It was a sweltering summer’s day in St Petersburg, and everyone was seeking shade from the scorching sun – inside, under restaurant awnings or in the shadows of trees in the parks. Only tourists defied the heat, pursuing photographs for their albums. The queue outside the Winter Palace was as long as a bread line, in the old days, and on a good day, the turnover of the young man selling bottled water on the Palace Square, or Dvortsovaya Ploshchad as the locals called it, exceeded the average month’s wage for a Russian industrial worker. The stability of Russia had been changed for ever by the emergence of capitalism. The classless Soviet Union had given families throughout the union a sort of predictability in everyday life that they had interpreted as security. The winds of change had raged across Russia for some years now, and the calm that followed had been unsettling for many citizens. Before the Berlin Wall had come down, society had centred around the inevitable battle against capitalism, and industrial machinery was like a coiled spring waiting for the arrival of war. That was also true of the production of cigarettes: the well-known Papirosa could easily be converted for military purposes; its cardboard filter was precisely the same diameter as a rifle bullet, and the machinery 116that produced it could also produce bullets. Aluminium production was also massive: there was the production of knives, forks, vacuums and refrigerators from aluminium, and production could also be switched immediately to military use.
The apparent disorderly layout of prominent Russian cities was something many Westerners mistakenly took as betokening a lack of planning. Nothing could be more wrong. The structure of the city centre – where an apartment block could be followed by an open square before the next apartment block towered – was anything but random. Cities were built to survive a nuclear attack. The untidy gaps in Russian town centres were corridors for rescue teams going through the ruins. When the Berlin Wall came down, and capitalism took over, these precautions were suddenly rendered obsolete. Like a thief in the night, it left Russia looking hopelessly archaic and with a manufacturing industry unfit for purpose.
On the other hand, it also presented an opportunity that had been identified by a handful of men – who had had then exploited it to acquire significant parts of Russian state assets under cover of a meticulously presented campaign, later named ‘privatisation’. At the start of the 1990s, these oligarchs had quickly understood how to ruthlessly transform their assets into enormous wealth – which they now had an apparently inexhaustible desire to show off. Luxury was in vogue in Russia, at least amongst the new ruling classes, and one of the top places to be seen was the Grand Hotel Europe on Nevsky Prospect. The hotel prided itself in giving guests a romanticised experience of the lifestyle typical in Russia’s golden age. The lavish interior certainly did everything possible to create the illusion that the hotel had a direct line to the Tsars. It had initially been built in the baroque style, but the renovations 117over the past few years had catered to the nouveau riche need to create distance between themselves and their fellow countrymen. An abundance of luxury was clearly the only common denominator in the decor. The fact that this had resulted in the complete and utter annihilation of the atmosphere experienced by notable guests like Dostoyevsky, Tchaikovsky, Anna Pavlova and Gorky was clearly of less importance.
Andrej Nitchenko stood in the middle of the hotel’s sizeable open cafe covering his mouth with his hand, as if his jaw couldn’t stay in place by itself; his eyes wolfed in the images of burgeoning wealth. In his elegant suit, he looked like a natural politician. I’m the leader of Mother Russia, he reminded himself as he sipped his espresso and observed the characters populating the tables around him. They were a motley band. Especially the men, who seemed to fall into two categories: small, chubby ones and large, boisterous types that you would not want to be on the wrong side of. What they all had in common were their expensive suits. The young women, with make-up and bling, were a more diverse bunch. If only they were truly beautiful, Andrej thought, wincing at the parvenus and their submission to the West’s hollow materialism.
He was checking his watch for the third time as he spotted them. Sergey Pustynikov ascended slowly up the red-carpeted white marble staircase with Shamil and his brothers in tow. The Chechens looked like fish out of water in their shabby T-shirts, worn jeans and boots better suited for hiking. Nitchenko noticed the Chechens’ unease in these surroundings. Shamil and his brothers greeted him nervously with short, firm handshakes, eyes fixed on the floor. Andrej Nitchenko said nothing to make them feel more comfortable, and a silence descended. Finally, he broke it:118
‘Are our three unfortunate friends ready to make a difference for Mother Russia? Even if it will cost them their lives?’ he said as, with a commanding look, he invited them to sit at a group of baroque-style couches in the furthest corner of the room.
‘Not only has our party lost two good friends, but it has also lost income of paramount importance to our efforts,’ he continued, once they had all sat down.
‘We can never return our brother, comrades or the volumes of narcotics we have lost. We know that. But we must reap revenge for our brother, and we owe it to our Chechnyan clans to correct what happened. A strategy that will compensate you for your financial loss and, at the same time, expose your incompetent leaders. Furthermore, we can undermine a hostile NATO, threatening your borders.’
‘We are ready to leave right away,’ Shamil cut in.
Sergey Pustynikov’s face generally revealed little of his thoughts, but it looked, momentarily, as if he might explode with rage over Shamil’s impertinent interruption of Andrej Nitchenko. The silence was deafening, and Shamil turned towards the crowd at the bar to see if they too were holding their breath. Then, a small tight-lipped smile relieved the tension.
‘That is the most intelligent thing I’ve heard in a long time,’ Andrej Nitchenko said in a low, icy voice.
His face did not give away his thoughts: he was reflecting on just how dangerous these Chechens could be. Boris Yeltsin’s decision to deploy Russian troops and defeat the ‘bandit elements’ in Chechnya had, in 1994, ignited a powder keg of nationalism. Young Chechens had been soldiers in the Russian Army, the army which Andrej considered to be his army. Overnight, those 119Chechens had been presented with a great dilemma. Up to that point, they had fought valiantly for Russia; there had been several Chechens in Nitchenko’s unit in Afghanistan, and they were good soldiers. But from that day on, he could no longer trust their loyalty. Now, he felt the same way about the three ex-prisoners across from him: he just couldn’t trust them. They had chosen to embark on terrorist actions as a sort of alternative business model and had thus declared loyalty only to money. He could not count on their loyalty towards Mother Russia. They profited from the chaos of civil war, and their cooperative behaviour was merely a veneer over the criminal tendencies embedded in their genes. Criminals could not be trusted. But criminal acts could be used in the service of a greater good, like Mother Russia.
Andrej Nitchenko produced a copy of the Russian paper Komsomolskaya Pravda from his black leather bag and placed it on the white marble table with the golden legs. The front page had a story from the press conference in Vedbæk, illustrated by a large colour photo of patrol leader Kaare Strand with the subtitle:
‘Even here, his name is known. Our so-called Justice Minister has promised strong action in response to the “criminality” this Dane uncovered – simultaneously selling out the values of the Motherland. We’ve been handed an obvious target. Sergey, show our three friends everything we have gathered so far.’
The three brothers stooped over the table and the paper as if it was a dangerous animal. The shame in their faces morphed into 120fury. All three straightened their backs, ready to prove to Nitchenko that they were worthy of his trust. Sergey Pustynikov briefly caught Nitchenko’s eye and nodded as he took a drag from his cigarette.
Sergey Pustynikov issued a short order: the audience was clearly over. Shamil and his brothers rose from their seats and followed him back down the red-carpeted white marble staircase and through the metal detector in the hotel’s lobby, emerging into the sunshine as a tight troop. The four men turned the corner to Mikhailovska Ulitsa, where they crossed to a shiny black Mercedes parked beneath one of the large linden trees. They climbed into the car as if in military formation. They drove southwest towards Sadovaya Ulitsa, over Sennava Place and to the left along Moskovsky Avenue, heading due south towards the city’s old, run-down industrial areas without uttering a word. This part of St Petersburg was not something to brag about, Sergey Pustynikov thought as he expertly manoeuvred the big Mercedes through district after district, none of which featured on the maps available to tourists in the city’s hotels. But the four men in the car were not tourists, and their destination had been chosen with complete premeditation.