OFF THE BOARD, INTO THE FIREOFF THE BOARD, INTO THE FIRE
There’s a very long list of things my hardline Soviet Communist grandfather would never have believed would happen in my lifetime, and my becoming the world chess champion doesn’t even make the top ten. Giving a speech on the importance of the “American values” of capitalism and liberty to a black-tie audience in Manhattan would be high on the list. So would my wearing a borrowed cowboy hat in Wyoming after lecturing there on the threat of Putin’s Russia.
The likely number one, however, took place on August 17, 2012, at a Moscow courthouse. Not even inside the courthouse, but outside of it. That was the day I was arrested and beaten by the police while protesting the sentencing of Pussy Riot, three members of the all-girl punk group that had been convicted for filming an anti-Putin protest inside a Moscow church. Their sentencing took place in the same Khamovnichesky court that had held Mikhail Khodorkovsky two years earlier. Unable to enter through the crowds, I was standing on the sidewalk outside speaking calmly with a few journalists when the police came over and literally carried me away.
By law, at least in theory, the police must inform you why you are being arrested. There were plenty of witnesses and even videos of my abduction to show that this never occurred. Instead, they show me, legs in the air, shouting, “What am I being charged with? What are the charges?” (As well as a few other words I would not want to explain to my young daughter.) They tossed me into the waiting police van and closed the door. But they didn’t lock it.
In a move I would quickly have reason to regret, I opened the door and demanded again to know what I was being charged with. My words were cut off as I half fell and was half pulled into the crowd of police outside the van. My arms were twisted and several blows came down on my head and body before they lifted me back into the van and shoved me to the rear. A Dutch photographer was quick enough to get a shot of me pinned against the van’s back wall by two cops, one bending my arm back and the other pressing against my throat.
I’m not objective about the events of that day, but I don’t think that an unarmed chessplayer nearing his fiftieth birthday presented such a terrible danger to an army of riot police. But while I was bruised for quite a while, I was lucky not to suffer any permanent injuries. My spirits were good enough that I could laugh when the police issued a statement that they were considering filing additional charges against me for biting one of the officers on the finger during their assault. Well, I am by no means a vegetarian, though as I turned fifty a few years ago I have had to cut back on red meat on my doctor’s advice. But I can say with certainty that were I to acquire a taste for human flesh, the way Bengal tigers are said to do, I would never bite anyone under the rank of general.
Knowing that witnesses and all the evidence in the world wouldn’t matter inside a Moscow courtroom, my friends and I scrambled to put together as many photos, videos, and testimonies as we could and publish them widely before my trial. Our hope was that if it was totally obvious to the entire world that I had violated no laws, it would be too embarrassing for the government to convict me on the charge of “participating in an unsanctioned protest.” That was 2012, when it was still possible to imagine the Putin government being embarrassed by anything.
I am quick to admit that in this I am very lucky to have a certain amount of protection because of my famous name. The news picked up the story and footage of my arrest and beating in minutes. Thanks to the power of social media, thousands of people could help my friends and me look through hundreds of photos and videos to prove that the officer who was going to charge me with assault had sustained the cut on his finger before my arrest. Unlike most Russians who are abused the way I was, or worse, I had the knowledge and resources to mount a defense campaign.
A week later, after nine hours in court, I was acquitted, to the great surprise of everyone, myself included. It was perhaps the first time ever in Putin’s Russia that someone had been acquitted of those charges in this way. Ironically, I had been one of the first people convicted under the draconian new anti-protest laws when I was jailed in 2007. In my statement after the acquittal, I thanked everyone who had expressed support and pleaded for those who had helped me to stay involved.
“This result demonstrates the power of solidarity. This means more than donating money and your voice. It is a shared sentiment that freedom matters everywhere, for every person, not only in your own country. It is essential to stay involved. The more people pay attention and bring pressure from the grassroots, the more cases will end the way mine did and the fewer will result like that of Pussy Riot. Find a way to make a difference!”
It was a bittersweet moment. While I was being arrested outside along with many others, the three young women of Pussy Riot inside had been sentenced to two years in a prison colony. Maria Alyokhina, twenty-four, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, twenty-two, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, thirty, had performed a brief “punk prayer” inside Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, mentioning Putin by name in the video they made of it. You can guess which was considered the greater act of sacrilege by the authorities.
I will return later to these brave women and their story, which became an international sensation that confirmed to the entire world that Putin’s regime had finally turned the corner into irredeemable despotism. But I would first like to explain how I came to be standing outside that courthouse and getting tangled up in ways that my grandfather would never have believed. For that we have to leave Moscow and go to Spain, and to the small Andalusian town of Linares.
In 1975, at the age of twelve, I played my first individual major chess event at the national level, the Soviet Junior Championship. Ten years later in Moscow, I became the youngest world champion in history. On March 10, 2005, in Spain, I played my last serious game of chess, winning the Linares supertournament for the ninth time. After three decades as a professional chess player, the last two of them as the number one ranked player, I decided to retire from professional chess.
It’s not common, in our age, for someone to retire while still at the top, but I’m a man who needs a goal, and who wants to make a difference. My accomplishments and contributions are for others to judge, but I felt that I was no longer playing an essential role in chess. Reclaiming the unified world championship was out of reach due to political chaos in the chess world, so I was reduced to unfulfilling repetition.
I have always set ambitious goals, and I have been lucky enough to attain most of them. I had achieved everything there was to achieve in the chess arena. Meanwhile, I felt that there were other areas in which I could still make a difference, where I could set new goals and find new channels for my energy. My new projects included working on a book on decision making, called How Life Imitates Chess, as well as lecturing and giving seminars on the topic. Another was the promotion of chess in education. The US-based Kasparov Chess Foundation (KCF) supports chess in schools and was working on a blueprint for teaching chess in the classroom. KCF now has centers in Brussels, Johannesburg, Singapore, and Mexico City with thousands of participating schools and a wide variety of events and training programs.
But all of those things could have waited. The main reason for my decision to leave chess when I did, and so completely, was of course politics—or what passes for politics in an autocracy. For many years I had been an ardent supporter of democracy in Russia, and at times I had participated in political activities back when campaigns and endorsement and votes actually mattered. By 2005, those things were already largely irrelevant to the power structure in Russia, but we still had hope. Thanks to a two-term limit, 2008 would bring the end of Putin’s presidency unless he wanted to risk becoming a pariah by abrogating the constitution completely. With Putin not running, our goal was to build enough momentum to bring a real democratic alternative to the ballot. I wasn’t sure how it was going to happen, but I knew I had to try.
As I wrote in the Wall Street Journal a few days after my retirement, my plunge into political activism was also personal:
When I look at my eight-year-old son I know the stakes of this battle could not be higher. Many well-off Russians are sending their children to foreign schools, far from the dangers created by our authoritarian leadership. Most of my compatriots don’t have that option. I do, but I want my son to grow up in the country in which he was born. I don’t want him to have to worry about military service in an illegal war or fear the repression of a dictatorship. I want my son to live in a free nation and to be proud of his country, and of his father. . . . There are millions like me in Russia who want a free press, rule of law, and fair elections. My new job is to fight for those people and to fight for those things.
My son Vadim is now eighteen and has no knowledge of what it is like to live in a free Russia. What he has seen of democracy and civil liberties he has learned the way I did as a teenager in the USSR, from traveling abroad and reading foreign news. At least he and his generation have the Internet, which is still relatively free in Russia. Two thousand five was also the year of my third marriage, and my wife Dasha continues to play a vital role in making this new phase of my life a happy and successful one. Our daughter Aida and our son Nickolas were born in and are growing up in a free country. But contrary to how I’d envisioned it, that country is the United States, not Russia.
A few months prior to my retirement, the Beslan school hostage crisis shattered the global conscience. I place it here, outside of the chronology, because of the impact it had on my decision to leave chess and because of my personal experience visiting the site in 2005.
On September 1, 2004, Chechen separatists took over eleven hundred hostages at a school in North Ossetia, a Russian region of the Caucasus bordering Georgia. It was what we call “First Bell” or Knowledge Day in Russia, the start of the school year when parents and other family members accompany their children to school. Thirty very heavily armed terrorists took over the school and herded the hostages into the gymnasium. The building was mined with IEDs (real ones, unlike at Nord-Ost) and a number of hostages were killed immediately.
The situation outside the school was predictably chaotic as disparate groups of regional and national security forces and political forces formed separate camps. Parents and other locals refused to leave the area, many because they wanted to prevent any military assault on the school. Memories of Nord-Ost were still very fresh. The attackers’ demands were similar to 2002: withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya and recognition of Chechnya’s independence. Other reports said they also wanted United Nations recognition of Chechnya.
They also demanded the presence of several regional politicians to serve as intermediaries, including North Ossetia’s president, Aleksander Dzasokhov, and the president of neighboring Ingushetia, Murat Zyazikov. Neither came to Beslan. Dzasokhov later said that he had been forcibly prevented from coming and told Time magazine that “a very high-ranking general from the Interior Ministry told him, ‘I have received orders to arrest you if you try to go.’”
Anna Politkovskaya, the journalist who was one of the few Russians trusted by the Chechens, was also invited. She immediately set off for Beslan but never arrived. Her tea was poisoned during the flight, putting her into a coma, and after coming close to death at a small medical center in Rostov, she returned to Moscow to recover. She stated that she was sure Russian security forces “neutralized me because they knew I was going to Beslan to set up talks.”
The despised leader of the Chechen independence movement, Aslan Maskhadov, who had a $10 million price on his head from Moscow, condemned the attack through his spokesperson and sounded ready to personally intervene. Dzasokhov later said he had been ready to negotiate, to offer safe passage for the terrorists and to release some imprisoned guerrillas, in order to guarantee the safety of the remaining hostages.
But as negotiations proceeded, the unthinkable happened. On September 3, the third day of the siege, two explosions shook the gymnasium just as medical workers were approaching the building to remove twenty bodies outside. One of the explosions started a fire on the roof. It is telling that, once again, there are a half-dozen theories about the origin of the initial explosions and even more about the ensuing battle, half of the theories coming from the same officials, whose stories changed by the day. Some reports said that some of the terrorists’ explosives had gone off by accident. Others that a Russian sniper had shot a terrorist, who detonated a bomb.
Equally confusing is the story of who was in charge outside, and who gave the orders to fire and when; and it has all only become more confused as time has passed after the tragedy. As firing of all kinds erupted inside and outside the gym full of hostages, many of them too dehydrated and weak to run, armed civilians participated alongside of local police forces and heavy military weaponry. It was deadly chaos. Only after neighbors found enormous shell casings on nearby roofs was it revealed that the military had fired flamethrowers into an auditorium full of children.
Practically as soon as the battle ended, bulldozers and dump trucks came in and removed debris (including some physical remains) and everything else that could have served as evidence with which to reconstruct the horrific events of the day. Testimony from locals outside and hostages inside repeatedly contradicted government statements about what had happened. The authorities were caught lying so many times about easily disproven claims, such as which weapons were used and when, that it is impossible to accept any of the official statements in good faith.
Unlike after Nord-Ost, there would be several official investigations of Beslan. One was completed in 2005 by a member of the North Ossetian parliament who was actually on the scene the day the school was stormed. The federal parliament produced two extensive reports in 2006. The Duma was controlled by United Russia, Putin’s party, and the report controlled by their representative became the official one. Another was done by Yuri Savelyev, a member of the Russian nationalist party Rodina (“Homeland”) and, coincidentally, a recognized expert in rockets and explosives. Savelyev’s report fits much better with the testimony of witnesses outside and the hostages inside regarding the weapons used and the order of events. He and another colleague filed their own report and refused to sign off on the official one. In 2007, they broke their silence to denounce it as a cover-up.
A 2006 article by David Satter looked at the evidence:
The version of the Beslan parents was supported by the findings of a commission of the North Ossetian parliament. In a report released on November 29, 2005, the commission concluded that the first explosion was produced by either a flamethrower or grenade launcher fired from outside the building.
The most powerful confirmation, however, came in a report released by Yuri Savelyev, a member of the federal parliamentary investigative commission and a highly regarded expert on the physics of combustion. . . . Savelyev concluded that the first explosion was the result of a shot from a flame thrower fired from the fifth story of a building near the school at 1:03 P.M. The second explosion came 22 seconds later and was caused by a high explosive fragmentation grenade with a dynamite equivalent of 6.1 kilograms shot from another five story building on the same street. The explosions, according to Savelyev, caused a catastrophic fire and the collapse of the roof of the school gymnasium, which led to the deaths of the majority of the hostages. The order to put out the fire did not come for two hours. As a result, hostages who could have been saved were burned alive.
Even the casualty records are disputed and were regularly revised for weeks. Interviews with family members and survivors helped fill in the gaps in the official records. The final numbers are 334 dead hostages, of which 186 were children. Over 700 were injured, with many requiring amputation from shrapnel wounds. Many of the killed had burned alive. The number of hostage-takers alive and dead is also disputed. The official numbers say that there were 32 attackers of whom one survived. Other reports say that there had been many more attackers, up to 75, many of which escaped. At least 10 members of the security forces were killed, including all three commanders of the assault group.
Credit for the Beslan attack was claimed by Chechen commander Shamil Basayev, who claimed he had originally hoped to target a school in St. Petersburg or Moscow. He also promised more such attacks, although this did not happen and Basayev died in an explosion in 2006. Once again, no one was sure exactly how he died, but in this case precious few people cared as long as he was dead.
The government was the only available target for the grieving Beslan families. You cannot demand answers from terrorists or from the dead. The one captured hostage-taker, Nur-Pashi Kulayev, was quickly convicted and disappeared into the Russian prison system. The Mothers of Beslan advocacy group supported appeals for him in the hopes of gaining information about the attack during a public trial. While they got very little government accountability for their tears, there were indeed dramatic governmental reforms after Beslan. Unfortunately, there was little in them related to greater security for the Russian people.
Just two weeks after Beslan, Putin brought together all eighty-nine of the nation’s governors along with his cabinet and spoke with them for several hours. After some opening remarks about Beslan, Putin said that the response had to be greater effectiveness and unity in the government and the country. Those words are red flags to any student of dictatorship, and this was no exception. Aside from a few natural responses about strengthening laws against terrorism and expanding law enforcement powers, the reforms were mostly aimed at further diminishing democratic institutions in Russia. Putin would now directly appoint governors: no more elections. Duma elections changed from a direct vote to a party vote, guaranteeing that established figures could keep their seats forever. Other reforms attacked the foundations of the democratic system, making it more difficult to register parties. Of course these things had nothing to do with Beslan or fighting terrorism or anything other than Putin seeing an opportunity to centralize more power into the Kremlin.
As a famous individual I had advantages in my new career as a political activist, but there were also drawbacks. I was vulnerable to accusations of being a neophyte, a dilettante who wouldn’t be interested in the hard work of building alliances and listening to people. I was determined to refute this perception as much as possible, and so I set off on a tour of Russia to hear what people thought of the state of the country and to spread the message that a different future was possible.
Also keep in mind that the opposition had no access to the mass media, so we had to be seen in person to be heard at all. A famous sportsman quitting to enter politics would have been big news just about anywhere else. But since my views about Putin were already well known, my retirement was covered from a purely sporting perspective. In contrast, several famous Russian hockey stars, including Fetisov and Tretiak, publicly endorsed Putin and received a great deal of attention. There was no chance for me to get on TV and discuss my future plans. Not only wasn’t I invited in the first place, but live television had been practically banned already in order to avoid any awkward political content.
I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. I was already being subjected to the attention every prominent opposition figure received from the Kremlin’s thugs and their proxies. These groups ranged from annoying pranksters to dangerous criminals, all on the payroll of those in charge of making sure any grassroots opposition movement met with immediate and heavy resistance. Youth groups we nicknamed the “Putin-Jugend” after their Nazi predecessors assigned members to heckle and throw things at me wherever I went to speak, and of course these groups were never bothered by the police. In April, I was bashed over the head with a wooden chessboard by a young man at an event in Moscow. And of course I was followed and recorded by more serious members of the security services at all times. That is the confidence of a totalitarian system.
But I wasn’t going to give up so easily. It was also important for me to travel because of how heavily the opposition world was weighted toward Moscow, and to a lesser extent St. Petersburg. Putin’s support was far greater outside of Moscow’s ringed roads, out in the regions where the economy was more likely to depend on the government and where the only sources of news were the Kremlin-controlled television channels. I visited Vladivostok in the east, sixty-two hundred kilometers from Moscow. I went to Rostov and then south into the Caucasus. I spoke with fishermen, railway workers, and students. And I went to Beslan.
I first visited the cemetery, or the New Cemetery as the people there had named it. There was still construction going on there, ten months after the attack. I put flowers on every grave, walking through the cemetery in a state of shock from my proximity to the horror that the people there had suffered and that the survivors lived with every day. Imagine row after row of graves, each with the same date of death: September 3, 2004, September 3, 2004, September 3, 2004, over and over 330 times. Row after row with birth dates in the 1990s and some in the 2000s. It was the most painful day of my life.
Yet I was still supposed to give a lecture in town, so I collected myself as best I could and headed to the local house of culture. Unsurprisingly, it was locked tight and every light was off. This was part of the usual package of harassment and isolation employed against opposition figures. Everywhere I went, meeting halls would suffer strange electrical or plumbing problems. Our plane wouldn’t be allowed to land and buses would arrive at incorrect locations. Locals would let me know they’d been threatened with harm or the loss of their jobs if they came to hear me speak. And so I spent much of my speaking time outdoors, in the street, or in lobbies and restaurants. Even hotels would be instructed not to give rooms to my colleagues and me.
This happened even in Beslan, a place that deserves peace and sanctity if any place in the world does. For that reason I had not wanted to come, but at the same time I felt that I had to. I had come not to make politics, but to see with my own eyes what had happened and to demonstrate to the families that they had not been forgotten. At this point, nearly everyone in the town blamed the government for caring more about killing the hostage-takers than about saving the lives of the hostages.
The Russian journalist Masha Gessen accompanied me on this leg of my journey and I have relied on her reporting of my visit to refresh my memory, which is clouded with the overpowering emotions of the day. Here I will quote two paragraphs directly, the first to show I’m not exaggerating about the juvenile harassment and the second to save myself more pain from reliving that day.
Just then there was a dull pop, very much like a gunshot, and the women screamed, “Garry! Garry!” The crowd broke apart, and Kasparov’s bodyguards tried awkwardly to shield him while keeping people from trampling one another as they rushed off the porch. A young man standing in front of the building suddenly turned out to be holding a bottle of ketchup, which he shook up violently and then aimed at Kasparov and squeezed. Kasparov was presently covered: his head, his chest, and the right shoulder of his blue sport coat were stained sticky red. The porch was empty now, save for a clear plastic bag with several broken eggs in it that had hit the roof of the porch before landing: that was what had made the popping sound. An old woman, now standing on the porch with us, tried to clean Kasparov’s face with a handkerchief. “Forgive me, forgive me,” he whispered over and over again, apologizing for triggering this incident in a town that was already racked with grief.
The crowd gradually grew as people came out of the houses and apartment blocks along the way to join the walk. They entered the school through the giant holes in the walls of what used to be the gymnasium. . . . Kasparov gasped when they entered the gym. “Oh my God, oh my God,” he whispered. The women walked to different corners of the ravaged space and began wailing; soon the hall was filled with a muffled, high-pitched sound. Kasparov looked stricken: his eyes red, mouth slightly open, head shaking. It was clear that it would not be possible to talk in here: the room was oversaturated with grief. He asked to be given a tour of the school, and as he walked around with the crowd, now grown to about a hundred people, he talked: “I’m walking through this school, thinking: How do people in Moscow keep walking around, saying something, continuing to lie? Among them, there is someone who gave orders to open fire. If that person gets away with it, we will all be to blame!”
Only three officials were ever charged over what happened at Beslan. All three were local North Ossetian police officers who were charged with negligence for failing to protect the school. Perhaps this was too much of a blatant scapegoating attempt even for Putin’s court system to abide, and all three were granted amnesty. When the judge read out the amnesty order in May 2007, a group of twenty-five Mothers of Beslan tore the courtroom to pieces. These officers could hardly be responsible for what had happened, but they were the only targets for the impotent rage of the families.
Here is the point at which we can divide our horror and our rage between those responsible—the terrorist murderers who conceived and carried out the attack—and those who failed in their duty to protect and preserve life, and then refused to produce accountability for those failures. Confusion, mistakes, outrages, and cover-ups occur in democracies, too, of course. Humans make mistakes and humans do horrible things all over the world; sadly, we seem unable to prevent these kinds of tragedies from happening in the first place (although one can certainly argue that treacherous dictatorships engender more of them). That is why the true test of our institutions is how they deal with these mistakes and horrors in order to maintain trust and to improve security.
The government’s responses to the terrorist attacks of Nord-Ost and Beslan and their aftermaths showed very clearly that the Putin regime had no interest in the trust or security of the Russian people. Putin didn’t need the people or their trust. He had oil, gas, total control of the media and the government, and a rapidly expanding security force. Unlike in democracy, where the loss of people’s faith in your administration will quickly cost you your job, being a dictator means never having to say you’re sorry, or even addressing the matter at all.
The other motive for my tour was to make contact with other activists around the country. There were still various opposition parties and NGOs struggling against the tide of increasing marginalization. As Putin tightened his grip on civil society, no group was too small or too innocuous to be persecuted. Ever on the alert against any “orange” activity, laws were passed to limit foreign funding of NGOs and increase penalties against protestors. A raft of “anti-extremism” bills went into effect, with language so broad and vague that any criticism of the government could be deemed an extremist act punishable by years in prison.
The Russian opposition in 2005–2008 was a jumble of liberal politicians, young activists of every political stripe, and old-guard human rights defenders. Several of the politicians were exiles from the Putin regime, including his former prime minister, Mikhail Kasyanov, and economic advisor Andrei Illarionov. There was Boris Nemtsov, Yeltsin’s former first deputy prime minister, and Vladimir Ryzhkov, one of the last surviving independent members of the Duma. Georgy Satarov was a former Yeltsin aide who had helped devise the new Russian constitution. It was a fairly high-powered group, except for the fact that they had absolutely no power at all.
In a more distant orbit there were the “respectable” politicians of the Yeltsin era attempting to cling to relevance in government as the political world crumbled beneath their feet. These individuals, such as former presidential candidates Irina Khakamada and Grigory Yavlinsky, founder of Yabloko, attempted to protest from within while staying on passable terms with Putin. Eventually they realized Putin had no use for them, even as loyal opposition. Some gave up and joined in Putin’s democracy charade for a paycheck while others left politics altogether. A few joined us, the “radical” or “external” opposition.
The human rights cadre included the venerable Ludmila Alekseeva, a founding member of the Moscow Helsinki Group and one of the few Soviet dissidents still active. Lev Ponomaryov was one of the founders of Memorial, one of the first Russian human rights organizations. The “young guns” included Sergei Udaltsov, chairman of the Vanguard of Red Youth, and Ilya Yashin, a charismatic youth activist on the liberal side. A few years later, former Yabloko activist Alexei Navalny would become the most prominent of us all thanks to his sharply penned and well-researched anti-corruption investigations finding a huge audience online.
Then there were the “disloyal nationalists,” the radicals, mostly young, in groups like writer Eduard Limonov’s National Bolshevik Party, which wasn’t as scary as the name sounds by the 2000s but was still more than enough to scare off the respectable liberal opposition. But they were willing to march against Putin for free speech and fair elections, and that was all that mattered to me.
Along with the politicians, organizers, and activists, there was substantial intellectual firepower in the wings among the countless Russian writers, journalists, and intellectuals disillusioned by Russia’s return to the dark ages. There were big-hearted lawyers who put in long hours of work defending protesters and activists from spurious charges for little or no pay. Political directors and staffers of a dozen or more opposition groups, including my own United Civil Front, organized protests, training seminars, and communications for little reward and often at great personal risk.
And suddenly there I was, dropped into the middle of it all. I felt at home with the liberals like Nemtsov and Illarionov, who shared my ideology of free markets and close alignment with Europe, but I also realized that opposing Putin had little to do with ideology by that point. It mattered little what policies you supported when there was no chance at all you would ever have the chance to enact those policies. The debates among opposition candidates were a like a group of starving people with no money arguing about what to order at a fancy restaurant.
I was already doing what I could on the international front, speaking at foreign parliaments and writing editorials to encourage Western leaders to increase pressure on Putin over his anti-democratic ways. In Russia, I hoped to use my lack of political affiliation as an advantage by bridging the gaps between the disparate opposition movements so we could unite to solve the only problem that really mattered: ending Putin and Putinism as soon as possible.
Before my retirement from chess I had helped form the Free Choice 2008 Committee and the All-Russian Civic Congress in 2004. I had been observing the dissatisfaction of the activists on every side. They were tired of dancing to Putin’s tune while watching their party leaders cut deals for paltry handouts. The Civic Congress was conceived as a unifying platform, but it fell short when forces from both sides of the political spectrum were unable to leave behind the Yeltsin-era civil war mentality and work alongside their traditional ideological adversaries.
In 2005, I formed my own small social action group, the United Civil Front, so that I would have a base of operations and an address. Then I went to work looking for strategic targets on the calendar where the opposition could make the most of our limited resources. It was important to have clear targets so we would have a feeling of purpose and hope. When I first entered the Russian political arena full time I had the feeling of sitting down to a chess game in progress, with my side facing checkmate in every variation. I realized that our first task as an opposition force was simply to survive, to get out our message that we existed, that we opposed the Putin regime, and that we were fighting. With every television station and major newspaper under state control it was a very difficult task, as you might imagine.
The opposition was in disarray, but the one thing we all had in common was the knowledge that democracy was our only salvation. By 2006, liberals, human rights activists, even the Communists—they all agreed that given a choice in a fair election the Russian people would reject Putin’s attempt to turn our country back into a totalitarian state. It didn’t matter that afterward we would be sitting on opposite sides of the floor. First, we needed to rescue our democracy.
This mixing of opposition groups also had several positive side effects. The leftists and those still mourning the Soviet Union came to recognize the importance of liberal democracy and political freedom now that they’d been cut out of the picture. The liberals, which in Russia refers to those like me who favor free markets and an open, Western-leaning society, learned to accept the need for the social and economic stability programs touted by the left. Unity not only stiffened the opposition to the Putin government, but has also clarified and advanced the specific goals of our member groups. This isn’t to say it was all one big happy family, but at least we were together.
To have a real impact, I felt it was necessary to unite on the core issue: you were either working with the Kremlin or dedicated to dismantling the regime. It was clear by then that there was no way to change anything from the inside. In a way, the key step was taking a page out of the Kremlin’s book: a nonideological movement. Forces from across the political spectrum came together. In the summer of 2006 we had enough momentum to go on the offensive, hosting The Other Russia Conference in Moscow in advance of the July G8 meeting in St. Petersburg.
The conference brought activists from all over Russia to share ideas and support. We also invited the international media and speakers from all over the world who were not afraid to speak strongly for democracy in the shadow of the Kremlin. My Civic Congress co-chairs and I wrote countless letters of invitation, calling in favors and twisting arms when necessary. Eventually many prominent figures contributed statements of support, although few G8 administrations had the courage to openly endorse us. We chose the name, The Other Russia Conference, to tell the world that the stable, democratic Russia Putin presented was not reality.
The Russian authorities made efforts to harass us at every turn; perhaps we were irrationally optimistic, but we interpreted this as a sign of progress: “We have them worried!” If this was truly a measure of success, I should have been proud that my humble United Civil Front offices were raided by security forces a few days prior to our December 16 march in Moscow, the first of a series of what would come to be called the Marches of Dissent. Thousands came out in peaceful support under our WE DO NOT AGREE banners despite being outnumbered five to one by police.
It led to an even bigger, and more contentious, March of Dissent in St. Petersburg on March 3, 2007. We had been denied permission to hold a rally, but over six thousand people defied the ban in the largest political protest of the Putin era up to that time. That sounds like nothing, I understand, but this was new and risky and it felt like a huge wave of energy. In democratic nations protests are routine, the kind of thing you might do for social reasons even if you don’t feel all that strongly. But coming into the streets in Russia was associated with upheaval and drama. It was a very big step for many of the participants to “radicalize” in this way, walking through OMON (paramilitary riot police) cordons and chanting “Russia Without Putin!”
I felt the energy in the street myself, and I liked it. When I retired from chess I had been told that my fiery, undiplomatic nature would make me unsuitable for political activism. I had been an aggressive attacker at the chessboard and a fractious rebel in the chess world even as world champion, so how would I adapt to the subtle world of alliances and diplomacy? I would like to think that in this I met politics halfway. I listened and showed respect—half the time. I argued with colleagues who knew more and who had done more because I wanted to push us all to a new level of cooperation and confrontation. It was the only way to build a coalition that included former prime ministers and would-be Bolsheviks. And when it came time to march, my loud voice and hard head were assets, not weaknesses.
Dozens of marchers were attacked by the riot police that day, the only violence that took place. It is very important to emphasize that over the course of many marches there was not a single overturned car or broken window. But of course we were demonized in the Kremlin-controlled media as violent hooligans and reporters focused their cameras on the few clashes with police, which of course had been provoked by the police. Around a dozen Marches of Dissent took place around the country in 2007, though the majority were in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
In November I was arrested at a Moscow rally and this time I was sentenced to five days in jail under the new anti-demonstration laws. It wasn’t pleasant, although I enjoyed a relatively gilded jail experience, signing autographs for guards and police and generally hearing a lot of sympathetic remarks from them about the state of the country. My old world championship rival, Anatoly Karpov, even tried to visit me. He was turned away, but I very much appreciated the gesture, especially since we were as opposed politically as we were in chess style.
As the rift between Putin’s Russia and the governments of the United States and Europe became increasingly apparent, a new diplomatic position was slowly adopted in the West. After years of trying to accept Putin as an equal, they started to say that while there are differences between Russia and our Western counterparts, these differences are minor, and “within an acceptable range,” in the words of one European Union official.
For me and for a dozen of my colleagues marching for democracy, that “acceptable range” was 120 square feet. That’s the size of the jail cell several of us occupied for five days as punishment for “disobeying the orders of a police officer” at the opposition rally in Moscow. That was the charge a Moscow district court added after the fact, a charge not mentioned in the handwritten testimony of the arresting officers. That was the least conspicuous of the many illegal aspects of my arrest and trial.
After our rally of several thousand people we attempted to meet up with another group, a meeting led by well-known human rights leader Lev Ponomaryov. From there we intended to deliver a petition of protest to the office of the Central Election Committee (CEC). The police had blocked the underground pedestrian passageways so we had to cross the broad street instead and we were soon blocked by more police. When they moved in close I spoke with commanding officer Major General Vyacheslav Kozlov, whom I had met previously. He warned us to turn back, saying we would not be allowed to approach the CEC offices. I offered to send a small delegation of twenty people to present the petition and he again told us to turn back, which we did.
Of course it is inaccurate to say that the police commander was the one in command. FSB officers in plain clothes were clearly in charge even at the police station, and the arrest itself was as choreographed as the trial to come. When the OMON special security forces pushed in past everyone else to arrest me, we could all hear “Make sure you get Kasparov” on their walkie-talkies.
From the moment of our detention we were not allowed to see our lawyers, even when we were charged at the police station. Three hours into the trial the judge said it would be adjourned to the following day. In fact, ten others were held at the police station without counsel for two days prior to their hearings instead of being released, as should occur with an administrative charge. But the judge then left the bench and returned to say that we had misheard her and that my trial would go forward! No doubt another example of what we call “telephone justice” in Russia. That is, before delivering the verdict the judge goes into the back not to deliberate, but to get a phone call from the powers that be.
As in the street and at the police station, the FSB agents and OMON forces were in control. The defense was not allowed to call any witnesses or to present any materials, such as videos and photos taken of the march and the arrests. After this show trial was over I was taken to the police jail at Petrovka 38 in Moscow and there the procedural violations continued. Not with regards to my treatment, which was respectful and as hospitable as a small box with metal furnishings and a hole in the floor for a toilet can be. I wasn’t allowed a phone call and all visitors were refused access. Even my lawyer Olga Mikhailova and Duma member Vladimir Ryzhkov were forbidden to visit me despite having the legal authority to do so.
My other concern was food, since it was out of the question to consume anything provided by the staff. (Nor would I fly Aeroflot unless I had no choice, and when I did I brought my own food and drink. Paranoia long ago became an obsolete concept among those in opposition.) On Sunday, thanks to growing external pressure, they allowed me to receive food packages from my mother.
In a fitting conclusion, even my release was handled illegally. Instead of letting me out at the jail into the waiting crowd of media and supporters, many of whom had themselves been arrested and harassed while picketing, I was taken secretly to the police station where I was first charged. From there I was taken in a colonel’s automobile all the way to my home. This may sound like good service, but it was obvious the authorities wanted to avoid the festive scene that would have occurred outside the jail upon my release.
When I had been arrested the previous April and fined $40, some people poked fun at the trivial amount. And five days in a Moscow jail is hardly the worst fate that can be imagined. Some commenters even suspected I wanted to provoke my own arrest for publicity, a chessplayer’s far-sighted strategy. First off, the penalty was not the point: the principle is. Were we to have the rule of law in Russia or not? Secondly, I had no intention of becoming a martyr or in leading an opposition movement from prison. I had no illusions before, and afterward I could confirm it was not a pleasant place to be even for a brief stay.
And this was not chess, with its cold-blooded calculations. This fight was about honor and morality. I could not ask people to protest in the streets if I was not there with them. At the rally on Saturday I had said our slogan must be “We must overcome our fear” and I was obliged to stand by these words.
It is also essential to point out that these arrests were only the tip of the iceberg, the small fraction that can be seen. Such things were taking place all over Russia on a daily basis. Opposition activists, or just those who happened to be in the way of the administration, were being harassed and arrested regularly on false charges of drug possession, extremism, or the latest trend: for owning illegal software.
During my five days in jail I had the chance to speak with many of the “ordinary consumers” of Kremlin propaganda. They were generally sympathetic and showed no signs of believing the many lies the Kremlin and the youth groups it sponsors have spread about the opposition. For them I was still the Soviet champion and the idea that I was an “American agent” sounded as ludicrous as it was.
So why was Mr. Putin so scared if things were going so well? He is, or at least he still was back then, a rational and pragmatic person, not prone to melodrama. He knew the numbers, so why the brutality and heavy-handed campaigning if he knew he and United Russia were going to win easily?
The answer is that he was becoming aware of how brittle his power structure was. Instead of sounding like the tsar, high above the crowd, he was starting to sound like just another paranoid autocrat, surrounded by enemies. As George Bernard Shaw wrote, “The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.”
And so demagoguery it was and demagoguery it continued to be. A violent pro-Putin youth group, Nashi, had already released a poster celebrating Putin’s “crushing victory” in the December 2 parliamentary elections. It also warned against the “enemies of the people of Russia,” me included, attempting to disqualify the results. These terms jibed nicely with Putin’s own rhetoric of threats and fear. The ground was being prepared for greater oppression.
Along with our public protests, The Other Russia also worked to establish a communications structure beyond the long reach of the Kremlin. We wanted to expose the daily crimes that were occurring and get this information into the hands of the right people in the press and the governments of the free world. As time went on, and the crackdown on civil society and public protest got stronger and stronger, I came to believe that this international outreach was the most promising avenue of attack. Putin benefited so much from economic and political engagement with the West that he was practically unassailable at home. Cutting him off from that foreign embrace was a priority. Unfortunately, the leaders of the world’s so-called leading democracies showed little interest in living up to their professed ideals.
Nothing symbolized the lack of will to stand up to Putin than the G8 Summit in St. Petersburg held July 15–17, 2006. The G7 was an informal club more than an organization, a strangely casual group that brought together the leaders of the seven largest industrialized democracies. (Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United States, as first met in 1976. Brazil and India have recently surpassed Canada and Italy on the GDP list, or will soon.) Boris Yeltsin was invited as a sort of honorary participant in 1998, a tradition that was carried over to Vladimir Putin. Russia hosting the meeting in 2008 represented its official entry into the club, which many had already called the G8 for years, instead of the awkward “G7+1.”
This was the cast: Stephen Harper, Canada; Jacques Chirac, France; Angela Merkel, Germany; Romano Prodi, Italy; Junichiro Koizumi, Japan; Tony Blair, United Kingdom; George W. Bush, United States. The president of the European Commission was also usually invited and José Manuel Barroso attended the summit at the Constantine Palace in St. Petersburg.
It was a grand moment for Putin and an equally dismal one for Russian democracy. Putin loved to see and be seen with these paragons of democracy as much as he despised what they supposedly stood for. It had been a nice gesture to invite Yeltsin to attend in the hope that all additional engagement with Russia would be good for everyone. Instead, the G8 became a perfect example of the damage engagement could do. Putin exploited every photo-op and handshake to flaunt these democratic credentials at home. It was difficult enough to communicate the opposition message of democracy to the Russian people without their seeing Putin on every channel being embraced as an equal by the leaders of the free world. I maintained the hope that the West would find its collective backbone and that Russia’s participation would be made contingent on our actually being a democracy. Instead, it took Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014 to finally get Russia’s G8 membership suspended.
While President Bush was in St. Petersburg he met with a group of Russian NGO directors and opposition figures—at least that’s what he was told. Whether he was aware of it at the time or not, every participant at the meeting had to be preapproved by the Kremlin. No one there would have qualified as an opposition figure in my view, except perhaps for Alekseeva, the former Soviet dissident. As ridiculous as this charade was, Tony Blair wouldn’t even make that token effort and was upstaged by his wife, Cherie Blair, who met with a group of NGO heads during the summit.
When observing the West’s conciliatory dealings with Russia during this period, a favorite quotation from Winston Churchill comes to mind: “However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.” For five years, President Bush had been talking about maintaining an open dialogue with Putin and about how hard he had worked to convince the Russian leader that “it’s in his best interest to adopt Western-style values and universal values.” This sounded quite reasonable, but we didn’t have to go on theory. We had a track record to scrutinize and it was already clear that the strategy of discourse and appeasement toward Russia had failed.
By the time the G8 meeting came around it was long past time for Western leaders to take a harder stance if they wanted their rhetoric about the promotion of democracy in Russia to have any credibility at all. The St. Petersburg summit offered the visiting heads of state a chance to see for themselves how bad things had become. If they had opened their eyes, the leaders who talked so often about receiving “mixed signals” from Russia would have seen that the only mixture that mattered was that of oil, money, and power.
Bush and Europe’s leaders apparently believed it was best to disregard such things for the sake of getting Russia’s cooperation on security and energy. But as Solzhenitsyn foretold, this cynical and morally repugnant stance has also proved to be an entirely ineffective one. Just like old times, Moscow has become an ally of troublemakers and anti-democratic rulers around the world. Nuclear aid to Iran, missile technology to North Korea, military equipment to Sudan, Myanmar, and Venezuela, making friends with Hamas; this was how Putin repaid the West for keeping its mouth shut about human rights in Russia for eight years.
And yet the G7 leaders refused to acknowledge that it was absurd to come to Russia for help with Iran, North Korea, or Hamas when the high energy prices the Putin administration required to keep its hold on power were driven by the tension that comes with every North Korean missile launch and each Iranian nuclear threat. Russia continued to block UN sanctions against these rogue states; the only mystery is why the West continued to treat Putin’s Russia like an ally.
The Europeans in particular also pretended Putin was some species of democrat in order to promote their nations’ business interests. Of course you can expect leaders to support their national interests to a certain extent. In France, Sarkozy promoted Renault and the oil company Total. In Germany, Merkel promoted Mercedes-Benz and Deutsche Telekom. And of course Berlusconi promoted the companies of . . . Berlusconi.
Economic engagement kept the billions coming in that Putin needed to expand his repression at home. Instead of these contacts helping to liberalize and modernize Russian business practices, the flow went the other way. Russia’s biggest export was corruption, not oil or gas. Putin’s oligarchs invited foreign investors and companies to partake in sweetheart deals in Russia and cleaned their money in London and New York IPOs with the help of eager Western banks and politicians looking for a cut.
After six years of crackdowns going uncontested, Putinism was reaching its second stage. When he took power in Russia in 2000, the question was “Who is Putin?” By 2007 it had changed to “What is the nature of Putin’s Russia?” His regime had been remarkably consistent throughout its stay in power, and yet foreign leaders and the Western press still acted surprised at Putin’s total disregard for their opinions. He needed Western aid and support while he was still consolidating power in Russia. When that task was completed, Putin no longer had to pretend to care about what the rest of the world thought.
Again and again we heard cries of “Doesn’t Putin know how bad this looks?” When another prominent Russian journalist was murdered, when a businessman not friendly to the Kremlin was jailed, when a foreign company was pushed out of its Russian investment, when pro-democracy marchers were beaten by police, when gas and oil were used as political weapons, and when Russian weapons and missile technology were sold to terrorist sponsor states like Iran and Syria, “Putin has blundered!” the Western leaders would say. Why? Unlike politicians in democracies, Putin didn’t care how something looked as long as he knew nobody would act to stop him. The only image he cared about was looking tough at home, and blatantly ignoring the feeble complaints of Western leaders only helped him in that regard.
What needed to be asked was what sort of government would continue such behavior, and where such a government would end up. Putin’s regime operated on an amoral scale, something entirely different from that of the Western nations struggling to understand what was happening behind the medieval red walls of the Kremlin. By 2007, I had become a full-time Putin explainer in my articles and lectures.
Putin’s government during that transitional period from fragile democracy to full-blown dictatorship was unique on the historical timeline. It was part oligarchy, with a small, tightly connected gang of wealthy rulers. It was partly a feudal system, broken down into semiautonomous fiefdoms in which feudal payments were collected from the serfs, who had no rights, and the smaller lords pay the bigger lords. Over all of that there was a democratic coat of paint, just thick enough to earn Russia entry into the G7 and keep the oligarchy’s money safe in Western banks.
As I wrote in the Wall Street Journal in July 2007, if you really wished to understand the Putin regime in depth, you had to go to the bookstore. Not to buy the works of Karl Marx or Adam Smith. Nothing by Montesquieu or Machiavelli, although the author you are looking for is of Italian descent. Skip Mussolini’s The Doctrine of Fascism for now (but hold on to it for later . . .) and the entire political science section. Go directly to the fiction department and take home everything you can find by Mario Puzo. The Godfather trilogy is a good place to start, but do not leave out The Last Don, Omerta, and The Sicilian.
The rise of Vladimir Putin and his St. Petersburg clan has been described as Machiavellian, but it is better described by the achievements of Don Vito Corleone: the web of betrayals, the secrecy, and the blurred lines between what is business, what is government, and what is criminal—it’s all there in Puzo’s books.
A historian could look at the Kremlin in 2007 and see elements of Mussolini’s corporate state, Latin American juntas, and Mexico’s pseudodemocratic Institutional Revolutionary Party machine. A Puzo fan sees the Putin government more accurately: a strict hierarchy, extortion, intimidation, a tough-guy image, a long string of convenient deaths among leading critics, eliminating traitors, the code of secrecy and loyalty, and, above all, a mandate to keep the revenue flowing. In other words, a mafia.
As long as you are loyal to the capo, he will protect you. If one of the inner circle goes against the capo, his life is forfeit. Once Russia’s richest man, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, wanted to go straight and run his Yukos oil company as a legitimate corporation and not as another cog in Putin’s KGB Inc., he quickly found himself in a Siberian prison, his company dismantled and looted, and its pieces absorbed by the state mafia apparatus of Rosneft and Gazprom. Private companies were absorbed into the state while at the same time the assets of the state companies moved into private accounts. State and corporate power merged. It became a perverse combination of Adam Smith and Karl Marx in which the profits were privatized and the expenses were nationalized.
Alexander Litvinenko was a KGB agent who broke the loyalty code by fleeing to the UK. Even worse, he violated the law of omertà by going to the press and even publishing books about the dirty deeds of Putin and his foot soldiers. Instead of being taken fishing in the old-fashioned Godfather style, in November 2006 he was killed in London in the first recorded case of nuclear terrorism. The Kremlin refused to hand over the main suspect in the murder and eventually Britain shelved the case, only to reopen it in 2014 when Putin’s invasion of Ukraine finally persuaded the British that engagement with his regime was no longer a possibility.
For seven years, from Putin’s election until the moment of the Litvinenko assassination, the West tried to change the Kremlin with kind words and compliance. They believed that they would be able to integrate Putin and his gang into the free world’s system of fair trade and honest diplomacy. Instead the opposite happened. The Kremlin was not changing its standards; it was imposing them on the outside world. The mafia corrupts everything it touches. Bartering in human rights begins to appear acceptable. As an added benefit, Putin and his cronies received the stamp of legitimacy from Western leaders and businesses while making those same leaders and businesses complicit in their crimes.
With energy prices so high, the temptation to sell out to the Kremlin was almost an offer you couldn’t refuse, and many didn’t even try. Schröder and Berlusconi could not resist and found themselves entirely compromised. Then we saw the spectacle of Nicolas Sarkozy boosting the interests of French energy company Total in the Shtokman gas field. There, too, we tried to warn everyone that foreign companies and investors were not immune. Shell found this out when the Kremlin pushed them out of the Sakhalin 2 gas fields in 2006, and British Petroleum learned the hard way in 2008 when its CEO fled Russia in fear for his life. Of course both of them soon came running back for more. If you want to invest in KGB Incorporated you should remember that they are very, very active shareholders.
In case you have forgotten the tale of Gazprom, Gerhard Schröder, and his dear friend Vladimir, its details are worth recalling. Not because anyone should care how Schröder spends his days, but because of the Kremlin methods the deal exposed to the world without an ounce of shame. What was one more small step for Putin was one giant leap for corruption in the West. When Putin invaded Ukraine in 2014, it was deals like these and thousands more that made it nearly impossible for Europe to disengage itself from Russia, let alone lead an effective boycott.
Just days after being pushed out of office as chancellor of Germany in November 2005, Schröder made sure he wouldn’t add to the high rate of unemployment he left behind. He accepted a top post with Russian energy giant Gazprom, which was the company in charge of a controversial gas pipeline project that Schröder actively supported as chancellor. The dubious ethics of this move and the speed with which it was made led to many obvious questions about whether or not Schröder abused his office to set up the deal, especially as he was trailing badly in the polls for most of the campaign against Angela Merkel. But the groundwork for Schröder’s new job was laid out in advance as part of a well-organized operation that brought in capital before personnel.
Matthias Warnig, as head of Russian operations for Germany’s Dresdner Bank, first brought in a deal to purchase 33 percent of Gazprombank in August. (Dresdner also helped the Kremlin pick the bones of Yukos.) Accordingly, Warnig was given a top position at the North European Gas Pipeline Company. Finally everything was ready for the arrival of Mr. Schröder.
The deal also kept everything in the family as Warnig was a spy for the East German secret police, the Stasi, at the same time Putin was running agents for the KGB in Dresden. As Putin himself has said, there is no such thing as a former KGB agent. In reality this was the lesser story: that Germany’s most powerful politicians and businessmen could be purchased the way a Russian oligarch might buy an aristocratic Bavarian estate to gain entry to high society. The larger and darker picture was how Putin has made the nation’s energy resources the center of his ruling clique. They completely erased the lines between public and private power and assets.
In Russia everyone was wondering, “Does the state run Gazprom or does Gazprom run the state?” Putin made a priority of tightening the unholy bond between his regime’s internal and external goals and the company that provides most of the natural gas to Central and Eastern Europe. They are not state-run companies; they are the state. Gazprom’s chairman at the time was Dmitry Medvedev, who had recently been named first deputy prime minister. Putin’s deputy chief of staff Igor Sechin headed the other Russian energy goliath, Rosneft. But that wasn’t the only reason Rosneft wasn’t investigated for its shady takeover of Yukos’s prime asset, Yuganskneftegaz, in a bogus auction. Taking la famiglia literally, Sechin’s daughter was married to the son of then–Russian attorney general Vladimir Ustinov.
So Schröder didn’t just join a Russian company; he joined the Putin administration. For Schröder’s price, Gazprom and Putin’s regime bought legitimacy in the eyes of the West. Deals like that one also provided Putin with priceless propaganda fodder. He could trumpet this coup of putting a former German chancellor in his pocket while at the same time the state-controlled media presented it as an example of how the West was only after money and oil.
Totalitarian regimes everywhere love to tell their citizens that for all their professed interest in democracy and human rights, Americans and Western Europeans are just as corrupt as their own leaders. It does tremendous damage to the pro-democracy cause in Russia, and elsewhere, when a figure like Schröder, the former leader of the third-largest industrial democratic nation, enthusiastically allies himself with authoritarian thugs. Using energy as a political weapon is a tried and true tactic, and the hiring of Schröder allowed Gazprom to act with even more impunity.
This was the new Kremlin strategy: to co-opt and quiet the West by recruiting prominent individuals. When everyone is guilty, no one is guilty, goes the logic. We already had seen the price paid for these see-no-evil policies on civil liberties and in Chechnya. With this new tactic, Western leaders had to resist the calls of their bank accounts, not only the calls of conscience. Everyone was engulfed in the same toxic cloud of oil, gas, politics, intimidation, and repression.
Those of us in the Russian opposition had been saying for a long time that while Putin was our problem, soon he would be the world’s problem. Our warnings went largely ignored. After years of rumbling warning signs, when the threats materialized in 2008 in the form of Russian tanks entering Georgia, the leaders of the free world were totally unprepared to deal with it. Engagement had failed but they didn’t know any other tricks to try. Expelling diplomats and limiting official visits was not going to have an impact. My suggestion then was the same as it is today: simultaneously curtail engagement and use the economic leverage of existing engagement to pressure its beneficiaries in Russia.
Ironically, Putin’s elites liked to keep their money where they could trust in the rule of law, and after the G8 lovefest in St. Petersburg, Putin and his wealthy supporters had every reason to believe their money was safe in the West. Limiting that access, or even threatening to do so, would have had a dramatic deterrent effect. Instead, it was business and appeasement as usual. The central myths of engagement are that it (1) liberalizes the unfree states and (2) provides leverage over them if they don’t liberalize. The first has proven false. The second has failed because the free world refuses to exploit its leverage the way dictatorships are so eager to do.
I have never called for a boycott of Russia, by the way. The free world also does big business with China, Saudi Arabia, and other autocracies without providing their leaders with democratic credentials the way they did with Putin. And it’s hard to imagine the elites who run another belligerent rogue state living in luxury in Western capitals. The minions and the oligarchs are loyal to Putin because he is the capo di tutti capi and he offers them protection. They can do as they like in Russia, and as long as they stay loyal they can get rich and take their money to America, to London, wherever. This is why I pushed for legislation to cut off that pipeline and damage Putin’s ability to protect his gang—and it’s why Russia fought so hard to prevent such legislation from gaining ground.
There was no reason to cease doing business with Russia. The delusion was that it could ever be more than that. The mafia takes and takes, and it only gives with many strings attached.