ACCORDING TO THE CENSUS OF OCTOBER 2002, THERE ARE 145.2 million people living in Russia, making us the seventh most populous country in the world. Just under 116 million people, 79.8 percent of the population, describe themselves as ethnically Russian. We have an electorate of 109 million voters.
The day of the parliamentary elections to the Duma,* the day Putin* began his campaign for reelection as president. In the morning he manifested himself to the peoples of Russia at a polling station. He was cheerful, elated even, and a little nervous. This was unusual: as a rule he is sullen. With a broad smile, he informed those assembled that his beloved Labrador, Connie, had had puppies during the night. “Vladimir Vladimirovich was so very worried,” Madame Putina intoned from behind her husband. “We are in a hurry to get home,” she added, anxious to return to the bitch whose impeccable political timing had presented this gift to the United Russia Party*
That same morning in Yessentuki, a small resort in the North Caucasus, the first thirteen victims of a terrorist attack on a local train were being buried. It had been the morning train, known as the student train, and young people were on their way to college.
When, after voting, Putin went over to the journalists, it seemed he would surely express his condolences to the families of the dead. Perhaps even apologize for the fact that the government had once again failed to protect its citizens. Instead he told them how pleased he was about his Labrador's new puppies.
My friends phoned me. “He's really put his foot in it this time. Russian people are never going to vote for United Russia now.”
Around midnight, however, when the results started coming in, initially from the Far East, then from Siberia, the Urals, and so on westward, many people were in a state of shock. All my pro-democracy friends and acquaintances were again calling each other and saying, “It can't be true. We voted for Yavlinsky* even though…” Some had voted for Khaka-mada.*
By morning there was no more incredulity. Russia, rejecting the lies and arrogance of the democrats, had mutely surrendered herself to Putin. A majority had voted for the phantom United Russia Party, whose sole political program was to support Putin. United Russia had rallied Russia's bureaucrats to its banner—all the former Soviet Communist Party and Young Communist League functionaries now employed by myriad government agencies—and they had jointly allocated huge sums of money to promote its electoral deceptions.
Reports we received from the regions show how this was done. Outside one of the polling stations in Saratov, a lady was dispensing free vodka at a table with a banner reading “Vote for Tretiak,” the United Russia candidate. Tretiak won. The Duma deputies from the entire province were swept away by United Russia candidates, except for a few who switched to the party shortly before the elections. The Saratov election campaign was marked by violence, with candidates not approved of by United Russia being beaten up by “unidentified assailants” and choosing to pull out of the race. One who continued to campaign against a prominent United Russia candidate twice had plastic bags containing body parts thrown through his window: somebody's ears and a human heart. The province's electoral commission had a hotline to take reports of irregularities during the campaign and the voting, but 80 percent of the calls were simply attempts to blackmail the local utility companies. People threatened not to vote unless their leaking pipes were mended or their radiators repaired. This worked very well. The inhabitants of the Zavod and Lenin districts had their heating and main water supply restored. A number of villages in the Atkar District finally had their electricity and telephones reconnected after several years of waiting. The people were seduced. More than 60 percent of the electorate in the city voted, and in the province the turnout was 53 percent. More than enough for the elections to be valid.
One of the democrats’ observers at a polling station in Arkadak noticed people voting twice, once in the booth and a second time by filling out a ballot slip under the direction of the chairman of the local electoral commission. She ran to phone the hotline, but was pulled away from the telephone by her hair.
Vyacheslav Volodin, one of the main United Russia functionaries who was standing in Balakov, won by a landslide, with 82.9 percent of the vote; an unprecedented victory for a politician devoid of charisma who is renowned only for his incoherent television speeches in support of Putin. He had announced no specific policies to promote the interests of local people. Overall in Saratov Province, United Russia gained 48.2 percent of the vote without feeling the need to publish or defend a manifesto. The Communists got 15.7 percent, the Liberal Democrats* (Vladimir Zhirinovsky's* party) 8.9 percent, the nationalistic Rodina (Motherland) Party* 5.7 percent. The only embarrassment was that more than 10 percent of the votes cast were for “None of the above.” One-tenth of the voters had come to the polling station, drunk the vodka, and told the lot of them to go to hell.
According to the National Electoral Commission's figures, over 10 percent more votes were cast in Chechnya,* a territory totally under military control, than there are registered voters.
St. Petersburg held on to its reputation as Russia's most progressive and democratically inclined city. Even there, though, United Russia gained 31 percent of the vote, Rodina about 14 percent. The democratic Union of Right Forces* and Yabloko* (Apple) Party got only 9 percent each, the Communists 8.5, and the Liberal Democrats 8 percent. Irina Khakamada, Alexander Golov, Igor Artemiev, and Grigorii Tomchin, democrats and liberals well known throughout Russia, went down to ignominious defeat.
Why? The state authorities are rubbing their hands with glee, tuttutting and saying that “the democrats have only themselves to blame” for having lost their link with the people. The authorities suppose that, on the contrary, they now have the people on their side.
Here are some excerpts from essays written by St. Petersburg students on the topics of “How my family views the elections” and “Will the election of a new Duma help the president in his work?”:
“My family has given up voting. They don't believe in elections anymore. The elections will not help the president. All the politicians promise to make life better, but unfortunately … I would like more truthfulness.”
“The elections are rubbish. It doesn't matter who gets elected to the Duma because nothing will change, because we don't elect people who are going to improve things in the country, but people who thieve. These elections will help no one—neither the president nor ordinary mortals.”
“Our government is just ridiculous. I wish people weren't so crazy about money, that there was at least some sign of moral principle in our government, and that they would cheat the people as little as possible. The government is the servant of the people. We elect it, not the other way round. To tell the truth, I don't know why we have been asked to write this essay. It has only interrupted our lessons. The government isn't going to read this anyway.”
“How my family views the elections is they aren't interested in them. All the laws the Duma adopted were senseless and did nothing useful for the people. If all this is not for the people, who is it for?”
“Will the elections help? It is an interesting question. We will have to wait and see. Most likely they won't help in the slightest. I am not a politician, I don't have the education you need for that, but the main thing is that we need to fight corruption. For as long as we have gangsters in the state institutions of our country, life will not get better. Do you know what is going on now in the army? It is just endless bullying. If in the past people used to say that the army made boys into men, now it makes them into cripples. My father says he refuses to let his son go into an army like that. ‘For my son to be a cripple after the army or even worse—to be dead in a ditch somewhere in Chechnya, fighting for who knows what, so that somebody can gain power over this republic?’ For as long as the present government is in power I can see no way out of the present situation. I do not thank it for my unhappy childhood.”
These read like the thoughts of old people, not the future citizens of New Russia. Here is the real cost of political cynicism—rejection by the younger generation.
By morning it is finally clear that, while the left wing has more or less survived, the liberal and democratic “right wing” has been routed. The Yabloko Party and Grigorii Yavlinsky himself have not made it into the Duma, neither has the Union of Right Forces with Boris Nemtsov and Irina Khakamada, nor any of the independent candidates. There is now almost nobody in the Russian Parliament capable of lobbying for democratic ideals and providing constructive, intelligent opposition to the Kremlin. The triumph of the United Russia Party is not the worst of it, however.
By the end of the day, with more or less all the votes counted, it is evident that, for the first time since the collapse of the USSR, Russia has particularly favored the extreme nationalists, who promised the voters they would hang all the “enemies of Russia.”
This is dreadful, of course, but perhaps only to be expected in a country where 40 percent of the population live below even our dire official poverty line. It was clear that the democrats had no interest in establishing contact with this section of the population. They preferred to concentrate on addressing themselves to the rich and to members of the emerging middle class, defending private property and the interests of the new property owners. The poor are not property owners, so the democrats ignored them. The nationalists did not.
Not surprisingly, this segment of the electorate duly turned away from the democrats, while the new property owners jumped ship from Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces to United Russia just as soon as they noticed that Yavlinsky Nemtsov, and Khakamada seemed to be losing their clout with the Kremlin. The rich decamped to where there was a concentration of the officials without whom Russian business, which is mostly corrupt and supports and feeds official corruption, cannot thrive.
Just before these elections, the senior officials of United Russia were saying openly, “We have so much money! Business has donated so much we don't know what to do with it all!” They weren't boasting. These were bribes that meant, “Don't forget us after the elections, will you?” In a corrupt country, business is even more unscrupulous than in countries where corruption has at least been reduced to a tolerable level and where it is not regarded as socially acceptable.
What further need had they of Yavlinsky or the Union of Right Forces? For our new rich, freedom has nothing to do with political parties. Freedom is the freedom to go on great vacations. The richer they are, the more often they can fly away, and not to Antalya in Turkey, but to Tahiti or Acapulco. For the majority of them, freedom equals access to luxury. They find it more convenient now to lobby for their interests through the pro-Kremlin parties and movements, most of which are primitively corrupt. For those parties every problem has its price; you pay the money and you get the legislation you need, or the question put by a Duma deputy to the procurator general's office. People have even started talking about “deputies’ denunciations.” Nowadays these are a cost-effective means of putting your competitors out of business.
Corruption also explains the growth of the chauvinistic “Liberal Democratic Party,” led by Zhirinovsky. This is a populist “opposition,” which is not really an opposition at all because, despite their propensity for hysterical outbursts on all sorts of issues, the Liberal Democrats always support the Kremlin line. They receive substantial donations from our completely cynical and apolitical medium-sized businesses by lobbying for private interests in the Kremlin and adjacent territories such as the procurator general's office, the Interior Ministry, the Federal Security Bureau [FSB*], the Ministry of Justice, and the courts. They use the technique of deputies’ denunciations.
That is how Zhirinovsky got into the Duma both last time and this. Now he has an enviable thirty-eight seats.
The Rodina Party is another chauvinistic organization, led by Dmitry Rogozin* and created by the Kremlin's spin doctors specifically for this election. The aim was to draw moderately nationalist voters away from the more extreme National Bolsheviks. Rodina has done well too, with thirty-seven seats.
*
Ideologically, the new Duma was oriented toward Russian traditionalism rather than toward the West. All the pro-Putin candidates had pushed this line relentlessly. United Russia encouraged the view that the Russian people had been humiliated by the West, with openly anti-Western and anticapitalist propaganda. In the pre-electoral brainwashing there was no mention of “hard work,” “competition,” or “initiative” unless in a pejorative context. On the other hand, there was a great deal of talk of “indigenous Russian traditions.”
The electorate was offered a variety of patriotism to suit every taste. Rodina offered rather heroic patriotism; United Russia, moderate patriotism; and the Liberal Democrat Party, outright chauvinism. All the pro-Putin candidates made a great show of praying and crossing themselves whenever they spotted a television camera, kissing the cross and the hands of Orthodox priests.
It was laughable, but the people blithely fell for it. The pro-Putin parties now had an absolute majority in the Duma. United Russia, the party created by the Kremlin, took 212 seats. Another 65 “independents” were to all intents and purposes also pro-Kremlin. The result was the advent of a one-and-a-half-party system, a large party of government plus several small “barnacle” parties of similar persuasion.
The democrats talked so much about the importance of establishing a genuine multiparty system in Russia. It was something in which Yeltsin* took a personal interest, but now all that was lost. The new configuration in the Duma excluded the possibility of significant disagreement.
Shortly after the elections, Putin went so far as to inform us that Parliament was a place not for debate, but for legislative tidying up. He was pleased that the new Duma would not be given to debating.
The Communists won forty-one seats as a party, plus a further twelve through individual Communists standing independently. It pains me to say that today it is the Communist deputies who are the most moderate and sensible voices in the Fourth Duma. They were overthrown only twelve years ago, yet by late 2003 they had been transfigured into the great white hope of Russia's democrats.
In the months that followed, the arithmetic in the Duma changed somewhat, with deputies migrating from one party to another. Absolutely everything the presidential administration wanted passed got approved by a majority vote. Although in December 2003 United Russia had not obtained a majority large enough to change the Constitution (for which 301 votes are required), this was not to prove a problem. In practical terms, the Kremlin “engineered” a constitutional majority.
I choose the word advisedly. The elections were carefully designed and executed. They were conducted with numerous violations of electoral law and, to that extent, they were rigged. There was no possibility of legally challenging any aspect of them because the bureaucrats had already taken control of the judiciary. There was not a single ruling against the results by any legal institution, from the Supreme Court down, no matter how indisputable the evidence. This judicial sanctioning of the Big Lie was justified as being “in order to avoid destabilizing the situation in the country.”
The state's administrative resources swung into action in these elections in just the same way as in the Soviet period. This was also true in no small measure of the elections in 1996 and 2000 in order to get Yeltsin elected even though he was ill and decrepit. This time, however, there was no holding back the presidential administration. Officialdom merged with the United Russia Party as enthusiastically as it used to with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (the CPSU). Putin revived the Soviet system as neither Gorbachev* nor Yeltsin had done. His unique achievement was the establishment of United Russia, to the cheers of officials who were only too glad to become members of the new CPSU. They had plainly been missing Big Brother, who always did their thinking for them.
The Russian electorate, however, was also missing Big Brother, having heard no words of comfort from the democrats. There were no protests. United Russia's election slogans were stolen from the Communists and were all about rich bloodsuckers stealing our national wealth and leaving us in rags. The slogans proved so popular precisely because it was now not the Communists proclaiming them.
It must also be said that in 2003 a majority of our citizens heartily supported the imprisonment, through the efforts of members of United Russia, of the oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky* head of the Yukos oil company. Accordingly, although manipulating the state's administrative resources for political ends is no doubt an abuse, the politicians had public support. It was just a matter of the administration's leaving nothing to chance.
Early in the morning, political analysts assembled on the Free Speech program to discuss the results as they came in. They were jittery. Igor Bunin talked of a crisis of Russian liberalism, about how the Yukos affair had suddenly aroused a wave of antioligarchic feeling in the middle of the campaign. They talked about the hatred that had accumulated in the hearts of many people, “especially decent people who could not bring themselves to support Zhirinovsky,” and the fact that the eclectic United Russia Party had managed to unite everybody, from the most liberal to the most reactionary. He predicted that the president would now stand in for the liberals in the ruling elite.
On the same program, Vyacheslav Nikonov, the grandson of Molotov, suggested that young people had not turned out to vote and this was the main reason for the democrats’ defeat. “Ivan the Terrible and Stalin are more to the taste of the Russian people.”
The evening's television continued. The program was funereal, with an added sense of impending stormy weather. Those in the studio seemed more inclined to take shelter than to fight. Georgii Satarov, a former adviser to President Yeltsin, insisted that the outcome had been decided by the “nostalgia vote” of those who pined for the USSR. The democrats came in for a lot of flak. The writer Vasilii Aksyonov complained that the liberals had failed to exploit the unsavoriness of the Yukos affair. He was quite right. The democrats failed to take a stand one way or the other over the issue of Khodorkovsky's treatment.
*
Free Speech was shortly to be taken off the air by its parent company NTV, to which Putin commented, “Who needs a talk show for political losers?” He was referring, no doubt, to Yavlinsky, Nemtsov, and the other defeated liberals and democrats.
Vyacheslav Nikonov was to transform himself a few months later into a raging apologist for Putin. There were to be many such conversions among political analysts.
So, where would we go from here? Our freedoms were bestowed upon us from above, and the democrats kept running to the Kremlin for guarantees that they would not be revoked, in effect accepting the state's right to regulate liberalism. They kept compromising and now had nowhere left to run to.
On November 25, thirteen days before the elections, a number of us journalists had talked for five hours or so to Grigorii Yavlinsky of the Yabloko Party. He seemed very calm and confident, to the point of arrogance, that he would make it into the Duma. We suspected some bargain had been struck with the presidential administration: provision of administrative resources to support Yabloko in return for “burying” a number of issues during the campaign. For me and many others who used to vote for Yabloko, this made our flesh creep.
Yavlinsky had no time for the idea of an alliance between Yabloko and the democratic Union of Right Forces Party.
“I consider that the Union of Right Forces played an enormous part in unleashing the Chechen war. It was the only party that could in any way be described as democratic and in favor of civil society, yet they chose to say that the Russian Army was being reborn in Chechnya, and that anybody who thought otherwise was a traitor who was stabbing the Russian troops in the back.”
“So who else could Yabloko now unite with against the war in Chechnya?”
“Now? I don't know. If the Union of Right Forces were to admit that they had been wrong, we could discuss the possibility of an alliance with them. But while Nemtsov is pretending to be a dove of peace and Chubais* is talking about the liberal ideal, you'll have to forgive me, I'm not prepared to discuss that possibility. Whom else we could unite with I don't know.”
“But it was not the Union of Right Forces who began the second Chechen war.”
“No, it was Putin, but they supported him as a candidate for the presidency and, incidentally, legitimized him as a war leader in the eyes of the intelligentsia and the entire middle class.”
“You are at daggers drawn with the Union of Right Forces. You don't want an alliance with them, but you have embarked on a number of compromises with the president and his administration in order to obtain some degree of administrative support for your campaign. As I understand it, and there have been many rumors to this effect, the war in Chechnya is precisely the compromise in question. You have agreed not to make too much noise about the Chechen issue, and in return you have been guaranteed the necessary percentage of votes to get you into the Duma.”
“Don't rely on rumors. That is a completely wrong approach. There are rumors about your own newspaper too. No other paper is allowed to write about Chechnya, but you are not shut down for doing so. The rumor is that they give you that leeway so they can go to Strasbourg and wave your newspaper about to show what a free press we have. See what is being written about Chechnya in Novaya Gazeta! I don't suppose for a moment that is really the way things are…”
“All the same, please give a straight answer.”
“I never struck any such deal or agreed to any such compromise. It is out of the question.”
“But you did have talks with the administration?”
“No, never. They talked about giving us money, back in September 1999.”
“Where was that money coming from?”
“We didn't get down to that kind of detail, because I said it was unacceptable. I said I was not against Putin—I had only just set eyes on the man—but to say I would endorse everything he was going to do six months in advance was impossible. I was told, ‘Then in that case we cannot reach agreement with you, either.’ Later, after the elections, when the leaders of the parties were invited to the Kremlin and seated in accordance with their percentage of the vote, one of the most highly placed officials in the land said, ‘And you could have been sitting here…’ I replied, ‘Well, that's just the way it is.’ This time they didn't even offer.”
“When did you last speak to Putin?”
“On July 11, about the Khodorkovsky affair and the searches at Yukos.”
“At your request?”
“Yes. They assembled the entire State Council and the leaders of the political parties at the Kremlin to discuss economic programs, etc. The meeting ended at half past ten at night and I told Putin I needed to talk to him urgently. At half past eleven I met him at his home. We discussed various problems, but the main one was Khodorkovsky.”
“Did you realize that Khodorkovsky would be imprisoned?”
“There was no knowing that in advance, but it was clear that the affair was being taken very seriously. I realized something bad would happen to Khodorkovsky when the Financial Times in London published an enormous article with photographs of Khodorkovsky, Mikhail Fridman,* and Roman Abramovich, under a very large headline, which they don't usually do. The story was to the effect that those oligarchs were transferring their wealth to the West and preparing to sell everything here. There were quotes from Fridman saying it was impossible to create modern businesses in Russia, that although they themselves were really pretty good managers, there was no way, in the midst of all the corruption, you could establish proper companies in our country.”
“Have you already reconciled yourself to the fact that Putin will win a second term?”
“Even if I don't reconcile myself to that, he will get it.”
“How do you realistically assess your chances?”
“How should I know? Our own research tells us we have 8 or 9 percent, but we are talking about elections where votes get added here, added there, and they call it ‘managed democracy’ People just give up.”
“I have the impression that you are giving up too. After all, people in Georgia* rejected the results of rigged elections and used extraparlia-mentary methods to alter the situation. Perhaps you should do the same? Perhaps we all should? Are you prepared to resort to extraparliamentary methods?”
“No, I'm not going down that path, because I know that in Russia it would end with the spilling of blood, and not mine, either.”
“What about the Communists? Do you think they might take to the streets?”
“Everybody is gradually being fed the information that they are going to get 12 to 13 percent. It has already become the conventional wisdom. I don't rule that out, because politically Putin has very successfully stolen their clothes. United Russia is hardly going to take to the streets because it's been awarded 35 percent and not 38, and there are no other mass parties. They simply don't exist. Forming a political opposition in Russia became a practical impossibility after 1996. First, we lack an independent judiciary. An opposition has to be able to appeal to an independent legal system. Second, we lack independent national mass media. I mean television, of course, and primarily Channel One and Channel Two. Third, there are no independent sources of finance for anything substantial. In the absence of these three fundamentals it is impossible to create a viable political opposition in Russia.
“There is no democracy now in Russia, because democracy without an opposition is impossible. All the prerequisites for a political opposition were destroyed when Yeltsin beat the Communists in 1996, and to a large extent we allowed them to be destroyed. There isn't even the theoretical possibility of a 100,000-strong demonstration anywhere in Russia today.
“It is a peculiarity of the present regime that it doesn't just brutishly crush opposition, as was done in the era of totalitarianism. Then the system simply destroyed democratic institutions. Now all manner of civil and public institutions are being adapted by the state authorities to their own purposes. If anyone tries to resist, they are simply replaced. If they don't want to be replaced, well then, they'd better look out. Ninety-five percent of all problems are resolved using these techniques of adaptation or substitution. If we don't like the Union of Journalists, we will create Mediasoyuz. If we don't like NTV with this owner, we will reinvent NTV with a different owner.
“If they began taking an unwelcome interest in your newspaper, I know perfectly well what would happen. They would start buying up your people, they would create an internal rebellion. It wouldn't happen quickly, you have a good team, but gradually, using money and other methods, inviting people to come closer to power, turning the screws, cozying up, everything would start to fall apart. That's how they dealt with NTV. Gleb Pavlovsky stated openly that they had murdered public politics. It was no more than the truth. The authorities also deliberately create pairings, so that everybody has someone to shadow. Rodina can take on the Communists; the Union of Right Forces can take on Yabloko; the People's Party can take on United Russia.”
“But if they are up to all this trickery, what are they afraid of?”
“Change. The state authorities act in their corporate interests. They don't want to lose power. That would put them in a very dangerous situation, and they know it.”
Yavlinsky was not to make it into the Duma.
Were we seeing a crisis of Russian parliamentary democracy in the Putin era? No, we were witnessing its death. In the first place, as Lilia Shevtsova, our best political analyst, accurately put it, the legislative and executive branches of government had merged, and this had meant the rebirth of the Soviet system. As a result, the Duma was purely decorative, a forum for rubber-stamping Putin's decisions.
In the second place—and this is why this was the end and not merely a crisis—the Russian people gave its consent. Nobody stood up. There were no demonstrations, mass protests, acts of civil disobedience. The electorate took it lying down and agreed to live, not only without Yavlinsky, but without democracy. It agreed to be treated like an idiot. According to an official opinion poll, 12 percent of Russians thought United Russia representatives gave the best account of themselves in the preelection television debates. This despite the fact that the representatives of United Russia flatly refused to take part in any television debates. They had nothing to say other than that their actions spoke for them. As Aksyonov remarked, “The bulk of the electorate said, ‘Let's just leave things the way they are.’ ”
In other words, let's go back to the USSR—slightly retouched, slicked up, modernized, but the good old Soviet Union, now with bureaucratic capitalism where the state official is the main oligarch, vastly richer than any property owner or capitalist.
The corollary was that, if we were going back to the USSR, then Putin was definitely going to win in March 2004. It was a foregone conclusion. The presidential administration concurred, and lost all sense of shame. In the months that followed, right up until March 14, 2004, when Putin was indeed elected, the checks and balances within the state vanished, and the only restraint was the president's conscience. Alas, the nature of the man and the nature of his former profession meant that was not enough.
At 10:53 a.m. today a suicide bomber blew herself up outside the Nationale Hotel in Moscow, across the square from the Duma and 145 meters [160 yards] from the Kremlin. “Where is this Duma?” she asked a passerby, before exploding. For a long time the head of a Chinese tourist who had been next to her lay on the asphalt without its body. People were screaming and crying for help, but although there is no shortage of police in that area, they didn't approach the site of the explosion for twenty minutes, evidently fearing another explosion. Half an hour after the incident the ambulances arrived and the police closed the street.
There is little comment on the terrorist incident, or on why such acts take place.
Russia's upper chamber, the Soviet of the Federation, has announced the date of Putin's reelection. Putin immediately goes into top gear, using all sorts of anniversaries and special days to present himself to the country and the world as Russia's leading expert on whatever is being celebrated. On Cattle Breeders’ Day he is our most illustrious cattle breeder; on Builders’ Day he is our foremost brickie. It is bizarre, of course, but Stalin played the same game.
Today, as luck would have it, is International Human Rights Day, so Putin summoned our foremost champions of human rights (as selected by him) to the Kremlin for a meeting of the Presidential Commission on Human Rights. It began at 6:00 p.m. and was chaired by Ella Pam-filova,* a democrat from the Yeltsin era.
The pediatrician Dr. Leonid Roshal spoke for one minute about how much he loves the president; Lyudmila Alexeyeva of the Moscow Helsinki Group spoke for five minutes about improper use of state resources during elections (which Putin didn't deny); Ida Kuklina of the League of Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers spoke for three minutes about the exploitation of soldiers as slave labor and other army horrors; Valerii Abramkin of the Center for Reform of the Criminal Justice System spoke for five minutes about the things that go on in places of detention (the president seemed to appreciate his speech more than the other speeches); Ella Pamfilova spoke at great length about the dismal relations between human rights campaigners and the law enforcement agencies; Svetlana Gannushkina of the Memorial Human Rights Center had three minutes to explain the implications of the new law on citizenship; Tamara Mor-shchakova, adviser to the Constitutional Court, had seven minutes to present proposals for making the state authorities publicly accountable; Alexey Simonov spoke for three minutes on freedom of speech and the predicament of journalists; and Sergey Borisov and Alexander Auzan of the Consumers’ Association talked of the need to protect small businesses.
Ranged against them were the head and deputy head of the presidential administration; the procurator general of Russia, Vladimir Ustinov; the minister of the interior, Boris Gryzlov; the minister of justice; the minister for the press; the chairmen of the constitutional, supreme, and business arbitration courts. Nikolai Patrushev, director of the FSB, was also present at the beginning, but left shortly afterward.
All the campaigners in turn set about Procurator General Ustinov. In between their attacks, Putin would also give him a dressing-down and accuse him of unjustifiable rulings. Tamara Morshchakova kept up a legal commentary on what was being said, urging for example that a social worker should be present during the questioning and court appearances of minors. This is standard practice in many countries, but to the Kremlin it sounded radically new. Ustinov parried by claiming this would be contrary to Russian law, and Morshchakova brought him up short by pointing out that the laws he was referring to simply did not exist. This meant either that the procurator general did not know the law, which is clearly unthinkable, or that he was deliberately misleading his hearers. With Putin present this was hardly thinkable either, which led back to the first possibility, which is incompatible with holding the office of procurator general.
“It is only when they have direct personal experience of something that you can get anywhere,” Svetlana Gannushkina told me. “While the president was talking on the telephone to Bush, I went over to Viktor Ivanov, the deputy head of the presidential administration and chairman of a working group on migration legislation. I unexpectedly found that we had equally negative feelings about residential registration. Ivanov's wife had recently spent five hours standing in line to get temporary registration of friends who had come to stay with them in Moscow. It had made her furious.”
This prompted Ivanov to recognize the folly of reviving residential registration, and he vowed to fight it. An FSB general, he offered to set up a joint working group with Gannushkina to reform it. “Give me a call,” he said. “Draw up a list of members for the group. We'll work on it together.”
Another example of the triumph of personal involvement over bureaucratic inertia came when Valerii Abramkin, a champion of prisoners’ rights, told the president a dreadful story about two juvenile girls who had been wrongfully convicted. Their juvenile status was overlooked both by the court and the prison authorities and was picked up only after the girls had been transported under guard into exile, at which point they were released. Unexpectedly, Putin reacted very strongly to this. Something human flashed in his eyes. It turned out that his family had come across a similar incident involving two young girls who had suffered from disregard for the law, and to whom his wife was now giving support. It really seems that some personal experience is a prerequisite to the administration focusing on the victims of injustice.
“You have the impression that on certain issues the president's information is very low-grade and sketchy. He doesn't do anything about it,” was Svetlana Gannushkina's reaction.
For the most part, Putin listened to what was being said and, when he did speak, presented himself as being on their side. He mimicked being a human rights campaigner. Evidently, now that the democrats have been silenced, he will represent Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces for us. The prediction of the political analysts on the night of the parliamentary elections has come to pass.
This was probably Putin's main purpose in meeting the human rights campaigners: to show them that their concerns were his. He is an excellent imitator. When need be, he is one of you; when that is not necessary, he is your enemy. He is adept at wearing other people's clothes, and many are taken in by this performance. The assembly of human rights campaigners also melted in the face of Putin's impersonating of them and, despite a fundamentally different take on reality, they poured out their hearts to him.
At one moment someone actually did blurt out that they had the feeling Putin understood them much better than the security officials. Putin was unabashed and fired right back, “That is because at heart I am a democrat.”
Needless to say, after this everyone's joy just grew and grew. Dr. Roshal asked to speak “just for a moment.” “Vladimir Vladimirovich,” he said, “I like you so much.” He has said this before. Vladimir Vladimirovich looked down at the table.
The doctor went on, “… and I do not like Khodorkovsky” Vladimir Vladimirovich suddenly stiffened. Heaven only knew where this pediatrician was heading. And sure enough, his boat was heading straight for the reef. “Although I like you and do not like Khodorkovsky, I am not prepared to see Khodorkovsky under arrest. After all, he is not a murderer. Where do we think he might run away to?”
The president's facial muscles worked, and those present bit their tongues. After that nobody mentioned Khodorkovsky again, as if Putin were a dying father and Khodorkovsky his prodigal son. The human rights campaigners did not press home the attack, as might have been expected, but tucked their tails between their legs. The sky darkened, and only one person was to be found who, after the slipup over Yukos, dared to broach another topic that the president's entourage always asks one not to mention, for fear of him losing control of himself. Svetlana Gan-nushkina raised the question of Chechnya.
Concluding her short speech on the problems of migration, which had been cleared by the administration, Gannushkina went on to say that she could not expect the president to talk about Chechnya, and accordingly wished simply to present him with a book that had just been published by the Memorial Human Rights Center, People Live Here: Chechnya, A Chronicle of Violence.
This was unexpected. The minders had no time to intervene. Putin took the book and, also unexpectedly, showed interest in it. He leafed through it for the remainder of the meeting, until 10:30 p.m. In the end he himself started talking about Chechnya.
“In the first place,” Gannushkina recalls, “he is certain that it is all right to trample human rights underfoot in the course of the campaign against terrorism. There are grounds that justify not observing the law, circumstances in which the law can be flouted. In the second place, browsing through the book, Putin commented, ‘This is badly written. If you wrote so that people could understand, they would follow you and you could exert real influence on the government. But the way this is presented is hopeless.’ ”
Of course, what he had in mind was not Chechnya but the defeat of Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces in the election. “Putin is right,” Gannushkina believes. She has long been a member of Yabloko, and worked in the Duma assisting the Yabloko deputies. “We are incapable of explaining to people that we are on neither one side nor the other, but defending rights.”
After that the conversation turned of its own accord to Iraq. The campaigners said there was no comparison: the Chechens were Russian citizens, unlike the Iraqis. Putin parried this by saying that Russia gave a better impression of itself than the USA, because we have pressed charges against military personnel who have committed crimes in Chechnya far more frequently than the United States has against its war criminals in Iraq.
The procurator general chimed in: “More than six hundred cases.” The human rights campaigners didn't let that pass: how many of those had led to sentences being passed? The question hung in the air, unanswered.
Lyudmila Alexeyeva, leader of the Moscow Helsinki Group and an unofficial doyenne of Russian human rights campaigners, someone whom the state authorities have raised to iconic status as personifying the human rights community as far as the Kremlin is concerned, proposed convening a round table with the same participants to discuss the problems of Chechnya with the president. “We'll need to think about that,” Putin muttered as he was saying his farewells, which meant, “There's no way that is going to happen.”
*
There were indeed no discussions on Chechnya between Putin and the human rights campaigners, but after their December meeting some of them, along with some of the democrats, decided to switch allegiance from the defeated Yavlinsky and Nemtsov to the newly democratic Putin, whom they evidently supposed would serve just as well.
The same fate befell a number of well-known journalists. Reputations were compromised before our very eyes. We watched as Vladimir Soloviov, a popular television and radio presenter, one of the boldest, best informed, and most democratic of reporters, who not long ago had exposed government wickedness, for example, over the chemical attack in the Nord-Ost disaster (when 912 members of the audience of a musical were taken hostage by Chechens), suddenly and publicly proclaimed his passionate support for Putin and the Russian state.
This happened to him because he was brought in closer to the Kremlin and sweetened up. He transmogrified. It is a recurrent Russian problem: proximity to the Kremlin makes people slow to say no, and altogether less discriminating. The Kremlin knows this full well. How many of them there have been already, stifled by the Kremlin. First they are gently clasped to the authorities’ breast. In Russia the best way to subjugate even the most recalcitrant is not money but bringing us in from the cold, at arm's length at first. The rebellious soon begin to subside. We have seen it with Soloviov, with Dr. Roshal, and now even the admirers of Sakharov* and Yelena Bonner* are beginning to talk about Putin's charisma, saying he gives them grounds for hope.
Of course, this is not the first time in recent history that we have seen this coming together of the regime and defenders of human rights, the regime and the democrats. It certainly is the first time, though, that it has been so devastating for former dissidents. What hope is there for the Russian people if one part of the opposition has been bombed out of existence, and another, almost all that remains, is being set aside for later use?
This morning there was more of the same, a reputation destroyed by the Kremlin's embrace. Andrey Makarevich was an underground rock musician in the Soviet period, a dissident, a fighter against the KGB,* who used to sing with passion, “Don't bow your head before the changeful world. Some day that world will bow its head to us!” It was the anthem of the first years of democracy under Yeltsin. Today, on live television on the state-run Channel One, he is being presented with a medal “For Services to the Fatherland.”
Makarevich came out in support of United Russia and took part in their preelection get-togethers. He really did bow his head to Putin and his United Russia Party. He told the people what a good guy Vladimir Vladimirovich was and, lo and behold, we now see him in receipt of official favors; a former dissident who wasn't embarrassed to join the Kremlin party.
Putin gave a reception for the leaders of the Duma parties, as this is the last day of the Third Duma. He spoke of positive developments in relations between the branches of state power. Yavlinsky smiled wryly.
Soon, across the road from the Kremlin, the final session of the departing Parliament was held in the Duma building. Almost everybody was there. United Russia was in a holiday mood and made no attempt to disguise the fact. Why would they? Every day newly elected deputies from other parties are defecting to them, moving closer to Putin. United Russia is inflating like a hot air balloon.
Yavlinsky stood apart from everyone else, as always alone. He was morose and taciturn. What was there to applaud? The destruction of Russian parliamentary democracy has been accomplished on the tenth anniversary of the First Duma under Yeltsin's presidency. Tomorrow, December 12, is also the tenth anniversary of Russia's new, “Yeltsin,” Constitution.
Nemtsov is trying to give as many interviews as possible while people are still interested in him. He explains. “The Union of Right Forces and Yabloko are doing the impossible, something that before December 7 seemed a fantasy: we are trying to unite.” People do not entirely believe him. All the pro-democracy voters were praying they would merge before December 7 in order to have an impact in the elections, but they just were not interested.
Gennadii Seleznyov, the speaker of the Duma, makes a farewell speech to which nobody listens. He knows his days as speaker are over, because in future the speaker will not be elected by Parliament, but appointed by the Kremlin. Everybody also knows who it is going to be: Boris Gryzlov, Putin's friend and one of his most loyal henchmen, the leader of United Russia and minister of the interior. It is unquestionably a historic moment. As we bid farewell to the Third Duma, we are bidding farewell to a political epoch. Putin has crushed our argumentative Parliament.
The exigencies of politics have not caused the Kremlin to neglect money matters. The attack on Yukos continues, with our business world trying to get its teeth into parts of it while everything is still up for grabs. The arbitration court of Yakutia has found in favor of Surgutneftegaz, a company that had lost out to Sakhaneftegaz, subsequently part of Yukos, in an auction of oil and gas rights held in March 2002. The verdict strips Yukos of the Talakan field with its oil reserves of 120 million tons and 60 billion cubic meters of gas, and awards its rival a license to exploit the central concession of the field in perpetuity.
Tsentrobank reports another record in replenishing the gold and foreign currency reserves. To December 5 these are $70.6 billion. But is this a triumph? One of the main reasons that companies are dumping their foreign currency profits on the market is the predicament of Yukos, with claims by the state that it concealed its earnings for tax evasion purposes. The others are not tempting providence and are converting their profits into rubles. The hullabaloo over Yukos is doing the state no harm at all, which is why it can pay off its foreign debt. The Russian people rejoice, without having a clue as to what is going on.
Today is also the ninth anniversary of the start of Russia's latest wars against the Chechens. On December 11, 1994, the first tanks entered Grozny, and we saw the first soldiers and officers burned alive in them. There was no mention of this today on any of the television channels. The anniversary has been removed from Russia's calendar.
The unanimity of the television stations cannot be coincidental and must reflect instructions from the presidential administration, which means we can be sure that Putin's presidential campaign will exclude all mention of Chechnya. That's the way he operates: since he doesn't know what to do about Chechnya, Chechnya will not be on the agenda.
In the evening there was a televised debate between Valeriya Novo-dvorskaya, a democrat to the marrow of her bones, and Vladimir Zhirinovsky. She talked about the monstrous irresponsibility of the war in Chechnya, the blood and the genocide. Zhirinovsky's response was to shriek hysterically, “Get out of this country! We will never give in to them!” In the vote at the end of the program, viewers cast 40,000 votes in favor of Zhirinovsky to 16,000 for Novodvorskaya.
Constitution Day. A holiday. Moscow is flooded with militiamen and agents in plain clothes. There are dogs everywhere, searching for explosives. The president held a grand reception in the Kremlin for the political and oligarchic elite and made a speech about human rights, predicated on the notion that they had triumphed in Russia. Yeltsin was there, looking fitter and younger, but with mental problems written all over his face. He was there because the Constitution was adopted during his presidency. He is not usually invited to Putin's Kremlin.
A survey revealed that only 2 percent of Russians have much idea of what the Constitution actually says. Forty-five percent thought its main guarantee was of the “right to work,” and only 6 percent mentioned free speech as something fundamental to their way of life.
A television phone-in. A big occasion as Putin meets the people. It was announced that more than a million questions had been submitted. The president's virtual dialogue with the country was hosted by his favorite television presenters, Sergey Brilev from the Rossiya channel and Yekat-erina Andreyeva from Channel One.
ANDREYEVA to Putin: “This is the third time you have appeared on this direct line. Me too. Are you nervous?”
PUTIN: “No. Don't offer what you can't deliver and don't lie, then you have nothing to fear.”
BRILEV, choking with joy: “Very much like our work…”
PUTIN: “ Everything that Russia has achieved has been achieved by hard work. There have been many difficulties and setbacks, but Russia has shown herself to be a country that stands firmly on her own feet and is developing rapidly. I have brought some statistics along. In 2002 our rate of growth was 4.3 percent. Five percent was projected for this year, but we shall achieve 6.6, or even 6.9. Payments on our foreign debt have been reduced. We have paid off $17 billion and the country didn't even notice it. The gold and foreign currency reserves in 2000 were $11 billion. In 2003 they rose to $20 billion, and today they are $70 billion. These are not empty statistics. A number of factors are involved here. If we continue with our present economic policy, there will be no more currency defaults. On the other hand, in early 2003 there were 37 million people whose income was beneath the subsistence level. In the third quarter of 2003 that number had fallen to 31 million, but this is still humiliating. The average subsistence level is 2,121 rubles [$72] a month, which is very low, and 31 million people live below that level.”
A question from Komsomolsk-on-Amur, Khabarov Region: “Ours is the third largest city in the Far East of Russia, an enormous industrial center, a city of young people, but a very long way from Moscow. My name is Kirill Borodulin. I work in the Amur shipyard. At present we are working only on export orders. When are we going to see orders from the Russian defense industry? We want to be needed by Russia.”
(The questions do not give the impression of being spontaneous, and the answers appear to have been prepared. Putin reads out statistics from his notes even though the question was asked “live on air.” He will evidently be answering only questions he wants to answer.)
PUTIN: “The fact that you are working for export is entirely positive. There is a battle being waged for the arms market, and Russia is not doing at all badly. We have an armaments procurement program up to the year 2010 and it is being fully financed. Of course, there are problems; one would always like to allocate more to our armed forces. The priorities for procurement are decided by the Ministry of Defense, which has placed new aircraft only eighth on its list of priorities, even though today's wars are fought using aircraft. You can be entirely sure that your services will be required.”
KATYA USTIMENKO, student: “ I have voted for the first time. What can we expect from the new Duma?”
PUTIN: “No civilized state can live without a legislative institution. A great deal depends on the Duma. We expect efficient, systematic work.”
ALEXANDER NIKOLAEVICH: “I live in Tula, in the house where my father lived before me. The foundations are breaking up. We are in an excavation zone. Why does the state talk so much, but still doesn't resolve the problem of crumbling accommodations?”
PUTIN: “I have been to Tula. I was surprised at the state of the residential accommodations. There are ways and means. What are they? Only a few years ago the state allocated practically no funds. For the first time we made funds available in 2003: 1.3 billion rubles [$43.3 million] from the federal budget. The same amount again was to be added from local government budgets. The way out is to develop mortgage lending. If mortgages had been introduced, you would have been able to make use of one. What is your monthly salary? You are working in an efficient region.”
ALEXANDER NIKOLAEVICH: “Twelve thousand rubles [$410].”
PUTIN: “You would qualify for a mortgage. We need to make some legislative changes.”
YURY SIDOROV, Kuzbass: “Working as a miner is dangerous. Why has the miners’ pension been reduced to the statutory rate? What sort of pension is that?”
PUTIN: “The average salary of miners is 12,000 rubles a month, against a national average salary of 5,700 [$195]. The logic of the pensions reform is for pensions to reflect directly the contributions made from salary. Your pension will differ from the average to your advantage; it will be higher. This change has been introduced. The national pension fund is opening a network of consultation centers around the country and in the workplace. You need to go and talk to them.”
VALENTINA ALEXEYEVNA from Krasnodar: “You have not so far announced whether you are intending to stand in the presidential election. What are your plans?”
PUTIN:: “Yes, I shall be standing. I shall make an official announcement in the near future.”
ALEXEY VIKTOROVICH, naval repair yard, Murmansk Province: “We have had no salary or vacation pay since August. When is this going to be sorted out?”
PUTIN: “We have sorted matters out as far as the budget is concerned. Delays must not exceed two days for salaries. As far as industry is concerned, there are a number of variations here. There are state enterprises, some of which are being reclassified as budget-financed enterprises. A number are in a parlous financial state. In other cases it is the owners and management who are responsible.”
Question from BRILEV: “How do you feel about having your portrait in government offices?”
PUTIN: “The president is a symbol of the state, so there is nothing terrible about that. Everything is good in moderation. When that is forgotten, it gives rise to concern.”
SGT. SERGEY SERGEYEVICH, Russian military base in Kant, Kirghizia:* “The Americans have managed to capture Saddam Hussein, but there is going to be a second Vietnam in Iraq. Everybody will run away. The chaos there will affect everyone.”
PUTIN: “ Sergey Sergeyevich, it is not in our national interest to see the USA defeated in its struggle against international terrorism. As far as Iraq is concerned, that is a separate issue. There were no international terrorists there under Saddam Hussein. Without the sanction of the United Nations Security Council the invasion cannot be regarded as legal, to put it mildly. In all ages, however, great empires have had delusions regarding their invulnerability, a sense of their grandeur and infallibility. This has invariably caused them a great deal of trouble. I hope this will not happen to our American partners.”
VITALII POTAPOV, electrician, Borovichi, Novgorod Province: “ Before the Duma elections your dog had puppies. How are they getting on?”
PUTIN: “They are doing well. They are very lively, but haven't opened their eyes yet. As to their future, we have had many requests from people wanting to adopt them. I and my children and my wife have to think about that. We have to make sure the puppies go to good homes. We need to know who we are giving them to.”
BALKAROV, a Kabardinian, Nalchik: “ I work in the Russian theater. The Abkhazians [from a disputed part of Georgia] are related to the Kabardinians [who are citizens of Russia]. Perhaps we should bring Abkhazia into the Russian Federation* and avert a new war?”
PUTIN: “This is a very acute question, for Russia as a whole, and especially for the south of our country. Maintaining the territorial integrity of the state was recently one of our own main problems and priorities. By and large that task has been accomplished. Following these principles, we cannot refuse to apply them to our neighbors. We are a member of the United Nations and we will fulfill our international obligations. There are peculiarities to do with the fact that the family of hill-dwelling peoples are a special community, with links of kinship between them that go back many centuries. We are far from indifferent to the fate of these peoples. After the collapse of the USSR many conflicts broke out, in South Ossetia, Karabakh, Abkhazia. It would be a mistake to suppose they can all be resolved by Russia. I say, agree matters between yourselves and we will act as an honest guarantor. We will keep a close eye on the Abkhaz problem, but we respect the territorial integrity of Georgia.”
AKHMAD SAZAEV, Balkarian writer: “ Inflaming ethnic strife is forbidden by law, but during the election campaign certain parties campaigned under the slogan, ‘Russia for the Russians.’ Why were these parties allowed to broadcast such sentiments on television?”
PUTIN: “Anyone who says ‘Russia for the Russians’ is either an idiot or a troublemaker. Russia is a multinational country. What do they want, partition? The dismemberment of Russia? Most likely these are mischief makers looking for easy gains, who want to show how radical they are. As regards the election campaign, I didn't see this on television. If it did happen, I shall talk to the procurator general. Action should be taken.”
NATALIA KOTENKOVA, Krasnoyarsk: “ Is it not time to end privatization and begin renationalization?”
PUTIN: “This is not a new question and I have my own views on the matter. When the country began privatization, it was assumed that the new property owners would be more efficient. That was quite right. Developed economies, however, have a well-established system of administration. By receiving taxation revenue from private enterprises, the state resolves social problems for its citizens. We ran into a snag. The administrative apparatus was not in place and the necessary resources did not flow into the treasury. I am quite certain that what is needed is to strengthen the state's institutions and legislation and improve our system of administration. Not to stop privatization.”
DMITRY YEGOROV, twenty-five: “ I listen to heavy rock. What kind of music do you like?”
PUTIN: “ Light classical music and Russian big band music with vocals.”
ALEXEY, Sverdlovsk Province: “Were you very strict in bringing up your daughters?”
PUTIN: “ No, unfortunately. Or fortunately. My girls have grown up independent, with a sense of their own worth. I think that is a good result.”
IRINA MOZHAISKAYA, teacher: “In the past three years there have been twelve terrorist outrages in Staropoliye. Forty-five people were killed in Yessentuki. How can this be stopped?”
PUTIN: “What is the root of the problem? It is a problem stemming not only from Chechnya. There are people in the world who consider they have the right to influence the outlook of people who adhere to Islam. They consider that they have a right to take control of territories densely populated by Muslims. This is extremely relevant to our country. ‘International terrorists’ is our name for these people. They have exploited the problems of the disintegration of the USSR, which are related to what has happened in Chechnya, but they have other goals. They want not independence for Chechnya but secession of all territories with a high Islamic population. If the Balkanization of Russia were to begin, that would be terrible. We must fight that. The threat comes from abroad. The Islamic extremist groups in Dagestan* consist of 50 percent of foreigners. The only way is not to give in to their pressure, not to panic. We must act firmly and systematically, and the law enforcement agencies need to improve the way they work.”
ANATOLY NIKITIN, Murmansk Province: “The internal affairs offices and traffic militia seem to think they are in business to make a profit. Are you fully informed about what goes on in these agencies?”
PUTIN: “In the current year there have been more than 19,000 irregularities within the Interior Ministry's area of responsibility, and of these more than 2,600 were outright violations of the law. Many officials have faced criminal charges. The security services will be further strengthened. To give you a straight answer, yes, I am aware of the real situation in the agencies of law and order.”
SERGEY TATARENKO: “ Is the state planning to stop the migration of Chinese into the Far East?”
PUTIN: “ Not to stop it, but to regulate it. We need to know where, how many, and what kind of migrants we require, and devise a way of attracting the manpower we need. The level of corruption in this sphere is very high.”
LIDIYA IVANOVNA, Khimki, Moscow Province: “Will a mechanism be created to fight corruption in the procurators’ offices and the courts? And in the executive institutions of the state?”
PUTIN: “Apart from becoming tougher over this, we need to introduce fundamental changes. We need to start a real administrative reform. The fewer opportunities officials have to interfere in the making of decisions, the better. The court system should be independent but transparent—accountable to society. The judges already have a system of self-regulation. I hope it will start working.”
IVETTA, student, Pedagogical University, Nizhny Novgorod: “They say you are a political pupil of Anatoly Sobchak, one of the founders of the democratic movement. What is your attitude toward the defeat of the forces on the political right?”
PUTIN: “ Sobchak was my teacher at university. The defeat of the forces of the right gives me no pleasure. All the country's political voices should be represented in our Parliament. Their absence is a major loss, but it is a result of their policies. They made mistakes both in the tactics and in the strategy of their political campaign. They had access to administrative resources—Anatoly Chubais is in charge of Russia's entire electricity system. They had everything, apart from an understanding of what people expect from a political party. There was also a lack of political will on the part of the miscellaneous forces on the right to agree on a joint course of action. I hope their defeat will not result in their disappearing from the political map. We shall help them too. We shall have discussions with the Union of Right Forces and Yabloko and try to make use of their human resources.”
VLADIMIR BYKOVSKY, Chuvashia: “Do you allow yourself emotions?”
PUTIN: “Unfortunately, I do.”
DOBROSLAVA DIACHKOVA, pensioner, Vyborg: “I work in a Hope Center for the elderly and disabled, and talk a lot to those who are resting there. Many have relatives and friends in the Baltic states. Why does Russia not undertake more positive action to defend the Russian population in the Baltic states?”
PUTIN: “ In recent years our Ministry of Foreign Affairs has been increasingly devoting attention to this. Many things there give us cause for concern. It cannot be said that these people are in full possession of their rights and freedoms. We are trying to help them both diplomatically and in court cases at various levels, but certain West European standards that are seen as appropriate in a number of other hot spots should also apply to the Baltic states. If in Macedonia the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the European Community believe there should be representation for the Albanian population in the south of Macedonia, why is this principle not applicable in Riga, where 25 percent of the population is Russian? Why are there different standards? In order not to do more harm than good for our compatriots, we shall approach this matter cautiously.”
ANNA NOVIKOVA, university teacher: “ People who distribute drugs should be given a life sentence!”
PUTIN: “I proposed changes to make penalties more severe. The Third Duma passed them, the Soviet of the Federation supported them, and a week ago I signed these amendments into law. There is a considerable increase in severity—up to twenty years’ imprisonment for certain categories. I think it is a significant improvement.”
PUTIN then read out a question he himself had chosen from those sent in by e-mail: “What is your attitude toward increasing the term for presidents?”
PUTIN: “ I am against it.”
Immediately after this communion with the people, Putin told the press: “Our state system is not yet fully established. In Russia everything is still evolving. Direct communication with citizens is extremely useful.”
This is how Putin concluded the event, and it may explain why he appeared on the phone-in in the first place: “Strengthening democracy has a practical importance in Russia. A situation has developed that will allow us to create a unique multiparty system, with a powerful right center, social democracy on the left, allies to either side, and also with representatives of marginal groups and parties. This is now an achievable goal.”
A strange statement that does not reflect reality.
If we consider the phone-in from a preelection viewpoint, the main planks of Putin's platform as of December 18 would seem to be: the fight against poverty, defense of the Constitution, the creation of a multiparty system, the struggle against corruption, the struggle against terrorism, and the development of mortgage lending.
How much of this is our virtual president likely to implement?
Today is Secret Policeman's Day. The Cheka-OGPU-NKVD-KGB-FSB have been at it for eighty-six years. On the television news this is the lead item. How awful. The tone of the report is very dispassionate, as if millions of lives had not been sacrificed to this blood-soaked service. What else can we expect in a country whose leader openly admits that, even while in the post of president, he remains “in the active reserve of The Firm”?
The final official summary of the parliamentary election results: United Russia, 37.55 percent (120 seats); the Communist Party, 12.6 percent (40 seats); the Liberal Democratic Party, 11.45 percent (36 seats). Rodina obtained 29 seats. In three constituencies, in Sverdlovsk and Ulianovsk Provinces and also in St. Petersburg, by-elections will be held on March 14 because the successful candidate this time was “None of the above.” From tomorrow the parties can propose their presidential candidates.
Deputies are scuttling over to join United Russia. Particularly painful is the defection of Pavel Krashenninikov, elected as an independent candidate, but previously known to the electorate as a liberal and a member of the Union of Right Forces. The Duma is becoming a one-party show.
Yavlinsky has declined to stand as a presidential candidate for Yabloko. He also declared that they would “create a major democratic party,” but made the announcement with the haughty expression that puts everybody off voting for him. Proof, if proof were needed, that we need new faces and new leaders. Today's are incapable of forming a democratic opposition.
Khakamada also announced that the Union of Right Forces would not be putting forward a candidate. Her explanation was convincing: “From the way people voted, it is clear that they don't want us leading the country.” The Communists also say they want no part in the election.
A boycott of the presidential election by the opposition on the right and left: is this now the only way for them to play a part in the country's politics after the December elections?
Today Putin submitted applications to the Central Electoral Commission from a group of electors who wish to start collecting signatures in support of his candidacy. The Kremlin's public opinion survey indicates that 72 percent of the electorate would vote for Putin if the election were held today.
Who is standing against him? As of now, the only alternative to Putin is Gherman Sterligov, an undertaker who makes coffins. He has no party behind him, only lots of money and “The Russian Ideal.” He is a rank outsider. The other potential runner is Vladimir Zhirinovsky. He has stated that the Liberal Democratic Party will field a candidate. He too is an outsider, but has done his bit to become an insider with the Kremlin. Putin looks ridiculous in such company. Presumably in the next few weeks the administration will cobble together a group of rather more respectable candidates for Putin to defeat.
Nobody quite believes yet that Khodorkovsky is going to be found guilty. Most people think this is all just a Kremlin ploy, which will be dropped after Putin has been reelected. On December 30 the period for which Khodorkovsky can be detained will expire, but hearings have been arranged well in advance at the Basmanny court in Moscow to extend his imprisonment.
This evening it became clear that the procurator general's office is asking that Khodorkovsky should be held until March 25. That is, he will see Putin's reelection from prison. Khodorkovsky was brought to the court only at 4:00 p.m. or so. Sometime after 6:00 p.m., when all the judges, employees, witnesses, plaintiffs, and defendants in other cases had left, the doors of the Basmanny court were closed and the hearing of his case began.
What are they so scared of? Is Khodorkovsky really the most dangerous man in Russia? Not even terrorists get this treatment, and Khodorkovsky is charged only with seven counts of financial irregularities. He was taken back to the Matrosskaya Tishina prison at about 10:00 p.m. The application of the procurator general's office was granted.
Some results of last Sunday's local elections of governors: in Tver Province 9 percent of the electorate voted for “None of the above.” In Kirov Province it was 10 percent.
Those who vote “against” are the real democrats in Russia today. They have done their duty as citizens by turning out to vote, and are mostly thoughtful people with an aversion to all those now in power.
Ritual murders are taking place in Moscow. A second severed head has been found in the past twenty-four hours, this time in the district of Go-lianovo in the east of Moscow. It was in a rubbish container on Altaiskaya Street. Yesterday evening, a head in a plastic bag was found lying on a table in the courtyard outside Apartment Building 3 on Krasnoyarskaya Street. Both men had been dead for twenty-four hours before the discovery. The circumstances in the two cases are almost identical: the victims are from the Caucasus, aged thirty to forty, and have dark hair. Their identities are unknown. The heads were found two-thirds of a mile apart.
Such are the results of racist propaganda in the run-up to the parliamentary elections. Our people are very susceptible to fascist propaganda, and react promptly. In Moscow, Dmitry Rogozin's Rodina Party won 15 percent of the vote earlier this month.
The Union of Right Forces and Yabloko have unveiled their new joint project: the United Democratic Council, an interparty body to which each party will nominate six members. At the announcement, not even party workers seemed to have much faith that the union would last. The general public seem totally uninterested in what has become of Yavlinsky, Nemtsov, and the Yabloko Party luminaries.
Putin has held a meeting with the business elite, or rather there has been a meeting of the board of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry that the president attended.
Putin favors the chamber over the RUIE, the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, which is considered the oligarchs’ trade union. It was from the RUIE that Anatoly Chubais spoke out in defense of Khodorkovsky shortly after his arrest. He didn't pull his punches, talking of an “escalation of the actions of the authorities and the law enforcement agencies in respect of Russian business.” He warned that the business community's confidence in the government had been undermined: “Russian business no longer trusts the current system of law enforcement or those running it.” This was a direct accusation by the oligarchs’ trade union that the forces under Putin's command were destabilizing society. Chubais called for Putin to adopt a “clear and unambiguous position.” These were unprecedentedly harsh words from business to the government.
Putin's response was to tell them publicly to “cut out the hysterics” and to advise the government “not to get drawn into this discussion.” He ignored the substance of the oligarchs’ complaint and expressed his complete confidence in the law enforcement agencies. When in January Boris Gryzlov was appointed speaker of the Duma, Putin promoted Rashid Nurgaliev, one of the most odious militia bosses, to be minister of the interior. This may also have been a response to whisperings at that time about Putin's supposed weakness as a leader, an attempt to demonstrate the robustness of the regime.
Putin's meeting with the Chamber of Commerce and Industry was much calmer, though. He sees the chamber as being in a different category from the RUIE. The president of the CCI, that wily old Soviet fox Yevgeny Primakov, read his speech and quoted Putin on five occasions, prefacing his words with “as Vladimir Vladimirovich has correctly remarked …” Primakov assured Putin that “an oligarch and a major entrepreneur are quite different things… The word ‘oligarch’ sounds pejorative. After all, what is an oligarch? Someone who gets rich through devious manipulation of, among other things, his tax bill, who may trip up his business comrades or make crude attempts to interfere in politics, corrupting officials, parties, deputies …” and so on. Primakov's entire speech was in the register of Soviet servility, and Putin clearly loved it.
Then it was time for questions. Naturally, they asked whether there was to be a review of the results of privatization. Even if they are not the oligarchs’ trade union, the Yukos affair was on everybody's mind.
Putin suddenly bawled like a market trader, or a prison guard, “There will be no review of privatization! The laws were complicated, muddled, but it was perfectly possible to observe them! There was nothing impossible about it, and those who wanted to, did! If five or ten people failed to observe them, that does not mean everybody failed to! Those who observed them are sleeping soundly now, even if they didn't get quite so rich! Those who broke the law should not be treated the same as those who observed it.”
“To be sleeping soundly now” is also a Russian euphemism for being in the grave.
After Putin's outburst, the proceedings continued smoothly. The businessmen made their reports to Putin and gave “socialist undertakings” to meet various targets, just as in the days of the USSR. Primakov carried on doing what nobody had sunk to since the advent of Gorbachev, namely licking the boots of the country's leader and vowing that no words could be more profound than his.
(In December 2003 this grated on the ear and many were dismayed by Primakov's behavior. It subsequently became clear that he was just the first to see the way the wind was once more blowing. Soon everybody who made speeches in Putin's presence was quoting him copiously— just as was the practice in the Brezhnev era—and not asking him awkward questions.)
Valeriya Novodvorskaya, the leader of the Democratic Union Party, received the Starovoytova Award in St. Petersburg for “her contribution to the defense of human rights and strengthening democracy in Russia.” The award is named after Galina Starovoytova, leader of the Democratic Russia Party, who was murdered by special operations hitmen from the Army's Central Intelligence Directorate (GRU) in the entrance to her own home. At the ceremony, Novodvorskaya said, “We are not in opposition to, but in confrontation with, the present regime. We shall not take part in the forthcoming elections. We shall boycott them, although this will not change anything.”
The opposition in Russia is first and foremost words, but Novod-vorskaya uses them with exceptional accuracy and is the first to take on the state.
The Moscow municipal court has increased the compensation awarded to one of the Nord-Ost widows, Alla Alyakina, whose husband, a businessman, died in the theater siege on October 26, 2002, by two kopecks [a fraction of a penny].
The first meeting of the United Democratic Council of Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces, at which the main issue is the prospects for joint political survival. An item about fielding a presidential candidate representing a united democratic front was removed from the agenda. From a conversation with Grigorii Yavlinsky:
“Why is Yabloko refusing to participate in the presidential election?” “Because our elections are no longer even relatively democratic.” “Then why did you take part in the parliamentary elections?” “It was precisely the questionable results of the parliamentary elections which made it clear that things could not go on like that. During the last elections unsanctioned political involvement of business was crushed. No businessman now dares to contribute money to a political cause without permission from the Kremlin.” “How do you see the future for Yabloko?”
“The same as for the rest of Russia. They will probably set up a decorative pseudodemocratic parallel party, or fight us to extinction. I don't suppose for a moment that we shall be left in peace to prepare for the next elections.”
“A one-party Duma? But the Communist Party is still in there.”
“Formally, yes. But if you took five people from the remaining parties,
put them in different rooms, and asked them crucial questions like,
‘What should be done in Chechnya? How should the army be reformed?
What should be done about education and health? What should our relations be with Europe and America?’ they would all give the same answers. We have a pseudo-multiparty parliament, pseudo free and fair elections, a pseudoimpartial judiciary, and pseudoindependent mass media. The whole setup is a Potemkin village, a sham.”
“Do you see this lasting for a long time?”
“Things are changing rapidly, and anybody who thinks any of this will last for a long time is mistaken. Although to you and me, perhaps, it will seem quite long enough.”
I take an interest in what Yavlinsky has to say almost from force of habit. Other journalists are completely uninterested.
In Moscow, the victorious United Russia Party holds its conference. Boris Gryzlov, the newly appointed speaker of the Duma, declares, “More than 37 percent of Russia's citizens, more than 22 million people, voted for us. We have obtained a majority in the Duma, which lays a great responsibility on us, and I do not believe in walking away from responsibility. I submitted an application to Putin and he made the arrangements for my transfer to the Duma. Permit me to express my especial gratitude to President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. It is by following his course that victory has been assured. Our candidate in the forthcoming elections is already known: the president—Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. Our duty is to ensure that he wins decisively.”
After the conference came the first meeting of the parliamentary United Russia Party. Gryzlov told us about his vision of the Duma's political role. Political debate, it seems, is mere chatter and should be excluded. For Gryzlov, a Duma without debate will be a step forward.
The Central Electoral Commission has registered a lobby group of electors proposing Putin's candidacy. As of today they can conduct their campaign officially, as if they haven't been doing just that until now.
The fifteenth conference of the misleadingly named Liberal Democratic Party begins in Moscow under the slogan “Russians are tired of waiting!” Zhirinovsky will not stand for president. “We will put forward a complete unknown, but I personally will lead the party during the election of the president,” he announced. The conference nominated Oleg Malyshkin, a wrestling coach who is Zhirinovsky's bodyguard and a complete imbecile. In his first television interview as a presidential candidate he had some difficulty remembering what his favorite book was.
Putin does not simply lack a field of competitors against whom to run. The whole background against which the election is being organized is an intellectual desert. The affair has no logic, no reason, no sparkle of genuine, serious thinking. The candidates have no manifestos, and one cannot imagine them being able to conduct a political debate.
What can we do? Election campaigns and hustings have been devised by democratic societies partly in order to allow the population some input into the deciding of their future, to give candidates advice and instructions.
We have been told just to pipe down. Candidate No. 1 knows best what everybody needs and accordingly requires no advice from anyone. There is nobody to moderate his arrogance. Russia has been humiliated.
Sterligov, the coffin maker, has been disqualified from standing by the Central Electoral Commission. Viktor Anpilov, a clown from the Workers’ Russia Party, promptly put himself forward. A horseradish is no sweeter than a radish.
At last they have found a worthy opponent for Putin: Sergey Mironov,* the speaker of the Soviet of the Federation, has been proposed by the Party of Life (another of the dwarf parties set up by the presidential administration's deputy head, Vladislav Surkov*). He immediately announced, “I support Putin.”
The conference of the Russian Communist Party is taking place. The Communists have proposed Nikolai Kharitonov, an odd, garrulous man who used to be a KGB officer. How wonderful!
Ivan Rybkin has announced he will stand. He is the creature of Putin's main opponent, Boris Berezovsky,* now in exile abroad. Rybkin used to be the speaker of the Duma and chairman of the National Security Council. Who is he today? Time will tell.
Meanwhile, Moscow is at a standstill. The rich haven't a care in the world; they are abroad on vacation. Moscow is very rich. All the restaurants, even the most expensive, are crammed or closed for corporate parties. The tables are laden with delicacies beyond the imaginings of the rest of Russia. Thousands of dollars are spent in an evening. Is this the last fling of the twenty-first century's New Economic Policy?
The first sitting of the new Duma. Putin announced that the Parliament “must remember that power derives from the people. Our main priorities are first and foremost to concentrate on issues affecting the quality of life of our citizens… It has taken considerable time and effort to move the Duma away from political confrontation to constructive work… It is essential to break through on every front… We have every right to call this a time that is seeing the strengthening of parliamentary democracy in Russia… All debate is useless…”
Vladislav Surkov, from the presidential administration, was also present. He is the spin doctor to whom United Russia owes its constitutional majority, a designer of political parties, slippery and dangerous.
Vladimir Ryzhkov,* an independent candidate from the Altai Region, announced that he intends to challenge the composition of the Duma in the courts. “The electorate did not give United Russia the mandate for a constitutional majority.” Really? Well, what are you going to do about it? We're living in times when the state authorities are entirely without shame.
Sergey Shoygu, minister for emergency situations and a leading functionary of United Russia, and by no means the stupidest of them, suddenly proposed that “United Russia should become the party providing public accountability in the fulfilling of the president's decisions.”
Irina Khakamada may after all stand for president. All the democrats and liberals are condemning her in advance, saying the administration has offered her a deal in order to have at least one intelligent opponent for Putin to defeat. Viktor Gerashchenko, formerly the head of Tsen-trobank and now a deputy of the Rodina Party has also decided to stand.
Irina Khakamada has confirmed she will stand as a candidate. She thought it over for twenty-four hours after a lobby group proposed it to her. Was it sent by the Kremlin?
She has until January 28 to collect two million signatures. Viktor Gerashchenko will not need to collect signatures, because Rodina is a party with seats in the Duma. Rodina was dreamed up by Vladislav Surkov and is financed by various oligarchs. Sergey Glaziev, also from Rodina, will stand as an independent.
Putin needed competitors, and he has received them as a New Year's gift. The new candidates have all promptly declared that the main thing is not to win but to take part.
It is a sad farewell to 2003. The Duma elections were a great victory for Putin's absolutism, but how long can you go on building empires? An empire leads to repression and ultimately to stagnation, and that is where we are heading. Our people have been exhausted by having political and economic experiments conducted on them. They want very much to live better lives, but do not want to have to fight for that. They expect everything to come down to them from above, and if what comes from above is repression, they resign themselves to it. The joke most popular on the Internet: “It is evening in Russia. Dwarfs are casting enormous shadows.”
The viewers of NTV's Free Speech program have voted for the Russian of the Year. Among the nominations were Vladislav Surkov (for bringing about the crushing victory of United Russia); academician Vitalii Ginzburg (Nobel Prize 2003, for work in quantum physics); the Novosibirsk film director Andrey Zvyagintsev (whose first film, The Return, won the Lion d'or at the Venice Film Festival); Georgii Yartsev (who coached the Russian soccer team to victory against Wales); and Mikhail Khodorkovsky (for creating the most honest and transparent company in Russia, becoming the country's richest man, and ending up in jail).
The viewers chose Ginzburg. Surkov came last.
At the end of the program, the presenter Savik Shuster revealed the rating of the nominees in a poll commissioned earlier from the ROMIR public opinion survey service. There too Ginzburg came first and Surkov last. This shows the divergence between the Putin administration's model of reality and what actually exists.
The virtual world of the official television stations is quite different. Vremya, the country's main news program, also ran a popularity poll for 2003. In first place was Putin, in second Shoygu, and in third Gryzlov. So there!
Now, as it is almost time for the Kremlin chimes to ring out at midnight, a final thought for the year. Why are so many people emigrating? In the past year, the number of our citizens applying to live in the West has increased by 56 percent. According to the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Russia is ahead of every other country in the world in terms of the number of its citizens seeking to emigrate.
The conference of the Party of Life confirms Sergey Mironov as its presidential candidate. He repeats that he hopes Putin will win.
Mironov is one of a number of props for the candidacy of Putin. Leaving nothing to chance is one of the main features of this campaign. Why are they so worried?
In the Chechen village of Berkat-Yurt, Russian soldiers have abducted Khasan Chalaev, who works for the Chechen militia. His whereabouts are unknown.
Putin holds a cabinet meeting. “We need to explain the government's priorities to the Duma deputies,” he insists repeatedly. He is not in a good mood. The Rose Revolution* has triumphed in Georgia and [Mikhail] Saakashvili* is celebrating victory. Provisional results suggest he gained about 85 percent of the vote. This is a wake-up call to the heads of the other countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States.* All those sitting around the table with Putin are well aware of this. There is a limit to how long you can trample people underfoot. When they really want change, there is nothing you can do to stop it. Is this what they are afraid of?
The final day for presidential candidates to lodge their documents. Kharitonov, Malyshkin, Gerashchenko, and Mironov have been proposed by parties in the Duma. There are now six independent candidates (Putin, Khakamada, Glaziev, Rybkin, Aksentiev, and Bryntsalov). Khaka-mada has problems with her right-wing political colleagues. Neither the Union of Right Forces nor Yabloko is in any hurry to support her or help with the collection of signatures. This makes her something of an outcast, which in itself might make Russians vote for her. We like pariahs, but we also like winners. People admire Putin for the way he manages to cheat everybody else. Those in the middle lose out.
This is the night before the Russian Orthodox Christmas, when people traditionally give presents and do good deeds (although not in public). Putin flew by helicopter to Suzdal. He has an election to win, so his personal life is public property. In Suzdal he walked around the ancient churches, listened to the singing of the novices in one of the convents, and posed for the television cameras and, no doubt, the press pack at the beginning of the Christmas service. The television shot was arranged to show Putin alone with the simple village congregation of little children and local women in their headscarves. Not a bodyguard in sight. He crossed himself. Thank God, there is progress in the world; he crosses himself very competently nowadays.
Another Russian tradition is that those at the top and bottom of our society might as well be living on different planets. Exhibiting Putin among ordinary people at Christmastime does not mean life will change for them. I set off to see the most underprivileged of all in a place where none of the elite set foot: Psycho-Neurological Orphanage No. 25 on the outskirts of Moscow.
Moscow's outskirts are not like the city center, which nowadays is improbably opulent. The outskirts are quiet and hungry. Here there are no benefactors with toys and gifts, books and Pampers. Not even at Christmas.
“Let's go to see the children,” says the wise Lidia Slevak, director of this orphanage for the very smallest children, in a tone that suggests this will answer all my questions.
Little Danila is sticking out like a candle from the adult arms of a caregiver. He seems to be with you, in that he has almost put his arms around you, but also not with you, lonely, distant. The world has passed him by, he is on his own. He holds his thin little back very straight, like a yogi. His shock of fair curly hair is like the candle's flame. The slightest breeze wafting in through the door from the corridor makes his silken locks flicker. He is a Christmas miracle, an angel.
The only question is: to whom does this angel belong? Nobody is allowed to adopt him because of our idiotic laws. Danila's official status is a problem to which there is no solution. His natural mother did not officially renounce her maternal rights before running away. The militia are supposed to track her down, but they have more important things to worry about. This means that he cannot be adopted, even though he is such a little wonder. The sooner he is adopted, the better his chances in life will be, the sooner he will recover and will forget all that has happened to him. But the state too has more important things to worry about.
The surroundings here are warm and clean, as in a good nursery. A sign above the door tells us that the group to which Danila and eleven other little boys and girls belong is called the Baby Starlings. Their patient caregivers are kind, very tired, overworked women. Everything here is good, except that the children don't cry. They are silent or they howl. There is no laughter to be heard. When he is not grinding his teeth, fifteen-month-old Danila is silent, peering attentively at the strangers who have arrived. He does not look at you as you would expect of a fifteen-month-old baby; he peers straight into your eyes, like an FSB interrogator. He has catastrophically limited experience of human tenderness.
It is the night before Christmas in the orphanage on Yeletskaya Street and a Christmas present has just been delivered. His name is Dmitry Dmitrievich and he has severe liver and kidney insufficiency. He was born in December 2002 and in May 2003 his mother “forgot” him in the entrance to an apartment building. Amazingly enough, the militia managed to track her down and she wrote out the necessary declaration: “I apply to renounce my parental rights.”
Dmitry Dmitrievich has been brought to the orphanage from the hospital. He has spent half his life in intensive care and now has no hair on the back of his head. It has rubbed off because he has always been lying on his back. The new boy in the group sits in a special baby walker and studies this unfamiliar place. There are rattles and toys in front of him, but Dmitry Dmitrievich seems more interested in people. He examines the consultant. He wants to take a good look at her but does not yet know how to work his little legs, which, since he's been bedridden for so long, are not helping him to turn the baby walker to face Lidiya Konstanti-novna. She doesn't intervene. She wants him to learn how to get what he wants.
“Come on, Dmitry Dmitrievich,” she says. “Take a grip on life! Fight back!”
Unaided, Dmitry Dmitrievich does fight back, and a few minutes later he has won and is facing Lidiya Konstantinovna.
“What kind of work do you feel you are doing here? The work of Mother Teresa, or of someone who has to clean up after our society? Or do you just feel very sorry for these children?”
“The children do not need pity,” Lidiya says. “That is the most important lesson I have learned. They need help. We are helping them to survive. Because of the work we do they can hope to find foster parents. I and my staff never refer to this as an orphanage in front of them. We call it a nursery so that later, in a quite different life if they are adopted, the children will not have even a subconscious memory of having once been in an orphanage.”
“You are working so that the children entrusted to your care should be adopted?”
“Yes, of course. That is the most important thing I can do for them.”
“What do you think about adoption by foreigners? Our patriotic politicians demand that we put a stop to it.”
“I think adoption by foreigners is a very good thing. There are some horror stories about Russian foster families too, only they don't get mentioned. Right now there is talk of withdrawing one of our children from his Russian foster parents. He will be coming back to us. Another problem is that Russian foster parents will not take children from the same family. Foreigners are happy to do that, which means that brothers and sisters are not separated. That is very important. We had a family of six children adopted in America. Natasha, the youngest of the six, was brought in to us wrapped in a piece of wallpaper. Her four-year-old brother wrapped her up in that to keep her from freezing because there was nothing else in the house to use. So what is bad about the fact that all six of them are now in the United States? I feel very happy when I look at the photograph I was sent from there. Nobody would believe the state they were in here. Only we remember that. In the past year, fifteen of the twenty-six children who have been adopted from our orphanage have been taken by foster parents from abroad, mainly from the USA and Spain. There were three pairs of brothers and sisters. Russian people just wouldn't take them.”
“They didn't want to or they couldn't afford to?”
“They didn't want to. And, as a rule, rich people in Russia don't adopt children at all.”
What kind of people will they grow up to be, the way our country has turned out now?
The wave of charitable giving in Russia came to a stop in 2002 when the Putin administration revoked tax privileges for charities. Until 2002, children in our orphanages were showered with gifts and New Year's presents. Now the rich no longer give them presents. Pensioners bring them their old, tattered shawls.
The World Bank has a special program called A Chance to Work, which gives disadvantaged children work experience and an opportunity to learn valuable job skills. If anyone did that in our society they would most likely be viewed with suspicion. “What's in it for them?” the neighbors would wonder.
It is the orphans themselves who show compassion. Nadya left the orphanage when she was too old to remain, and was allocated a room by the local authority as the law requires. She promptly moved in four other orphans. Completely unfamiliar with the ways of the world, they had exchanged their own rooms for mobile phones and had found themselves on the street.
Now Nadya is feeding them, but she is penniless. None of them can find work. Hers is true charity. She can see no point in trying to approach the banks and other wealthy institutions. They wouldn't let her past security.
Meanwhile, our nouveaux riches are skiing this Christmas in Courchevel. More than two thousand Russians, each earning over half a million rubles [$17,400] a month, congregate there for the “saison russe” in the Swiss Alps. The menu offers eight kinds of oysters, the wine list includes bottles at 1,500 euros [$1,980], and in the retinue of every nouveau riche you can be sure of finding the government officials, our true oligarchs, who deliver these vast incomes to the favored two thousand. Not a word is heard in the televised Christmas reports from Courchevel about hard work having led to the amassing of these fortunes. The talk is of success, of the moment when everything just fell into place, of the firebird of happiness caught by its tail feathers, of being trusted by the state authorities. The “charity” of officialdom, otherwise known as corruption, is the quickest route to Courchevel. It is a modern version of the tale of Ivan the Fool, who just couldn't be poor, no matter how badly his brothers cheated him: just pay the Kremlin and riches and power will come your way.
Zhirinovsky's bodyguard has been registered by the Central Electoral Commission as the first candidate in 2004 for the presidency of Russia. Hip-hip-hooray! Zhirinovsky has power of attorney over Malyshkin.
In Krasnoyarsk Region the peasants are being paid in sick calves. The potentate ruling over this region is the oligarch closest to Putin, indeed his representative there, Vladimir Potanin. No wages have been paid in cash at the dairy farm in Ustyug for over three years; the peasants are given calves instead. All the machinery has been sold off to settle debts. The vet was fired long ago, so there is nobody to look after the ailing calves.
This really is a first for us. The pupils of the International Orphanage in Ivanovo are on hunger strike. The orphanage was founded in 1933 to provide for children from many different countries whose parents were in the prisons of “states with reactionary or fascist regimes.”
The children are demanding that the International Orphanage be left alone, not broken up and privatized and the building sold. (They were successful.)
In the Chechen village of Avtury unidentified soldiers have abducted the human rights campaigner Aslan Davletukaev from his home. The kidnappers drove up in three armored personnel carriers and two armored UAZ jeeps.
Today is Russian Press Day. In anticipation, the ROMIR public opinion survey asked people, “Which social institutions do you most trust?” Nine percent trust the media; 1 percent trust political parties, 50 percent trust Putin, 28 percent trust nobody, and 14 percent trust the Russian Orthodox Church. The government and the army scored 9 percent each. Local government and the trade unions scored 3 percent, and the law enforcement agencies managed 5 percent. People were, of course, at liberty to trust more than one institution. Some did.
Victims of the terrorist acts of recent years have sent an open letter to all the presidential candidates. It reads:
The presidential election is a time for reviewing the past and for the outgoing authorities to account for what they have been up to while in office. There must be few people in Russia who have suffered more in this period than we. We lost those dear to us when apartment buildings were blown up in 1999 and when the theater on Dubrovka was seized by terrorists in 2002. We call upon you to include investigation of these terrorist acts in your manifestos.
… We would like to know what each of you will do if elected. Will you set up genuine, independent, and impartial inquiries, or will the conspiracy of silence surrounding the deaths of our loved ones continue? We have tried in vain to obtain credible explanations from the state authorities. The present president of the Russian Federation was under an obligation to reply, not only by virtue of his position, but simply as a matter of conscience. The deaths of our loved ones were, after all, directly related to his political career and to decisions made by him. The blowing up of apartment buildings persuaded the Russian people to support his hard line on Chechnya during the last presidential election, and he personally gave the order to use gas in Dubrovka.
The signatories then submit a list of questions to the candidates, which they have previously addressed to Putin without any response. Regarding the blowing up of the apartment buildings:
Why did the authorities obstruct the investigation of events in Ryazan when FSB agents were caught red-handed preparing to blow up an apartment building?
How did the speaker of the state Duma come to issue a statement about the blowing up of the apartment building in Volgodonsk three days before it occurred?
Why was there no investigation of the discovery of the high explosive, hexogen, in sacks labeled SUGAR at the army base in Ryazan in the autumn of 1999?
Why under pressure from the FSB, was the investigation closed into the transfer of hexogen from army storage facilities to fictitious firms through the Roskonversvzryvtsentr Research Institute?
Why was the lawyer Mikhail Trepashkin arrested after establishing the identity of the FSB agent who rented the premises for placing the bomb in the apartment building on Gurianov Street?
Regarding the Dubrovka siege [the taking hostage of the audience of the musical Nord-Ost]:
Why was the decision made to begin a gas attack at the very moment when a real opportunity had arisen to negotiate the release of the hostages?
Does the fact that the authorities decided to use a slow-acting gas, which would have given time for explosive devices to be detonated, indicate that they already knew the terrorists had no real explosives on them?
Why were all the terrorists, including those who had been incapacitated, killed when they could have been arrested and required to give evidence to an inquiry?
Why did the authorities conceal the fact that K. Terkibaev, who, after his name became known, died in a car crash, was an FSB agent who took part in the seizure of the theater?
Why, when the assault was planned, was no attempt made to organize on-site medical assistance for the hostages, a neglect that resulted in the deaths of 130 people?
The only replies were from Irina Khakamada and Ivan Rybkin. She has supported the Nord-Ost victims from the very beginning. Altogether, Khakamada is beginning to seem the most normal of the candidates.
Everything she has said so far has been worth listening to. She has been saying that under Putin the country cannot progress. Irina Khakamada:
I have not studied the explosions in Moscow and Volgodonsk, so I shall reply only to the questions about the events at Dubrovka.
The decision to mount the assault was made on the third day of the siege. I was inside the building on the first day and am replying on the basis of what happened then. My impression is that on the first day it would have been possible to free the hostages through negotiation. I believe the purpose of the assault was a show of strength, and that saving people's lives was not a high priority.
It remains a riddle to me how it was possible to kill every one of the terrorists, who were situated in different parts of the building and auditorium; and why, after the gas attack, all the terrorists died, while some of the people next to them died and others survived. I suspect they were disposed of because as living witnesses they might have testified in open court that the hostages could have been released. I emphasize that this is a suspicion, because there should be a presumption of innocence.
We in the Union of Right Forces organized an investigation of our own, and came to the conclusion that no thought was given to trying to rescue the hostages. Everything was unplanned and the result was a shambles. The military side was deemed the most important aspect of the operation, and nobody was even appointed to take care of the civilians.
I can add on my own account that after the Dubrovka tragedy Mr. Putin misled the whole world. Replying to a question from a journalist from The Washington Post, he said, “These people did not die as a result of the gas, because the gas was harmless. It was harmless, and we can say that in the course of the operation not a single hostage was harmed [by the gas].”
While President Putin and his cohorts were quaking with fear in the Kremlin, not for the lives of their citizens, but of losing power, a number of people were brave enough to try to save the hostages by voluntarily going in to the terrorists in order to attempt to free at least the children. I thank God that I, the mother of two children, had the courage and resolution to go in and negotiate with the terrorists.
In the past I have not made public much of what I saw in the Dubrovka theater complex or, in particular, how the president and members of his administration reacted to my effort to save lives. I mistakenly thought that President Putin would ultimately help to establish the truth, and would apologize for his order to employ a deadly gas. Putin, however, remains silent and gives no answers to people who have lost those dearest to them. The president has made his choice and decided to conceal the truth. I also have made my choice and will tell the truth. As a result of my negotiations with the terrorists in the theater on October 23, 2002, and what happened subsequently, I came to the conclusion that the terrorists had not the least intention of blowing up the theater complex, and that the authorities had not the least interest in trying to save all the hostages.
The main events occurred after I returned from negotiating with the terrorists. Alexander Voloshin, the head of the presidential administration, threatened me and ordered me not to interfere further.
Thinking over what occurred, I have come to the inescapable conclusion that this terrorist act helped to reinforce anti-Chechen hysteria, to prolong the war in Chechnya, and to maintain the president's high approval rating. I am convinced that Putin's actions in covering up the truth are a crime against the state. I undertake that, when I become president, the citizens of Russia will learn the truth about the blowing up of the apartment buildings, the tragedy at the theater complex, and many other crimes committed by the authorities. Recently, many of my friends have tried to dissuade me from entering the presidential election. In public they state that I am almost betraying the interests of the democrats, who are calling for a boycott of the elections, but in private they warn that I will simply be killed if I tell the truth. I am not afraid of this terrorist regime. I appeal to everybody else not to be intimidated by them. Our children must grow up free people.
Ivan Rybkin also replied:
Both the blowing up of the apartment buildings and the events at Dubrovka are a consequence of the “antiterrorist operation” and, more precisely of the second Chechen war being waged in the North Caucasus. President Putin rode into the Kremlin on the crest of this wave, promising to restore order. He has proved incapable of doing so. People are dying in terrorist outrages everywhere. The war continues without respite, for which Putin and his immediate entourage are guilty. To this day there is much that is completely unclear and inexplicable about all these tragedies.
Concerning the blowing up of the apartment buildings:
I believe a crime was committed by the security agencies. Even if we accept the claim that [the FSB agents discovered planting explosives] in Ryazan were engaged in “exercises,” all the official rules and instructions were ignored.
How did Seleznyov, the speaker of the Duma, know? This is not just odd, it is appalling. Having made this announcement, he should face criminal investigation and reveal where he got his information, so that we can see clearly who really ordered and who really carried out this atrocity…
The approaches and training that the security forces are receiving in the course of the Chechen war are being extrapolated to the whole of Russia. They are totally brazen and believe that the end result is all that matters. This is extremely dangerous.
On Dubrovka:
All the behavior of the state authorities points to the fact that when it became clear there was a real possibility of freeing the hostages, they decided to mount an assault. Everyone in Moscow and all over Russia is talking about the fact that the assault was ordered to conceal the real facts about what happened there.
Was the government in the know? I find it particularly unpleasant to answer this question, because during the events in Budyonnovsk, at a very secret meeting, the security forces contradicted everything the government has maintained. I was told that this gas and other chemical means could not be used in a bus with hostages because the terrorists would have time to detonate their explosives. As they were losing consciousness they might also start firing at random. As it was used this time, the government clearly knew there would be no explosions.
The terrorists were shot while unconscious because they would have had a great many interesting things to tell an independent inquiry. The whole of Russia is asking why unconscious people were shot; identified, approached, and shot in the head.
The authorities failed to keep [the FSB agent] Terkibaev out of public view, and that is why he was killed. I know how angry people were, because they knew Terkibaev had authorization from the presidential administration. He himself boasted about the fact that he had managed to redirect [the terrorist leader Movsar] Baraev's attack from the Duma to Dubrovka.
The lack of assistance to those who suffered during the assault was barbaric, and is wholly on the conscience of those responsible for the final phase. There is an attempt to divert popular anger over the lack of timely medical aid onto the mayor of Moscow, but it is not the mayor who is responsible for fighting terrorism; that is the job of the FSB.
The cascade of medals and stars onto the chests and epaulets of security forces who ought to have been punished for letting Baraev's unit through in the first place confers honor neither on those decorated nor on the individual who decorated them. Again, we need an independent inquiry.
I am not one of those who believe that the time will come when the archives are opened and we discover the truth. That day will never come. We need an investigation now, so that such an atrocity is never repeated, so that there is never a repetition of this appalling mistreatment of our citizens.
Meanwhile, as a result of defections, the United Russia Party has gained a sufficient majority in the Duma to change the Constitution. Gennadii Raikov applied to join them today, taking the number of Putin's supporters in the Parliament to 301.
Apathy is ever more palpable; people are certain that nothing good can be expected. The presidential election is discussed on television, but otherwise nobody says a word about it. They already know how it will end. There is no debate, no excitement.
In Moscow the best-known Russian human rights campaigners this evening celebrated the Old [Russian Orthodox] New Year in their own way. They gathered at the Andrey Sakharov Museum and Social Center to try to form either a broad democratic front or a democratic club (as Vladimir Ryzhkov is suggesting), and to do it outside the traditional democratic institutions of the Union of Right Forces and Yabloko.
The most businesslike proposals were made by Yevgeny Yasin: “If we want a really broad union, we need a very limited program. We need very few demands, in order to get as many people as possible to join. Our one aim should be to defend the gains of Russian democracy, to confront the authoritarian police state regime.”
Toward the end of a heated discussion that lasted many hours, tidings from prison were brought to the Sakharov Center. Karina Moskalenko, a lawyer, arrived direct from Matrosskaya Tishina prison, where she had had a meeting with her client Mikhail Khodorkovsky She conveyed Khodorkovsky's good wishes to all the champions of human rights and the news that “the only ideal that enthuses him today is the ideal of defending human rights. If he gets out of prison he is determined to devote himself exclusively to working for the betterment of society.”
They have managed to bring an oligarch to civic consciousness. The activists clapped like children at a Christmas party.
Moscow's Basmanny court, as much in the Kremlin's pocket as ever, continues to refine the art of selective justice, where what counts is not the law, but the individual it is being applied to. If that person is an enemy of Putin, the Basmanny judges are pedantic; if he is a favorite, they do not get vexed over legal niceties, or even require him to attend the hearing.
Today Judge Stanislav Voznesensky was considering a claim from Nadezhda Bushmanova of Ryazan Province, the mother of Alexander Slesarenko, a soldier killed in the second Chechen war. Alexander was fighting in the Armavir special operations unit of the Interior Ministry.
In September 1999, at the very beginning of the second Chechen war, this unit was included in a special operations group under the command of Viktor Kazantsev, at that time commander of the North Caucasus military district. Kazantsev committed an error and Alexander, among many others, was killed. Here is what happened:
Everything began on September 5, officially the first day of the war, when Putin issued a decree to begin an “antiterrorist operation.” There was fighting in villages in Dagestan. At around 1700 hours the fighters occupied the Dagestan village of Novolakskoye on the border with Chechnya, and a unit of the Lipetsk militia special operations unit found itself holed up in the militia station. It needed rescuing. On the night of September 5 the 120 men of Special Operations Unit 15 were called into action. Among them was Alexander Slesarenko. On September 6 the unit was at the Mozdok army base in North Ossetia. On September 7 they were deployed to the Dagestan village of Batashyurt, and on September 8 to Novolakskoye. At this point the Armavir men came under the command of Kazantsev. He had been placed in overall charge of the operation to clear the Novolakskoye and Hasavyurt regions of Dagestan, and all categories of troops were under his command.
On September 8, Kazantsev ordered Maj. Gen. Nikolai Cherkashenko, his deputy in charge of the Interior troops, to present a plan to take the adjacent commanding heights in accordance with Kazantsev's general instruction. On September 9 Kazantsev approved the plan, and at 2130 hours Maj. Yury Yashin, commanding officer of the Armavir unit, received the order to attack and occupy and hold the heights until the arrival of reinforcements, so that fire could be directed down onto Novolakskoye.
The Armavir men did as they were ordered and moved in at top speed, deaf and naked, as they say in the army, without secure means of communication, using only open channel walkie-talkies with batteries that, because there had been no time to recharge them, were flat. How much ammunition they would need had not been calculated, because the Armavir men had not been told how long they would have to hold out. They were expendable, and anyway they didn't even belong to Kazan-tsev's regular forces.
The war in the Caucasus is very odd. All the federal troops are supposedly on the same side, but the reality is quite different. The soldiers under the Ministry of Defense are at daggers drawn with the FSB, and the Interior troops are at loggerheads both with their own Interior Ministry and the army. When officers say, “The casualties were not ours,” that means in army-speak that the fallen were militiamen or soldiers of the Interior troops. This is why a battle has been raging for many years over who should head the joint command of forces and resources in the North Caucasus. If an army man is in charge, there is no way non-army personnel will get the ammunition and walkie-talkies they need.
That is what happened on this occasion. Kazantsev, an army man, was in command of non-army men. By 0100 hours on September 10, ninety-four non-army special operations troops had occupied the heights without losses. At 0600 hours Major General Cherkashenko received a confident report from Major Yashin and passed the information to Kazantsev, who immediately drove off, reassured that the hills had been taken. He was absent until 0840 hours, but at precisely 0620 hours Yashin suddenly found himself with a battle on his hands. At 0730 hours Chechen fighters began to encircle the special operations troops. Yashin radioed for assistance, but Cherkashenko, left to represent Kazantsev at the command post, was unable to help. He knew that another group of Interior troops, commanded by Maj. Gen. Grigorii Terentiev, had already tried to break through to Yashin's detachment, but had been repelled by stiff opposition. Fourteen men had died and there were many wounded, including Terentiev himself. On the slopes of the heights five armored personnel carriers were in flames.
Apart from Terentiev's detachment, no others would go to the aid of Yashin because they were army men and because Kazantsev was asleep. At 0830 hours Yashin shouted to Cherkashenko that they all had only a single round of ammunition left and needed to retreat. Cherkashenko agreed. At 0840 hours Kazantsev, having woken up, burst into the command post. He couldn't understand why Yashin was retreating. He had ordered him to hold the position at all costs.
At this point all contact with Yashin was lost. The walkie-talkie batteries had run out. The major was “deaf” and entirely on his own. Yashin divided the unit into groups, headed one himself, entrusted another to Lieutenant Colonel Gadushkin, and at about 1100 hours, gathering their strength, they began to retreat downhill. This was the only way the unit could hope to survive. Kazantsev was at the command post and observed the movements personally. He then gave orders to bomb the slopes. Why? Because he had his plan and had already reported “upstairs” the time within which the fighters on the hill would have been eliminated.
At 1500 hours, two low-flying SU-25 attack planes appeared in the sky over Yashin's group and delivered a targeted strike at the Interior Ministry troops who were breaking out of their encirclement. The targeter, on Kazantsev's specific orders, was the commanding officer of the Fourth Air Army and Antiaircraft Defense Forces, Lt. Gen. Valerii Gor-benko. As the bombs were dropped, these two heroes, Kazantsev and Gorbenko, were standing at a field observation point and saw with their own eyes that Yashin's group were launching signal flares to indicate where the bombs should not be dropped.
Why was the Armavir special operations unit punished in this manner on September 10? Because it had been set up. They were sacrificed to protect Kazantsev and his idiotic plan. They were invited to die as heroes rather than escape the encirclement and be potential witnesses, but failed to take the hint. This is the method of our security bosses, later employed many times in Chechnya and elsewhere. Nord-Ost was a clear enough demonstration of the same thing. It is a method sanctioned repeatedly by Putin. If you survive, you must be vilified and punished.
The military procurator's office of the North Caucasus military district is, under our monstrous judicial system, effectively dependent on the commanding officer of its district, in this case Kazantsev, for the allocation of promotions, accommodations, and privileges. It considered a criminal case regarding the killing of the Armavir men, brought by their relatives. The court acquitted Kazantsev on all counts. More than that, it depicted him as a hero surrounded by cowards. Here is a quotation from the court records:
In reality, the Interior troops were retreating in disarray. The situation was close to critical. Kazantsev made the decision to move to the forward sector himself. He personally halted the subdivisions of Interior troops who were fleeing in disorder, and personally identified a new mission to them, attempting to deploy the remainder of the Interior troops’ subdivisions to cut off the fighters.
Kazantsev is an army hero and the Interior troops are cowards. This is the verdict of the court.
The soldiers certainly were fleeing, but from a death trap they had been put in. They tried to survive the bombing as best they could, which was being directed at them on the orders of imbeciles. They were dragging their wounded, calling for assistance to retrieve the bodies of those who had been killed. Kazantsev observed all this.
The final toll from that single treacherous bombing of the heights at 1500 hours by two SU-25 attack aircraft was eight dead and twenty-three wounded. Only one soldier was killed in combat with the Chechen fighters.
The overall losses of Interior troops in the course of Kazantsev's operation of September 9-10 were “over eighty men,” according to the inquiry. No further details are available. The soldiers of Major Yashin's doomed detachment were making their way back to their own lines for several days afterward. Alexander Slesarenko's body was returned to his home in Ryazan Province two weeks later, in a sealed coffin. The coffins were buried in the graveyards of Russia, and the state stuck into their grave mounds the very cheapest of memorials, an insult to the men who lie beneath them.
Overcoming her grief, Alexander's mother applied to the Basmanny court, within whose jurisdiction the Ministry of Defense lies. Judge Voz-nesensky directed the treasury to pay her 250,000 rubles [$8,700] in compensation. Needless to say, it did not come from the pocket of Kazantsev, who was by then a favorite of the president and Putin's personal representative in the North Caucasus. Kazantsev has been showered with medals, orders, and titles by Putin for his part in the so-called antiterrorist operation, for bringing Chechnya to the state the president wanted it in.
Judge Voznesensky is a young man, dynamic and modern, and doesn't clam up at the mention of administrative interference in the judicial process. He knows exactly what you are talking about. I know him well. He is brilliantly educated and peppers his conversation with Latin expressions, revealing a level of erudition unheard of among Russian judges. Voznesensky did not, however, delve too deeply into the details of Private Slesarenko's death, or indeed bother summoning that “Hero of Russia,” Gen. Viktor Kazantsev, to the courtroom.
So, once again, the taxpayers of Russia uncomplainingly pick up the tab for the second Chechen war and the idiocies of its generals, plus all the other expenditure on successive military escapades in the North Caucasus.
How long is this going to continue? The tragedy of the second Chechen war has been the launch pad for the stellar careers of all those implicated in it as comrades-in-arms of the present president. The more bloodshed, the higher they rise. So who takes responsibility? It simply does not matter how many people Kazantsev sends to their death; it does not matter how often he collapses drunkenly into the arms of others, including journalists. It is water off a duck's back. The only thing that matters in Russia today is loyalty to Putin. Personal devotion gains an indulgence, an amnesty in advance, for all life's successes and failures. Competence and professionalism count for nothing with the Kremlin. The system that has evolved under Putin profoundly corrupts officials, both civilian and military.
Alexander's mother tells me, “I shall never reconcile myself to the fact that my Sasha was sacrificed to a general's ambition. Never.”
In Moscow there is a fuss over a new history textbook. Members of United Russia are demanding that Putin require that “pride at the events” of the Russo-Finnish War of 1939 and of Stalin's collectivization of agriculture be included. They insist that our children should once more read a Soviet treatment of the Second World War and the supposedly positive role played by Stalin. Putin is going along with this. Homo sovieticus is breathing down our necks. Another textbook has meanwhile been banned for including the comment by academician Yanov that Russia is in danger of turning into a national socialist state armed with nuclear weapons.
Relatives of the Nord-Ost victims have a meeting at the procurator general's office in Moscow with Vladimir Kalchuk, a Serious Crimes investigator running the inquiry into the theater hostage taking. They have asked me to accompany them in order to reduce the likelihood that Kalchuk will deceive or insult them. When there are no outsiders present, Kalchuk constantly insults the relatives of those who died, and has never been brought to book for this. He is under personal instructions from Putin to falsify the investigation and ensure that information about the gas used should be suppressed.
“Passports on the table!” Kalchuk barks, signaling the beginning of the meeting. “ ‘Nord-Ost Association?’ What is that? Who has recognized this organization?”
“Can we talk like civilized human beings?” Tatyana Karpova asks. She is the mother of Alexander Karpov, one of the hostages who died, and she is the chairperson of the Nord-Ost Association. “How many terrorists were killed? How many managed to escape?”
“According to our data, all the terrorists in the building were killed, but it is impossible to give a hundred percent guarantee.”
“Why were all the fighters killed?”
“Well, they were, and that's all there is to it. These things are decided by the security forces. They are risking their lives when they go in, and it is not for me to tell them who they should or should not kill. I have my own opinion as a human being, and I have my opinion as a lawyer.”
“Do you consider that a published videotape of a shooting suggests that any of the hostages could have been killed in this manner?” (Tatyana is referring to images from the morning of October 26, 2002, immediately after the assault at the entrance to the theater complex, which show an unidentified woman in military camouflage aiming a pistol at, and possibly shooting, an unidentified man whose hands are tied behind his back.)
“Nobody is ‘finishing off anybody in that clip. Journalists would like to represent it as a killing. We have had it analyzed. What is there is a corpse being dragged from one location to another and the woman is merely indicating where it is to be put. We know whose corpse it was.”
“Whose?”
“If I tell you, you will only say it is all lies.”
“Is it the body of Vlakh?” (Gennadii Vlakh was a Muscovite who entered the occupied building on his own initiative to search for his son.)
“Yes, it is. The examination will demonstrate that.”
Kalchuk knows perfectly well that Vlakh's son and his ex-wife have studied this tape carefully, and categorically denied that the person being dragged about is Gennadii. Nothing fits: not his build, his hair, or his clothing.
Tatyana continues, “Do you admit that there was looting in the hall after the assault?”
“Yes. The rescuers, the security forces, were in there and if they saw a purse, they popped it into their pocket. They are only human. It's the kind of country we live in. Their salaries are wretchedly low.”
“Are you investigating instances of looting?”
“Oh, come on… Of course not.”
“We desperately want to know the truth about how our relatives died. Are you intending to press charges against any officials for failing to provide [medical support in the aftermath]?”
“If you were all given a million dollars like they do in the West, you would shut up straight away. You would do a bit of weeping and then just shut up.”
Vladimir Kurbatov, father of a thirteen-year-old member of the Nord-Ost cast who died: “I would not shut up. I would still seek the truth about when and where my daughter died. As it is, nobody knows.”
Lyudmila Trunova, a lawyer present at the meeting: “How did the body of Grigorii Burban, one of the hostages who died, come to be discovered on Lenin Prospekt?”
“Says who? I don't know.”
Tatyana Karpova: “Why was the body of Gennadii Vlakh cremated, as if he were one of the terrorists?”
“That is none of your business. Why don't you ask questions about your old man?”
“A question about Terkibaev …”
“Terkibaev was never there. Politkovskaya did not help us. (I wrote in my newspaper about FSB officer Terkibaev's role in the siege.) She refused to give us information about him. She just said she didn't know anything.”
“Has anybody been charged in connection with this affair?”
“No.”
Kalchuk is a typical representative of the law enforcement and security officials of the new era of Putin. They are actively encouraged to treat people high-handedly.
In Magadan, meanwhile, large numbers of conscripts have fallen ill on the way to their units. Putin reacts instantly, calling this “a criminal way to treat people.” The raw recruits were lined up on an airfield for several hours wearing only light clothing, and more than eighty ended up in the hospital with pneumonia. One of the soldiers, Volodya Beryozin from Moscow Province, died on December 3 from hypothermia. Beryozin had been a strong, healthy boy who was selected to serve in the president's regiment. Volodya's father, like everyone else, is demanding an explanation from the president of how such a thing could occur.
It is already January 15, and Volodya Beryozin was buried nine days ago, but Russia became indignant only after Putin expressed his anger. Soldiers are dust beneath their officers’ boots. That's the way it is here, and Putin, himself the incarnation of a stereotype, accepts it. His anger is a preelection stunt. No more than that.
The body of Aslan Davletukaev, abducted from his home on January 10, has been found showing signs of torture. He had been shot in the back of the head. The body was found on the outskirts of Gudermes. Aslan was a well-known Chechen human rights campaigner. [Despite the intervention of international organizations, the investigation of the murder proved fruitless.]
Glory be to our tsar! An investigation is under way into the case of the frostbitten soldiers. Their inhuman treatment began at the Chkalov military aerodrome in Moscow Province. The weather was far from warm, and new recruits were crammed for twenty-four hours into an unheated arms store, sleeping on crates or on the cold floor. They were given nothing at all to eat, either then or on the subsequent journey. They were transported in a cargo plane at a temperature of — 22°F, like logs, and were all frozen to the marrow. When they landed in Novosibirsk they were forced out onto the airfield and made to stand in a biting wind at — 2°F for two hours. At Komsomolsk-on-Amur airfield they spent four hours in light clothing at — 13°F. In Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky it became obvious that some of them were seriously ill, but the officers escorting them ignored the situation. In the barracks where they were accommodated after the flight, the temperature was 54°F. By now almost one hundred of them were ill. There were no facilities to treat them. The army doctors had only antibiotics that had expired in the mid-1990s, and there were no disposable hypodermic needles. The medics gave them cough medicine.
The chief military procurator's office has announced that it will shortly be questioning Col. Gen. Vasilii Smirnov, head of the central logistics board of the Ministry of Defense, in connection with the case of the frozen soldiers. This is an unprecedented liberty imaginable only if they have been given the green light from higher up. Twenty-two generals have already been questioned, the first time generals have ever been quizzed over anything that happened to conscripts. It is wonderful to see the president acting as Russia's foremost champion of human rights, but will he be wearing the same mask after the presidential election?
Our democracy continues its decline. Nothing in Russia depends on the people; everything depends on Putin. There is an ever greater centralization of power and loss of initiative by officialdom. Putin is resuscitating our ancient stereotype: “Let us wait until our lord the barin comes back. He will tell us how everything should be.” It has to be admitted that this is how the Russian people like it, which means that soon Putin will throw away the mask of a defender of human rights. He won't need it anymore.
Where have all the democrats gone? Alexander Zhukov, a former democrat and now a member of United Russia, considers that “it is a good thing when there is a ruling party in Parliament. The electorate will see clearly who is responsible for everything. In the previous three Dumas that was not the case. It is plain that United Russia is going to encourage a market economy based on reduction of the tax burden, development of free business and reducing the role of the state, re-forming of natural monopolies, bringing Russia into the world market, and reform of social welfare, which is not functioning satisfactorily at present. There is no reason to worry about this Duma. Democratic procedures are being observed better than in its predecessors.”
(Zhukov was shortly afterward appointed a deputy prime minister.)
Political splits and defections continue. The Russian Revival Party, another of the dwarf parties, this one headed by Gennadii Seleznyov, has decided to support Putin in the election and to dump Sergey Mironov, chairman of the Soviet of the Federation and leader of the Party of Life, with whom it had an alliance during the parliamentary elections. The decision was taken after analyzing the party's showing in the elections. Between them the parties of these two leaders won just 1.88 percent of the vote.
Television shows Putin reiterating, “We do not need an argumentative Duma.” The members of United Russia assure the country that their takeover of Parliament is “more honest” with the electors. It is becoming increasingly obvious that strict military discipline rules within the United Russia Party. None of the deputies is allowed to give interviews to journalists or to vote according to conscience. The party now has 310 deputies. Deputies are still joining up and swearing allegiance.
The presidential election campaign is really very odd. There isn't actually any need for cunning spin doctors. Everyone already prefers Putin, even those standing against him. The idiot bodyguard Malyshkin has admitted as much. There was an item on television about Malyshkin's mother, who lives in Rostov Province in a house without running water. She says she will vote for Putin because she is very pleased with him. Mironov has even asked in amazement, “Why are we all standing as candidates? We should all stand shoulder to shoulder with Him.”
Sergey Glaziev, another pseudocandidate, declares to the people, “I like Putin. I have a lot in common with him. What I don't like is the way his decisions are implemented.”
The failure of the democrats and liberals to put forward a joint candidate themselves looks increasingly like political suicide.
In Grozny, in broad daylight, Russian troops abducted Khalid Edel-khaev, forty-seven, a taxi driver, on the road leading to the village of Petropavlovskaya. His whereabouts are unknown.
The Central Electoral Commission is beginning to receive signatures from supporters of the nonparty candidates, but is there anyone left who is actually against Putin? Only Irina Khakamada.
Within the Communist Party there is a conflict between the leaders, Zyuganov and Semigin, and they have no time left over for a committed political battle against Putin. Rogozin of Rodina says he wants to support Putin. Glaziev is still shilly-shallying.
The deadline for submitting signatures is January 28, and there are fifty-five days remaining until the election.