‘Only You Can Save Your Sons’

The New York Times Magazine

On a hot night last August in a small Russian town on the banks of the Volga River, Yelena Arefieva heard a knocking and someone crying: Mama. Mama. Mama. ''I jumped like a cat to the door,'' she said, but there were only mosquitoes buzzing in the stairwell, for the cries were in her dreams. A few days later, Yelena received a letter from a young police investigator just back from serving three months in Chechnya. It was about her son, Denis, a 19-year-old junior sergeant with an artillery unit who had been sent to Chechnya in June.