VLADIKAVKAZ, RUSSIA — People in this town know the man with the stooped, halting walk and the burning eyes. They point out his house, and they talk about "what he did" and about how they admire "what he did" and wonder if they too would have the strength to do "what he did."
This is what Vitaly Kaloyev did: After his wife and children were killed in a plane crash in 2002, he stalked the air traffic controller who was on duty all the way to Switzerland, knocked on the man's front door and stabbed him to death with a pocketknife.
"I don't really take offense at people who call me a murderer. People who say that would betray their own children, their own motherland," Kaloyev said. "I protected the honor of my children and the memory of my children."
By the time Kaloyev walked out of a Swiss prison and made an emotional return to this city spread in the icy shadows of the Caucasus Mountains late last year, his crime had been eclipsed by his fame and a social split over his significance. Some Russians cheer Kaloyev as a national hero, a "real man." Others are appalled by his celebrity status, which they believe highlights the worst tendencies of Russian nationalism.
Kaloyev's story is a postmodern tragedy, a tale of loss and vengeance, but also of clashing cultures -- of the deeply humanistic, man-to-man world of the Caucasus crashing confusedly into the sterilized, legalistic culture of big Western companies facing expensive lawsuits.
Although he says he blacked out and can't remember attacking 36-year-old Peter Nielsen, Kaloyev doesn't deny killing him, nor is he sorry for the man's death. Even in the earliest days of his grief, Kaloyev admits, he fixated on Nielsen, the only controller on duty when the plane carrying Kaloyev's family crashed into another plane in midair. Within two days of the crash, he had tracked down the air traffic controller's name and neighborhood. He knew that Nielsen had two children, and that his wife was pregnant with a third child.
In 2004, after a sensationalistic trial in Switzerland visited by luminaries from his home republic of North Ossetia, Kaloyev was sentenced to eight years in prison. But after high-level lobbying from the Russian government, he was set free three years later on the order of Switzerland's highest court.
