«На Кавказе раньше происходит половое созревание, давайте не будем ханжами. Есть места, где женщины уже в 27 лет сморщенные».

“Sexual maturity occurs earlier in the Caucasus, let’s not be prudes. There are places where women are already wrinkled at 27.”

Russia’s Children’s Rights Commissioner
Pavel Astakhov, weighing in on the marriage.

once is not enough

Vasily Pukirev’s famous painting (1862), Unequal Marriage.*

A wedding in Chechnya between a school girl and a local police chief this spring has scandalized Russia, raising questions about human rights in the Russian Caucasus republic, and its place in the country.

The marriage first came to light when friends of the bride-to-be, 17-year-old Kheda Goylabieva, sent out WhatsApp messages of alarm that she was being forcibly taken as the second wife of a man 40 years her senior – Colonel Nazhud Guchigov, who happened to be an influential official and acquaintance of Chechnya’s leader, Ramzan Kadyrov.

A reporter with Novaya Gazeta (one of Russia’s few truly independent newspapers) went to investigate, and the story snowballed. Yet instead of reprimanding the police chief (polygamy and marrying underage girls being illegal in both Chechnya and Russia), Kadyrov backed Guchigov.

Interviews with Goylabieva, where she emphatically said on camera, “Yes, I know he is already married, but it so happens that I am marrying him,” were broadcast on pro-Kremlin channels, while Kadyrov blasted critical voices on his Instagram account, calling the event the “wedding of the century,” and quoted Pushkin’s “love conquers all ages.”

It became simply impossible – and dangerous – to know the truth about the story, as police surrounded Goylabieva’s village and the media frenzy gathered steam. “Does Russian law matter in this land?” columnists wrote, as Kadyrov danced the lezginka at the wedding party after the marriage was performed, strangely, not by a civil registrar, but by a presenter from Grozny television.

The commotion served as another pretext for the Chechen strongman to crack down on “outside influences” on his domain: he announced that women should not be allowed to use WhatsApp. A month later, masked men wielding hammers tore through the office of the human rights group Committee Against Torture – one of the last such groups working in Chechnya, as police stood idly by. Kadyrov claimed that the campaigners had destroyed their own property in order to get more grants.

“The issue is not her age, the issue is that a man who has been endowed with some power can point to any school girl, and she will be brought to him on a silver platter, because people are afraid for their family, life, etc. So those who are saying – oh, but it’s Chechnya, it’s not Russia – don’t be surprised if in a couple of years somewhere near Ryazan the local lord will put together a harem of underage girls he picked out at the town’s last day of school. Don’t be surprised that their parents will be mute while regional authorities and federal officials mumble something about ‘love conquers all ages’ and wrinkled women.”

Dagestani journalist Zakir Magomedov

(Underage marriage and polygamy are
even more widespread in Dagestan.)

NOTES

* The painting, as revealed by Vladimir Gilyarovsky in Moscow and Muscovites, was based on a tragedy in the painter’s own life. The woman is in fact his fiancée, married off to an old clerk. The artist put himself in the painting as well, in the back right, with his arms folded.