, but Russians usually stay here until mid-December, they are not cold! Yesterday I was at the Russian bazaar - no one! And in Migros ( Turkish chain supermarket — A.E.) too, even in the old town you can’t hear Russian speech. And also these stupid planes, there are no direct flights from St. Petersburg, and our border guards made such a face at Donut and me when we took off...” (The donut turned out to be Timur’s son, who works in Antalya, St. Petersburg and Moscow.)

Elena learned Turkish in Moldova, where she lived next to the Gagauz people. “They are the same Turks, the language is very similar, only they were forced to be baptized.”

The bazaar is a chaos of stalls with fruit, nuts, spices, olives, vegetables, cheeses, shoes, clothes, watering cans, clothespins, hair clips and a lot of other junk. An endless web weaving around the city center. Turkish son of Russian father, trading olive oil, told me that there are no Russian sellers at the bazaar, and the Russian buyers are mostly the wives of Turkish husbands, and they speak Turkish.

In big shopping center Migros, a blonde with a braid, carrying in a stroller also a blonde and also with a braid, only a small one, consoled me:

— There are a lot of Russians here, you’ll definitely meet them in the old town.

— Haven’t there been fewer of them due to recent events? Has anything changed?

- What has changed? Or do you think everyone will immediately abandon their children-husbands and run? Of course not! Tell them that everything is fine with us, let them come.

Antalya wakes up after lunch, like many southern cities. On the famous Kaleici descent, I was lured into a shop by the smart Russian-speaking salesman Memet.

— Are Russians good? Are there many of them?

- Of course, good! I have a Russian wife, from Novosibirsk, and a 5-year-old daughter. Now this is... a difficult political situation and the season is over. But they will return in 2-3 months. As soon as the season ends, they will return immediately. Russians always come back.

— What do you think about politics? Did your president do the right thing?

- Of course, that's right. They flew over our territory, they were warned 10 times that they had violated the border, and asked to get in touch. They didn’t answer, our people didn’t even know whose plane was shot down, because there’s a war in Syria. Why did they fly to us?

— What will happen if the Russians impose sanctions against Turkey?
— It’s nothing like with tourists. In 2 months they will remove it anyway, it will cost more for Russia. You go to Khurma, you’ll see everything for yourself.

According to Elena from St. Petersburg, the wealthy Khurma district is “a kind of Turkish Rublyovka, for Russians.” At the entrance to Khurma, there are Russian nesting dolls in the park. The first is taller than human height, and then smaller, smaller. Behind them are mountains. The further into the quarter you go, the more luxurious the houses, the more signs in Russian and women of Slavic appearance. The first to speak to me are two store owners with a sign in two languages: “Akdeniz Butik. Shoes and clothes." The hostesses turn out to be Turkish women from Kazakhstan and in perfect Russian they say:

— There are a lot of Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians in Turkey. Russians are not treated like this anywhere else. Like with brothers and sisters. Just last week we hung up a sign especially in Russian.

— And the government doesn’t prohibit it? Otherwise, you know, they are already writing slogans: “Whoever goes to Turkey is not a patriot...”

- No! Our government is for the Russians! If they had been against it, we would not have hanged him.

Next is a completely surreal sign: “BORSCH + 50 gr + Borodinsky - 20, Grandma’s pies - 3, Herring + Beer - 15, Belyashi - 5, Cheburek + Beer - 16, Dumplings 1 kg - 30.” The cafe is called “Toros café”, three women are smoking at a table, on the bar counter there is a festively packaged brick of Borodinsky with the signature of the FB group “Russians in Antalya”. Cafe owner:

- Yes, we are Russian. We have husbands and children here, we moved here, opened this establishment. Not for tourists, for our locals. There are more Russians living in Khurma than in the rest of Antalya. They love us here. And in connection with latest events began to love even more! Our Turkish neighbors come from the pharmacy across the street, support us, and say that everything will settle down. We looked Russian news, this is some kind of nonsense. They say you can’t fly here, everything is bad here. But here we have nothing like that, everything is bad in Russia, but nothing has changed here. And they say you have a lot of Russian wives. Why are they beating us here, taking away our bread, forcing us to wear a burqa! So look at us and write that they treat us great, there’s my husband standing in a vest - wonderful person. And they feed us well, well, you can see it from us! There are 20,000 Russian wives in Antalya. Here we have good business, and not only here. The Russian young man Alexey brings us Borodino bread and kvass, everything is fine with him too. There were no riots here; if there had been, they would have started with us, they would have come to Khurma, it was just us. If there are dissatisfied people anywhere, then maybe in Istanbul...

Morning Istanbul surrounds me with market noise, ambulance sirens, sounds of prayer and sellers of everything in the world who literally jump out of their shops screaming: “Girl, gold! Sheepskin coats, fur vests, sweets!” It takes me a long time to figure out what switches sellers to Russian faster, - Slavic appearance, dark brown hair or a camera in my hands. To begin with, I fall into the clutches of a jeans dealer: his father is Russian, his mother is from Tajikistan, he works and studies here, but work has become difficult.

“I don’t remember a year like this.” Don’t you see that everything is so beautiful here, there are a lot of shops, the sellers are cheerful, you ask what they have at home, with their families - they will cry. Now there are these sanctions, Russia has stopped buying, goods are standing at the border, nothing is allowed through, everything is spoiling, there is no money. It was so bad, now there are still refugees. The President decided to let Turkmens from Syria come here, but here his people have nothing to eat! And it was impossible to do this with Russia, he will now go to kiss Putin’s feet, apologize, to return it to the way it was. If Russia doesn’t buy, there will be no Russian tourists, we will have nothing to eat. I watch Russian news, they say that the Russian president is waiting for an apology, but ours does not want to apologize. But he will have to.

- You probably Russian television are you looking? - I say.

“Well, yes,” he answers, perplexed. - What kind of person are you?

There are indeed a lot of refugees on the streets, but this does not scare the Uzbek waiter in the nearest cafe. He also did not notice that there are fewer Russians, but he knows for sure that President Erdogan is wrong:

“You couldn’t do this with Russia, they won’t buy vegetables from us now!” I'm from Uzbekistan, so I'm for Russia.

In the evening, at the reception I am met by the owner of the hotel - a Turk who speaks good Russian. Over tea he complains:

— There are no Russians at all now. This is very bad. It’s winter at the resorts now, but we have a season all year round, we have business here, trade. No trade - no hotels. People like to stay here because the location is good - metro, shops, cargo nearby, the center. It's unclear how this will end. They, of course, violated our borders in vain, this is impossible, the military did the right thing in shooting down. But what should people do now?

He watches Turkish television. “What else?”

“The biggest problem, the biggest problem, is Limonov,” he says suddenly.

— How do you know Limonov?

- Everyone here knows. There are many, many lemons standing at the border that will spoil. And more tomatoes. They don't allow tomatoes. What is their fault?

— What are your memories of Russian guests?

- Yes normal people, almost exactly like us. No conflicts, nothing.

- Will there be a war? - I ask.

- What are you talking about, what kind of war?! Who needs us as much as the Russians? And who still needs Russians?..

"...The biggest mistake is to neglect the Russians.

Offend the Russians.

Never offend Russians.

Russians are never so weak

as you think.

God forbid that the Russians be expelled or something taken away from the Russians.

Russians always come back.

The Russians will come back and get theirs back.

But when the Russians return,

They destroy everything in their path.

Don't offend the Russians.

Otherwise, when the Russians return to earth with the graves of their ancestors,

those living on this earth will envy their dead ancestors..."

Excellent book by German Sadulayev

German Sadulaev. Wolf Leap

Essays political history Chechnya from the Khazar Kaganate to the present day,

M.: Alpina non-fiction, 2012.

There are books that are ahead of their time. Let's do without listings. Everything is in sight. There are books that it would be better not to write. And there are simply written at the wrong time. This, in my subjective opinion, is the book by German Sadulayev “Wolf Leap: Essays on the Political History of Chechnya from the Khazar Kaganate to the Present Day.” The author is half Chechen, half Russian. The only true alloy of blood for an attempt at an objective study of Russian-Chechen relations. Why not on time? Very simple. Neither Russians nor Chechens need this book. It will be too unpleasant for both to read. The issue of targeting is very important, we will return to it later.

Why won't Chechens like the book? The point is not even in the name, although it is clearly not to the taste of a devout Muslim to consider the Vainakh ethnic group to have emerged from Judaic Khazaria. For the first time in Russian literature, Sadulayev asserts commonness Chechen people, debunks the myths that have been established in the consciousness of this ethnic group. Yes, they are not made of iron, not of stone; their intransigence is overblown; The slogan “freedom or death” is conventional, invented by the Russian intelligentsia of the 19th century, absorbed by the Chechens at the level of national egoism, but it is alien to the nature of the Vainakh tribes. They ordinary people, from flesh and blood, who want to live peacefully, raise children, work on their land, and so that no one interferes in their internal affairs. They will decide for themselves. Good or bad - it doesn't matter. The main thing is yourself.

Why won't Russians like the book? Lack of historical correctness. Let’s make a reservation right away: by Russian we will understand the entire Russian-speaking population that identifies itself with this culture. Sadulaev harshly and decisively strips the heroic shine from everyone Caucasian wars from tsarist times to the present day. Russian statehood has been sticking its snout into things that aren’t its own for three hundred years, poking around when no one asks it to. He imposes his rules where no one needs them, arranges genocide of the local population without any historical justification, populates Chechnya with Russians, and then leaves them to their fate, gets into the internal fight of Chechen national movements and destroys everyone in a row, without calculating the bearish force. He leaves without a quick slurp, having proven nothing to anyone.

Returning to the question of the addressee, it becomes extremely important: for whom did German Sadulaev write this book? Certainly not for Russians and not for Chechens. And at the same time: only for them. For us.

And now even more important question: why this book? It completely contradicts the official, state-approved point of view on the history of Russian-Chechen relations. She contradicts this point of view and caustically ridicules it. History consists of bare facts, but it is always written by the winners, giving the facts the necessary interpretation. Today, this book is equally unpleasant for both Chechens and Russians. After all, we are accustomed to the fact that there must always be a winner, there are always right and wrong, treacherous and fair. And Sadulayev tells us: no, there is only historical processes. How to explain this to a soldier left without a leg, who drinks half the night, and in the morning begs for alms in the subway? How to tell this to a resident of the village of Novye Aldy, in front of whose eyes neighbors were shot? How? Is it unpleasant to remember this? Again closed topic?.. But the point is not that remembering is unpleasant, something else is more important: you cannot forget.

And at the same time, deep down you understand: Sadulayev is right, a thousand times right. Deadly ambivalence.

And yet there is something that is unconditionally captivating in the research of the half-Russian, half-Chechens. Subtle, unspoken, almost lyrical love to both peoples. Mutual recognition of their greatness. And a passionate, beyond rules and logic, desire for the brotherhood of these peoples. There is no warm response to this work either in the press, or on television, or on the radio. They don't even discuss it on the Internet. And they won’t discuss it. Everything is calm in Chechnya. The question is closed. Closed, but not resolved.

Two Russian women of post-Balzac age very accurately described the queue to check in for my Turkish Airlines flight: “Men, Turkish wives, and you and I, damn it...” Somehow that’s how it was. Plus I’m on a business trip: to see what they say about us in Antalya and Istanbul.

Passport control employees, stern women in uniform:

—Where are you flying?

- To Turkey.

— Purpose of the trip?

- Tourism.

- Ah, tourism... Well, well. Lenk, did you see? These Russians don't care where to fly!

What has fundamentally changed is the sharp stratification (however, it was felt before). Antalya looks at everything that happens completely differently from Istanbul.

Judging by the Botox and tattoo on her lips from 15 meters away, I unmistakably identified the lone visitor at the table as Russian.

A Russian Moldavian from St. Petersburg, Elena, who has an apartment in Antalya, immediately told me: “Oh, the first Russian face in three days. So strange! The season is over, but Russians usually stay here until mid-December, they are not cold! Yesterday I was at the Russian bazaar - no one! And in Migros (Turkish chain supermarket - A.E.) too, even in the old town you can’t hear Russian speech. And also these stupid planes, there are no direct flights from St. Petersburg, and our border guards made such a face at Donut and me when we took off...” (Donut turned out to be son Timur, who works in Antalya, St. Petersburg and Moscow.)

Elena learned Turkish in Moldova, where she lived next to the Gagauz people. “They are the same Turks, the language is very similar, only they were forced to be baptized.”

The bazaar is a chaos of stalls with fruit, nuts, spices, olives, vegetables, cheeses, shoes, clothes, watering cans, clothespins, hair clips and a lot of other junk. An endless web weaving around the city center. The Turkish son of a Russian father, who sells olive oil, told me that there are no Russian sellers at the bazaar, and the Russian buyers are mostly the wives of Turkish husbands, and they speak Turkish.

In the large Migros shopping center, a blonde with a braid, carrying in a stroller also a blonde and also with a braid, only a small one, consoled me:

— There are a lot of Russians here, you’ll definitely meet them in the old town.

— Haven’t there been fewer of them due to recent events? Has anything changed?

- What has changed? Or do you think everyone will immediately abandon their children-husbands and run? Of course not! Tell them that everything is fine with us, let them come.

Antalya wakes up in the afternoon, like many southern cities. On the famous Kaleici descent, I was lured into a shop by the smart Russian-speaking salesman Memet.

— Are Russians good? Are there many of them?

— What do you think about politics? Did your president do the right thing?

— What will happen if the Russians impose sanctions against Turkey?

— It’s nothing like with tourists. In 2 months they will remove it anyway, it will cost more for Russia. You go to Khurma, you’ll see everything for yourself.

— And the government doesn’t prohibit it? Otherwise, you know, they are already writing slogans: “Whoever goes to Turkey is not a patriot...”

- No! Our government is for the Russians! If they had been against it, we would not have hanged him.

- Yes, we are Russian. We have husbands and children here, we moved here, opened this establishment. Not for tourists, for our locals. There are more Russians living in Khurma than in the rest of Antalya. They love us here. And in connection with recent events, they began to love even more! Our Turkish neighbors come from the pharmacy across the street, support us, and say that everything will settle down. We watched Russian news, this is some kind of nonsense. They say you can’t fly here, everything is bad here. But here we have nothing like that, everything is bad in Russia, but nothing has changed here. And they say you have a lot of Russian wives. Why are they beating us here, taking away our bread, forcing us to wear a burqa! So look at us and write that they treat us great, there’s my husband standing in a vest - a wonderful person. And they feed us well, well, you can see it from us! There are 20,000 Russian wives in Antalya. We have good business here, and not only here. The Russian young man Alexey brings us Borodino bread and kvass, everything is fine with him too. There were no riots here; if there had been, they would have started with us, they would have come to Khurma, it was just us. If there are dissatisfied people anywhere, then maybe in Istanbul...

Morning Istanbul surrounds me with market noise, ambulance sirens, sounds of prayer and sellers of everything in the world who literally jump out of their shops screaming: “Girl, gold! Sheepskin coats, fur vests, sweets!” It takes me a long time to figure out what switches sellers to Russian faster - Slavic appearance, dark brown hair or a camera in my hands. To begin with, I fall into the clutches of a jeans dealer: his father is Russian, his mother is from Tajikistan, he works and studies here, but work has become difficult.

— You probably watch Russian television? - I say.

“Well, yes,” he answers, perplexed. - What kind of person are you?

There are indeed a lot of refugees on the streets, but this does not scare the Uzbek waiter in the nearest cafe. He also did not notice that there are fewer Russians, but he knows for sure that President Erdogan is wrong:

“You couldn’t do this with Russia, they won’t buy vegetables from us now!” I'm from Uzbekistan, so I'm for Russia.

In the evening, at the reception I am met by the owner of the hotel - a Turk who speaks good Russian. Over tea he complains:

He watches Turkish television. “What else?”

“The biggest problem, the biggest problem, is Limonov,” he says suddenly.

— How do you know Limonov?

- Everyone here knows. There are many, many lemons standing at the border that will spoil. And more tomatoes. They don't allow tomatoes. What is their fault?

— What are your memories of Russian guests?

- Yes, normal people, almost exactly like us. No conflicts, nothing.

- Will there be a war? - I ask.

- What are you talking about, what kind of war?! Who needs us as much as the Russians? And who still needs Russians?

Anastasia Egorova

The fact that this was written by a Chechen is especially important.

"...The biggest mistake is to neglect the Russians.

Consider Russians weak.

Offend the Russians.

Never offend Russians.

Russians are never so weak

as you think.

God forbid that the Russians be expelled or something taken away from the Russians.

Russians always come back.

The Russians will come back and get theirs back.

But when the Russians return,

they do not know how to calculate force and apply it proportionately.

They destroy everything in their path.

Don't offend the Russians.

Otherwise, when the Russians return to earth with the graves of their ancestors,

those living on this earth will envy their dead ancestors..."

German Sadulaev

Evaluation of information

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Offtopic. The material is not aftershock in form, but not in spirit. At the discretion of the editors, in short.

In the mid-eighties, gold was found in completely remote places on the border of the Chinese Gobi and the Mongolian Altai. In a huge deposit of more than five hundred tons of metal. The gold was not alluvial, which could be washed in trays and butars, but indigenous: dissolved in a giant granite massif. The massif stuck out from the slope of the gentle South Altai ridge, like a boomerang of a god crashing into the ground, and went deeper into the ground than the drilling rigs could reach. Ten grams of gold were smeared in each ton of this monolithic mass.

The geological party that found the deposit consisted of two types of people. Five leading geologists, who managed the field geochemical laboratory and marked the well grid, came to Altai from Soviet Union. The remaining ten had Mongolian citizenship, but they were not Mongolians by blood, but were Kazakhs and their parents lived in the very west of the country, on the border with the USSR. The Mongol herders did not like them and once almost killed one of the laboratory assistants returning from Tsetseg in a UAZ. In fact, they would have killed him if the party leader had not gone out to meet him and opened fire from the Stechkin, without wasting time on empty talk. Nine-millimeter bullets proved to be an excellent life-saving weapon.

The aimag authorities built a small village of five houses, a laboratory and administrative building and several cabins on a rocky plateau next to a granite ridge. Geologists equipped the premises with everything necessary for exploration and analysis of ores. The leader of the party, having sworn something to someone in Chita, received at his disposal a satellite reception system, which settled in a remote kung with a ball of a protective casing and made it possible to watch and listen to almost the whole world - if, of course, you knew the coordinates of the corresponding satellites.

The party drilled, assessed and described the deposit. In addition to gold, the granite contained a lot of silver and copper, which tripled its value, and in the surrounding rocks there were rich cassiterite and pyrite veins. The mountain was covered with numerous wells, and several tens of tons of core and surface samples accumulated in the field laboratory. After reading the preliminary report, written by the party leader on a carbon copy typewriter, it was quite possible to become mentally damaged by the rosy prospects.

All this took five years. Every year, the party leader with his deputy and boxes of papers and samples flew to Ulaanbaatar, the deputy and the boxes remained there, and the leader and papers went to Moscow. Each time he returned from Moscow more and more gloomy. Finally, at the end of 1992, he arrived and ordered the work to be curtailed. Due to the liquidation of their expedition itself. No one else in Moscow needed her. For those who found themselves at the trough, there was enough gold within Russia, and what’s more, in the state gold and foreign exchange fund.

The geologists collected their belongings and thought about what to do with the village and equipment. On the one hand, judging by the events seen on TV in their homeland, this equipment, and gold itself, is unlikely to be needed by anyone in the foreseeable future. On the other hand, taking an example from the best of the newborn domestic businessmen and selling machines, a laboratory and a satellite system to the Chinese across the border, giving the Mongolian border guards some Chinese vodka, somehow did not turn my heart. It would be too simple, and the people who were looking for uranium, tungsten and gold in the remote deserts simple solutions avoided.

The party leader came up with a plan. He ordered all systems of the village to be mothballed. I agreed with the somoni head on the creation of a local enterprise. He transferred to his account all the property of the expedition and one set of documentation on the field. He signed an order appointing the senior and most experienced Kazakh geologist as its director. And he ordered him to wait for the leadership to return, keeping the trust intact and in strict secrecy. The field turned into a separate independent structure and was managed by people who knew how to obey orders and carry them out regardless of the circumstances.

The Russians left, and the Kazakhs remained to live at the foot of the golden ridge. Since the expedition stopped paying them wages, they began to make a living by repairing equipment and made peace with the Mongols, who didn’t understand a damn thing about engines. Then the four youngest Kazakhs went home to Altai and returned with their wives and children. The received order prohibited the use of the village's property and they lived in yurts. There was not enough technical work for everyone, so the younger ones began to raise sheep purchased from the Mongols and finally ceased to differ from the local population. Apparently, their company was the only geological exploration enterprise in the world, equipped with equipment, highly qualified personnel - and engaged primarily in the procurement of sheep skins and repairing trucks.

And every day they patrolled around the territory of the field, from the central site of the village to the last well. Kenzhegazi, a senior geologist who became the director, was very afraid that something would happen to the village - it would burn from a lightning strike, for example - and the report materials would be lost. He was not afraid of the equipment - they had delivered it once, they would deliver it again - but he was responsible for information worth billions of dollars, recorded on vulnerable paper. If it had been possible, he would have carved the text of the reports and maps on the granite body of the formation itself, but, firstly, he did not have such an opportunity and, secondly, this would not solve the problem of secrecy. Therefore, he compiled a second set of maps of the territory and carefully applied all the changes to it - from blown away by the wind well pole to a new stream bed passing between the projections of ore bodies. I went to the aimak center, cheaply sold a gold nugget found in a quartz core to a Chinese reseller, and instead of a used jeep, I bought a monstrously expensive photocopier and a Chinese gasoline generator. I brought it all home, put it in the yurt, spent three months copying documents, typing up inventories, and eventually received a duplicate set of materials. He put the thick folders in a drawer and hid them securely. It was pure idiocy, but it made him feel safer.

Kenzhegazi had no idea that the Russian party leader and his deputy were accidentally killed in Novosibirsk by local bandits, with whom they had quarreled in a restaurant while celebrating their return to their homeland. Containers with geological exploration reports and rock samples stood for three years in the dead end of the Chita railway, until they were cleared to transport some things. Documents marked “SS” went to the landfill, and pieces of granite stuffed with gold were poured on top of them. Full information No one else had information about the deposit, and the scattered deposit still had to be found by institutions and systematized, and in Russia in 1995 no one was going to do this.

Then the ninjas came. They moved along the cassiterite veins, knocking out the richest places with hammers and taking what they collected to the Chinese in two old trucks. Tin was mentioned in reports and Kenzhegazi considered rich tin ores promising for development from Russian territory. From his point of view, the veins were the same property of the enterprise as a kung with an antenna, a box with copies of reports and a diesel generator. In addition, he did not like the Chinese for personal reasons, and the ninja worked closely with them. The Kazakhs met the ninjas in the steppe, laid them face down in the dust and explained that they could not go further. Because tin will become very expensive in the future. Unacceptably expensive.

The ninjas are gone. And they returned a week later. With guns. And there were almost two dozen of them. Kenjegazi, spitting out his front teeth, agreed that tin was not very expensive after all. Then he stole a UAZ and drove to the border guards. It was not far to go, he returned much faster and also not alone. One ninja was shot, the rest stood in a deep, cramped hole for two days. Then the police took them away and promised to shoot them for spying in the border zone. The ninja gave away all the money they had earned from the Chinese, one of the trucks, left and never returned. Kenzhegazi cheaply inserted new teeth in the regional center and terrified the cattle breeders with a polished stainless grin.

In the summer of 1999, a search expedition of a large geological exploration company arrived in the soum. The company had already licensed almost ten percent of the country for geological exploration and was wondering what else it could retain.

Kenjegazi was deep in thought. Unlike ninjas, Canadians couldn't be put in the dust or put in a hole. Firstly, because they would have been immediately released from the pit and Kenzhegazi put in their place. And secondly, because Kenzhegazi respected professionals doing the same thing as him. However, the deposit had to be preserved. While the Canadians were digging in the distant eastern border somon, but sooner or later geochemical analyzes and satellite images will lead them to the granite massif. And when they see the village, geological trenches and well network, it will become impossible to keep them away. The area will be licensed in Ulaanbaatar for detailed geological exploration, equipment will be brought in, security will be installed, and when the Russians sort out their political mess and return, a huge plant will be waiting for them, grinding granite into gold, silver and copper for export to Canada. And only he will be to blame for this. Kenzhegazi remembered his winter internship on the Taimyr Peninsula twenty years ago, imagined what it would be like to mine tungsten in fifty-degree frost - without waiting for dawn, he rushed to the regional center at breakneck speed, came to the administration library in the morning and began to methodically take notes on collections of documents.

The Canadians really studied the pictures well. Within a week, their Land Rovers, packed with equipment, were trundling along the rutted road to the west. They walked fifty kilometers in one day; overloaded vehicles could not travel faster through such terrain. There were still about sixty kilometers left to the ridge when an unexpected obstacle was discovered on the way. The entire steppe, from edge to edge, was filled with a continuous mass of sheep. The herd slowly moved east, towards the cars. The driver of the front Land Rover beeped, then stopped releasing the horn altogether, but the phlegmatic animals were not afraid of the thin, nasal signal. The column got stuck in the herd, as if in a swamp. There was no end in sight to this stream; the sheep barely wandered, sometimes lowering their heads and plucking dusty grass bushes. The Canadian spoke about local livestock farming and turned off the engine.

Five hours later, when the geologists were tired of cursing and fell into a gloomy stupor, from somewhere over the horizon four horsemen came to them through the sheep battle formations. One of the visitors explained to the student translator accompanying the geologists that the Canadians had chosen the route poorly and ended up in the middle of a gathering point for local livestock breeders. To the question of how much longer these damn animals can gather, the answer was as clear as day: who knows, not even a tenth of it has come yet. Canadians unfamiliar with the practice of sheep breeding imagined a herd ten times larger in size and became completely disheartened. The visitor advised us to turn the cars around and try our luck in a month. After which he lit a fire and fed the geologists amazing shurpa with wild onions.

In the morning, the victims of livestock farming turned their jeeps around and went to finish geochemistry at same place. For some reason, the herd did not bother them at all. When the cars disappeared over the horizon, the first herdsman who met them thanked the other three, they went to feed the animals that had starved during the “siege” to their former pastures, and he himself with his small flock moved towards the village.

A month later the Canadians returned. They didn’t meet any sheep along the way, but ten kilometers from the low mountains, the column’s path was blocked by a dusty, rattling UAZ. Got out of the UAZ big man with a rifle on his shoulder and, clanking his steel teeth, in poor English he asked what they had forgotten in such an inhospitable place. I studied the documents presented and advised me to get lost the further the better. Because the license for geological exploration in this area belongs to a completely different company and the Canadians have already entered its territory about five kilometers. Then the “owner of the steppe” showed a copy of the license with exclusive rights issued three days ago. He listened to sour congratulations, straightened his rifle and asked whether he should call the police in order to comply with the law and whether the guests were all right with the steering mechanisms in their cars.

Kenzhegazi was saved by the wild Mongolian legislation and the complete confusion that reigned in the Bureau natural resources. Arriving in Ulaanbaatar and getting to the BPR, he immediately discovered two pleasant surprises: firstly, no one there remembered or knew him, for ten years there was not a trace left of the old personnel of the Ministry of Mining Industry, and new democratically-minded administrators in they knew less about mineral resources than pigs about jewelry. And secondly, the law on mineral resources, adopted three years ago and passed by his attention in desert exile, made it possible to license anything and anywhere very quickly and for mere pennies, without bothering with proof of reserves or any formalities whatsoever. Ulaanbaatar was being built up with neat red brick cottages, brand new jeeps were rolling around everywhere and there was a smell of easy money in the air. In this invigorating atmosphere, Kenzhegazi registered an impressive allotment of territory for the undivided use of his small company, which, just in case, included promising, from his owner’s point of view, areas on the flanks of the main field. Not a single living soul in the BPR even thought to ask why a gloomy man who looked like a criminal needed a piece of rocky Altai slopes and what he intended to do there, and if it did, the officials were afraid to ask a man with such a stainless smile. They just took me down for the urgency of the registration. The attack of world capitalism was repulsed with virtually no losses and no one still knew anything about gold.

Kenzhegazi returned to the field, drove the Canadians out of there and thought hard. What he saw in the capital gave rise to gloomy thoughts. The Kazakh, despite his Mongolian citizenship, always considered himself more of a citizen of the USSR, considered Mongolia itself to be the sixteenth republic, and the invasion of the country by Western mining companies looked to him no less terrible and unthinkable than the entry of a NATO tank army into the Kharkov region. Judging by the map he saw in the BPR, the entire central part of Mongolia had already fallen to the onslaught of international corporations; the industrial enclaves of Darkhan, Erdenet and Choibalsan stuck out as small islands in the sea of Western licenses, and even the largest hundred-ton indigenous gold deposit of Boroo, which in his memory was included in the production plan "Glavvostokzolota" was now being developed by some Australian charaga. Moreover, something completely unimaginable happened: the top secret strategic uranium tar in the sands of the south-eastern Gobi was not looked for by Atomredmet search teams, but by Canadians and the same Australians with International Uranium logos on their jackets. To top off the misfortunes, from nature and society, apparently, not only his small expedition with its precious mountain, but even the almighty Ministry of Geosciences of the USSR itself disappeared. All this spoke of one thing: the USSR in general and Russia in particular abandoned all positions in Central Asia and it is unclear when they will be returned.

How should the order be carried out in such strange circumstances, Kenzhegazi found it difficult to say, but it was absolutely clear to him that this adventure could not continue for long. It was impossible to stop the expansion of huge corporations with the help of his ten Kazakhs. Sooner or later, someone will find out about the composition and quantity of ore on his site; in extreme cases, he will determine from a satellite the presence large deposit, and then the fate of his expedition and the field will be decided quickly and radically. The license would be taken away by any legal or illegal means, they would all be given a kick in the ass, and the fact that now there was no one to take advantage of the riches of the golden mountain anyway did not console Kenzhegazi at all. Because now there is no one to do it, but it will still pass ten years and the Russians will return. They always come back. In any case, for now it was necessary, if not stopped, then, if possible, to slow down the advance of Western expeditions into the depths of the somon, and also, if possible, to find the legal successors of Mingeo and finally transfer one and a half thousand tons of the gold equivalent to the rightful owners.

In subsequent years he became very interested political activity. Wandering around the shepherds' camps with " educational program", the geologist spoke with all his might about the horrors of "imperialist mining" - about clouds of poisonous dust covering herds, about rivers flowing with acid, about wells, the water from which dissolves the intestines, about ravines spreading from quarries - and with these sermons he had a bucolic image life wild success. Demonstrations of the Mongols-herders turned out to be a very effective means in the fight against the “imperialist colonialists”; herds of sheep, according to the once tested scenario, blocked any attempts by Canadians and Australians to conduct geological exploration within a radius of the next hundred kilometers. An employee of the Asia Gold PR department who arrived. to strengthen relations with the public, he was dragged out of the car right in the square in front of the administration building and almost strangled with a lasso. The police took him away from the “environmental party activists” at the last moment, the activists spent a month under lock and key, but the Australian lost all desire to establish relations with the local population. once and for all.

The Russians returned earlier than Kenzeghazi expected. Four years later, a call rang in the office, and his assistant answered the phone. The caller spoke a language that the Kazakh had not heard for more than ten years. A man called from Moscow, asked to connect him with the director of the field and could not understand why his interlocutor’s voice was breaking.

Kenzhegazi was at a rally in the regional center. Having learned that his twelve-year odyssey had come to an end, he stopped mid-sentence in the middle of a fiery speech, got into a UAZ and drove off to the steppe for half a day. Then he came back and spent the rest of the day re-reading his copy of the old report. He wanted to meet Russians in good shape and not get confused by numbers when talking.

How was he found? By pure chance. A large Russian corporation acquired a Siberian branch geological institute. In the process of inventorying documents, an elderly Mingeo expert came across a report on the analysis of pieces of granite with an abnormally high content of literally “everything good,” with the possible exception of platinum. Neither the organization that ordered the analysis, nor the people who worked with it were no longer within reach, or even alive, but the deputy director of the institute said that his predecessor had mentioned some incredible gold deposit, discovered just before the collapse of the country in a remote place. region of Mongolia and that this granite is from there. Another year passed in search of scattered materials preserved in other sources and living eyewitnesses from the Chita and Irkutsk expeditions who remembered the equipment of the parties to Mongolia. Information about the areas of activity of these parties was obtained from the archives of the SVR, which contained old KGB reports on the search for strategically important minerals. Finally, certain time it was necessary to compare the vigorous activity of the Green Party, who had come from nowhere in the remote steppe, with the area of probable work of Soviet geologists and to correlate the personalities of the leadership of the newly-minted party with the names remaining on the forms of old Irkutsk applications for the study of samples.

The specialists who came from Russia were most shocked by two things. Oily, shiny diesel engines are being preserved - in a country where any ownerless unit is dismantled for parts within a day. And the sampling procedure - when the shepherds, smoked and tanned to black, jumped off their horses, without a single unnecessary movement, handled the pneumatic drill, carefully placed the core into bags and filled out the accompanying documents. Because, as in the famous joke, “there were, damn it, very good geologists.”