A Russian village buries a soldier and tries to understand the war
A cold wind blew across the steppe, but Sapura Kadyrova saw no point in bundling up. She waited to greet her son, who came home from the war in a crimson government-issue casket.
“So maybe I’m not warm,” moaned Ms. Kadyrova, 85. “Then let me die.”
Throughout the day, she and her daughters had greeted relatives, friends and neighbors who came to pay their respects to her son Garipul S. Kadyrov, who was killed on the front line in Klishchiivka in eastern Ukraine.
“He would have turned 50 in February, and he promised me he could come home then,” Mrs. Kadyrova told her guests. “Now I will meet him alone in his grave.”
In major Russian cities, the war can feel like distant background noise, where the latest iPhones are on sale and things look much the same as before – except for the ubiquitous army recruitment posters. While there are no less than 80 percent of Ukrainians If I have a close friend or family member who was injured or killed in the war, many Russians in urban centers still feel isolated from it.
It is in villages like Ovsyanka, a former collective farm in southwestern Russia, where the pain and loss of the war is felt most deeply. And as friends and neighbors gathered in Ms. Kadyrova’s cottage, preparing food in the kitchen and sharing memories of the deceased, grief mixed with a longing to understand the loss of another soldier.
“He was sure he was doing the right thing,” said Lena Kabaeva, Kadyrov’s sister, who said he “never complained” about conditions at the front and used his salary to buy gifts for his cousins and nieces.
Another of Mr. Kadyrov’s sisters, Natasha, was so beside herself with grief that her siblings gave her a sedative. Ms. Kabaeva said the family felt it necessary to tell their mother that her son had been killed fighting with Americans.
“She still doesn’t understand what this war is about,” Ms. Kabaeva said, explaining that her mother grew up when Ukraine and Russia were both part of the Soviet Union. “It would be impossible for her to understand that we are fighting the Ukrainians today.”
Mr. Kadyrov, a mild-mannered farmer known at home by his nickname Vitya, thought he was too old to be called up to fight. But in October 2022, shortly after President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia ordered the mobilization of soldiers, Mr. Kadyrov was drafted at the age of 49. A few months later he was killed along with two other soldiers.
“They used to not take the elderly, but now they take everyone,” said the elderly Ms. Kadyrova, an ethnic Kazakh whose ancestors emigrated from Kazakhstan to Russia, whose border is about 100 miles away.
All day long, female relatives crowded the kitchen, serving milky tea and preparing beshbarmak, a Kazakh specialty of boiled meat with onions on a layer of thick noodles.
Other family members and friends gathered in the largest room of the house, cross-legged on the floor. Almost all of them spoke of other loved ones who had been killed in Ukraine, either because they had been mobilized or because they had joined the Wagner mercenary group, such as one of Kadyrov’s cousins, Aleksei.
“The West has turned Ukraine against us,” said Mindiyar S. Abuyev, 77, after saying he attended Aleksei’s funeral. “We are simple people, and we support our Putin – and we will win.”
As darkness fell in mid-November, mourners went outside to greet Mr. Kadyrov’s casket. Ms. Kadyrova and Natasha wept as the men in the family placed the closed coffin on a stand in front of three funeral wreaths brought by members of the local government. (One of the wreaths bore the wrong name, presumably that of another dead soldier.)
Two officials presided over the ceremony with military honors.
“This is a tragic, devastating event,” said the head of the local government, Sergei V. Yermolov, in the smooth voice of a professional announcer. “But it is thanks to guys like him that there is a peaceful sky above our country. By participating in the special military operation, they defend our freedom, our lives and the health of our children and loved ones. Eternal memory and eternal glory to him.”
The regional military commissar presented the family with a Russian flag and a military band played a shortened version of the Russian national anthem as an honor guard fired into the air.
The coffin was then taken to the family compound where, according to local Kazakh custom, it would spend the night before being buried the next day.
It’s a scene playing out in villages like Ovsyanka in the Volga region and across Russia.
“I have another friend who was mobilized,” said Alyona, 22, the wife of one of Mr. Kadyrov’s cousins. “He left for the war weighing 120 kilograms. All that came back was 20 pounds of bones, she said. She was devastated that the Kadyrov family could not wash the body according to Muslim custom, or open the coffin for a final farewell.
Ovsyanka is located three hours south of Samara, Russia’s eighth largest city. No longer a collective farm, the village is now impoverished and offers few jobs other than subsistence farming, said a local resident named Pasha. Escaping poverty has been a major incentive for soldiers to join the army and earn a signing bonus of up to 550,000 rubles (almost $6,150), in addition to a monthly salary far higher than the average salary in the villages in the region.
In addition, the Russian state provides financial compensation to the families of the deceased soldiers, usually five million rubles (about $56,000) from the federal government, plus another payment from the regional government, usually between three and five million rubles. The Kadyrov family was in the process of filing paperwork to access the funds, a relative said.
Pasha referred to the monetary compensation when he spoke about two men in the village who hanged themselves last year. “They could have at least participated in the special military operation, died with honor and made sure their families were taken care of,” he said.
Mr. Kadyrov’s older brother, Murat, hanged himself in 2016, making the family’s pain over the loss of a second son all the more acute.
After the ceremony, a group of Mr. Kadyrov’s closest male relatives sat next to the closed coffin in the main room. The debate about the value of the war became emotional.
Zhaslan, 34, married to Mr Kadyrov’s niece, questioned the government’s reasoning for why Russians should fight and die. “People say it is for the motherland,” he said. ‘But where is the motherland? The homeland is the one you protect, not the one you destroy.”
He said Russian television was full of lies. “On the zombie box they show us that everything is fine and that our side is winning,” he said. But why was it, he asked, that the front lines had hardly moved since Wagner mercenaries took Bakhmut last spring?
“This is a worthless war,” he said.
He debated Ms. Kabaeva’s husband, Sagindyk Kabaev, who continually advanced the argument, peddled by Mr. Putin and the Russian media, that the West had provoked the war.
“This war was inevitable,” Mr Kabaev said. He pointed to America’s record of initiating foreign wars. “Let’s do the math: How many wars has America started?”
He also cited a common argument made by Mr. Putin that “Ukraine has historically always been Russian territory,” a claim disputed by many Ukrainians.
Yet Mr Kabaev admitted: “Ordinary people are suffering: collective farmers, machinists and drivers. The sons of the ministers are not there. If that had been the case, the war would have been over long ago.”
The next day, Mr. Kadyrov was interned next to his dead brother on the hard, rocky ground of a small cemetery near the ruins of another destroyed farm.
Gennady A. Bergengaliyev, a retired school principal from a nearby town, watched as the men took turns shoveling dirt onto the burial mound. Earlier he had given a short speech about the importance of defending Russia and the role local men played in the war.
At the cemetery, he gestured to the gravestone of Murat, Mr. Kadyrov’s brother, and back to the men tending the new grave.
“This is a great achievement for his parents,” he said. “He was a simple, ordinary man. And this has brought them honor.”