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By late 1999, the use of zachistka in the press and everyday speech had reached an infectious and alarming level. From September 1999 to 2005, zachistka appeared 787 times in the headlines of Moscow’s central newspapers in relation to the second war in Chechnya. In the text of the papers, it appeared 10,730 times. From the verb zachistit’, zachistka was used in the literal sense to describe the cleaning of pipes, the sanding or smoothing out of metal, the cleaning of paint or corrosion from surfaces . . . .^[19] It was linked euphemistically to the idea of cleaning out human beings—in this case, suspected Chechen rebel fighters and their alleged civilian supporters. No longer neutral or inoffensive, zachistka became congruent with the practice of gathering or sweeping, in the literal sense, Chechen men and women into fields, factories, or schools to be checked, detained, or executed, usually on the outskirts of a targeted village. In this respect, the idea of harvesting or cleansing the land is reminiscent of the metaphor adopted in Hitler’s Germany—that of völkische Flurbereinigung (cleansing of the soil).^[20]

The resemblance to the Serb word etnicko ciscenje (ethnical cleansing), coined in the wars of the former Yugoslavia some years earlier, was, indeed, striking. Not only because of its etymological origin, but also because of its meaning. Another linguistic root of zachistka is the Russian word chistka, which means purge. Stalin’s repression in the 1930s in which hundreds of thousands of party members, intellectuals, and kulaks were liquidated was called Velikaya Chistka (Great Purge). The word zachistka therefore evokes a double association: on the one hand with the practices of ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, on the other hand with the purges of Russia’s Stalinist past. We should, however, not forget that ethnic cleansing, especially of nonwhite Muslim peoples, has old historical roots in Russia. John Dunlop, for instance, reminds us that “in May 1856, Count Kiselev, minister of state domains, informed officials in the Crimea that Alexander [tsar Alexander II] was interested in ‘cleansing’ (Kiselev used the verb oshishchat’) Crimea of as many Tatars as possible.”^[21] That the tsarist empire was interested in annexing foreign lands, but not in annexing foreign peoples, was expressed by the famous remark of a tsarist minister that “Russia needs Armenia, but she has no need of Armenians.”^[22]

In 2005 the Russian human rights organization Memorial estimated the total death toll of civilians due to the zachistki between two thousand and three thousand.^[23] But the zachistki were not only murderous events, they were equally economic events. They were well organized looting operations. Oleg Orlov, one of the leaders of Memorial, wrote that “these operations are usually accompanied by crimes against the local population. Robberies on a mass scale are the most common and basic form of war crime. This doesn’t just mean that the troops or police take people’s money. These are organised operations in which, quite openly, right in front of the local population, people’s property is loaded onto trucks or armoured personnel carriers. This is not just a matter of a few undisciplined soldiers and clearly sanctioned by the officers. For the military, it’s a business.”^[24] Corruption and looting were widely accepted and had become quasi-institutionalized practices for the rank and file, as well as for the officers, who had become “war entrepreneurs.” For them the war had become a means of personal enrichment. This commercial aspect of the war in Chechnya has also been stressed by Herfried Münkler, who wrote that “the war in Chechnya is conducted by both sides in such a way that it is no longer clear where the dividing line is between acts of war and normal criminal violence.”^[25] This war criminality merges with a wider criminality, because “in the end the actors in these wars make many contacts with international organized crime to sell the booty, trade illegal goods, or to buy weapons and ammunition.”^[26] What is alarming in the Chechen case is that these criminal acts were not committed by irregular, disorganized fighters in a faraway and obscure failed state, but by the special troops and the regular army of a great European power, which is a member of the Council of Europe.^[27]

Filtration Points: Hiding Torture