Committee 2008, an organization campaigning for fair elections, but hoping to get them only in 2008, has issued a manifesto in which it says it is currently “repugnant” to live in Russia. As if we didn't know! The chairman of the committee is [the former world chess champion] Garry Kasparov* He is intelligent and self-reliant, which is a good start.
During the night, masked gunmen in white Zhigulis without number plates—the trademark of [Ramzan] Kadyrov's* forces—kidnapped Mi-lana Kodzoeva from her home in the Chechen village of Kotar-Yurt. Mi-lana is the widow of a fighter. She has two small children. Her whereabouts are unknown.
Irina Khakamada has made a public appeal to the Russian business elite for funds. Leonid Nevzlin, a friend of Khodorkovsky's, has offered to support her. Chubais refused.
Those who survived the siege of Leningrad are beginning to receive medals and payments to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the raising of the siege. They are getting between 450 and 900 rubles [$16–$31]. The survivors are poor and in St. Petersburg people lined up for many days to receive it. In all, about 300,000 people were eligible to receive this pittance, but only 15,000 succeeded. The survivors dislike the new medals intensely, which read “Resident of Besieged Leningrad” and “For the Defense of Leningrad.” The Peter and Paul Fortress is depicted from an unimaginable perspective, and tank traps that were never there are shown on the embankment. It's all been done Soviet style. Like it or lump it.
In Grozny, unidentified persons wearing camouflage fatigues and driving a military UAZ jeep abducted Turpal Baltebiev, twenty-three, from the Hippodrome bus stop. His whereabouts are unknown.
Putin is in St. Petersburg. His election campaign continues against the backdrop of the sixtieth anniversary of the raising of the siege of Leningrad. He flew to Kirovsk, to the legendary Neva Bridgehead, where his father, Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin, fought and was severely wounded. It was from the Neva Bridgehead that, on January 18, 1943, the siege of Leningrad was lifted. During the siege Putin's elder brother starved to death. His mother barely survived. Between 200,000 and 400,000 soldiers died trying to break through here. The exact number and the names of many are unknown to this day, because most were simply Leningrad volunteers who died before they could be enlisted as soldiers. The bridgehead is nearly a mile long and several hundred yards wide. Even today no trees grow there. Putin laid a bouquet of dark red roses at the monument.
In honor of Putin's arrival, a meeting of the Presidium of the State Council was held. This is a purely consultative but highly ceremonious institution, created by Putin to keep the governors of Russia's provinces happy.
Today's session was devoted to the problems of pensioners, of whom there are more than 30 million in Russia. Some twenty were herded along to a meeting with Putin, wearing old suits and shabby cardigans. They were from Leningrad Province and spoke of their abysmally low quality of life. Putin listened to them all, interrupted nobody, and said, “It is essential for us to consider how we can provide a dignified life in old age. This is a crucial task for the state.” The words “a crucial task” are heard constantly, but, depending on the audience, it is the welfare of the peasants, or improving the health service, that is crucial. It is the familiar mimicry of a KGB agent, but the people seem not to notice. This time Putin promised to double the amount by which pensions will be indexed in 2004. The average monthly addition will amount to 240 rubles [$8.35], for which they will be able to buy 18 ounces of good-quality meat.
Khakamada has published her manifesto:
During the past four years the state authorities have suppressed all political opposition and destroyed the independent mass media;
the party of government in the Duma has no program and no ideas;
if in four years’ time, by 2008, those who support democracy have not made themselves heard, Russia will slide back irreversibly into authoritarianism;
I challenge Putin to a debate, because I want to hear from him exactly what kind of Russia he wants to build;
I have collected four million signatures in support of my candidacy;
I am prepared to be the cork shot from the bottle confining the genie of the will of Russia's citizens.
Good, effective stuff, but Putin didn't raise an eyebrow at any of the statements, as if they hadn't been made. Nobody insisted that he should respond. Our society is sick. Most people are suffering from the disease of paternalism, which is why Putin gets away with everything, why he is possible in Russia.
At 6:00 p.m. the Central Electoral Commission ceased to accept signatures of supporters of presidential candidates. Putin, Mironov, and Ryb-kin had already submitted theirs. Khakamada handed in hers at 3:00 p.m.
The entrepreneur Anzori Aksentiev sent in a letter withdrawing his application.
There are alternatives: Khakamada for Westernizers, Kharitonov for Communists, Malyshkin for political extremists and hoodlums, Glaziev for believers in our new superpower status.
Vladimir Potanin continues trying to position himself as a “good” oligarch—that is to say, one not comparable with Khodorkovsky He is proposing to reform the oligarchs’ trade union: “Business is a constructive force. We need a new, meaningful dialogue with the state authorities. Business should consider the needs of society, should explain who we are.” He also talks about moderating the ambitions of the oligarchs and says that big business has no need of representation in the country's leading councils.
Potanin was given prime time on television to say all this. Everyone takes that to mean that he had the blessing of Putin himself.
On television Putin cuts the price of bread by using the old Soviet method of stopping grain exports. Why were we exporting grain anyway, if the country is going hungry? There is nobody to put this question as the opposition has no access to the media. Putin hears reports that in many regions the cost of bread has doubled over the past month, and demands that these uncontrolled price rises be stopped immediately.
On television he promises to look into the payment of pensions to people disabled in childhood during the Second World War. Zurabov [the minister of health and social welfare] reports to him that he is quite sure the necessary legislation will go through all its readings in the Duma very rapidly. It is as if the Duma had no timetable for other legislation. All that matters is the president's requirements for his election campaign, which seems to consist of constantly doling out money.
At the same time Zurabov reports to Putin on pensions for priests. Putin takes a great interest in the welfare of priests! Zurabov reminds him that before the fall of the USSR priests had no entitlement to a pension at all.
In place of genuine preelection debates we get yet another episode of the ongoing political soap opera that is the Rodina Party: a furious row between Rogozin and Glaziev instead of debates about the future of the country. Rogozin heaps abuse on Glaziev, Glaziev blusters a lot of nonsense in reply and nobody talks about what it is that Putin might have to offer the country in a second term. Almost none of the candidates who are supposed to be opposing Putin have any ideas at all.
In Moscow, Yelena Tregubova was almost blown up by a small bomb planted outside her apartment building. Was it just hooliganism? She recently published an anti-Putin book, Tales of a Kremlin Digger. She was a member of the Kremlin press pool, but then saw the light and wrote a book about the inner life of the Kremlin that shows him in a highly unflattering light.
[Tregubova was shortly to emigrate from Russia.]
At about 5:00 p.m. there was a terrorist outrage in Vladikavkaz. A Zhiguli car was blown up just as military cadets were driving past on a truck. One woman died and ten people were injured. One cadet is in critical condition.
In Grozny, unidentified armed men wearing masks and camouflage fatigues abducted Satsita Kamaeva, twenty-three, from her home on Aviatsionnaya Street. Her whereabouts are unknown.
Meanwhile, in Moscow, Putin's election campaign headquarters are said to have been set up, but they are just as virtual as Putin himself. The address is No. 5, Red Square, only nobody is allowed in. Putin has appointed as leader of his election team Dmitry Kozak, the first deputy head of the presidential administration in charge of legal and administrative reform. Kozak has the reputation of being the cleverest person in the administration, after Putin, of course. Like Putin, he is a graduate of the Law Faculty of Leningrad University. He worked there in the procurator's office and in the St. Petersburg City Hall, and in 1989-99 was deputy governor of St. Petersburg. In other words, he is one of Putin's Petersburg brigade.
The League of Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers is to set up a political party. In Russia parties are born for one of three reasons: because there is a lot of money somewhere; because somebody has nothing better to do; or because somebody has been driven to desperation. The Party of Soldiers’ Mothers is entirely a product of the December 7 parliamentary elections, born in the wilderness of a Russian politics purged of all democratic forces.
“We are mature enough now to found a party,” says Valentina Mel-nikova, chairperson of the organizing committee. “We have been talking about it within the movement for a long time, but previously we could call on the support of the Union of Right Forces and Yabloko in our campaign for reform of the army, to help soldiers, for the abolition of conscription and legislative initiatives. Yavlinsky and Nemtsov were still players, but now everything is in ruins. We're standing amid a political Hiroshima, but we still have problems that need to be resolved. There is nobody left for us to turn to, nobody on whom we can pin our hopes. All the present political parties are a continuation of the Kremlin by other means. You half suspect that the Duma deputies scuttle off every morning to Red Square to receive their instructions from the Lenin Mausoleum, and then go away to do as they have been bid. That is why we have decided to form a party ourselves.”
The Party of Soldiers’ Mothers, then, is a party of desperation, born of the complete political hopelessness that is the sum total of the last four dismal years. In an era when everything is under the Kremlin's control, this is a straightforward grass-roots initiative, which has appeared without the benefit of “administrative resources,” in which Vladislav Surkov, Russia's ubiquitous political fixer, has been allowed absolutely no part.
The decision to create the party was made very simply: after the Duma elections, women from Miass, Nizhny Novgorod, Sochi, and Nizhny Tagil called the Moscow office of the League of Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers. The committees in these cities were the driving force behind the creation of a new political party.
The remnants of Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces are, of course, a sorry spectacle, but a concomitant is the appearance of public initiatives from deeply committed people with an immense dissident potential. Putin wants everything close cropped, but from his coppicing of the opposition something positive is sprouting. A time for new initiatives is coming. The devastation of the political arena emboldens those who refuse to live under the old Soviet clichés and intend to fight. In order to survive in enemy territory, when no one else will fight for you, you have to summon up your resolve and start fighting for yourself. In the language of the soldiers’ mothers, that means fighting for the lives of soldiers against the army recruitment machine that devours them.
The last straw was an incident involving Ida Kuklina and Putin. Ida has been working for ten years in the Moscow committee and is now even a member of the Presidential Commission on Human Rights. She had put a lot of energy into getting the pension raised for conscripts who have been reduced to the state of Category 1 invalids (the current pension is 1,400 rubles, or around $49 a month). Category 1 invalids are amputees and those bedridden with spinal injuries or confined to wheelchairs.
Ida Kuklina handed a petition to Putin personally at one of the meetings of his commission. He wrote a generally encouraging, if not very specific, recommendation on it—“The question is posed correctly. Putin”—and forwarded it to the government and the pensions department.
The deputy prime minister for social welfare, Galina Karelova, responded tartly that there would be a revolt of the disabled if the attempt was made to raise the level of pensions for conscripts who had just been crippled to the level of ex-servicemen disabled during the Second World War or the Afghan and other local wars. That, Karelova opined, would be unethical.
Ida again approached Putin, again received a positive response, and was again turned down by the officials. This happened three times in succession. It was at this point the mothers decided that the only solution was to become legislators themselves. The intention is to have deputies from the Party of Soldiers’ Mothers in the Duma after the parliamentary elections in 2007.
“Who will be the leader of your new party? Are you going to invite some clued-up politician?”
“One of our own people,” Valentina Melnikova replies emphatically.
While I was speaking to the soldiers’ mothers about the future, we heard about a fresh atrocity within the army. Pvt. Alexander Sobakaev was brutally tortured in the Dzerzhinsky special operations division of the Interior Ministry's troops. His family last heard his cheerful voice on the telephone late in the evening of January 3. Alexander, not quite twenty years old, was in his second year in the army, already a lance corporal and dog handler in the sapper battalion. He called to say that everything was fine. They recalled the day they had seen him off to the army, and laughed at the thought that they would soon be celebrating his return. That very night, in the early hours of January 4, if we are to believe the documents that accompanied the zinc coffin, Alexander hanged himself using his own belt, and “there were no suspicious circumstances.” On January 11 his body was brought home to the tiny forest village of Velvo-Baza, 180 miles from Perm. The representatives of his division, who brought the coffin, explained to his parents that “it was suicide.” There was no coroner's certificate. The parents did not believe this and demanded that the coffin be opened. The first to back off in horror were his service colleagues. Alexander's body was not only covered in bruises and razor cuts, but the skin and muscles on his wrists were cut to the bone, baring the tendons. A doctor from the local hospital was asked to come and, in the presence of the local militiaman, a cameraman, a CID photographer, and officers from the district military commissariat, recorded that this mutilation had occurred while Alexander was still alive.
The parents refused to bury their son, demanding an inquiry. His mother stayed home, but his father went straight to Moscow to the Dzerzhinsky special operations division and to the capital's newspapers. That is how the outrage came to light.
Putin did not react on this occasion. Indeed, if he were to react to every atrocity in the army he would be doing so almost every day and the electorate would start to wonder why these occurrences were so common, and why the commander in chief—i.e., Putin—hadn't done anything about it before.
Accordingly, no attempt was made to track down Alexander's killers. The military procurator's office did everything in its power to ensure that the truth remained hidden. Alexander fared less well than Volodya Ber-yozin, for whose death from cold and starvation officers will appear in court, thanks only to the fact that Putin's election campaign had just begun, and that he got his hands on the story first.
Alexander's death is not being investigated with any urgency. Although his parents refused to bury the body of their son until an independent inquiry made public the truth about his death, this was refused. The family ran out of money to pay for keeping his body in the Kudymkar district mortuary, and Alexander was buried as a suicide. How many more of our sons will have to be sacrificed before a great joint campaign by the public sees this army reformed root and branch? It is a question that refuses to go away.
Do we see a change in the mood of society, a civil society beginning timorously to emerge from the kitchens of Russia in the same way that, after a purge in Chechnya, people very quietly, very cautiously creep out of their cellars and bolt-holes?
As of yet, no, although many are beginning to realize what people in Chechnya have realized after being subjected to the “antiterrorist operation”: you have to rely on yourself if you want to survive; you have to defend yourself if nobody else will. The rampaging of the bureaucracy is more out of control than ever after the triumph of their United Russia Party, and there are still far too few public initiatives.
As election day approaches, the television news bulletins increasingly resemble heartening dispatches on Putin's achievements. The greater part of the news is taken up with bureaucrats reporting to Putin in front of the cameras, but without any semblance of independent commentary. Today, Sergey Ignatiev, the chairman of Tsentrobank, was briefing him on the improbable growth of the gold and currency reserves.
To the accompaniment of a lot of political chatter about the welfare of the people, the Fourth Duma is passing lobbyist-driven legislation even more blatantly than the Third Duma. There is, for example, a proposal for a significant reduction of value-added tax for estate agents. This is simply laughable, because estate agents in Russia are millionaires. Nobody raises the matter in the mass media, although they whisper about it a good deal. Journalists practice rigorous self-censorship. They don't even propose such stories to their newspapers or the television stations, certain in advance that their bosses will ax them.
The Eighth World Gathering of the People of Russia has ended. It was touted as the big event of February and almost resembled a congress of the United Russia Party, with all the top government bureaucrats turning up. Funnily enough, though, nobody can remember when the Seventh World Gathering took place.
At the gathering the president's oligarch banker, Sergey Pugachev, sat at the right hand of the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church. Pugachev is one of the Putin oligarchs who replaced the Yeltsin oligarchs, and the government even goes so far as to refer to him as “a Russian Orthodox banker.” At Pugachev's instance, the gathering adopted an odd kind of Ten Commandments for businessmen, called A Code of Moral Rules and Principles for the Conduct of Business.
The code pontificates on matters such as wealth and poverty, nationalization, tax evasion, advertising, and profit. One of the commandments informs us that “wealth is not an end in itself. It should serve to create a goodly life for the individual and the people.” Another warns that “in misappropriating property, failing to respect communal property, not giving fair recompense to a worker for his labor, or deceiving a business partner, a person transgresses the moral law, harming society and himself.” Moreover, on the subject of tax evasion, not paying one's dues is “stealing from orphans, the aged, the disabled, and others least able to protect themselves.
“Transferring part of one's income through taxation to provide for the needs of society should be transformed from a burdensome obligation grudgingly fulfilled, and sometimes not fulfilled at all, into a matter of honor, deserving of the gratitude of society.” On the poor: “The poor man is also under an obligation to behave worthily, to strive to labor efficiently, to raise his vocational skills in order to rise out of his impoverished condition.” Again: “The worship of wealth is incompatible with moral rectitude.”
The code contains allusions to Khodorkovsky, and to Berezovsky and Gusinsky “There should be separation of political from economic power. The involvement of business in politics and its influence on public opinion must always be transparent and open. All material assistance given by business to political parties, public organizations, and the mass media must be publicly known and monitored. Clandestine support of this nature deserves to be publicly condemned as immoral.”
In that case, of course, the entire election campaign of United Russia was immoral, as is the fact that Putin's oligarch is a senator.
All this is intended to reinforce the idea that it is right and honorable to be a “good” businessman in Putin's pocket, but that if you try to be independent you are bad and must be destroyed. The code is manifestly anti-Yukos. Although it is supposedly voluntary, it is, like everything in Russia nowadays, “compulsorily voluntary.” You don't have to join United Russia, but, if you don't, your career as an official is going nowhere. Metropolitan Kirill, tipped as the successor of the rapidly declining and constantly ailing patriarch, conducted the session when the code was discussed. He said quite openly, “We will go to everybody and invite them to sign. If any refuse to sign, we shall make sure that their names become known to all.” Some priest!
In any case, who is preaching this morality to us? That same Russian Orthodox Church that gives its blessing to the war in Chechnya, to arms trading, and to the fratricide in the North Caucasus. The adoption of this code of moral principles for businessmen is an extraordinary bid by the Russian Orthodox Church, which is disestablished, to involve itself in internal and foreign policy. The RUIE commented that “The Church itself needs to be reformed. Its own stagnation is the reason that it comes out with such bizarre fancies.”
Viktor Vekselberg, one of the oligarchs rumored to be next in line for imprisonment by Putin, has suddenly announced he is buying the collection of Fabergé Easter eggs that belonged to the family of our last emperor, Nicholas II. Nobody doubts that Vekselberg is simply trying to ransom his way out of trouble by demonstrating that he is “on the side of Russia,” which the administration accepts as a coded way of saying “on the side of Vladimir Vladimirovich.”
Vekselberg insists that “the return of these treasures to Russia is something personal to me. I want my family my son and daughter, to have a different understanding of their place in life. I want big business to participate intelligently in public works. I am not seeking advantage, proving anything to anybody, or whitewashing anything.”
The oligarch doth protest too much, methinks.
In Cheremkhovo, in Irkutsk Province, seventeen workers of the No. I Sector Communal Residential Services Office have gone on hunger strike. They are demanding payment of their wages, which are six months in arrears. They are owed a total of about two million rubles [$70,000]. They are following the example of their colleagues in another sector who had to go on hunger strike at their workplace for only three days to get their wages paid.
In Moscow, there has been a meeting of Open Forum, an event attended by political analysts; not necessarily the main ones, but reputable people who have been involved as political advisers in all the national and regional elections. They agreed on one important matter: in the four years of Putin's rule, the modernizing of Russia has been sidelined by the goal of strengthening the power of one individual. Those associated with him are neither a class nor a party, just people who are “in step with Putin.” The analysts also agreed that the model of a managed democracy does not work.
8:32 a.m. Three months after the terrorist attack outside the Nationale Hotel, there has been an explosion in the Moscow Metro, at the interchange between the Paveletskaya and Avtozavodskaya-Zamoskvoretskaya lines. The train was heading into the city center during the rush hour when a bomb exploded beside the first door of the second carriage. The device had been placed 6 inches above floor level in a bag. After the explosion the train's momentum carried it a further 330 yards and a fierce fire broke out. Thirty people died at the scene, and another 9 died later from their burns. There are 140 injured. There are dozens of tiny unidentifiable fragments of bodies. More than 700 people emerged from the tunnel, having evacuated themselves in the absence of any assistance. In the streets there is chaos and fear, the wailing sirens of the emergency services, millions of people terrorized.
At 10:44 the Volcano-5 Contingency Plan for capturing the culprits was implemented, more than two hours after the explosion. Who do they think they are going to catch? If there were any accomplices they will have fled long ago. At 12:12 the police started searching for a man aged thirty to thirty-five, “of Caucasian appearance.” Very helpful. At 1:30 Va-lerii Shantsev, the acting mayor of Moscow while Luzhkov is in the USA, announced that the victims’ families will receive 100,000 rubles [$3,479] in compensation, and the injured will be paid half that amount.
Terrorists with explosives can move around Moscow without hindrance, despite the extraordinary powers granted to the FSB and militia, and still the people support Putin. No one suggests a change of policy in Chechnya, despite the ten terrorist acts involving suicide bombers in the past year. Red Square is now almost permanently closed to visitors. The Palestinization of Chechnya is obvious. An hour after the explosion a statement was issued by the “Movement Against Illegal Immigration,” an organization created by the security forces. Its leader, Alexander Belov, declared:
Our first demand is to forbid Chechens to travel outside Chechnya. To this day in the USA and Canada there are special reservations set aside for awkward peoples. If an ethnic group does not want to live like civilized human beings, let them live behind a barrier. Call it what you like: a reservation, a pale. We need somehow to defend ourselves. We can no longer pretend that the Chechens, of whom the majority are linked in one way or another with the Chechen resistance, are citizens in the same sense as Chuvashes, Buryats, Karelians, or Russians. For them this is a continuation of the war. They are taking revenge. The Chechen diaspora in Russia, including Chechen businessmen, are a hotbed of terrorism. I am only saying what 80 percent of Russians think.
He is right. That is exactly what the majority thinks. Society is moving toward fascism.
Only a few members of the state authorities continue even trying to think. Gen. Boris Gromov, the governor of Moscow Province and a Hero of the Soviet Union for service in Afghanistan, spoke out: “When I heard about the explosion in the Metro, my first thought was that all this began back in Afghanistan. The decision of the leaders of the USSR to send troops to Afghanistan was irresponsible in the extreme, as was the later decision of the leaders of Russia to send troops to Chechnya. These are the fruits of those decisions. They said they were going after gangsters, but entirely innocent people are now suffering as a result. This will continue for a long time into the future.”
On the state television channels they keep drumming into people that terrorism is a disease of liberal democracy: if you want democracy, you must expect terrorist acts. They somehow overlook the fact that Putin has been in power for the past four years.
Putin, despite the explosion, is having talks with the president of Azerbaijan, Ilkham Aliev, who is in Moscow. Putin merely mentioned in passing, “I wouldn't be surprised if this were to be exploited in the runup to the election as a means of putting pressure on the current head of state. There is a marked coincidence between the explosion and the fact that plans for peace in Chechnya are again being put to us from abroad. Our refusal to conduct negotiations of any kind with terrorists …”
What negotiations? Suicide bombers blow themselves up. He was anxious, his eyes flickering around, betraying a hysterical man who does not know what to do next.
In the next few days there is to be scrutiny of the lists of signatures of the nonparty presidential candidates: Ivan Rybkin, former head of the security council of the Russian Federation; Sergey Glaziev, leader of the Rodina Party; and Irina Khakamada. The authorities’ actions betray the fact that the person they are most worried about out of these three is Ryb-kin, even though his opinion poll rating is virtually zero. The head of the Central Electoral Commission, Alexander Veshnyakov, has stated in advance of the scrutiny that a preliminary check of Rybkin's lists has shown that 26 percent of the signatures are invalid. Precisely 26 percent—not 27 and not 24.9—because the law says that if the number of invalid signatures exceeds 25 percent, they can refuse to register the candidate. People are laughing and saying that at least it's not 25.1 percent.
Where, actually, is the election campaign? So far there is nothing to be seen. The would-be candidates were in no hurry to stand, and most of them are in no hurry to win. Nobody seems worried by this, neither the candidates nor their supporters. As for Candidate No. 1, he makes no attempt to fight, argue, and win. Irina Khakamada is convinced that the Kremlin has succeeded in persuading everybody that they can't beat a conspiracy. “There is no open struggle. Nobody believes it will help.”
The Rodina Party continues its internal feuding. They do not want to win the election, either. Dmitry Rogozin, who is also the deputy speaker of the Duma, has even announced that he will support Putin in the election, not Glaziev, the cochairman of his own party. They seem a very odd lot. Do they ever give a thought to their supporters? They give the impression that what the electors think is of no concern, and that everything will be decided without consulting them. Rogozin even calls for the presidential election to be canceled and a state of emergency declared because of the terrorist acts.
Five new blood donor centers have been opened in Moscow. There is an urgent need for all blood groups for the 128 bomb victims who remain in the hospital.
But where are the explosives detectors in the Metro? Where are the patrols? We Russians are innately irresponsible, always seeing conspiracies against us. We never bother to push anything through to completion, just hope for the best. The militia check passports in the Metro, but no doubt terrorists make sure their documents are in order. The militia catch some hungry Tadjik who can't find work in his homeland and has come to dig our frozen soil because we don't want to do it ourselves. They shake him down for his last hundred rubles [$3.50] and let him go. Where are the security agencies who should answer for the fact that the attack was successful? Where are the security people on the ground? Thousands of half-starved conscripts of the Interior troops have been brought in to guard Moscow. That's good. At least they will be paid and be able to eat. At least they are not in their barracks.
But “measures” like these are ineffective, mere reaction. As soon as people start to forget this nightmare, everything will return to how it was. The writer and journalist Alexander Kabakov comments, “We are still alive only because those who commission these acts are short of people to carry them out. But why those who commission terrorist acts are still alive is quite another question.”
Putin has not fired Patrushev, the director of the FSB. He is a personal friend. How many more acts of terrorism have to succeed before Putin realizes his pal is no good at his job?
The Memorial Human Rights Center has issued a statement:
We grieve for those who have died, and sympathize deeply with the injured. There can be no justification for those who planned and executed this crime. The president and law enforcement agencies are confidently asserting that this was the work of Chechens, although no evidence of this has yet come to light. If their speculation should prove correct, the present tragedy will unfortunately have been only too predictable. The refusal of the country's leaders to take any steps toward a real, rather than a decorative, political settlement of the conflict has only strengthened the position of extremists. These are people who set out no sane political goals on the basis of which compromise might be possible. Over recent years human rights associations and many public and political representatives have warned repeatedly that the brutal acts of the federal forces in Chechnya spell danger for every person living in Russia. For a long time now hundreds of thousands of people have been living out every day in a lethal environment. They are being forced out, cast beyond the limits of civilized life. Thousands of humiliated people whose relatives and friends have been killed, abducted, physically and psychologically crippled, represent, for the cynical and unconscionable leaders of terrorist groups, a source from which to recruit their followers, suicide bombers, and those who commit terrorist outrages. Peace and tranquillity for the citizens of Russia can be achieved only by a resolute change of policy.
Ivan Rybkin has disappeared. A bit of excitement in the election at last: one of the candidates is nowhere to be found. His wife is going crazy. On February 2, Rybkin criticized Putin in very harsh terms and his wife believes that did it for him. On February 5, Kseniya Ponomaryova, the coordinator of the support group that put Rybkin forward, warned that “massive sabotage” was being prepared against him. His headquarters have been receiving reports from the regions for a week about unauthorized interrogation of his supporters. The militia visited the homes of people collecting signatures, questioned them, and took statements. They wanted to know why they were supporting Rybkin. In Kabardino-Balkaria students gathering signatures were threatened that the militia would inform the university administration and consider whether it was appropriate for them to be allowed to continue their studies.
No details have yet been established of the type of bomb used in the Metro or of the composition of its explosive. Putin keeps repeating, as he did after Nord-Ost, that nobody inside Russia was responsible. Everything was planned abroad.
A day of mourning has been declared for those who died, but the television stations barely observe it. Loud pop music and markedly cheerful TV advertisements make you feel ashamed. One hundred and five people are still in the hospital. Two of those who died are being buried today. One is Alexander Ishunkin, a twenty-five-year-old lieutenant in the armed forces born in Kaluga Province, where he will be buried. He graduated from Bauman University and went to serve as an officer. On February 6 he was going back home to Naro-Fominsk, where his unit is stationed. He had come to Moscow to obtain spare parts for a vehicle and had taken the opportunity to visit some university friends. That morning, he got on the Metro to travel to Kiev station, with a change at Pavelet-skaya. When Alexander didn't return, his mother assumed he had missed the train—just before going to the Metro he had called to say he would be back at 11:00. His uncle Mikhail identified his body in the mortuary. He couldn't believe it. Seven years ago Alexander's father was killed, and since then Alexander had been the very dependable head of the family. His mother wept: “It's as if my soul has been taken from me. He promised me grandchildren.” Even in issuing his death certificate the state can't refrain from dishonesty: the box for “Cause of death” has been crossed through. Not a word about terrorism.
The other person being buried today is Vanya Aladiin, a Muscovite just seventeen years old. The procession of Vanya's family and classmates stretches through half the cemetery. He was a lively, cheerful, friendly boy people called Hurricane Vanya. Three days earlier he had got a job as a courier and on February 6 was traveling to work. On February 16 he would have celebrated his eighteenth birthday.
Rybkin is still missing. Gennadii Gudkov, the deputy chairman of the Duma security committee and a retired FSB colonel, is letting it be known that Rybkin is safe. But where is he? Does the state have no special obligations toward presidential candidates?
Rybkin's wife, Albina Nikolaevna, insists that he has been kidnapped. The Presnya District procurator's office has unexpectedly opened a criminal investigation under Article 105, premeditated murder, but the Central Directorate of Internal Affairs began insisting there is good reason to suppose that Rybkin is alive. An hour later the Presnya office changed its mind about the murder inquiry on orders from the procurator general's office. What is going on?
The political commentators agree that a semblance of competition has been created, saving the election from being a complete farce, as it would have been if Putin's only opponents had been a coffin maker and a bodyguard. Zero risk, of course, but highly embarrassing. No doubt that is why, in the end, they registered everybody, and decided that a mere 21 percent of Rybkin's signatures were invalid, even though the day before they had said it was 26 percent. The only snag is that Rybkin has vanished. The idea of boycotting the elections, which the liberals and democrats were proposing, has fizzled out. They didn't try very hard.
In Moscow a further thirteen people killed in the Metro explosion have been buried. Twenty-nine people remain in critical condition. The death toll has risen to forty; one more person has died in the last twenty-four hours.
Rybkin has been found. A very strange episode. At midday he broke radio silence and announced that he was in Kiev. He said he had just been on vacation there with friends and that, after all, a human being has a right to a private life! Kseniya Ponomaryova promptly resigned as leader of his election team. His wife is shocked and refusing to talk to him. Late in the evening Rybkin flew into Moscow from Kiev, looking half dead and not at all like someone who has been having a good time on vacation. Rybkin remarked it had been more heavy going than negotiating with the Chechens. He was wearing women's sunglasses and was escorted by an enormous bodyguard.
“Who was detaining you?” he was asked, but gave no reply. He also refused to talk to the investigators from the procurator's office who had been searching for him. His wife, while Rybkin was flying home, gave an interview to the Interfax news agency saying she “felt sorry for a country which had people like that as its leaders.” She was referring to her husband.
It was later announced that Rybkin might withdraw his candidacy.
Grigorii Yavlinsky's new book on Peripheral Capitalism (in Russia) has been launched in Moscow. It has been published in Russian, but on Western money. The book is about the “authoritarian model of modernization,” which Yavlinsky considers nonviable. In spite of this book, Yavlinsky has effectively given up the struggle against Putin.
In St. Petersburg, skinheads have stabbed to death nine-year-old Khursheda Sultanova in the courtyard of the apartments where her family lived. Her father, thirty-five-year-old Yusuf Sultanov, a Tadjik, has been working in St. Petersburg for many years. That evening he was bringing the children back from the Yusupov Park ice slope when some aggressive youths started following them. In a dark connecting courtyard leading to their home the youths attacked them. Khursheda suffered eleven stab wounds and died immediately. Yusuf's eleven-year-old nephew, Alabir, escaped in the darkness by hiding under a parked car. Alabir says the skinheads kept stabbing Khursheda until they were certain she was dead. They were shouting, “Russia for the Russians!”
The Sultanovs are not illegal immigrants. They are officially registered as citizens of St. Petersburg, but fascists are not interested in ID cards. When Russia's leaders indulge in sound bites about cracking down on immigrants and guest laborers, they incur responsibility for tragedies such as this. Fifteen people were detained shortly afterward, but released. Many turned out to be the offspring of people employed by the law enforcement agencies of St. Petersburg. Today, 20,000 St. Petersburg youths belong to unofficial fascist or racist organizations. The St. Petersburg skinheads are among the most active in the country and are constantly attacking Azerbaijanis, Chinese, and Africans. Nobody is ever punished, because the law enforcement agencies are themselves infected with racism. You have only to switch off your audio recorder for the militia to start telling you they understand the skinheads, and as for those blacks … etc., etc. Fascism is in fashion.
The Candidate Rybkin soap opera continues. Rybkin makes statements each more startling than the last, for example: “During those days I experienced the second Chechen war.” Nobody believes him. The jokers are asking, “Is there a human right to two days of private life in Kiev?”
Before this, Rybkin had the reputation of being a meticulous person, not at all given to wild living, highly responsible, not a heavy drinker, and even slightly dull. “Two days in Kiev” are very much out of character. So what really happened in Ukraine?* And did it happen there? Rybkin reports that after he disappeared he spent a certain amount of time in Moscow Province at Woodland Retreat, the guesthouse of the presidential administration. He was taken from there and, when he could tell where he was again, found himself in Kiev. He says further that those controlling him compelled him to call Moscow from Kiev and talk light-heartedly about having a right to a private life.
*
So what was going on? What was the motive? There has been no inquiry into the Rybkin affair, so I offer these suggestions:
As we know, Putin refused to take part in public debates, on the grounds that the public supposedly already knew whom to vote for. This was clearly an excuse. Putin is not good at dialogue, especially when the topic is one he is uncomfortable with. This has been demonstrated on trips abroad when the administration is unable to gag reporters; journalists ask questions the president finds awkward and he flies off the handle. Putin's preferred genre is the monologue, with leading questions prepared in advance.
We have allowed our political firmament to configure itself in such a way that there is now only one luminary. He is infallible and enjoys a sky-high rating, which appears invulnerable to everything except the man himself and his murky past.
But then, out of the rabble of candidates knocked together by the Kremlin, in the week preceding February 5, Rybkin jumps up and starts hinting at compromising materials that discredit the luminary and his illustrious past, the obvious suggestion being that he is going to reveal some of this. Moreover, Rybkin had the audacity to describe Putin as an oligarch, a sound bite that was completely off-message, since our luminary's campaign is based on showing the people how bad the oligarchs who are “not on our side” really are.
Rybkin was beginning to give our No. 1 presidential candidate grounds for serious unease. There was, moreover, the shadow of Boris Berezovsky behind Rybkin. Perhaps he really had something.
In the week before the abduction Rybkin was beginning to look like a loose missile with a warhead of materials that might seriously damage the Kremlin.
But what could they be about? That was why they needed to employ psychotropic drugs, which are now so sophisticated that a person cannot stop himself from blurting out everything he knows. The main source of information was Rybkin himself not those around him, not his staff, but his brain. That is why they switched it off while they fished around in it. The likelihood is that Rybkin himself has no idea what he told them in those days, or to whom he told it.
There is also Woodland Retreat, a secluded place conveniently closed to outsiders, and Kiev, and the blatant compromising of him after his reappearance when even his indignant wife, talking to an official news agency, was made use of.
Let us look at the detail, the practicalities of the operation. The fact that Rybkin was taken to the Woodland Retreat guesthouse is evidence that the presidential administration was privy to his abduction, as was the FSB. The president's secretariat is an outfit that has long been described as a subdivision of the FSB. These two offices are the principal managers of Russia and do not merely work hand in glove, but function as a single entity. In addition, the fact that Rybkin had been seen at Woodland Retreat and would shortly return there was blurted out by Gudkov, who had evidently either elicited the information from old contacts or had it leaked to him. Immediately after Gudkov blabbed his mouth, the guesthouse administration was able to deny that Rybkin was there.
And indeed he was no longer there. They were already arranging for his return via Kiev. An important detail is that the presidential candidate was secretly smuggled from Russia into Ukraine. (There is no customs or passport record of his crossing the border.) Technically this is quite possible; there are holes in the border, and it is no secret that Ukrainian guest laborers drive into Russia through these holes, which are large enough for vehicular traffic, when they want to avoid unnecessary encounters with officials whom they would have to bribe.
However, what is interesting in the Rybkin case is not the technique of how he was transferred over the border, but the fact itself that he was spirited from the guesthouse of the secretariat of the administration of the current president of the Russian Federation to VIP apartments in Kiev controlled by the administration of the current president of Ukraine. Leonid Kuchma* is close to the administration because he is an accomplice in their political crimes, and in return for that we might well help him out in a similar way, if he were ever to need assistance. This is also the reason the state wants to develop the Commonwealth of Independent States, but not to make its borders too watertight, so that former colleagues in the KGB of the USSR should be better able to carry out joint special operations both here and there.
Let us look next at personalities. Who could give the order to shake information out of Rybkin, after first having switched off his conscious mind? Cui bono? Our luminary, surely.
We are not talking here about orders, needless to say. Our top cats have only to raise an eyebrow, hinting at their august displeasure, for their serfs to rush immediately to carry out their wishes. In our political Wonderland this eyebrow twitching even has a name: it is known as “the Pasha Grachev effect,” referring to the time when the former minister of defense was apparently thoroughly fed up with the fact that Dmitry Kholodov, a journalist, was unearthing his dark secrets. The minister of defense is said to have hinted to his military friends how greatly Kholodov was pissing him off; the next thing you know, the journalist was blown to pieces.
No doubt the Grachev effect was in play here too. Rybkin, thank God, was not murdered, but only because to have the angel of death intervening so blatantly in the election would have worked against the interests of Candidate No. 1.
These are the kinds of criminal goings-on, complete with psycho-tropic drugs, that we get when one candidate, who happens to be the current president, is simply incapable of performing in preelection debates, is incapable of discussion, is irrationally afraid of opposition, and, moreover, has come to believe in his own messianism. We are not so stupid as to believe that Rybkin was running away from his wife.
To all appearances, then, Rybkin had relatively little compromising material. The soap opera had no further episodes. Everybody forgot about him, including Putin. The end result, crucially for a society short of alternatives, was that Rybkin failed to confront the regime publicly.
Throughout January, people were being abducted in Chechnya, only for their bodies to be found later. The number of those abducted is comparable to the number killed on February 6 in the Moscow Metro. In Chechnya, everyone is at war with everybody else. There are armed men everywhere, the so-called Chechen security forces. The commonest expression on people's faces is gloom. There are large numbers of half-insane, traumatized adults. Children, who resemble children only in their physical appearance, make their way to school. The armored personnel carriers plow arrogantly past, and from them soldiers point their submachine guns at you as contemptuously as ever. Those they look down on look up, no less unforgivingly, at them. At night there are firefights, “softening up” by artillery bombardment, battles, and bombing in the foothills. In the morning there are fresh shell craters. It is a war in stalemate. Do we want an end to it, or are we actually not all that bothered?
There has not been a single sizable demonstration against the war in Chechnya during the entire presidential election campaign. The unbelievable long suffering of our people is what allows the horror that is Putin to continue. One can find no other explanation.
Why has nobody come forward to “claim” responsibility for the explosion in the Metro on February 6? There are two possible explanations:
Either the intelligence forces were behind the explosion, no matter whose hands they used, which would explain the absence of demands or admissions of responsibility;
Or individual terrorists were involved in an act of personal vengeance for relatives who had been killed, for the trampling underfoot of their honor and their homeland. This is as shameful and depressing an explanation as that involving the complicity of the intelligence services.
Putin is raising the remuneration of those “working within the zone of the antiterrorist operation” by 250 percent. Perhaps this will lead to less looting in Chechnya.
Rybkin is still flapping. He has flown to London to consult Berezovsky. He seems determined to complete his political implosion in full public view. Why is it so easy in Russia to put down democratic opposition? It is something in the opposition themselves. It is not that what they are confronting is too strong, although of course that is a factor. The main thing is that the opposition lacks an unflinching determination to oppose. Berezovsky is a mere gambler, not a fighter, and those who line up with him are no fighters, either. Nemtsov is just playing games, and Yavlinsky always looks as if something has offended him.
Alexander Litvinenko in London and Oleg Kalugin in Washington, former KGB/FSB officers who have been granted political asylum in the West, have suggested that a psychotropic substance called SP117 may have been used on Rybkin. This compound was used in the FSB's coun-terintelligence sections and in units combating terrorism, but only in exceptional cases on “important targets.” SP117 is a truth drug that operates on specific parts of the brain in order to prevent an individual from having full possession of his mind. He will tell everything he knows. According to Litvinenko, “When somebody is under the influence of SP117, you can do anything you like with them and they will be incapable of remembering in detail or explaining coherently what happened, whom they met, or what they said. SP117 consists of two components, the dote and the antidote. First they administer the dote. Two drops are added to any beverage, and some fifteen minutes after taking it the victim completely loses control of himself, possibly for several hours. The effect can be extended by administering additional small amounts of the dote. When the necessary information has been extracted, the victim is given the antidote, two pills dissolved in water, tea, or coffee. After roughly ten minutes he returns to normality. There is a complete loss of memory. He feels shattered. If the drug has been administered over several days, the individual may experience panic and shock because that period of his life has been obliterated from his memory, and he will be unable to understand what has happened to him.”
These statements by Litvinenko and Kalugin will not save the political career of Rybkin. Putin has won this round against Berezovsky, now his sworn enemy, but his great pal in the late 1990s.
Today, precisely one day after the effective removal of Rybkin from the election race and his declaration that he will not take part in debates, is the official start of the presidential election campaign. Each of the candidates is entitled to four and a half hours of free airtime on television, on state channels, and this allowance must be in the form of live broadcasts. The only person with compromising materials against Putin, Rybkin, has voluntarily turned down the opportunity of appearing on live television. Which is exactly what the Kremlin needed.
At 2:00 p.m. hours Putin had a meeting in Moscow State University with more than 300 of his aides and supporters. He was giving an account of what he has done during his first term. All the press and TV reporters were invited to be present, but, as the main state television stations emphasized when broadcasting the event, “Putin was speaking as a private individual.” Putin has refused to participate in televised debates, and this speech was as insipid as the reports of general secretaries to Communist Party congresses in the past. His audience in Moscow University woke up as he spoke his last words and clapped like mad.
In the course of the broadcast one candidate for the presidency therefore spoke his way through nine million rubles’ ($313,000) worth of airtime. The official tariff of the Rossiya channel for 30 seconds of campaign advertising is 90,000 to 166,000 rubles [$3,100-$5,775]. Did Putin pay? It was a flagrant abuse of state resources for electoral advantage and a clear violation of electoral law.
Six hundred journalists reported the meeting. They were assembled at the press center of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at 9:30 a.m., and registration continued until 12 noon. Everybody was searched before being put on buses. A member of the president's campaign team who looked like, and doubtless was, an FSB stooge, periodically harangued us: “I repeat once more: nobody will ask any questions! Have you all heard that?” The journalists were transported to the meeting in twenty-three green buses with a militia escort, the way in Russia we transport children to a pioneer camp. After the meeting the journalists were herded into the buses again and taken back. No stepping out of line! Was this a private meeting between an individual and his friends to seek ways of ensuring a better future for their country?
Olga Zastrozhnaya, one of the secretaries of the Central Electoral Commission, stated that this televising of the president's speech was “a direct violation of the rules of electioneering, because the broadcast was unquestionably political campaigning rather than informational.” Alexander Ivanchenko, the director of the Independent Electoral Institute and a previous secretary of the Electoral Commission, commented unambiguously, “Putin's election campaign falls short of civilized election standards. In technical terms there is a delegitimization of electoral procedures. The presidential election should be declared invalid, but the Central Electoral Commission is impotent.”
There was no public reaction to this. Gleb Pavlovsky, a totally cynical individual, the director of the Effective Politics Foundation and one of the Kremlin's main spin doctors, even stated publicly, “The electorate doesn't care who gets how many extra minutes on air!”
Television continues its brainwashing through upbeat broadcasts. Today Prime Minister Kasianov reported that agricultural production has risen 1.5 percent, and that under Putin all the conditions are now in place for the successful development of Russia's agribusiness. “We are poised to regain our prominent position in the world's grain markets,” Kasianov assured us. It is unlikely that his sycophancy will save him. He will be removed soon. Putin is uncomfortable with politicians left over from the Yeltsin era who remind him of a time when it was he who was a mere puppet, and of the history of how he came to be selected as Yeltsin's successor.
In the course of the election campaign we have heard that we are world leaders in virtually everything, from arms sales and grain exports to space exploration. So far they are not claiming we are world leaders in car manufacture. High-ranking officials’ backsides have evidently not yet forgotten the experience of riding in our Zhigulis.
Does the Duma have any clout at all? Putin wanted it to elect Vladimir Lukin, a former Yabloko man and well-known liberal, as human rights ombudsman before the presidential election. United Russia pulled out all the stops, and although Rodina and the Communist Party said they would boycott the vote, the appointment went through. Lukin was the only candidate on the ballot; the others were simply excluded. He is delighted. “I very much look forward to working in this area,” he said. But what about those whose rights need to be defended?
(Lukin was to prove a mediocre ombudsman, lacking in initiative and under the Kremlin's thumb, never straying beyond the bounds of what was permissible. Chechnya, for example, was never one of Lukin's priorities.)
In Qatar, Zelimkhan Yandarbiev, the former vice president of Chechnya and colleague of Presidents [Dzhokhar] Dudaev and [Aslan] Maskha-dov,* has been killed by a bomb apparently fixed beneath his jeep. He left Chechnya at the beginning of the second Chechen war. This was almost certainly the work of the Russian intelligence agencies—the army's Central Intelligence Directorate or the Federal Security Bureau. Most likely, the former.
Ivan Rybkin has announced that he will not be returning from London. A defecting presidential candidate is a first in our history. Nobody now has any doubt that the regime drugged him.
A call to our newspaper's editorial offices, supposedly from “a well-wisher” in the intelligence services. “Pass it on to London, as we know you can, that if Rybkin should produce any compromising material against Putin in television debates, another terrorist act will follow. The president will have to distract the attention of the public somehow.”
We passed the message on, but Rybkin has already washed his hands of the election. He is in fear for his life.
Liberal voters seem to be of two minds. Khakamada called a meeting of her supporters in Moscow and I went along. Many people say outright, “If we don't put forward Khakamada we shall have no option but to vote against all of them, or not turn out at all.”
Rogozin and Glaziev continue to play dangerously on the emotions of those who feel an impaired sense of nationhood.
A new tragedy in Moscow. The roof of the Aqua Park in Yasenevo has collapsed. It happened in the evening when the celebrations of St. Valentine's Day were at their height. Seventy percent of the dome, an area the size of a soccer field, fell in over the swimming pool. Officially, there were 426 people in the Aqua Park, but unofficially it was nearer 1,000. The building is shrouded in steam. People in their swimsuits leaped out into — 4°F of frost. In the worst-affected area there was also a restaurant, a bowling alley, bathhouses, saunas, exercise rooms, and a family area with a warm pool for children. Twenty-six bodies were found immediately, but there are many body parts. The authorities say it was not a terrorist act.
Officialdom has started making life difficult for the new Party of Soldiers’ Mothers. The Ministry of Justice, which is responsible for registering parties, claims it has not yet received any documents from the party; they have not only been handed in to the ministry, but the Soldiers’ Mothers also have an official ministry receipt for them. The bureaucrats are trying to set all kinds of traps in the hope of tricking the new party into infringing the muddled and onerous laws on forming parties. Then they could simply be got rid of. For now the women are doing all right, checking every step.
Yevgeny Sidorenko, the spokesman of the Ministry of Justice, declared, “I am not at all sure we shall register such a party. A political party cannot limit its membership to a particular group of the population. What if somebody who is not a soldier's mother wants to join? A soldier's father, for instance?”
He must be a fortune-teller. The fathers do want to join. In our political Sahara, the Party of Soldiers’ Mothers is so attractive that many men have joined despite the party's title, and nobody, of course, has any intention of debarring them. Serving officers, moreover, have been phoning the Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers asking that there should be a place for them too when the party's structure is being decided. These are honorable officers who refuse to reconcile themselves to the idea of an army that is little more than a mechanism for taking the lives of our young men. The Party of Soldiers’ Mothers is beginning to look like a real means of rescuing the army and establishing public accountability for our armed forces.
The Sultanovs, the family of the little girl Khursheda who was murdered by skinheads in St. Petersburg, have abandoned Russia and gone to live in Tadjikistan. They took a small coffin containing the child's remains with them.
The FSB is to be in charge of investigating the explosion in the Metro. It promptly demanded new powers, comparing the situation to that in the United States after September 11.
Our war of the North against the South continues. Nobody imagines this is the last terrorist outrage, or doubts that the Chechens were behind it. A majority support giving those who live here hell. Seventy percent of Russians favor kicking out all Caucasians. But where to? The Caucasus is still part of Russia.
Today is the fifteenth anniversary of our withdrawal from Afghanistan. That is seen as marking the end of the Afghan War, but we had already sown the seeds for terrorism to develop. Just like the Americans with their bin Laden: he is what he is today because the Afghan War was what it was.
Blood donor centers have been set up for the victims of the Aqua Park disaster. We are beginning to know what to do in these situations.
The shareholders of Yukos have stated that they are prepared to ransom Khodorkovsky from the state. Leonid Nevzlin [Khodorkovsky's right-hand man at Yukos], who fled to Israel, has announced that they are willing to part with their stakes in return for freedom for him and Platon Lebedev [CEO of Menatep Bank, which was the main shareholder of Yukos, now serving eight years of penal servitude for alleged tax evasion].
Nevzlin himself owns 8 percent of the shares of Menatep Group. He says the offer is backed also by Mikhail Brudno (7 percent) and Vladimir Dubov (7 percent).
Khodorkovsky has expressed indignation from jail and refuses to be ransomed. He has decided to drain this cup to the dregs.
The NTV television company is refusing to provide airtime for the election campaign and debates of the “other” presidential candidates. It claims they have low ratings in the opinion polls and nobody would watch the programs. Perhaps a country gets the candidates it deserves, but they should at least be allowed to speak. There is no doubt that the company's decision was made under pressure from the Kremlin.
In Moscow the committee supporting Khakamada has met in the fashionable and expensive Berlin Club on Petrovka. Khakamada said, “I am going into this election as if to the scaffold, and with only one aim: to show the state authorities that there are normal people in Russia who know exactly what they are up to.” That is good. She is trying to show that fear has not yet conquered Russia, which would be an unconditional victory for Putin.
United Russia also held a meeting of “the democratic intelligentsia” in support of Putin, who, it was claimed, is having mud slung at him by his opponents. Putin's defenders included the veteran singer Larisa Dolina, theater and film director Mark Zakharov, the actor Nikolai Kara-chentsev, and circus manager Natalia Durova. They were sent a letter asking them to “defend the honor and dignity of the president,” and duly answered the call. It was mentioned in passing that the overall membership of United Russia has reached 740,000, and that more than two million “supporters” have been registered, although no explanation of what this means has been forthcoming. United Russia emphasized that its purpose as a political party is to support the president. Not policies, not ideals, not a program of reform: an individual.
The Central Electoral Commission joyfully reports that more than 200 international observers have been officially accredited for the election on March 14. In all, some 400 are expected.
The Duma contributes its mite to the pathetic attempts to fight terrorism. The powers of the secret police and spies will be widened, and amendments to the criminal code have been adopted to increase the penalties for suicide bombers. They will now be liable to life imprisonment! This seems unlikely to deter people who have decided to settle their accounts with life in this way. The Fourth Duma is the collective brain of today's bone-headed Russian bureaucracy.
The Duma is playing up to the intelligence services because that is what Putin likes. There is no mention of the additional three billion rubles [$104 million] the intelligence services were awarded shortly after Nord-Ost for the fight against terrorism. Where did all that go, and why has the number of terrorist outrages not decreased? The Fourth Duma has given its legislative blessing to a purely virtual fight against terrorism. The efficiency of the intelligence services is not even queried, and the problem of Chechnya, which is at the root of everything, is not mentioned.
Sergey Mironov has taken part in the television debates for the first time. Everybody immediately rounded on him, as if he were Putin, but Mironov refused to be a whipping boy.
“Of course you are Putin!” Khakamada said. “Why, after all the terrorist acts, has Gryzlov been promoted when he should have been fired?”
“I am not the representative of candidate Putin!” Mironov replied.
“Then answer as the third person in the hierarchy of power in the state,” Khakamada continued.
Mironov still chose not to answer. That's the kind of debates we have.
Nobody takes them seriously. They are broadcast very early in the morning.
The Central Electoral Commission has refused Rybkin permission to take part in live preelection debates from London. There is no way Rybkin is going to be allowed to dish the dirt on Putin live on television.
In Voronezh, Amar Antoniu Lima, twenty-four, a first-year student at the Voronezh Medical Academy, has died after being stabbed seventeen times. He came from Guinea-Bissau. This is the seventh murder of a foreign student in Voronezh in recent years. The murderers are skinheads. Zhirinovsky's slogan in the parliamentary elections was “We are for the poor! We are for the Russians!” It has been taken over by United Russia, and accordingly by the Guarantor of the Constitution himself. And by the skinheads.
There is increasing speculation that all the candidates, with the exception of Malyshkin and Mironov (and Putin), may withdraw from the election simultaneously. Glaziev has already announced his withdrawal, Rybkin is on the verge of doing so, and so is Khakamada. The pro-Putin press says this is a plot to enable them to save political face because they will achieve only tiny percentages of the vote on March 14.
The real reason is simply frustration at Putin's total absence from all preelection discussion, putting the other candidates in a farcical situation. In Khakamada's words, “The campaign is becoming increasingly lawless and dishonest.”
Putin has fired his government live on television, nineteen days before the election. According to the Constitution, the newly elected president appoints a new cabinet, and at that point the previous government retires. The reason for the dismissal has not been revealed. The government was not blamed for anything, although there would have been plenty of grounds for doing so, and the only explanation being offered is that Putin wants to go to the electorate with an open visor, so that they should know who he will be working with after the election. The fired ministers speak on television about the joy with which their hearts were filled when they heard they had been fired. The Kremlin has demonstrated to the electorate that our elections are a complete sham and that the government is purely ornamental. At any moment of the spin doctors’ choosing, it can be done away with.
Does it matter one jot whom Putin appoints as prime minister in place of Kasianov, or who is in the government? No. Everything in the country depends on the presidential administration. The firing resembled a special operation. It was carried out in total secrecy. There were no leaks. It is as if they were carrying out a targeted military strike, not just dismissing ministers. The majority of the cabinet learned of their firing from the television news.
The dismissal of the government in this manner demonstrates the establishment in Russia of political oligarchy. With this lot, all the financial oligarchs, who up till now had a finger in the pie, are nowhere.
The official television stations explain that “the president is optimizing the replacement of ineffective ministers so that the Russian people should know who will be in office after March 14.” As if the election were already over.
Putin's first presidential term has effectively come to an end today. This is the termination of the era of Yeltsin, of whom Kasianov was the last remaining major appointee. Putin will now spend his second term completely distancing himself from Yeltsin's policies.
Yelena Bonner has appealed to the presidential candidates in an open letter from America:
Once again I call upon the presidential candidates Irina Khaka-mada, Nikolai Kharitonov, and Ivan Rybkin to jointly withdraw from the election. By standing as candidates each of you has tried to make your program known to the electorate and to demonstrate to Russian society and world opinion the dishonesty of this election. Leave Candidate No. 1, Putin, alone with his puppets, and call on the groups supporting you and ordinary electors to boycott the election. Anybody who dislikes the word “boycott” may, if they prefer, describe this as a call not to appear on parade. It will then be of no importance what percentage they dream up for the turnout. What matters is that the authorities will know the real figure.
Even more important is that everyone who deliberately does not vote will gain self-respect from not participating in this state-sponsored lie. Most importantly, refusing to participate will clearly indicate your goal, a goal shared for the next four years by right and left politicians and their political supporters. That is the battle to restore the institution of real elections in Russia, in place of the surrogate that is being imposed on the country today. Later, in 2007 and 2008, if you jointly stop elections from being a big lie, a scam, you will once again become political opponents and competitors in the struggle for voters. Right now, however, only your joint refusal to take part in the election and your call to the voters not to participate in it are strategically and morally justifiable.
There was no reaction to Bonner's appeal. No commentaries, no thunder and lightning. Nothing.
People are beginning to titter about Putin, even on television. He is in Khabarovsk today, looking as pompous and imperial as a king in a folktale. In the morning he opened the Khabarovsk-Chita motorway. After that he talked to some war veterans who asked him for more money, so he increased the northern supplement for pensions. He spent some time with young hockey players at a new ice skating stadium. The commander in chief of the Pacific fleet, Viktor Fyodorov, had been expressing alarm at the possibility of force reductions, so Putin also announced that the Pacific fleet would not be trimmed back because “our Pacific fist needs to be strong.” He also promised support for the submarine base in Kamchatka. (He should try going there to see for himself the conditions in the officers’ village at Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky.) Next, the acting minister of transport, Vadim Morozov, asked Putin for 4.5 billion rubles [$158 million] for a railway link between the Trans-Siberian Railway and the Baikal-Amur Highway, and Putin gave it to him. The businessman and governor of Primoriye, Sergey Darkin, asked for three billion rubles [$105 million] for new ships. The president of Yakutia, Vyacheslav Shty-rov, asked for funds for an oil and gas pipeline from Irkutsk to the Far East, and Putin promised to fix it.
No hint has been given as to who is to be the new prime minister. Rumors are circulating.
Some say Putin will appoint himself prime minister, others that it will be Gryzlov, or maybe Kudrin.
In the evening, NTV broadcast To the Barrier! The duelists were Vladimir Ryzhkov, an independently minded deputy in the Duma, and Lyudmila Narusova, the widow of Anatoly Sobchak, Putin's teacher and boss. The question for discussion was why Putin had dismissed the government. Ryzhkov was witty and ironical without being malicious. He mocked Putin, but in a friendly, condescending way. During the program viewers were invited to vote on whether they supported Narusova or Ryzhkov.
Narusova insisted that the president was always right about everything, but could not explain anything beyond that. This is highly typical of Putin's supporters. The result was a resounding victory for Ryzhkov, who polled 71,000 votes to Narusova's 19,000 for her defense of Putin. Narusova, assuring everyone that Putin was going into the elections with the purest of intentions, was trounced.
Early voting in the election has begun for those who are on the high seas, in the air, on expeditions, or who live in remote and inaccessible regions. Although the results will be declared only on March 14, the main ballot rigging will occur with these early ballot boxes. It is easily done.
Throughout the weekend we were hearing that the president was consulting the main United Russia figures over whom to appoint as prime minister. Most people are sure this is just PR and that nobody is being consulted about anything.
In Moscow, a “presidential election” by text message has been held. The result was 64 percent for Putin, 18 percent for Khakamada, and 5 percent for Glaziev.
Putin is shown on all television channels talking to the actor and director Yury Solomin about the 250th anniversary, in 2006, of the rescript of Catherine the Great on the establishment of theaters in Russia. Putin keeps asking how the occasion should be marked, and goes on being interested for a very long time.
The new prime minister of Russia is Mikhail Fradkov.* Nobody has a clue who he is. Apparently, he was an official in the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Trade and worked in various embassies; he occupied various positions in various ministries in the post-Soviet period, and worked in the Tax Police when they were at their lowest ebb. Fradkov, flying back from Brussels, said that he doesn't yet know what a “technical prime minister” is. That is, he doesn't know what position he has been appointed to by Putin. A prime minister as clueless as this is, even for us, quite unusual.
Everything is being reduced to absurdity. The appointment of Fradkov as prime minister by the Duma deserves an entry in the Guinness Book of Records: 352 votes in favor of a man who, when asked what his plans for the future were, could only blurt, “I have just come out of the shadow into the light.”
Fradkov is a man of the shadows because he is a spy. We have a truly third-rate prime minister. He is even bald. His very appearance tells you he is a political ploy. He has been chosen so that Putin, and only Putin, should be the authority figure. Nothing is going to change. Putin will continue to decide.
So what is the new policy? The answer is: nothing. Fradkov is a modest executive, always ready to carry out the tasks dictated by the party. No more, no less than that.
Rybkin has withdrawn his candidacy, without giving any clear explanation as to why. He continues to give the impression of being mentally unwell.
Khakamada has traveled to Nizhny Novgorod, Perm, and St. Petersburg. She appears to the public looking irritated and exhausted, but if that's the state she is in, she would do better not to go there in the first place. Kharitonov is off to Tula. Malyshkin is in the Altai but can barely string his words together. Mironov is in Irkutsk but incapable of saying anything without notes.
The main thrust of the television commentaries about the candidates is that it is an outrage for them to dare to compete with our principal candidate. There is a gradual atrophy of the organ responsible for the democratic perception of reality. Propaganda is put out to the effect that people voted for a single candidate in the Soviet period, and everything was fine then. Presumably in the next elections we won't even hear these matters debated. There will be one officially appointed opposition candidate, and society will take that in its stride. The country is sinking into a state of collective unconsciousness, into unreason.
International Women's Day. In accordance with an old Kremlin tradition, Putin assembles token working women. There has to be a tractor driver, a scientist, an actress, and a teacher. Words spoken from the heart, a glass of champagne, television cameras.
This is the last moment for candidates to withdraw from the race. Nobody has done so, and six remain on the ballot paper: Malyshkin, Putin, Mironov, Khakamada, Glaziev, and Kharitonov. A great deal of television coverage is devoted to early voting by reindeer breeders and those at faraway border posts.
From today campaigning and the publication of opinion polls are banned, but everybody gave up campaigning after Fradkov was appointed. There seemed no point.
Putin is on all television channels meeting sportsmen to ask what they need in order to win in the Summer Olympic Games. They need more money. Putin promises it.
It is fifty years since Khrushchev's campaign to cultivate the virgin lands of Siberia and Kazakhstan. Putin receives prominent public figures at his residence and asks them what they need. They need more money. Putin promises they shall have it. The formation of the “new” government is looking unpromising. There was talk about reducing the number of top-level bureaucrats, but the number has actually increased. All the supposedly fired ministers have been reinstated as deputy ministers in amalgamated ministries, which means we get one new bureaucrat plus two old ones. In total, from twenty-four old ministries and departments they have created forty-two new ones. The government is just the same, but minus Kasianov. An oligarchic government, controlled by different oligarchs, close not to the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Property, but to Putin. Putin is a political oligarch. In earlier times he would have been called an emperor.
Silence and apathy. Nobody can be bothered to listen to the drivel coming from the television. Let's just get it over with.
Well, so he's been elected. The turnout was, as the presidential administration required, very high. The speaker of the state Duma, Boris Gryz-lov, emerging from the polling station, told the assembled journalists, “Campaigning today is forbidden, but, anticipating your curiosity, I will say that I have voted for the person who for the past four years has ensured the stable development of Russia's economy. I have voted for policies as clear as today's weather.”
In the evening Alexander Veshnyakov, director of the Central Electoral Commission, informed the Russian people that only a single infringement of electoral law had been noted during the poll: “Vodka was being sold from a bus near one of the polling stations in Nizhny Tagil.”
In Voronezh, the Central Board of Health issued Order No. 114 to the effect that no hospitals should admit anybody during the period of voting who was not in possession of an absentee ballot. All the patients duly turned up with absentee ballots in order to be allowed to be ill. The same process was repeated in Rostov-on-Don. In the contagious diseases department of the city hospital, mothers were told they could not see their children unless they had arranged an absentee ballot.
In Bashkortostan,* President Rakhimov* delivered 92 percent of the vote for Putin; Dagestan, 94 percent; Kabardino-Balkaria, 96; Ingushetia,* 98. Were they running a competition? During the thirteen years of our new, post-Soviet life, this is the fourth time Russia has elected a president. In 1991, it was Yeltsin; in 1996, Yeltsin again; in 2000, Putin; in 2004, Putin again. The eternal cycle repeats for Russia's citizens, from an upsurge of hope to total indifference toward Candidate No. 1.
Now we know the official figures: Putin got 71.22 percent. Victory! (May it be pyrrhic.) Khakamada got 3.85; Kharitonov, 13.74; Glaziev, 4.11; Malyshkin, 2.23; Mironov, 0.76. Mironov had absolutely nothing to his candidacy other than a doglike loyalty to Putin. His result reflects that. By and large, the concept of ruling the country by the same methods used in conducting the “antiterrorist operation” has been vindicated: L’état, c'est Putin.