Surreal, the Chechens say repeatedly, we live in a surreal world. Mostly this is an attempt to describe something terrible and unimaginable, but by now, you can only say that Grosny has reached a new dimension of the fantastic. What other city looks like Dresden 1945 in one corner – an urban cadaver of rubble which stretches for kilometres – and in the other like St. Tropez – with white boulevards and beauties in stilettos? Where else does the head of government flirt one day with a "federal sharia" and the next with the winner of a beauty contest? In what other streets do the houses still bear the war-time plea – "peaceful people live here" – and two blocks away, posters for Ayurveda treatments?

Grosny is intoxicated. The city is reinventing itself, with all the senselessness of a city that wants to forget war. Building brigades are pounding housing blocks out of the ground, schools, hospitals, even a church. In recent months Grosny has welcomed rock stars, a wrestling championship, a book fair and the circus FlikFlak. One of the main routes out of town is strewn with watermelons and inflatable paddling pools in blue and pink. If a burning giraffe were suddenly to appear on the horizon, no one would bat an eyelid.

Vachit Saurayev is just back from Grosny; now he's standing in the oil-paint haze of his studio in Goity, in pancake-flat North Chechnya. He says: "Grosny is pure Surrealism," and his friend Abu Pashajev laughs as if he'd just made a truly surprising point. Anyway they both owe a lot to Surrealism. They cite Dali and de Chirico as a source of inspiration, although this influence is not as strong as the war itself. "It was only with the onset of war that I became a great artist," says Saurayev without false modesty. "But of course you have to stay alive."

There was a time when he used to paint bunches of flowers, fat bouquets, but today he slaps a lump of brown paint onto the canvas where a red abyss glows below yellow rafters. It could be ruins, it's certainly not flowers. The two of them would probably attract attention anywhere: the crooked-backed Saurayev with his greasy felt cap and pilots' goggles and the gaunt Pashayev with his blazing eyes, wolfish grin and propeller-like gestures. But in Chechnya, where the majority of artists concentrate on lovingly executed renderings of defence towers, these two are freaks.

People find Pashayev's paintings uncanny, and that is quite an achievement in a place like this. His ink drawings are populated by faceless creatures on cracking moonscapes and bodiless heads spitting blood. On one of the countless raids on his house a Russian soldier asked him if he was right in the head, and Pashayev said, no, a beam had fallen on him. People have been killed in Chechnya who have made better jokes, but Pashayev plays the fool, the holy fool, who obstinately insists that it's possible to have a purely artistic relationship with war.

But there is no war any more, even the Chechens say that the post-war era has begun and even among artists few take such a sinister view of the situation as Pashayev."Grosny is made of shadows and dust," he mumbles. "They build houses on the bodies of the dead." Or Saurayev: "Construction, construction – and art?" he murmurs aggressively. "There are no workshops, no galleries, no public. And we have to drag the paint over here from Moscow!"

This is true and false. There is art. Saurayev's paintings hang in the reading room of the library, which although housed temporarily in a private home, is still full to bursting every morning. As far as content goes, it must be said that dreary monoculture has the upper hand. Poetry, art and songs revolve almost exclusively around two themes: the unrivalled merits of the Russian-installed prime minister, Ramzan Kadyrov, and the unrivalled merits of his father, President Akhmad-Khadji Kadyrov. Father Kadyrov was blown to bits by rebels in a football stadium two years ago, and his son was promptly made premier and he probably will be president, too, soon.

All the same, the artist's homages work well with the new Kadyrov squares, the Kadyrov Mosque, the oversized Kadyrov portraits everywhere and the Kadyrov fan club enthusiasts, who marched through the renovated section of Grosny on the 100th day after Ramzan's inauguration wearing T-shirts bearing the image of the Chechen, looking more like Che Guevara than his usual dismissive self.

Ruzlan Chakischev, director of the Nuradilov Theatre, is pressed for time, because he has to prepare his Kadyrov piece by August 23. That is the day Kadyrov Sr. would have turned 55, so Kadyrov Jr. is throwing a huge party. Two years ago, the theatre was a ruin; the ensemble performed in schools and gyms which themselves were in ruins. Now rebuilding is under way, supported by the Kadyrov fund. They have already performed "The Little Prince" in one small room. The next big thing will be the Kadyrov epic. "It is a government commission. We're getting half a million roubles," says Chakischev. So it would have been pretty difficult to turn down? - "Turn down? But the piece was our idea in the first place!"

Even if you look at the Kadyrov cult as another manifestation of Russia's Putin cult, even if you recognize that in the other republics of the Caucasus similar governors from Moscow celebrate a similar cult of personality, even then, the cynical thought can't be suppressed: All that suffering and dying - for this joke? Have the Chechens really fought two wars against the giant, barbarous Russia, provoked it and acted against it and paid with their own blood for their deeds - only to throw themselves at a Chechen puppet from the Kremlin?

"He is our Petain. Don't think people love him. They are just dead tired," sighs Usam Baisajev, looking a bit more lanky and down on his luck than usual. Baisajev works for Memorial, a human rights organization and one of the very few groups that has not profited from the new developments. Because hardly anyone talks with Memorial any more. Not that there are no more human rights violations. "We have evidence that Ramzan Kadyrov personally tortured people, but we cannot publish this evidence," says Baisajev. "Who would guarantee the safety of the witnesses?"

The violence has turned inward, like an abscess. Lingering rebels still carry out skirmishes with Russian troops, but they do that in neighbouring republics, too. The number of Chechens who disappear in so-called filtration camps in Russia or in the hands of the Russian military is dropping.

But in Chechnya, the day of reckoning has begun. The fact that Kadyrov includes former criminals and rebels in the ranks of his bodyguards, who commit murder to remove debtors or witnesses to crimes, who kidnap families of rebels in order to blackmail the fighters - all this is the triumph of a Russian politics of Chechnyization, a situation that leaves an old actress groaning: "Putin pitted us against each other. He is so clever." Some people hand over all their money to carry out a vendetta, she says: "Here, you are nothing if you do not avenge your own." The struggle against the Russians unified the Chechens. But the internal struggle eats away at them."

And some debts will never be paid. As can be seen, for example, in the fact that the Museum in Grosny has the tragic distinction of being the first museum in Europe to be destroyed since 1945 - but no one wants to know about it. Strictly speaking, it was two buildings in one, the Museum for Fine Arts, with 3,500 works and the Museum of Local History, with a quarter million items. But today, the rubble in the provisionally patched together building in the centre of Grosny accumulates in witness to a singular barbarity. Behind walls of cardboard are stored sculpted torsos and a shattered Chinese vase, sewing machines, carpets, jars, and in the midst of all this sits director Vaicha Astalov, acting all secretive. Yes, certainly, everything is lost. Only two paintings are still in Grosny. - Can one see them? - "No way. Security, you understand." - But what paintings are you talking about? - This he cannot reveal under any circumstances. Security...

The Museum of Grosny was no Louvre. One or two Repins hung on its walls, along with Roubaud's "The Seizure of Shamil" from 1859, a few Italian works, and otherwise Russian or regional artists such as Verechagin, Gagarin, Sacharov and Gorbatov. And in fact it did represent the links between Caucasus and European high culture. At least for some. For others, in the chaos of the pre-war period when Chechnya declared its independence, it instead represented booty. There is a rumour that the wife of the Chechen President sold an entire collection to the wife of the later Georgian President Gamsachurdia. But it is no rumour that some rebels and any number of common criminals regularly looted the building.

He, Astalov, can say nothing about this. He didn't take over as director until 1996. So much was gone already by then. But why was the rest not evacuated? "I tried," says Astalov, "I went to the minister of culture, Sakayev, every day." He wanted to take the holdings to neighbouring Ingushetia, but Sakayev would not agree. Independent Chechnya was not recognised by the Russians, there was a danger that they would never get the works back. Astalov suggested North Chechnya, but Sakayev was worried about a Russian attack and refused. The only remaining option was the mountains but Astalov did not want that because it would have meant dividing up the holdings. And so everything stayed where it was until January 2000, when a bomb tore the house apart from the roof to the cellar.

In the meantime, 98 works have been restored in the Grabar Art Conservation Centre in Moscow, in as much as they can be restored - which applies to about half of them. Now, 75 works are stored in the Russian State Museum and Exhibition Centre. Until, that is, director Astalov's building once again has a sturdy roof, and a floor and a guard - or until the planned museum complex in Grosny, a gem with a national library and philharmonic, is finished. At this point, the land still houses a new bazaar with a shiny blue roof. That would have to be torn down. On the other hand: all this rebuilding, tearing down, rebuilding - common in a normal republic - would be an absolute sensation for Grosny.


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The article originally appeared in German in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on August 8, 2006

Sonja Zekri is a journalist and editor at the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Translation: lp and Toby Axelrod.