A strange situation exists in Russia resulting largely from the nature of the Soviet period, the ideological character of the USSR, and the enhanced suggestibility of the Russian people: Beginning in 1917 the ruling authorities regularly and methodically committed improper acts. Concealing these acts required even more unacceptable practices, culminating in human disasters, tragedies, and limits on a wide spectrum of human rights. For the people to accept this as natural, the state had to possess additional means and instruments and to resort to indisputable and continuous lies. In 2000 Putin named this instrumentality the “vertical of power.”
It would be naive to assume that Putin and Company’s lack of a formal program means that no such program exists. Of course it does. If it were openly proclaimed, however, both Russian and foreign public opinion would recoil in horror from the regime that has ruled Russia since 2000. Although this program is known only to the initiated, it can easily be deciphered by analyzing what the Russian authorities have done from the beginning of the present century. The program is one of reaction, reviving totalitarianism at home and expansion abroad.
When Putin became president, Russia was virtually ungovernable. Therefore, people accepted his deliberately neutral-sounding thesis about the need to establish a “vertical of power” in Russia as something natural, especially since the absence of a workable system of governance had produced negative consequences under both Gorbachev and Yeltsin. What that power represented, what its goals were, and what the means were for achieving them were quite another matter. Putin’s vertical of power is nothing other than a new oprichnina—in other words, the creation of a group of Kremlin loyalists who enjoy special privileges and power.
I worked for many years with representatives of organizations that called themselves “the organs.” Many of my colleagues and acquaintances belonged to these organizations. In the course of working with them, I acquired an in-depth understanding of their peculiar worldview. What, then, did those who took power in 2000 see as Russia’s fundamental problems?
The first thing to understand is that a majority of employees of the Russian special services possess Bolshevik—that is, communist—convictions. Approaching the situation in Russia from this perspective, they trace the root of Russia’s misfortunes to pluralism and the germs of democracy. Starting in 1997 when I was working in the Security Council, representatives of the special services “cultivated” the idea of the need to establish a two-party system in Russia rather than the multiplicity of parties that had sprung up in the first post-Soviet years. They spoke to me with such conviction about the harm of having a large number of parties that I realized they were parroting a line that had come down “from above.” Under Yeltsin, however, this plan was not destined to be implemented.
The communist convictions of most officials in the special services and the military by no means signified their adherence to the ideas of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. They often had only the foggiest notion of such things. To them communism meant the organization of society, the way it functioned, and the relationship between the individual and the authorities. In other words, it was the Leninist-Stalinist model of state and society that inherently denied personal interests and enshrined public interests, which the authorities defined as the unity of thought and the domination of force in foreign and domestic policy.
When Gorbachev’s opponents began to employ the vilest methods to stop his cascading reforms, the masses, with the help of the special services, naturally began to embrace the stereotype that politics is intrinsically a dirty business. Indeed, the KGB and the reactionary segment of the Soviet leadership proceeded from the false premise that all means were permissible to achieve their goals. Regrettably, from a short-term perspective, the extremely immoral Leninist-Stalinist approach to politics is justified. For this kind of politics to work, the tender shoots of democracy must be weeded out, the air holes through which fresh air flows must be sealed off, everything and everybody must be “arranged,” and, above all, control must be established over the hitherto independent legislative and judicial powers as well as the mass media. As noted previously, Putin began his tenure as head of state by asserting his control over the Fourth Estate.
Intent on creating a new totalitarianism in Russia, Putin could not ignore the fact that the broad plenary powers of the president were partially limited by parliament. Under Yeltsin, the State Duma had been occasionally insubordinate and had even tried to impeach him. Moreover, not infrequently, opposition parties in the State Duma and the regional leaders seated in the upper house of parliament put the executive authorities in a difficult position. The new Russian autocrat could not abide such insubordination. Soon after assuming power he set about dismantling parliamentarianism in Russia; however, there was no special urgency with respect to the State Duma. Thanks to the efforts of the “patriots,” a reliable pro-Putin majority had been established there.
In the summer of 2000 Putin changed the principle on which the Federation Council was based. Previously it comprised the heads of the constituent members of the federation; now it consisted of their appointed representatives. The upshot was that the Federation Council became wholly controlled by the Kremlin.
In September 2002 Putin administered a heavy blow to the very foundations of democracy. Changes were introduced into existing legislation that prohibited holding referenda in the last year of a presidential term or of the State Duma, as well as banning any initiative to hold a referendum during federal election campaigns. Thus, the prohibition covered the larger part of every election cycle, and the opportunity for citizens to initiate referenda was sharply constricted.
Beginning in December 2004, the highest officials (presidents and governors) of the constituent units of the Russian Federation began to be appointed by the respective regional parliaments on recommendations from the president of the federation. The people were deprived of the opportunity to elect the heads of the regions, who thus became wholly divorced from their constituents and completely dependent on the Kremlin. The governors had to please a single elector—namely, the president.
The year 2005 bade farewell to any hopes for fair parliamentary elections. New legislation stipulated that elections be conducted exclusively according to party lists, making it impossible to elect independent candidates, to create electoral blocs at every level of elections, and, for small parties, to unite and enter parliament through joint efforts. In addition, the threshold of unverified voters’ signatures that would disqualify a party or a candidate from registering to run in elections was lowered from 25 percent to 10 percent. Since the verification of signatures is conducted by electoral commissions and law enforcement organs appointed by the vertical of power, this provides an opportunity to disqualify any party it so desires. But even this was not enough for the authorities. They also placed restrictions on election observers. As a result of these restrictions, only parties that have registered their lists for the election are permitted to send observers. This provision sharply limits the opportunity for independent oversight of the elections.
The Kremlin deemed these amendments to the legislation insufficient, and in July 2006 new changes were introduced that prohibited political parties from nominating members of other parties to stand in the elections. Thus, minor parties lost any chance whatsoever of combining their efforts, not by formally creating already prohibited electoral blocs, but by nominating candidates on some sort of single “basic” list. Moreover, political sympathies and party loyalty became the basis for limiting the passive voting rights of voters and the active rights of candidates aspiring to become deputies. At the same time, in elections at every level the choice of “none of the above” was removed. Russian citizens were thereby robbed of the opportunity to vote against all candidates as a way of expressing both their lack of faith in the candidates and the parties allowed to take part in the elections and their desire for new elections. Previously, if a majority of voters voted for “none of the above,” the elections were considered invalid.
Finally, to avoid any election surprises, in November 2006 the requirement that a certain minimum number of voters must actually cast ballots to validate an election was abolished. Voters were thereby deprived of their final opportunity “to vote with their feet” as a way to force new elections with new candidates. It now became possible to conduct elections without voters.
By stretching the concept of “extremism” to the limit (more follows), the registration of candidates accused of “extremist activities” was forbidden. Thus, persons with uncleared convictions for various stipulated actions or those who had been handed administrative punishment for preparing and disseminating banned political symbols were excluded. This created supplementary mechanisms for barring the opposition from elections. It also introduced an extrajudicial limit on voting rights. Finally, electioneering through the media by certain candidates and parties against other candidates and parties was prohibited. Thus, the last elements of political competition were quashed, the opposition was unable to inform citizens of the mistakes committed by the authorities, and the citizens were deprived of the right to learn about them.
Not content with these legislative changes, Putin blatantly falsified election results on a broad scale. Technology was an important means for doing this.1 Up until December 2011 when short-lived protest demonstrations occurred in Moscow, although well aware of these deceptions, people did not react to the familiar practice of rigging the election results, the pressure to vote for candidates indicated from “on high,” the destruction of ballots, and the other forms of manipulating the elections. Thus, for the time being all future elections results were decided in advance. However, it cannot be denied that were honest elections held, their results would still tally with the Kremlin’s needs. Yet the democratic opposition would be able to stay active in politics, thereby keeping alive hope for the emergence of civil society.
The concept of extremism was adapted for use in the struggle against dissenters. The law “On Counteracting Extremist Activity,” adopted in 2002 and amended on July 27, 2006, includes the aforementioned vague notion of undermining the security of the Russian Federation. Moreover, it reenacts under a different name the notorious Article 11 of the Criminal Code, which replaced the explicitly political Articles 70 and 190 of the Soviet Criminal Code (referred to in chapter 1). In the same spirit, included in the definition of extremist activity is “the creation and/or dissemination of printed, audio, audio-visual or other materials (output) intended for public use and containing even one of the indicators stipulated in the present article.”
However, progress continues on this front, and the Putinist lawmakers have improved upon Soviet penal legislation. With adoption of the amendments in 2006, the definition of extremism was further expanded to include “financing of the stipulated activity or other assistance in planning, organizing, preparing, and implementing the stipulated activity, including by means of financial resources, real estate, instructional, polygraphic and material-technological, telephonic, fax or other means of communication, information services, or other material-technical means.” Moreover, any criticism of the authorities is defined as extremism. Anyone may be held responsible—for example, someone who rented out an apartment where extremist material was written, who lent money to an author, who allowed an author to use the telephone, fax, or email. One can hardly imagine all the possible interpretations of this notoriously illegitimate legislative norm.
So just what is this “extremist material”? It is “documents intended for publication or information for other bearers.” But how does one determine if the materials are intended for publication? And where is freedom of speech? But this has no meaning for the legislator. The “author of print, audio, audio-visual and other materials (output) intended for public use and containing even one of the indicators stipulated in Article 1 of the present Federal law is considered to be a person engaged in extremist activity and bears responsibility in accordance with procedures established by the legislation of the Russian Federation.” This responsibility is stipulated in Article 282 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation on “Inciting Hatred or Enmity as well as Humiliation of Human Dignity.” The punishment is up to five years’ deprivation of freedom. No policies to encourage extremism exist in any civilized country, so this is a typical flourish of the current Russian hypocrites.
For the reader to develop a clearer picture of the goals and means of the vertical of power, we must again step outside the temporal limits of this book. Putin’s third official presidential term has been marked by genuine legislative madness. (It is really his fourth term, as it is clear that the stuffed teddy bear Dmitry Medvedev took virtually no decisions during his term as president [2008–12] and simply warmed the presidential chair for his boss.) There is a good reason why Russian wits call the State Duma, or Russia’s parliament, the State Dummy and the Runaway Printer. With unusual speed this strange machine has adopted draconian laws reinstating criminal responsibility for slander, the definition of which is vague in the Soviet tradition; prohibiting Americans from adopting Russian orphans; prohibiting foul language, which a large part of the population employs to one degree or another and which the overwhelming majority use at least occasionally; blacklisting websites, or censoring the Internet; tightening the rules for conducting meetings; outlining punishment for insulting the feelings of believers (the sensitivities of nonbelievers are ignored); passing a homophobic law; and prohibiting adoptions by same-sex couples.
Particularly noteworthy is the law that forces nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) receiving financial or other aid from abroad and “participating in political activities” to register as foreign agents. This is a sinister formulation in the Soviet Russian tradition, suggesting something extremely hostile to the country. By this means, the NGOs are made to condemn themselves as representatives of the interests of other countries and not of Russia. Moreover, in print as well as on the Internet, they must indicate that their publications were prepared by these same “foreign agents.” Irrespective of their statutory goals and missions, any activity carried out on the territory of the Russian Federation—not only participation in political actions aimed at influencing policy but also in shaping public opinion—is considered political activity. Naturally, joint-stock companies with state participation and their branches are excluded from the scope of this law. This is a masterful trap. Many NGOs must either admit they are foreign agents and suffocate from lack of funds or immediately close up shop. Moreover, even after registering as foreign agents, the NGOs are subject to financial checks, supposedly aimed against money laundering of illegally obtained funds and against financing of terrorism. Their activities are scrutinized under a microscope. Further, the authorities can deny registration to any NGO on simple, unsubstantiated suspicions.
The overall result is the revival of repressive Soviet legislation but dressed up differently. In the absence of open persecution for political and religious convictions, even broader prohibitions—for example, of “extremism”—are required for the sake of appearances.
Toward this end Media-Most and NTV were destroyed, and then other independent mass media was as well. After suppressing freedom of speech, the guillotine for democracy was adjusted and perfected.
The blackest legacy of Soviet times was restored even prior to the seizure of power by the special services. This real Pandora’s box was opened partly from mindlessness, partly from the incompetence of those in power and their inability to solve problems, and partly from a desire to deal with current issues. But there can be no doubt that from this Pandora’s box burst forth terrorism, violence against one’s own citizens, a spy scare, and heightened fears of both imagined and real dangers (which, of course, were sometimes specially concocted by the authorities). They were all deployed to create an atmosphere of general hysteria in the country to facilitate controlling the population. The reactionaries deliberately unleashed the genie of violence when they were still battling against Gorbachev’s reformation. Under Yeltsin violence became a daily occurrence in Russian politics. It would take hundreds of pages to fully analyze the violence of the Russian state. Here I shall address only the most prominent manifestations. First, let us consider the role of violence itself in Russian politics over the past century.
Violence inflicted upon its own citizens is a trademark of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Russia. The Red Terror. The legendary Solovki Islands—the site of the first Soviet concentration camps where, beginning in 1921, Lenin exiled the nation’s intellectual and spiritual elite—became the forerunner of the GULAG. The destruction of the nobility, the intelligentsia, the priesthood, the better-off peasantry, and other “enemies of the people” was the foundation of Bolshevik policy as were genocide and the forced internal deportation of people of various nationalities who were inhabiting the USSR. It is difficult even to enumerate the varieties of violence.
The USSR would not have survived long without violence against its own citizens. Mass repression was curtailed after the death of Stalin in 1953, but in 1962 the authorities decided to use the familiar methods “to restore order” in Novocherkassk.2 However, this was the lone example of force being applied within Russia. Naturally, even after the demise of the USSR and during investigations conducted in 1993–94, the names of those responsible for the deaths were not revealed.
During perestroika, the provocative and disproportionate use of force occurred with beatings and teargassing in several regional capitals. Each was a disaster. In most cases the violence was provoked by neo-Stalinists for whom force was a political weapon. The lives and well-being of fellow humans were small change in the struggle to achieve political and other ambitions. The stakes were power.
Once Yeltsin became the undisputed head of state, he frequently resorted to outright violence. He first unleashed violence in October 1993, when he ordered tanks to shell the rebellious parliament. The state of emergency declared at that time led to massive violations of human rights, including attacks against passengers on public transport who included women, children, and the elderly.
One cannot reproach Putin for neglecting the coercive agencies. He loves to play with toy soldiers, not miniature lead ones, but live ones as he has done in Chechnya, in Georgia, in Ukraine, and in Syria. He views the officials of the law enforcement organs as his toy soldiers and the oppositionists as enemy toy soldiers. The rest of the population, which he considers the “electorate,” are also toy soldiers. He would like them to be unthinking and submissive. Dressed in a flight suit he loves to pose in front of television cameras with his entourage in the cockpit of a jet fighter or a strategic missile bomber. He also loves to play with toy boats. As commander in chief he has this prerogative. This “leader of the nation” also does not hesitate to use force against his own people or against foreign countries.
This is not the place to attempt an exhaustive analysis, or even a full listing, of this phenomenon. Instead, I shall address a few of the more dangerous processes taking place in Russia.
Traditionally the Russian authorities required an enemy. In Soviet times prior to Gorbachev, “world imperialism” filled the bill. From the Kremlin’s perspective, it brought in its train regional and local conflicts and “national-liberation struggles” (that in many cases were actually inspired by Moscow) and spawned international crises, some of which threatened a global nuclear missile confrontation. Undoubtedly, the Soviet Union’s “anti-imperialist struggle” was one of the sources of international terrorism.3 From the moment Russia began trying to “civilize” itself, the situation changed. Mikhail Gorbachev thought that having an enemy was not only unnecessary but even counterproductive. For Boris Yeltsin and his successors, however, an enemy was necessary. Why? To rationalize the breakdown of the country and its impoverishment. To hold onto power, to protect themselves.
Terror has a long history in Russia. Starting in the 1860s, terror was one of the basic means of revolutionary struggle. It was widely used to eliminate persons whom the revolutionaries deemed “harmful” and to destabilize society in order to obtain funding and other resources.4 After achieving power, the revolutionaries did not dispense with this familiar and effective instrument for eliminating adversaries. In this respect, the USSR and Russia attained the very pinnacle of success.5 De facto terror was the foundation of politics in the USSR. In twenty-three provinces of Russia from June 1918 through February 1919, 5,496 persons, of whom only 800 were ordinary criminals, were shot by Cheka organs.6 In 1920, 6,541 persons were sentenced to death by revolutionary military tribunals.7
Naturally, the USSR employed terrorism in one form or another in its “anti-imperialist struggle.” It is no coincidence that the bloodiest of pro-Soviet regimes, as well as leftist and extremist organizations, actively employed terrorism. Nor is it an accident that Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez, famous as Carlos the Jackal, was enrolled in a terrorist school in Cuba, a state friendly to the USSR. He also attended Moscow’s former Patrice Lumumba Friendship University (since renamed), a school that trained revolutionaries and was known in the West as a global terrorist academy. Nor was it by chance that Abdullah Öcalan, founder of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, hid out in Russia, which he entered quite legally, although he was being pursued by police from many countries.
The first really notorious terrorist act in contemporary Russian history took place on June 14, 1994, in Budyonnovsk, where Chechen fighters seized hostages, including staff, at a two-thousand-bed hospital. Nevertheless, on June 16, during the crisis, Yeltsin flew to Halifax for a meeting of the Group of Seven. On his orders, on June 17, an assault on the hospital began, during which 166 persons were killed and more than 400 wounded. According to numerous witnesses, all the victims were killed or wounded by federal troops. The attack failed; the terrorists fled. Meanwhile, the public was shocked that Yeltsin was enjoying himself in Halifax. Then he attained one of his “high points,” announcing, without any proof, that Turkey was prepared to provide sanctuary to the president of Chechnya, Dzhokhar Dudaev, and that Dudaev had accepted this proposal. The Russian president concluded his portentous announcement by asserting that Chechnya had become the center of global terrorism.
A series of meaningless, anonymous terrorist acts followed, without demands being made. Because of their specific characteristics, no historical analogies could be drawn with them. There was no answer to the question of why and by whom they were being committed, especially since the victims of the anonymous terrorists—terrorists who made no demands—were random persons, passengers on municipal transport, planes, trains. Right after each such crime a “Chechen footprint” was found but then quickly disappeared. People were terrified, especially in Moscow, where most of the terrorist acts occurred. Apparently the only goal of these terrorist acts was to create an atmosphere of fear, to incite hysteria. Strange as it may seem, one possible answer to the question of why lay right at hand: it is quite possible that the authorities were securing for themselves an ability to act freely against terrorists. One can also not discount that under Yeltsin the sharpest interclan struggles had developed.
What should we make of the claim that Chechens committed these terrorist acts? This version is totally logical when one considers how much grief the federal authorities have inflicted upon practically every Chechen family. However, the tradition of blood vengeance is hardly relevant here. It is always directed against specific offenders and does not entail revenge on the basis of nationality. Moreover, in Chechnya a code of honor still prevails that does not include anonymity, especially regarding revenge. In several instances Chechen leaders claimed responsibility for terrorist acts they were accused of committing even though, according to the Russian special services, these leaders actually had nothing to do with them. They claimed responsibility believing that such notorious terrorist acts would bolster their authority. Finally, one cannot discount the practice of kamikaze (suicide) attacks, like those in the Middle East, by persons who make no demands whatsoever. In sum, the truth about terrorist acts under Yeltsin is complicated and multidimensional.
In Russia the background of this series of terrorist acts was quite distinctive. A domestic political struggle was being waged between those who sought revenge for Russia’s defeat in the war with Chechnya, on the one hand, and those who favored a peaceful resolution of the Chechen problem, on the other. Against this background, I could hardly ignore what someone from the Federal Security Service whispered to me: behind all these terrorist acts stood Minister of Internal Affairs Anatoly Kulikov, who had supposedly established a secret subunit for this purpose. This sounded quite plausible, since Kulikov was one of the leaders of the “war party,” but the FSB was not exactly a trustworthy source of information. It is doubtful that, apart from those who never talk, anyone could say with assurance what the truth really was. Perhaps the whisper was intended to deflect attention away from the real guilty party and toward another agency? In any case, one sensed, at the very least, that behind several of the terrorist acts during Yeltsin’s administration stood someone in power who did not want to see a peaceful resolution of the problems Russia faced, including that of Chechnya.
Of course, under Yeltsin the problem of terrorism was particularly acute and abnormal. After all, it was he who launched the First Chechen War, releasing the genie of terrorism from the bottle. It was on his watch that the special services began playing with terrorist acts. However, there is nothing more cynical than what Putin has been up to with respect to terrorism. His stance toward terrorism is simple: Terrorism benefits him, and he makes use of it. To do so he must lie systematically, which he does selflessly, ecstatically, mechanically, as the spy-president was taught to do.
Putin came to power on a wave of fear evoked by the explosions in apartment houses in Moscow on the night of September 9, 1999, on Guryanova Street and early in the morning of September 13, on Kashirskoye Boulevard.8 In the absence of any evidence, responsibility for these terrorist acts was laid on Chechen separatists.
Who could believe the later assertion by the director of the FSB that employees of his organization had furtively placed hexogen, which had been used for the explosions in Moscow, in an apartment block in Ryazan supposedly to test the vigilance of citizens? Of course, no one believed this. And then they forgot about it. It would have been better not to forget, for the result was that the authorities got away with it. After all, the FSB had been caught red-handed.
Literally on the eve of Putin’s appointment, the second incursion of Chechen fighters into Dagestan occurred and was immediately characterized as “international terrorism.” (Since it was not on his watch, it means he was not guilty! Who recalls that he headed the FSB at the time? No one remembers.) His assertion about it being international terrorism appears to be gibberish or basic illiteracy. How could one speak of international terrorism within the boundaries of a single, albeit multinational, country? But it was neither gibberish nor illiteracy but a precise, far-reaching calculation. After the terrorist acts of September 11, 2001, in the United States, Putin found the bogeyman of international terrorism extremely helpful! It was this tragedy, along with his boldly stated declaration that terrorism in Russia was not homegrown but international, that helped Putin convince President George W. Bush to insist the European Union should reconcile with Russia and not allow any further cooling of relations. Thanks to this assertion, the West overlooked the Kremlin’s outrages in Chechnya, the de facto elimination of freedom of the mass media, and all its other excesses.
Russians were enthusiastic that a decisive man was at the helm, a man who had launched an antiterrorist operation against Chechnya. Again almost no one noticed the bald lie. From the start it was hardly “antiterrorist operations”; rather, there were broad-scale military actions, skillfully managed politically, that led to a wave of terrorism. In any case, Putin’s poll numbers shot up, which is what he wanted. According to what was long the official version, terrorism and Chechnya were indistinguishable. But the most terrible terrorist acts that occurred were so mysterious that one could not help wondering how they could take place and then end in the way they did.
That Putin also managed to turn these major terrorist acts to his advantage raises disturbing questions. Included among these acts was the surrealistic story of some 700 theatergoers who attended the popular Moscow musical Nord-Ost in the theatrical center in Dubrovka and were taken hostage on October 23, 2002. (This figure is an estimate; the actual number of hostages is unknown.) The terrorists demanded the withdrawal of troops from Chechnya and promised to blow up the building if it was stormed. Was this another confirmation of Putin’s thesis never to negotiate with terrorists and not to withdraw troops from Chechnya? As far as he was concerned, the terrorists could just “go take a piss.” This is just how most ordinary Russians reacted: They praised Putin for not negotiating with the terrorists. In effect, they applauded the authorities for killing so many people rather than leaving that to the terrorists. Meanwhile, the international community was horrified and expressed condolences but did not raise any inconvenient questions. A routine investigation followed that spared the Kremlin any embarrassment.
According to official figures, 129 people died as the tragic result of this hostage-taking and the subsequent storming of the theater by special forces. (On good evidence, independent experts consider this a low estimate.) Most of the victims died from an unknown and rather mysterious gas that the special services used before storming the building. Many obvious questions remain unanswered. How could such a large group of terrorists, who were armed to the teeth, enter the hall without hindrance? Where did they live and make preparations for the seizure of hostages? Where did they store their weapons and prepare their explosives? Who planned the operation? Why were all the terrorists, without exception, killed after they were helpless and unconscious following the use of the gas? Was the report about taking two terrorists prisoner—a man and a woman—true? If so, why was nothing more heard about them? Why did some of the special forces participate in the attack without an antidote (to the poison gas)? Why were the medics unprepared to receive the victims and not informed about the type of gas employed? In the final analysis, how many people died? To say the least, everyone knows that the official figures for the number of dead were far from accurate.
The mysterious gas responsible for the deaths during the “liberation” of the hostages deserves separate mention. Contrary to the official version and according to information in Novaia gazeta, what was employed in Dubrovka was not based on fentanyl, for which there is an antidote, but rather another inhalant anesthetic, phtorotan. (In the West it is called galotan.) It needs to be very carefully controlled since in its surgical state the drug quickly anesthetizes people and makes it very difficult for them to breathe, leading to asphyxiation and death. In the words of the newspaper’s medical expert, “Apparently, those who decided to employ phtorotan were impressed by its virtues: it does not ignite, it does not burn, it does not explode, as it does in its gaseous state.”9
Much is explained by the whispered information that it was Putin who supposedly personally directed the operation to “liberate” the hostages of Nord-Ost. Moreover, the investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya published an article in Novaia gazeta that in any country other than Russia would most likely have led to the fall of those in power. Politkovskaya demonstrated the complicity of the authorities in the tragedy and their role in aiding and abetting the terrorists. She managed to find out that one of the terrorists who had seized the theater and was later killed, according to various sources, was working in the Information Division of President Putin’s administration with spin doctor Sergei Yastrzhembskii and had associated with Vladislav Surkov.
Politkovskaya and the editors of Novaia gazeta believed that a certain Khanpash Terkibaev was an agent dispatched by the special services to manage the terrorist act from within. It was Terkibaev who secretly secured the passage of the Chechen terrorists through Moscow to the Dubrovka theater, which he entered as a member of the terrorist detachment and then left before the attack commenced. In Politkovskaya’s words, “It was he who assured the terrorists that ‘everything is under control,’ ‘it’s full of scum,’ that ‘Russians have again taken money,’ and all you need to do is to ‘make a bit of a noise,’ and what will come out of it is a ‘second Budyonnovsk and that way we will secure peace, and then, after the assignment is fulfilled ‘they will let us go’—not all of us, but they’ll let us go.”10 It follows from this that the seizure of hostages in the theater was initiated and organized by someone from the special services.
After Nord-Ost, Terkibaev became a “companion in arms” in President Putin’s administration and was supplied with “all the documents enabling him to travel freely everywhere he was needed,” thereby giving him access to the Chechen leader Aslan Maskhadov and to Yastrzhembskii. He was even entrusted with engaging in negotiations, in the name of the Putin administration, with deputies of the Chechen parliament and escorting them, as the leader of the group, to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, France.11
An even more terrible terrorist act was the seizure on September 1, 2004, of a school in Beslan in southern Russia, where, contrary to preliminary official information claiming there were 354 hostages, independent sources said there were actually 1,200. The preliminary official version stated that more than 390 persons died. Others claim the authorities did not include 350 unidentified body parts in the number of victims. According to official data, 700 former hostages were hospitalized. More than 200 persons (the figure of 260 is also given) were also said to be missing. Excuse me—how can they be missing?
Yet another cynical lie: tanks and flamethrowers were involved in storming the school. The preliminary official version failed to mention this. How can this action be called rescuing hostages? Who was saving them by employing inappropriate weapons? We should thank the people of Beslan who forced the authorities to acknowledge what would otherwise have been concealed. Yet something else has not been revealed—namely, who issued this criminal command. Most likely only an extremely cynical person endowed with enormous power could act so incompetently.
Putin took advantage of this terrorist act to further suppress democracy and escalate his cruel policies. He issued an extremely pointed statement asserting that “weakness” was the cause for what had happened. (The weak get beaten, the head of state explained, using the logic of common hooligans.) Most important, Putin characterized the seizure of the school in Beslan as “an attack against Russia.” According to Putin, terrorism is an instrument for “tearing fat chunks” off of Russia. Russia was confronting a “total, cruel, and full-scale war.” The logical conclusion was that it was necessary to strengthen the authorities. (Toward this end, during the Chechen campaigns, the president did away with the direct election of governors.)
Why then was it necessary to kill Aslan Maskhadov in March 2005? He was the most moderate and, at the time, the most legitimate Chechen leader. Was it so there would be no one with whom to sit down at the negotiating table? And why, for so many years after what was pronounced the victorious conclusion of the antiterrorist operation, did Shamil Basaev, the Chechen guerrilla leader, remain so elusive that the question arose as to whether he possessed some sort of safe conduct document? Later, according to a triumphal communiqué, he was supposedly killed by the FSB in July 2006, but no one was able to confirm this reliably.
Finally, why did Putin, who unthinkingly preferred to sacrifice the lives of hundreds of his “subjects” and would not “even sit down at the negotiation table with terrorists,” personally and with evident pleasure, invite Hamas to Moscow in 2006, to the revulsion of the civilized world?
One of the problems illegitimate states face is the frequent need to engage in cover-ups with respect both to specific individuals and to their own actions. Even so, sometimes what is secret becomes known. Another requisite is the need to deny actions and information that would harm the illegitimate entity and its officials.
A unique situation developed in post-perestroika Russia. The instruments for suppressing and punishing dissenters and for forcing the people into conformity had been disbanded. At the same time, after the breakup of the USSR, wide-scale looting, sharp and unrestrained political struggles, and many other factors logically facilitated the natural elimination, including physical elimination, of persons whom the state or individuals in power considered undesirable.
The journalist Dmitry Kholodov, who worked for the popular scandal sheet Moskovskii komsomolets (Moscow Komsomol member), was the first victim of a notorious political assassination. He died in an explosion in his office on October 17, 1994, when he opened an attaché case that supposedly contained important documents. According to the investigation, Kholodov was gathering materials for an article in which he intended to address corruption in Russia’s Western army group. He was scheduled to appear soon at parliamentary hearings on this question.
If the elimination of Kholodov was likely intended to cover up the theft of military property and the involvement of various officials, the killing of opposition deputies in Russia’s State Duma was quite a different matter. Gen. Lev Rokhlin, who sharply criticized the situation in Russia, especially in the army, and demanded the dismissal of President Boris Yeltsin, was killed on the night of June 3, 1998. His widow was accused of his murder but was later cleared.
Galina Starovoitova, one of Russia’s leading democratic activists and rights defenders and a candidate for president of the Russian Federation in 1996, was shot in the doorway of her house in St. Petersburg on the night of November 20–21, 1998.
On August 21, 2002, Vladimir Golovlev was killed. He was one of five cochairmen of Liberal Russia, a party opposed to Putin that had been initially founded by Boris Berezovsky but later turned against him. In depositions he provided the Procuracy of the Chelyabinsk region regarding privatization in the district, Golovlev asserted that several well-known persons were involved in questionable dealings. Among them he named Anatoly Chubais and Viktor Khristenko, who held high posts in Russia. The mass media reported that in all about fifty persons had been named, including the entire leadership of the Chelyabinsk region in the 1990s and a number of high Kremlin officials.
Sergei Yushenkov, a friend and comrade in arms of the previously assassinated deputies Golovlev and Starovoitova, as well as of the leader of Russian human rights activists Sergei Kovalev, was shot four times on April 17, 2003. An investigation did not rule out the possibility that the killing of the two deputies to the State Duma and the leaders of Liberal Russia, Yushenkov and Golovlev, were linked. The killing took place on the day that Liberal Russia, the party of which Yushenkov was a leader, officially announced it had completed registration with the Ministry of Justice and declared it was fully prepared for the elections. Yushenkov had charged that Putin had come to power as the result of a coup d’état, and he accused the special services of being involved in the apartment house explosions in Moscow and Volgodonsk in the fall of 1999.
At least one more death fits the category of political murder. On July 3, 2003, Yury Shchekochikhin, deputy chairman of the State Duma’s Committee on Security and deputy editor in chief of the opposition newspaper Novaia gazeta, died of a sudden and raging illness. According to the official version, the cause was a very rare acute allergic reaction, although Shchekochikhin had never suffered from allergies.
All these are widely known, if partially forgotten, facts. But no one knows how many undesirable politicians and journalists in the country were killed, maimed, beaten, terrorized, or intimidated. Few also were aware of, or paid any attention to, any cases concerning the leakage of information about several interesting documents.12
On February 13, 2004, the Kremlin executioners turned a new page in their history when the former vice president of Chechnya Zelimkhan Yandarbiev was killed in Qatar. In Doha the Qatari special services quickly arrested three Russian citizens who were on assignment there and accused them of the premeditated murder of Yandarbiev. One of them, an official of the Russian Embassy, was subsequently released. The court in Qatar sentenced the two others, who did not enjoy diplomatic immunity, to life sentences.
Russian authorities were suspected of numerous attempts on the life of Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze. Russia was also the main suspect in the attempt on the life of Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko, who was hospitalized during the election campaign in September 2004. His doctors concluded that he had been poisoned with dioxin.
In the fall of 2006, there took place what can only be called an orgy of political killings committed for their shock effect. On October 7, the well-known opposition journalist Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead in the entryway to her house. Almost immediately, Putin cynically asserted that this murder would cause more harm than her activity as a journalist did. In Putin’s view, the harm Politkovskaya had caused was mostly because she had openly and fearlessly criticized him.
Mystery cloaked the investigation of this crime. For example, security cameras captured the car in which the killers had arrived, as well as a view of the house itself, but the license plate numbers were not visible. They tried to determine the numbers from other cameras, but everything was obscured. Forensic expertise was of no help. Nevertheless, they managed to determine the car in which the killers had arrived. Later it turned out that some time before the death of the journalist, Lt. Col. Pavel Ryaguzov of the FSB had extracted Politkovskaya’s address from an FSB database and immediately phoned his old acquaintance Shamil Buraev, the former head of the Achkhoi-Martanovskii district in Chechnya, who was loyal to the Russian Federation. When it turned out it was an old address, a police operation was mounted to discover the new one. Thus, two groups had Politkovskaya under observation: one was the killers; the other was responsible for surveillance and infiltration.
On November 23, 2006, former FSB officer, forty-four-year-old Alexander Litvinenko, who had fled to Great Britain in 2000 and received a British passport in October 2006, died in the hospital of University College London. A significant amount of the radioactive element polonium-21—a rare substance that is strictly controlled in the few countries, including Russia, that produce it—was found in his body. The English doctors and police unsettled Moscow, because they had not only found polonium-210 in Litvinenko’s body but also established where he had been poisoned and identified his suspected poisoners (former officers of the Russian special services Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun), and other victims, including the bartender who had served the poisoned tea. They also found traces of radioactive contamination in places Litvinenko, Lugovoi, and Kovtun had visited.
A rather striking illustration of what was going on was Russia’s dissemination, in various forms, of all kinds of improbable versions of the murder—for example, that Litvinenko had traded in polonium and didn’t know how to handle it, and that he had committed suicide (“to irritate Putin”). The poorly concealed disinclination of the Russian investigation organs to cooperate with the British and their categorical refusal to hand over to British justice the prime suspect Lugovoi were equally telling. (Lugovoi was transformed into virtually a national hero and elected a deputy to the Duma from the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, which, as noted previously, had been created with the help of the Soviet KGB.)
Soon the situation became quite Kafkaesque. At a conference in Dublin on November 24—that is, the day after Litvinenko died—Yegor Gaidar, the head of the first Yeltsin government, suddenly felt very ill and was rushed to a hospital with signs of poisoning. An examination by Irish doctors established that the patient had undergone a radical deterioration in his main bodily functions over a short period. However, they were unable to determine the cause, nor were traces of radiation found in Gaidar’s body or in places that he had visited. The doctors were also unable to give a diagnosis of the poisoning since there was no actual toxic substance in Gaidar’s system. Irish and British police conducted an investigation of the incident. For good reason, Gaidar was obviously frightened by what had happened to him and accused “the explicit or covert opponents of the Russian authorities who wish to promote the further radical deterioration of relations between Russia and the West.” That Gaidar’s condition improved while he was in a Moscow hospital and that an unusual statement later was issued in his name, one that unexpectedly echoed the official position that Litvinenko had been poisoned by notorious “enemies of Russia,” naturally raised serious questions. An author of political thrillers might depict the situation as resulting from the blackmail of a well-known Russian politician who had been given an antidote in exchange for issuing such a statement and stopping his criticism of Putin. The impunity of the killers and the anonymity of those who commissioned these crimes are the trademarks of political killings in Russia.
Nevertheless, occasionally the curtain of secrecy is raised, as happened with the murders of Litvinenko and Zelimkhan Yandarbiev, thanks to foreign special services and sometimes thanks to journalists. Thus, for example, a sensational article by Igor Korol’kov, published in Novaia gazeta, revealed that criminal gangs had been created in Russia that were working under the supervision of the special services and the Ministry of Internal Affairs.13 Their mission was the extrajudicial elimination of undesirables. Investigations into their crimes were obstructed and criminal cases collapsed. Witnesses who were prepared to give depositions about the involvement of the GRU (military intelligence) in these activities were eliminated. One gang had been assembled from veteran criminals who had been released early from prison and provided with arms to assist in the redistribution of property.
An investigation of the murder of the journalist Kholodov pointed to these organizations. Officers of the GRU who had been involved in special operations in Abkhazia in Georgia, the Trans-Dniestr region of Moldova, and in Chechnya, where they physically eliminated persons who had been fingered to them, fell under suspicion. One of the accused officers had once placed a magnetic explosive device under the car of Russia’s then deputy minister of finance Andrei Vavilov; fortunately, the deputy minister was not killed. While investigating the Kholodov case, apart from the GRU, the investigation also pointed to the organized crime division (GUBOP) of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.14
Let us revisit the series of terrorist acts in Moscow in the mid-1990s that took place during Yeltsin’s presidency. The idea of a well-coordinated attack on Moscow by Chechen gunmen received wide currency. However, as an investigation and a court later proved, it was not Chechen fighters but a former KGB colonel who exploded the bus at the National Exhibition of Economic Achievements. It was also a former FSB officer who tried to blow up the railroad bridge across the Yauza River in Moscow. Both of these former employees of the special services were directly connected to Maxim Lazovsky’s criminal gang.15 At least eight active duty officers of the FSB worked in close contact with the gang. This was established by the chief of the Twelfth Section of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department Vladimir Tskhai, a lieutenant colonel in the militia. As soon as it became clear that the Moscow militia headquarters would not relinquish its spoils, Lazovsky and his closest accomplices were eliminated, while the teetotaler Tskhai died from cirrhosis of the liver.
Novaia gazeta possesses a document that appears to be a set of secret instructions. It refers to the creation of a completely secret, illegal, special subdivision and of several regional operational fighting groups. The organizational form of this body took the form of a private detective and security enterprise, and its leadership and core employees appear to be persons released from the operational services of the Ministry of the Interior, the FSB, the SVR, and the GRU.16 The plan is to establish a public organization—for example, the “Association of Veterans of Russian Special Services”—as a cover for its investigative and operational fighting activities. According to the plan, this organization will be utilized, in particular, in the creation of permanently operating pseudo detachments that will have strong operational contacts directly with the bandit wing of the OPGs and with the OPGs themselves, specializing in contract killings and terrorist acts.17 What was envisaged was an organization of “a fully equipped fictitious military unit both in the regions and in the center.” Utilization of the special forces’ extralegal reconnaissance “to neutralize or physically eliminate the leaders and active members of terrorist and intelligence-sabotage groups waging war against federal authorities” was not ruled out. Attention should be paid to the fact that murders would be committed “with the goal of averting serious consequences.”18
Thus, in the view of Novaia gazeta, an integrated special services system has been created to carry out extrajudicial executions. According to Novaia gazeta’s sources, this document was signed by one of the then leaders of GUBOP, Colonel Seliverstov, and based on a secret resolution of the government. Yury Skokov, first deputy prime minister of Russia in the early 1990s, took part in drafting the resolution.
According to Novaia gazeta, this activity was coordinated by an FSB subunit, completely secret even by the organization’s own standards, that was established in the early 1990s as the Directorate for Working with Criminal Organizations and was headed by Gen. Yevgeny Khokhol’kov. The mission of this subunit, consisting of 150 persons, was to infiltrate secret agents into the criminal world. This extremely secretive subunit was revealed at a press conference in 1998, at which five employees discussed its involvement in extrajudicial killings. Specifically, the employees asserted that the leadership of the directorate had hatched plans to physically eliminate Boris Berezovsky. After the press conference, the newspaper noted that the directorate was quickly disbanded, and Nikolai Kovalev, who was then the director of the FSB, retired.
According to Novaia gazeta, the technology of extrajudicial killings was perfected in Chechnya. Prisoners were interrogated under torture, then transported to an uninhabited place, where they were blown to pieces in groups of three to five.19 As a result of such activity, criminality was elevated to what, in principle, was not only a new organizational but also political level.
On March 26, 2000, a tragedy occurred that was replicated on January 19, 2009. It started with Col. Yury Budanov. After getting thoroughly drunk while celebrating his daughter’s birthday, he ordered Lt. Roman Bagreev to shoot up a peaceful Chechen village. The lieutenant did not obey. Then Budanov and his deputy, Lt. Col. Ivan Fedorov, beat up Bagreev. Afterward Budanov ordered the crew of his own infantry fighting vehicle to grab the eldest daughter of the Kungaevs, eighteen-year-old Elza, and take her to regimental headquarters. Unable to endure the “interrogation” that lasted for many hours, Kungaeva died, and Budanov, who was later sentenced for kidnapping, rape, and murder, ordered that she be buried in the forest.
What happened subsequently is another mystery. Experts’ conclusions differ on Budanov’s responsibility. An examination “determined” that Budanov had not raped Kungaeva but that a certain soldier, Yegorov, had violated her corpse. Therefore, the charge of rape against Budanov was dismissed. Contrary to the findings of a court-ordered psychiatric examination, Budanov was sent for compulsory treatment. Then, under the influence of public opinion in Chechnya, the case was reexamined, and Budanov was sentenced to ten years in a hard labor penal colony, stripped of his state commendations, and denied the opportunity to hold leadership positions for three years after his release from confinement.
An overwhelming majority of the Russian public supported Budanov, and for many he became almost a national hero. After repeated requests for a pardon and conditional early release, in December 2008, the municipal court of Dimitrovgrad ruled that Budanov had repented of his crime and wholly absolved him of guilt. The authorities do not throw their own bastards to the wolves.
Then at a press conference in January 2009, in the Independent Press Center in Moscow, Stanislav Markelov, a well-known lawyer who had taken part in a series of high-profile cases and was an embarrassment to the authorities, announced his intention to dispute what he considered to be the illegal conditional early release of Budanov and, if necessary, to file a suit with the International Court for Human Rights in Strasbourg. After Markelov left the press conference, he was killed with a shot from a pistol fitted with a silencer. The Novaia gazeta journalist Anastasia Baburova, who left the press conference with him, threw herself on the killer, who then shot her.
Naturally, the Budanov case could be used as a cover for other objectives of the murder. For example, Markelov was connected with the Nord-Ost case, was a lawyer for Anna Politkovskaya, and represented the interests of those who suffered the mass slaughter by the Blagoveshchensk special-purpose militia unit in Bashkortostan in December 2004. Lawyers from the Institute for the Supremacy of Law, which he founded and directed, were actively engaged in the case of former GRU special forces Capt. Eduard Ul’man, who confessed to the murder of six peaceful inhabitants of Chechnya as well as of Magomed Yevloev, owner of the website Ingushetiia.ru.20 In other words, Markelov was punished for defending human rights and the independence of the judiciary.
After the murder of Stanislav Markelov, the assailant went into hiding. Moreover, for a long time the investigation supposedly could not locate a single witness or a single clue. Clearly, it is impossible to kill two people in broad daylight in central Moscow, not far from the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and a metro station, without being noticed.
These are only the most notorious cases. There are actually many, many more. I do not mean to imply that all the cases cited without exception are the result of actions by highly placed state authorities. It is another thing, however, to say that they have made the actions possible. Moreover, that people suspect their involvement itself speaks volumes. In sum, the orgy of killing “undesirables” began under Yeltsin and really took off during Putin’s presidency.
Naturally, murder is the most efficacious and effective means of eliminating those who defy the authorities. But there are also other options—for example, making someone’s life unbearable.
At the beginning of his administration, Putin was insufficiently skilled in the art of neutralizing those who stood in his way. Naive people interpreted his slogan of “Equidistance from the oligarchs” as a pledge not to make use of the oligarchs as his “money bags.” It turned out that such an interpretation was quite wrong. Vladimir Gusinskii, who opposed him, was stripped of his media empire in Russia, and Boris Berezovsky, who helped bring Putin to power and was subsequently forced to flee to London for this fatal mistake, was also stripped of a large part of his fortune. These oligarchs were kept at a distance from influence in Russian politics; they were replaced by others. Gusinskii may have quieted down, but Putin miscalculated with respect to Berezovsky, who would not forgive his former fair-haired boy and became an active opponent of the Putin regime.
Yet another misfire of the early Putin period was the kidnapping by the special services of Radio Liberty journalist Andrei Babitskii, who had sharply critiqued Russian policy and its machinations in Chechnya. Babitskii was held by the Russian special forces supposedly for not having proper documents. The instantaneous exchange of the journalist, allegedly on his initiative, for three Russian soldiers supposedly taken prisoner by a nonexistent Chechen field commander was unpersuasive. Babitskii’s release was secured solely due to the proactive stance taken by Russian and foreign journalists. There are grounds for suspecting that had the journalists been more passive, Babitskii would have been eliminated.
But Putin is educable. In February 2003 in a meeting with leading Russian businessmen in the Kremlin, the president of Russia asked, “Mr. Khodorkovsky, are you sure you’re in compliance with the Tax Department?”
“Absolutely,” replied the boss of the largest Russian oil company YUKOS and one of the richest men in Russia.
“Well, we’ll see about that,” Putin muttered ominously.
The result was that on October 25, 2003, the young oligarch, who had not concealed his presidential ambitions and who supported liberal political parties, was arrested. Prior to this, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Menatep Interbank Association Platon Lebedev was arrested.21 The core of the accusations against Khodorkovsky was that he had created an organized criminal group, by which, evidently, was meant his business partners, to evade taxes and engage in other improper activities.
Can anyone have the slightest doubt that YUKOS strove to maximize its profits or that the laws in force at the time these “crimes” were committed provided such an opportunity? The possibility that Khodorkovsky and some among his associates did something illegal cannot be ruled out. But something else is troubling: almost all Russian entrepreneurs were engaged in the same or similar activities, but only Khodorkovsky and YUKOS were punished. No unprejudiced observer could doubt that the underlying reason was the Kremlin’s fear of Khodorkovsky’s presidential ambitions. The selectivity of the judicial system in and of itself is testimony to its incompetence.
As ordered, the court sentenced Khodorkovsky to nine years in a camp. To discourage Khodorkovsky from aspiring for early release, he was regularly placed in a punitive isolation cell. But the authorities considered all this insufficient.
In the winter of 2007, a scandal erupted. On December 27, Vasily Aleksanian, the executive vice president of YUKOS who had served in his position for only five days and had been arrested on April 6, 2006, lodged an official complaint that accused the investigators of pressuring him by refusing to provide him with medical assistance. Yet the condition of the virtually blind Aleksanian, who was suffering from cancer and AIDS, was deemed “satisfactory,” and he himself was judged “fit to undergo further inquiries.” Just what were these further inquiries regarding a mortally ill and unspeakably suffering man? It was all very simple. Aleksanian was refused medical assistance because he did not agree to give testimony against Khodorkovsky and Lebedev in exchange for that medical assistance. Or, in Aleksanian’s words, “in effect in exchange for my life.” According to Aleksanian, when he said he knew of no crimes committed in YUKOS or by its employees and refused to give testimony, the conditions of his confinement deteriorated. He was denied pain medicines and held in a near-freezing cell that was so cold he had to sleep in his overcoat for an entire year.
Nevertheless, under the pressure of public opinion, on February 8, 2008, Aleksanian was transferred to a specialized clinic, and his trial was halted. But even then the authorities acted with extraordinary cynicism. Aleksanian was chained to his bed, not permitted to shower, and not allowed to say good-bye to his relatives.
Naturally, the Russian authorities never slackened their obsessive attention to journalists. According to what most likely is incomplete information from the Glasnost Defense Foundation, since Putin came to power the profession of journalism in Russia has become extremely dangerous. The following table, based on data the fund collected about journalists and editors, illustrates this point.
| Year | Killed | Disappeared | Attacks on editors | Attacks on journalists |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
2001 |
17 |
3 |
102 |
|
|
2002 |
20 |
99 |
||
|
2003 |
10 |
96 |
29 |
|
|
2004 |
13 |
73 |
15 |
|
|
2005 |
6 |
63 |
12 |
|
|
9 |
69 |
12 |
||
|
2007 |
8 |
75 |
11 |
|
|
2008 |
5 |
2 |
48 |
5 |
|
2009 |
9 |
58 |
10 |
|
|
2010 |
12 |
58 |
6 |
|
|
2011 |
6 |
1 |
80 |
|
|
2012 |
3 |
91 |
4 |
Punitive psychiatry, that terrible instrument in the struggle against dissent, which had been eliminated with such difficulty under Gorbachev, was also revived. As in the past, there reportedly were numerous such cases.
Opposition politicians, rights defenders, political commentators, and journalists vanished from television screens and the mass print media. They were regularly replaced, to use Stalinist jargon, by small cogs in Putin’s vertical power machine. The accusations against those who disappeared from public view were not always convincing. The result is that Russians think and vote as the Kremlin wants them to. The people are silent. Unfortunately, they no longer have any interest in these matters.
The revival of an obsession with espionage is always not merely a symptom that things are out of joint in Russia but also an indication that the leaders are beset by a complex of unseemly problems and improper schemes. Here we may recall the Lockhart Conspiracy that the Cheka had concocted as early as the summer of 1918, alleging that the English diplomat R. H. Bruce Lockhart intended to promote a coup d’état by suborning the Latvian riflemen who guarded the Kremlin. Naturally, the Chekist provocateurs “uncovered” the plot, thus averting the coup d’état they themselves had dreamed up. The history of the CPSU was a compulsory subject everywhere, so all students in higher educational institutions in the USSR learned this totally bogus story. It is revealing that the red terror began soon after the “discovery of the Lockhart plot,” this far-fetched attempt on the life of Ulyanov (Lenin). By employing torture the Stalinist investigators and procurators beat the “enemies of the people” into “confessing” that they were working for foreign intelligence services.
The Leninist-Stalinist tradition of provocations slackened after the death of Stalin, the “Father of Nations,” in 1953. Of course, the West was regularly accused of “terrible provocations.” For example, the police or security service in some Western country might detain a Soviet diplomat or his wife in a store for attempted shoplifting. The Soviet side would immediately lodge a protest about another supposed provocation, although everyone knew that a petty thief had been seized. However, since they enjoyed diplomatic immunity, that was the end of it. Of course, Western special services were engaged in recruitment and the other work that agents do. Several of these cases became known, but as a rule, they didn’t become big scandals. There were other scandals that involved the expulsion of Soviet spies hiding under the cover of Soviet diplomatic representatives and the tit-for-tat expulsion of Western diplomats. Under Gorbachev these scandals subsided and disappeared entirely after the disgrace of the August 1991 attempted coup. Moreover, in late 1991 the USSR informed the Americans about the system of listening devices that had been implanted in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. For a long time the employees of Russia’s secret services were distressed that, as a result, their secret agent network was exposed. The Chekists forgot that their service was merely an auxiliary instrument of politics; that political decisions were made by Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Soviet foreign minister Boris Pankin, and Chairman of the KGB Vadim Bakatin; and that all of these democratically inclined officials had decided this matter unanimously.
It cannot be denied that the USSR’s intelligence presence in the West was disproportionate and obviously excessive. For example, in 1987 there were sixty-one diplomats in the Soviet Representative Office in Geneva, of whom only twenty were employees of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the USSR, Byelorussia, and Ukraine.22 Moreover, many agents of the secret services were under deep cover as career diplomats, officials of other ministries and departments, scholars, and so forth.
Despite the break that occurred during perestroika and, especially, in the last months of the USSR, the soil cultivated to manipulate society by using the supposed threat of domestic and foreign enemies remained arable and productive. This was already evident in the 1990s. After Putin came to power even more elaborate games took place that focused on the spy mania and secrecy, obvious signs of a return to the bad old days. This phenomenon was inevitable under Yeltsin because of the struggle between the doves and the hawks who needed to demonstrate clearly the utter insidiousness of domestic and foreign enemies; under Putin it was to justify the hardening of the regime and the elimination of dissenters.
From Yeltsin’s administration forward it was understandable why Russian counterintelligence despised ecologists, given the catastrophic condition of Russia’s environment. For example, they did not appreciate the actions of the retired senior captain Alexander Nikitin, an expert for the Norwegian NGO Bellona Foundation who divulged the environmental hazards of nuclear contamination from aging Soviet nuclear submarines. Charges were filed against him in a local FSB case in Saint Petersburg in 1995. The authorities were likewise displeased with his publication of reports by ecologists about the contamination of northeastern Europe by nuclear waste from the Northern Fleet. This was the basis for accusing him of treason and divulging state secrets. He was tried and eventually acquitted, but it took him five years to clear his name.
Another spy scandal connected with ecology was the arrest in 1997 of Junior Capt. Grigory Pas’ko, an employee of the paper Boevaia vakhta (Battle station), for cooperating with the maritime bureau of the Japanese television company NHK as well as the Japanese newspaper Asahi. Pas’ko was accused of “high treason.” In the winter of 1995, Japanese television broadcast his video showing the discharge of liquid radioactive waste into the Sea of Japan from the repair and dismantling of Russian atomic submarines. The video unleashed a storm in Japan. No well-informed, reasonable persons believed that Nikitin and Pas’ko were guilty of crimes.
Several Western countries believed that during Yeltsin’s administration Russia had already significantly boosted its intelligence operations directed against them to Cold War levels. Official Moscow excused itself on the grounds that Russia was within its rights to use its intelligence services in defense of its national security. Moreover, in view of growing international cooperation among the special services, it was wrong to talk about a menacing Russian intelligence presence.
We must point out several features of the Russian authorities’ espionage games. First is that after the downfall of the USSR, all the necessary material preconditions existed for them to play these games. With the exception of the most enterprising persons who were able to prosper in the new conditions, everyone else, including officials, scholars, and other professionals, became impoverished and were desperate to earn money by whatever means. In order to survive, everybody traded whatever they could: books, crockery, and their bodies, among other things. Information, opportunities, and influence were all for sale. In this context, officials behaved in the most improper fashion, thereby laying the foundation for total corruption. Scholars who were driven to the edge of physical survival had no other recourse since their work, experience, and knowledge were of no interest whatsoever to the new authorities.
Naturally, it would be the height of naïveté to suppose that foreign intelligence services were not engaged in recruiting Russian citizens. There is another, unquestionably vital side of the question—namely, industrial espionage. But some of the espionage scandals are beyond the bounds of reason.
As someone who worked for many years in the field of science and understands the research methodology of Russian scholars, the sources to which they have access, and the degree of information they possess, I was struck by the case of Igor Sutyagin, head of the U.S. Defense Technology and Defense Economy Policy section in the Department of Political-Military Studies of the Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies, who was arrested in 1999 and given a sentence of over ten years. As a former employee of a department in this institute concerned with military matters, I was convinced from the outset that the charges against Sutyagin were baseless. The charges included passing information about missiles, military aircraft, the composition of the strategic nuclear forces, the Ministry of Defense’s progress in implementing plans to achieve a unified state of preparedness, and the composition and status of an early warning system in case of a missile attack. Not a single employee of the institute could get anywhere near any documents dealing with these matters, even if he had access to secret materials. Sutyagin lacked such clearance. Moreover, even if, on his own initiative, anyone possessing the highest level of clearance expressed an interest in these or similar questions, he not only would have failed to receive the relevant documents but also would have aroused extreme suspicion on the part of the special services.
A terrible scandal erupted in the late 1970s when I worked in the Department of Military-Political Studies of the Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies. In an article published in an unclassified scholarly journal, my senior colleague supposedly let slip a vital state secret by revealing the contents of highly classified directives addressed to the Soviet delegation to nuclear missile disarmament negotiations with the United States. How could he have gotten access to the holiest of holies of Soviet policy? He hadn’t. As an honest professional whose job required him to publish articles, he had simply pondered the question of what position the Soviet representatives might take at the nuclear negotiations. His analysis was based on common sense and information from unclassified publications. Even the KGB could find no fault with him. There was raucous laughter in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. What sort of directives were they if their contents could be figured out by an ordinary scholar?
In the case of Sutyagin, it was perfectly natural that he met, possibly not just on five occasions but many more times, with representatives of the special services of other countries. It is impossible for international specialists not to meet with their foreign counterparts, often with no way of knowing whether they belong to the special services. Another accusation against him was equally absurd: as a teacher at the Obninsk Training Center of the Russian Navy, he supposedly tried to ferret out secret information from the military cadres studying at the center to pass along to foreign agents.
Of course, it is difficult to say anything definitive when the subject is espionage. This is especially so when the accused is a rather highly placed diplomat who, unlike a researcher at the Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, really may know a lot. However, doubts arose about the validity of the accusations of espionage against Valentin Moiseev, the former deputy director of the First Department of Asian Countries in the Russian Foreign Ministry, when a twelve-year sentence delivered by a Moscow municipal court handed down in December 1999 was commuted to four and a half years by another Moscow municipal court.
Another case that raises serious questions is that of Anatoly Babkin, the director of the Department of Missile Technology at the Bauman State Institute of Technology in Moscow, who was taken into custody in April 2000. It should be emphasized at once that the Bauman Institute is an extremely important organization that is involved in extraordinarily sensitive issues. The name of the department that Babkin headed speaks for itself.
This is a dark tale from beginning to end, since Babkin was initially the chief witness in the troubled case of the American citizen Edmond Pope and at first gave testimony confirming his espionage activities. Later Babkin recanted his testimony, saying it had been given under the pressure of the investigations and that he himself was on the verge of a heart attack.
The story of Edmond Pope, who was arrested in April 2000, handed a twenty-year sentence, and then pardoned by President Putin in February 2001, merits inclusion in a textbook for beginning provocateurs. But that is not our focus here. After Pope returned to the United States, an accusation was leveled against Professor Babkin. The sentence of the court in his case, delivered in February 2003, deserves a round of applause. The court found Babkin guilty of transmitting information to the American spy Pope on the technical specifications of the Shkval high-speed submarine torpedo and sentenced him, in accordance with the article on high treason in the Criminal Code, to an eight-year suspended sentence. A single comment is in order: in Russia a suspended punishment for espionage happens only for espionage that never occurred.
The list of pseudo spy scandals is extensive. For example, in January 2006, a spy scandal erupted around a stone. In brief, it was alleged that supposed agents for the United Kingdom, working under the cover of Great Britain’s embassy in Moscow, secreted espionage equipment under a rock in one of Moscow’s squares and then collected information from portable computers carried past it. No one had seen this rock, so a representative of the FSB triumphantly demonstrated a full-scale model of it. The FSB declared that it arrested the Russian agent and that he had started to confess. However, before long everyone, including the FSB, forgot about this. Moreover, the names of the four English evildoers, exposed through the heroic efforts of the FSB, were widely disseminated, but for some reason the “plotters” were not expelled from Russia. One of the main charges against the employees of the British Embassy was their participation in financing NGOs in Russia. This financial assistance also was presented as the main evidence of espionage activities on the part of the NGOs themselves.
The Russian special services traditionally take an extremely jaundiced view of NGOs, especially those with links abroad. Chekist paranoia contends that Georgian and Ukrainian NGOs, using foreign funds and acting on the orders of their foreign sponsors, were behind the Rose and Orange Revolutions, respectively, in 2003 and 2004. With considerable experience in falsifying election results in Russia and planning to do it again, the Putinocracy could not help being scared by their own invented fears regarding the “subversive character” of NGOs, especially those financed from abroad. As a result of this phobia, in April 2006 new legislation took effect that severely hampered the work of NGOs and virtually empowered the government to shut down any of them at its own discretion. In addition, the needlessly complicated system of overseeing NGOs mandated by this legislation grants authorities the right to veto the financial and work plans of the NGOs. The NGOs also face pressure from the law regarding the struggle against extremism, as discussed earlier. In other words, any activity, not only of NGOs but also of private persons engaged in the defense of human rights, immediately becomes actionable as a manifestation of extremism, just as it was in the period from Lenin through Chernenko.
Contrary to expectations, the new legislation did not become the pretext for the mass elimination of NGOs; they were simply shown their place. Russians, already accustomed to a lack of freedom, began to play by the new rules of the game that were actually the traditional rules for Russia. But as noted previously, the law requiring those NGOs receiving funds from abroad to register as foreign agents threatened their very existence.
In these ways, the Russian authorities applied themselves to uprooting the last shoots of a nonexistent civil society. Long before they reined in the Kremlin, the Chekists had achieved their goal of blocking the emergence of civil society. Their espionage games had succeeded.
In 1875 Nikolai Nekrasov, the liberal Russian writer and critic, wrote that there had been worse times but none so base as the present. Even an outline of the Stages of the Great Path that, since the downfall of the USSR, Russian authorities have followed in restoring control over the people and in establishing their absolute power demonstrates that Nekrasov’s words apply even more to contemporary Russia than when they were written.
The opportunities available to the Kremlin gods have increased immeasurably compared to any time in the past. Many factors are responsible. First is that the authorities completely ignore the law. Second is the submissiveness of the people. Here the view of the psychologist Liubov Vinogradova, executive director of the Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia, is worth considering. She observes that only around 15 percent of the Russian population engage in inquisitive behavior—that is, the ability to consider various options in order to improve one’s position. From this she concludes that, Russia “is a country of persons with ‘ingrained powerlessness.’” It is very easy to provoke persons in a state of ingrained powerlessness to engage in any kind of aggression.23 They are easily manipulated because they are not free. Finally, new technology enables the authorities to establish an unprecedented degree of control over persons and groups of interest to them.
Earlier in Russia there were great writers, philosophers, and poets who inspired their contemporaries by defining the great issues of the day. They set the parameters for thought. Now they have been replaced by those who repress thought and who traffic in thoughtlessness. They are manipulators who fear an informed and thoughtful public. There is an ugly feature of Pandora’s box: it is easy to open, whether from curiosity or for other reasons, but it is much more difficult to recapture the disasters that have been let out of it. As it is said, he who sows discord in his own house will inherit the wind.
From the time of the great Spanish painter Francisco Goya comes yet another truth: the sleep of reason gives birth to monstrosities. There can be no doubt about the prolonged sleep of reason of the Russian state. The monsters stare us in the face.