Ever since I’d heard it, Ella Polyakova’s statement during our conversation about Soldiers’ Mothers had been ringing in my head.
She seemed to think that Igor’s generation, on the whole, was irreparably affected in every sphere of their lives by the simple fact of trying to live in the corrupt and unpredictable world of post-perestroika Russia.
Of course, there were those of Igor’s age and experience who were not as cynical as he about their ability to impact society—poets and writers and intellectuals and journalists and activists among them. (And it would be members of this generation who would emerge as the de facto leadership of the popular opposition in late 2011.) But Polyakova’s theory was that it was the younger generation who would reveal the wrongs, find another way, and bring the new Russia into being. And I had come across several folks who made me believe her.
Polyakova herself had introduced me to Viktor Andreev, legal council for Soldiers’ Mothers. He was about six foot five, dressed in blue pinstripes. He had very light blond hair, bangs poking into his green eyes. Handsome and with the slim build of a dancer, he reminded me of a young Baryshnikov. His shirt also was striped, and there were only a couple of stubbly patches of hair on his face where he shaved. In his early twenties, he had already brought two cases before the Russian Supreme Court.
Both cases had to do with the provisions relating to mandatory conscription. The first challenged a not uncommon policy in which police locate draft dodgers in the subway or some other public place through ID checks and take them to the military enlistment office, where they’re essentially forced into service. The second challenged the system that allows only military-approved doctors to provide physicals for military fitness. Andreev argued Soldiers’ Mothers’ position that the military commission should accept evaluations from any doctor. He lost both cases, but still it seemed quite the accomplishment for a young man not even twenty-five.
“I think Russian young people have no essential values and aims,” he said. “They want to live, to eat, and to entertain each other, but have no spiritual values.”
He told me that, unlike almost every person he knew, he had not paid and would never pay a bribe, for anything. He did not wish to be complicit in the system of corruption. He insisted on paying for his own, very bad hundred-ruble (about three dollars) cups of coffee when we met.
He was currently using his own conscription as a test case to challenge the constitutionality of the alternative service provision to mandatory military service. He had lodged an application to claim alternative service as a conscientious objector, and if it was denied, as he expected it would be—the previous year, only one young man in St. Petersburg had successfully applied for alternative service—he would use its rejection as the basis for his case, which would allege that the process of application and procedure for appealing for alternative service denied citizens’ civil rights.
“After all of this, in the end, when my application is approved, then I’ll present them the documents about my medical condition,” he says. “I have problems with my back. Everyone in our country has problems with their back.”
He was also working on filing complaints in the European Court of Human Rights for cases that had been rejected in Russian courts, which are known to operate under political influence. One of the cases he was appealing to the European courts involved a St. Petersburg military unit widely accused of allowing its seasoned officers to systematically pimp out younger recruits in a prostitution ring. When the case failed, the recruit on whose behalf Soldiers’ Mothers brought the case was thrown in jail and, in a countersuit, Soldiers’ Mothers was fined fifteen thousand rubles (about US$500) for defamation.
I asked him if he was worried about his safety, taking on the most powerful players in the fight against corruption in Russia.
“I think it’s not dangerous for me until I reach a certain point,” he said. “If I launch an application saying that the military draft should be abolished, it would be very arrogant and would be very dangerous for me.”
Many in the West are familiar with Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist for the opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta, famous for covering the wars in Chechnya and doing critical investigative pieces on Russian government officials. She was shot in the elevator of her apartment building in 2006. Her death is widely believed to have involved Chechens or Chechen groups.
Far fewer know Olga Bobrova, who essentially stepped into her shoes at Novaya Gazeta as a correspondent in the Caucasus region.
I met Olga on the one-year anniversary of the Russia–Georgia conflict. The Caucasus was heating up again. Not long before, there’d been a suicide bomb attack against the president of Ingushetia. She had a flight back to Moscow from Ingushetia and came directly from the airport to meet me. I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect. I had in mind a Politkovskaya type, slight, with close-cropped hair and clunky glasses, a determined, no-nonsense face.
But Olga could not have been more different. She had long blond hair and wore a leopard scarf around her neck, a frilly net shawl over a frilly black blouse, sparkling white pants, modest heels decorated with reflective glass. Her nails were painted neon purple. Her lipstick was orange. And her travel bag was Louis Vuitton; I did not have the eye to determine its authenticity. She travelled back and forth between Moscow and one of the most dangerous parts of the world with the total contents of that Louis Vuitton bag weighing in at about three kilos.
The first thing she said to me after our introduction was “We get quite a lot of visits at Novaya Gazeta from Western journalists. They’re all trying to make a heroic picture of us, that we all wanted to be journalists since kindergarten. It’s not true. Don’t make a hero out of me.”
She insisted that her status as a journalist was more of a fashion choice than a crusade. Olga went to the Russian State Social University. She chose it because of its beautiful forest campus on Losiny Ostrov, just outside Moscow. When deciding her major, she wanted something that “suited” a woman, she said. She thought journalist or lawyer, and ended up a journalism major.
She started working for another liberal newspaper but soon joined the staff of Novaya Gazeta. Her first North Caucasus assignment was covering the notorious and tragic hostage takeover of a school in Beslan that ended with the deaths of nearly four hundred people, most of them children. Politkovskaya was poisoned on her way to cover Beslan, and Bobrova found herself drawn to the seemingly hopeless chain of lawlessness and corruption engulfing the region. It had been her beat ever since.
After the shootings of the human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov and the Novaya Gazeta staffer Anastasia Baburova in central Moscow in January 2009, one of Bobrova’s colleagues questioned her decision to continue reporting from dangerous places and on dangerous people. Her colleague took her to the corner of the office where the portraits of murdered Novaya Gazeta journalists hung. “Why are you going to Ingushetia?” her colleague asked. “There’s no space left on the wall for your picture.”
When she had been in the field for a long time and things seemed to be getting dangerous, she would go to Vladikavkaz, the capital of North Ossetia, and have her hair done for psychological piece of mind. She participated in a training program at Novaya Gazeta in which an FSB officer coached female journalists on survival techniques, such as saying they were four months pregnant if they found themselves in a bad spot. The hope being that even rebels and terrorists might respect a pregnant woman. She was skeptical at first, but she had used the technique many times.
I asked her, given all this, why she chose to do it. “I don’t know what to tell you about why I’m doing it,” Bobrova said. “But I’m doing it.”