Terrorist acts in London, as the G8 meet at Gleneagles, near Glasgow. Putin is there. Casualties and blood are shown on our television screens, but it is better not to listen to the commentary: there is very little sympathy and a lot of malicious satisfaction. It is as if we are pleased that the British are suffering the same as we do. They are particularly careful to insinuate that Great Britain is now prepared to extradite Akhmed Zakaev to Russia, although the British government has said nothing of the sort.
What is it with us? We are always ready to exult at the suffering of others, and never prepared to be kind. Throughout the world we are held to be good, fair people. I have no sense of that at present.
In Moscow, the Heroes continue their hunger strike, but not one television channel reports the fact.
Marina Khodorkovskaya, the mother of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, has delivered to our Novaya Gazeta an open letter to the cosmonaut Georgii Grechko, who has signed a notorious open letter of fifty actors, writers, producers, and cosmonauts—people well known throughout Russia. They write to the effect that they condemn Khodorkovsky and are glad he has been given a severe [nine-year] sentence. The letter is wholly in the spirit of the Stalin epoch, when the populace would write ecstatic exhortations to The Leader to continue destroying his opponents, real or imagined.
“I am hurt and ashamed for you,” Khodorkovsky's mother writes. “I find it hard to believe that you, a well-informed and not unfeeling person, knew nothing about the vast amounts my son and his company invested in educational projects for young people and teachers in various regions of the Russian Federation. If you did know that, where is your conscience? If you did not know it and are kicking someone who has been condemned on instructions from above, then where are your honor and manliness? I am not asking you to defend Khodorkovsky and to criticize our so-called justice system—every person has a right to their own opinion—but before publicly vilifying someone, you need to be in full possession of the facts, and without that there can be no question of elementary justice.”
We published the letter, but no response was forthcoming from Cosmonaut Grechko, who, incidentally, also opposes his colleagues’ hunger strike. That is his choice.
Hearings continue in the case of the thirty-nine National Bolsheviks. They have been in various Moscow prisons for seven months now. New cages reaching to the court ceiling have been installed, two for the young men, one for the young women. All three are packed tight. Ivan Mel-nikov, a prominent Communist deputy of the Duma, and also a member of the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe, cannot believe what he is seeing: the ridiculous appurtenances of a trial of political prisoners. Working in the Duma, you would never expect such a thing. There the state authorities appear to work by consensus, by deals and accords; here, however, there is no mistaking the pitiless attitude toward “enemies of the Reich.” Deputy Melnikov also teaches at Moscow University; most of the National Bolsheviks are students, some of them from Moscow University, and he has come to act as a character witness for them, but the judge rules this out.
The defendants are accused of having caused damage amounting to 472,700 rubles [$16,500]. If you divide that between the thirty-nine accused, it transpires that the procurator general is demanding that each be imprisoned for up to eight years for causing just over 12,000 rubles [$420] of damage. Why such severity? Because they shouted, “Putin— you get out!” and other similar suggestions in Putin's public reception area.
They made their view of the president known and here they are, caged like puppies on a dog farm. They look at us so seriously that it breaks your heart. One has grown a bushy, black beard in prison and shaved his head. In photographs before he was locked up he looks quite different. Another is still too young to grow a beard, but he has been eaten alive by bedbugs; he is covered in sores. A third keeps scratching— he is suffering from prison itch, erysipelas. They are a danger to society because of their viewpoint on life in this country.
The judge evidently feels that everything is going to plan, in accordance with the instructions he has received. He knows whose side he is on.
Almost all the liberals and democrats, current and ex-, turned up at the trial of Khodorkovsky and Lebedev. Nobody turns up to this trial. There are no pickets, no demonstrations, no protest meetings, no slogans chanted. This is very odd, because it is by now absolutely clear that this is no less a show trial than the Yukos trial. It is, of course, a show trial to intimidate a different age group, people in a different income bracket. Yukos was about putting the super-rich clearly in the dock, while here the accused are low-income young people, mostly students. The message is, however, exactly the same—see what will happen to you if you dare to defy us: prison, bedbugs, erysipelas, prison camp, doing time with thugs.
For many years we had great hopes that trial by jury would force real independence on the courts. The state authorities had to allow it because, if they hadn't, they could have said good-bye to any prospect of being admitted to the Council of Europe. Since 2003, juries have gradually begun to consider criminal cases, and if conventional courts acquitted fewer than 1 percent of defendants, jury trials were at least finding 15 percent not guilty.
Those acquitted, however, were more often than not gangland bosses and “heroes” of the war in Chechnya, federal soldiers who had committed atrocities there, murders with aggravating circumstances in the main. After the acquittal of Yaponchik, a well-known criminal boss, respect for trials by jury gradually fell to zero. They were just another false dawn.
Bad news from Blagoveshchensk. The last militiaman held on charges has been released from jail. While human rights campaigners were making waves in Moscow, in Bashkiria they were quietly releasing Officer Gilvanov, one of the most brutal characters in the whole episode, who had beaten up young men from the village of Duvanei. Now all the beasts are free again. The district court in Ufa decided that Gilvanov was not a danger to society, although he personally attacked a boy whose leg was in a frame, knowing that he was completely helpless with a complex fracture of his leg. Even more disgusting is the fact that the Interior Ministry of Bashkiria has allowed Gilvanov to return to work as a militiaman.
The authorities are now planning to get their own back for all the fuss that was raised after the outrages.
The materials of the criminal case were lodged, supposedly in complete security at the department for the investigation of serious crimes, in the republican procurator general's office. Now, however, it transpires that the lawyers’ applications to have major charges brought for illegal detention at the so-called filtration points have disappeared. The current charges are merely for “exceeding their authority.”
At the same time, the victims of the “cleansings” are subjected to unprecedented administrative harassment, dismissed from their jobs for refusing to withdraw their statements. This is happening to the victims most brutally mistreated and to their parents, who complained to Moscow-based journalists and human rights campaigners about the extreme violence of the local militia and OMON. Nor have the lawyers who agreed to represent the victims’ interests been having an easy time. When Stanislav Markelov from Moscow and Vasilii Syzganov from Vladimir arrived in Blagoveshchensk at the request of Moscow human rights associations and met their clients, a drunken hooligan with a knife rushed into the house. It was only because the owner of the apartment, Vitalii Kozakov, took the blows on himself that the lawyers were saved. Kozakov's blood was all over the apartment and staircase, but when the militia were called they turned and drove away, refusing even to arrest the knifeman. At this point the attacker spilled the beans; he admitted the militia themselves had instructed him to provoke a drunken brawl. They wanted a pretext to arrest the lawyers defending the victims of their own earlier violence.
The victims of Blagoveshchensk have formed a Society of Victims of Filtration, Cleansing, and Militia Violence, appealing to all citizens who have had similar experiences:
We have no rights, just like you. In those dark December days we knew what the civilian population of Chechnya has been through, because we experienced it all ourselves. Militia violence in our city marked the beginning of heavy-handed actions in many regions of Russia. They are starting off in small towns, but in no time at all filtration will also be seen in the great cities. We no longer have any confidence in the state authorities or the courts. We can rely only on ourselves and on mutual help from others in our situation. We ask you, no matter who you are, no matter where you live, no matter what your nationality is, to contact us. We must stop this now, before we are all destroyed.
The hunger strike of the Heroes, which began on July 6, continues. On July 12 officialdom finally showed itself in the person of Ombudsman Vladimir Lukin, by which time some of those fasting had already had to be replaced. His first act was to ask the journalists to leave. Out we trooped. His visit coincided with the arrival of a delegation of widows of Heroes who had come to show their solidarity.
Larisa Golubeva's husband, Dmitry Golubev, was a submarine captain first class and Hero of the Soviet Union. He was the commander of the second atomic submarine ever built in the USSR. “When he was dying, he kept saying to me, ‘What are you crying for? You will have everything. You will be well looked after. You are the wife of a Hero.’ Of course, that was not what I was crying about, but he could never have imagined how things would turn out.”
Commanding only the second Russian atomic submarine to be built was never going to be good for your health, as the commanders of those vessels were being experimented on. Larisa spent her life in garrisons: Kamchatka, Severomorsk, Sebastopol … It was a life of waiting, and hoping that her husband would return alive from his ordeals.
What is Larisa, who shared everything with her heroic husband, entitled to now? Well, nothing. Under the new law, a Hero's widow is entitled to no supplement to her pension. A state that has sunk into unbelievable corruption, bringing equally unbelievable wealth to its top functionaries, is cutting back the budget. The benefit payable to the Hero's widow is so low that she is better off renouncing it and settling for the standard old-age pension, because you can't have both. That is what Larisa has done.
She has her old-age pension, and also receives the president's monthly 500 rubles [$17] as a survivor of the siege of Leningrad. In total, she gets 3,200 rubles a month [$112]. That is the legacy of a Hero.
The hunger strikers have no regrets about their past, but they do regret the present and fear for the future. Their protest will end, they are certain, with the opening of a genuine dialogue between the citizens of Russia and the state authorities.
Gennadii Kuchkin is a fifty-one-year-old Hero of the Soviet Union from Kinel in Samara Province. As a senior lieutenant he found himself fighting in Afghanistan with the tank corps. He took part in 147 battles, and in 1983 was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. Only yesterday he flew in from Samara to join his comrades’ strike.
“As I understand it, the aim is to force our state authorities to be honorable.” For all his 147 battles, he is still an innocent. He is a romantic, and he needs to be, in order still to feel like a hero when his country spits on his heroism. Gennadii had to wait ten years after the award of his title to get an apartment, living in other people's accommodations with his family and his wounds. It took twelve years before he got a telephone.
“The lying begets cynicism,” he says. “I sometimes give talks in schools. What are the children interested in nowadays? Money, mainly. They want to know if I am a rebel fighter. They generally ask me two questions: how many people have I killed, and how much money do I get for that? When they find out how much I get, they no longer regard me as a hero. They lose interest. It is a very fundamental question, of course, who makes up the elite in Russia nowadays. The elite are anybody with money or power, from the boss of a small district like ours up to our First Citizen.”
I personally asked Boris Nemtsov of the Union of Right Forces to go and visit the hunger strikers: “Go out there and give them some moral support!” He was not very taken by the idea and said, rather oddly, “They will expect me to bring them something. I can't go there empty-handed.” Nemtsov assumed they would be expecting him to bring good news of some kind from the regime, but they would have been happy if he had just brought himself because he wanted to be there.
Our society isn't a society anymore. It is a collection of windowless, isolated concrete cells. In one are the Heroes; in another are the politicians of Yabloko; in a third there is Zyuganov, the leader of the Communists; and so on. There are thousands who together might add up to be the Russian people, but the walls of our cells are impermeable. If somebody is suffering, he is upset that nobody else seems concerned. If, in other cells at the same time, anybody is in fact thinking about him, it leads to no action, and they only really remember he had a problem when their own situation becomes completely intolerable.
The authorities do everything they can to make the cells even more impermeable, sowing dissent, inciting some against others, dividing and ruling. And the people fall for it. That is the real problem. That is why revolution in Russia, when it comes, is always so extreme. The barrier between the cells collapses only when the negative emotions within them are ungovernable.
The Heroes have suddenly been invited to the session of the Soviet of the Federation where the legislation relating to them is to be discussed. They were as pleased as children who had been bought a long-anticipated bicycle. Burkov kept saying, “The ice is breaking up. I told you, the authorities are beginning to communicate with us. Excellent!”
Their delegation sat for several hours in the Soviet of the Federation, gradually beginning to feel that something was wrong. The law was put to the vote. Burkov jumped up and shouted to the whole chamber, “And what about us? Is nobody going to listen to what we have to say?”
They were reluctantly allowed to speak. Clearly nobody had been expecting actually to have to listen to them. They had been invited merely to get them to call off their hunger strike.
Burkov began speaking, but was rudely interrupted. The chairman of the Soviet of the Federation, Sergey Mironov, irritably put the legislation to the vote and the senators passed it. Mironov invited the Heroes to his office and assured them that the Soviet understood their concerns, but that those upstairs had a different view. He repeatedly asked them to abandon the hunger strike, after which “it will be possible to begin a dialogue with the administration.” They left feeling they had been humiliated, and returned to their little cell.
The trial of the National Bolsheviks continues as the procurator reads out the indictment. The state has decided to use the case to establish the fundamental concept of collective guilt, something not heard of since Stalin's show trials. In later years, Soviet and Russian procurators and judges have always been at pains to personalize guilt as far as possible, distancing themselves from totalitarian practices, but in 2005 they are with us again. Procurator Smirnov gabbled out the names of the National Bolsheviks, claiming that they had all “participated in mass disturbances involving violent behavior … a criminal plan had been devised to infiltrate … obstructed agents of the Federal Security Service … leaflets containing antipresidential sentiments … demonstrating manifest disrespect for society … chanted unlawful slogans about the removal from office …”
During a break in proceedings, defense lawyer Dmitry Agranovsky commented, “I have participated in a great many trials, and invariably the guilt has related to specific individuals. Here, however, they clearly intend to give a precedent-setting verdict based on collective guilt for dissidence. This is a political fiat from above.”
We are sometimes called a society of millions of slaves and a handful of masters, and told that is how it will be for centuries to come, a continuation of the serf-owning system. We often speak about ourselves in that way too, but I never do.
The courage of the Soviet dissidents brought forward the collapse of the Soviet system, and even today, when the mobs chant “We love Putin!” there are individuals who continue to think for themselves and use what opportunities exist to express their view of what is happening in Russia, even when their attempts seem futile.
A rare example of an intelligent, detailed, articulate protest has come from a campaigner of the Human Rights Association in Tyumen. Vladimir Grishkevich has sent the Constitutional Court a supplementary deposition to his complaint about the unconstitutional nature of the law on appointing regional leaders. He agrees to its being considered together with complaints from Committee 2008, Yabloko and a group of independent deputies of the Duma. His statement is a very important fact in the history of our country and will show that by no means everybody remained silent in 2005, even though no revolution has come about. Moreover, those who raised their voices were not only to be found in Moscow. After a long and detailed analysis of the illegality of Putin's move to nominate governors, he concludes:
On the basis of the above, I request the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation to give an official assessment of the circumstances described above in which the federal law was adopted and signed. I refer to the law “On the Introduction of Changes and Additions to the Federal Law ‘On the General Principles of Organization of Legislative (Representative) and Executive Organs of State Power of Constituent Territories of the Russian Federation’ and in the federal law ‘On the Basic Guarantees of Electoral Rights and the Right to Participate in Referenda of Citizens of the Russian Federation.’ ”
The court failed to respond. Society failed to protest.
Our people seem to wake up only when it hits them where it hurts. Revolutionary passions run high only when money is involved.
In Ryazan, the trade union of the Khimvolokno factory mounted a picket outside the provincial government offices. The trade unionists do not want their enterprise to be closed. They are certain that the synthetic-fiber plant is being deliberately bankrupted to enable someone to buy it on the cheap. A directive was first issued to cease production for three months, then to cease production completely on the grounds that it was losing money.
This was when the workers woke up. There are very few jobs in the town and the factory's management informed twenty-five workers, who included members of the trade union committee, that they were being put on the minimum wage of 800 rubles [$28] a month. The workers from Khimvolokno found no support, however, not even in Ryazan, because they had never supported anyone in the past. They just stood there picketing the government offices, with nobody paying any attention.
Ulianovsk is a more militant town. A sticker protest has begun there: “No more bureaucracy, no more Putin!” It is being organized by a national youth movement called Defense, together with the local ecological and youth organizations. The activists covered the town in little labels reading, “No more lies!,” “Say no now and fight back!” They call for nonviolent civil protests against a bureaucracy that is leading their region and the country to ruin. They are not trying to defend their pay packet. Theirs is a prologue to revolution.
Why Ulianovsk? The province is one of the poorest, turned into a mere source of raw materials for big companies based elsewhere and, worse, into a rubbish tip for waste materials. This is thanks to the efforts of the governor, effectively imposed on the voters by the presidential administration, that great hero of Chechnya, Gen. Vladimir Shamanov. Under him the crime bosses of Ulianovsk came out of the underground. Shamanov openly depended on them and was surrounded by ex-soldiers who had retrained as gangsters, a minor sideways movement in Russia. Shamanov himself was thoroughly stupid and incapable of managing civilians.
Wrapping themselves in democratic slogans and brandishing the support of Putin, these supposed helpmates of the state openly robbed, and continue to rob, the province, even though Shamanov has now been transferred to the presidential administration.
The Defense movement in Ulianovsk is like a local fragment of the Ukrainian protest movement. Members of Defense believe that, within the framework of the law, they can hold nonviolent demonstrations, protest meetings, pickets, and distribute leaflets and now stickers. Defense in Ulianovsk has rallied the local youth wing of Yabloko and of the Union of Right Forces, and the ecological organization Green Yabloko.
In Moscow a demonstration took place outside the Interior Ministry to protest against brutality on the part of the law enforcement agencies. About twenty people turned out. Their banners read, “No more secret orders! Press charges against those guilty of violence in Blagoveshchensk and other towns and villages.” The demonstrators demanded the resignation of Rashid Nurgaliev, minister of the interior of Russia, the bringing of a criminal prosecution against Rafail Divaev, minister of the interior of Bashkiria, and against all the officers and officials of the law enforcement agencies guilty of acts of violence.
The protest was against attempts by the militia to intimidate the Russian people, but the Russian people didn't show up. It lasted two hours. Nobody came out from the Interior Ministry to speak to the protesters, because they only worry about mass demonstrations. If the numbers are not there, they laugh at us and go about their business.
The eleventh day of the hunger strike. The participants are very weak. What lies ahead? The regime is silent. Do they need some of these people to die? Most of the hunger strikers are old, disabled, or ill. Still not a single politician has come to speak to them.
The hunger-striking Heroes face a stalemate. The authorities contemptuously ignore all their suggestions.
“What's the point?” I ask Svetlana Gannushkina in bewilderment. We are talking shortly before a meeting, attended by Putin, of the improbably named Presidential Commission for the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights, of which Svetlana is a member. “Why can't they just listen? Why do they always insist on doing everything in the worst possible manner? Why do they force one stalemate after another?”
“Why? Because they want to create a country it is impossible to live in,” Svetlana replies sadly. She is the only member of the human rights commission brave enough to agree to hand Putin the Heroes’ appeal. Perhaps the barin is a good man after all.
This afternoon a jury at the Moscow City Court acquits Vyacheslav Ivankov, also known as Yaponchik, of shooting dead two Turkish citizens in a Moscow restaurant in 1992. All the television stations lead with this, with live link-ups to the court. They also report that Mr. Ivankov is intending to write a book. The hunger strike doesn't get a mention, and the trial of the National Bolsheviks gets just a couple of words here and there. We hear nothing of what they might be planning to do if they were to get out of prison.
How can we go on living such a lie? We pretend that justice has been done in the case of Yaponchik, we rejoice that justice was not done in the case of Khodorkovsky We applaud both these just outcomes. This is not your enigmatic Russian soul; this is the long-standing tradition of living a lie about which Solzhenitsyn wrote long ago, mixed with a lazy refusal to take your backside off your chair in a warm kitchen until they take the warm kitchen away from you. At that point you might join a revolution, but not before.
The fourteenth day of the hunger strike. Surkov, Putin's chief ideologist, calls them blackmailers: “We will not allow anyone to twist our arms.”
Actually, what has Surkov to do with anything? Why should it depend on this political manipulator, who has to his credit only the virtual achievements of United Russia and the bloody Chechenization of Chechnya—the same Surkov who dares to think this makes him a political heavyweight—why should it depend on him whether 204 Heroes of the country get a hearing or not?
*
In the course of the hunger strike, they have written many letters, sending them by fax, e-mail, and even by hand to the offices of important persons. They have given many interviews mentioning these letters, although few were ever broadcast.
What this episode has demonstrated is that many of our most prominent figures, leaders, and deputy leaders of parties inside the Duma and out, of movements and alliances, and even the leader of the Soviet of the Federation, Sergey Mironov himself, who, according to the Constitution, is the third most powerful man in the country, seem to sympathize with the hunger strikers, their demands, their feelings, their desire to serve the country. They do so, however, only in private. Publicly, for the television cameras and information agencies, for the president, they stand united in opposition to it. They voted in favor of the humiliating amendments that sparked this whole confrontation, one that shows no signs of concluding in dialogue.
Why are the independently minded of our political establishment so two-faced? That is the question. Is it not a matter of straightforward blackmail by the administration: if you do not say what we require you to, we will take away your perks?
Nobody wants to go without their perks nowadays. Our political “elite” is profoundly infected with cowardice and scared stiff of losing its power. Not of losing the respect of the people, just its seat. They have no more to them than that.
*
A terrorist act in the Chechen village of Znamenskoye. A vehicle was seen at the central crossroads, in the front passenger seat of which was a dead body. The militia were called, but, when they approached the vehicle, it was blown up, killing fourteen of them. A child was also killed, and many, including young boys, were injured.
It turned out that in the early evening of July 13 Alexey Semenenko, twenty-three, was abducted from the hill village of Novoshchedrinskaya. The kidnapping took place in front of his younger sisters. In recent months, Alexey and his young wife had been saving up to get out of Chechnya. His relatives had lived in Novoshchedrinskaya for a hundred years and it was a large, united, hardworking family, but what could they do? The more firmly Kadyrov becomes ensconced, the greater the lawlessness and the more remote the hope that life will come right. That was what Alexey had decided.
He decided to take seasonal employment reaping the harvest, which can bring in good money in a short time. Alexey returned home from the fields on July 13 to find four armed men in combat fatigues waiting for him. They were Chechens and had arrived in two silver UAZ off-road vehicles. Nearly everyone in Novoshchedrinskaya is certain these were Kadyrov's troops. Anyone living in Chechnya can distinguish Kadyrov's from Yamadaev's troops, the OMON from Baisarov's or Kokiev's troops (all of them paramilitaries of the “Chechen Federal Security Units,” as they are called) by the vehicles they drive and the weapons they favor. The paramilitaries talked to Alexey, then bundled him into one of the vehicles and drove off. The neighbors memorized the number plates, but they turned out to be false.
The following morning, the family notified the authorities of the abduction, and Chechen local militiamen who had known Alexey from childhood spent two days looking for him in all the security subdivisions. They didn't find him. At this point the local procurator's office scented danger and reverted to its usual cataleptic state.
On July 19, the first person to approach the vehicle was a nearby militiaman. He opened the door and saw a corpse in the passenger seat, which, judging by the smell and state of decomposition, had been dead for a considerable time. He also noticed that the body had bullet wounds to the face.
He went to call reinforcements, and thereby saved his own life. When a crowd of his colleagues arrived to inspect the vehicle, it was blown up. The button was pressed by someone who could see it and intended to kill as many militiamen as possible. After the explosion, Sergey Abramov, the Moscow-appointed Chechen prime minister, made some dark remarks about Basaev and Umarov, but did not himself go near the scene. A state of mourning was declared.
The Semenenko family, meanwhile, had been continuing to scour Chechnya for Alexey. Two days later they were visited at home and asked to go to Mozdok in neighboring North Ossetia to identify a body. All murder victims are taken to the forensic medical center there, as Chechnya does not have one of its own.
Tatyana Semenenko, Alexey's mother, still not suspecting any link with the bomb in Znamenskoye, found the victims of the explosion laid out in the mortuary refrigerators, except for one bag of remains that had been dumped on the floor in a puddle of water.
In this bag, which was being treated as if it contained the body of a terrorist, she found the remains of her son. She was able to identify him only from a tattooed letter “L” on his arm. There was no face to speak of. The family subsequently buried this arm and the head. The militiaman who had first approached the vehicle, and seen Alexey's body while it was still in one piece, said it had been dressed in combat fatigues. His kidnappers had evidently dressed him this way before shoving him in the mined vehicle.
That is the end of the story, The Semenenkos have nowhere to turn. There was no public reaction. Nobody—not Kadyrov, Alkhanov, or Kozak— bothered to offer their condolences to the family. Nobody offered to compensate them for the death of their son. Nobody tried to pay them just to keep quiet. A criminal case in respect of the abduction of Alexey Semenenko was opened and closed, but they didn't even bother to open a criminal case in respect of his murder. Because he killed militiamen, Semenenko is officially classified as a terrorist. Admittedly, he was dead at the time of committing this crime.
There are really only two possibilities as to what happened. If those who kidnapped Alexey were indeed Kadyrov's troops, as everybody in the village believes, then the Kadyrov gunmen may themselves have staged this terrorist act, knowing that for as long as there is terrorism, paramilitaries are in work. If peace were to return, they would all be thrown straight in prison.
The second possibility is that the paramilitaries sold Alexey's body to the fighters, Basaev's or others. This is also plausible, because it has long been known that the dividing line between Kadyrov's troops and Basaev's is increasingly permeable, despite Kadyrov Junior's endless idiotic talk of how he dreams of shooting Basaev. Those preferred by Putin's regime are the most sly, cynical, and criminal elements in the land.
Who now in Chechnya is protesting about the saga of Alexey Semenenko? Nobody. His family are terrified of Kadyrov's paramilitaries because his two younger sisters saw the faces of the abductors. It is more prudent to forget their son than to risk making waves. These are the effects of Putin's war, on the way people think in Chechnya, and it is a way of thinking that is rapidly spreading to the rest of Russia. You find a similar blind panic gripping the families of those abducted throughout the North Caucasus, in all those towns and villages where Chechnya-style mass “cleansings” have been taking place.
The more violent the rampaging of the security agencies, the higher Putin's approval rating, for the simple reason that very few people want to risk life and limb by opposing him.
Such is daily life in Russia today. Crimes, a lack of honest investigation, and even a lack of any attempt at it. The result is the endless replication of tragedies and terrorism.
For the first time in recent years, my newspaper refused to print the story about Alexey Semenenko. Novaya Gazeta wants to stay out of trouble, so it is best not to give Ramzan Kadyrov too much grief, since he is in favor with the president.
Today Putin received human rights campaigners and members of his Presidential Commission on Human Rights in the Kremlin. Svetlana Gannushkina was not allowed to speak, but handed Putin the letter from the hunger-striking Heroes. The matter was also raised directly by Alexander Auzan, another activist present. Putin was not pleased. He stated, “Everything has settled down there now. I have had a report.” Auzan was insistent, however, and repeated what he thought the president ought to be told on the subject. Ella Pamfilova, the chairwoman, became impatient and demanded that no further time be spent on the topic. The argument came to an end and Putin continued to regard the Heroes as part of the enemy opposition.
The discussion then moved on to ecological matters. The human rights campaigners missed their one opportunity to speak openly to him. Many of them are too afraid they might not be invited back.
According to Svyatoslav Zabelin, cochairman of the Socio-Ecological Alliance,
Putin raised three issues: first, how best to inform citizens about reforms being implemented; second, how the Social Chamber could be used as a channel to make public opinion more influential; third, how the voluntary sector in Russia could be developed with less reliance on Western resources.
On the second question, about the Social Chamber, the campaigners maintained a collective silence. On the third, Putin unexpectedly announced that he was prepared personally to oblige the government to find ways of empowering voluntary associations by channeling state and private sector resources. He seemed to me to be genuinely concerned that this support should not be seen as an attempt to bribe civil society and public associations. He was being very practical.
On the subject of ecology, I told Putin: “We need public ecological accountability, and public ecological audits. We have neither of these things at present. As a result, there are quite extraordinary things going on in the state sector. In 2002 the public sector had four ecological inspectors per district, but in 2005 there are four districts per inspector. How can we hope to avoid violation of ecological guidelines without public participation?
“We also find extraordinary liberties being taken with ecological audit. Here the problem is that businesses are required by law to take reasonable steps to ensure that industrial projects are discussed with the public, so that the interests of society and the overall interests of the state are properly considered. This is simply not happening. Most worryingly, the worst offenders are those companies in which the state has the largest financial stake.
“One well-known company involved with the pipeline from East Siberia to the Pacific is said to be behaving in a thoroughly devious manner. In order to comply with the requirement for a public ecological audit, it has set up a ‘public’ association of its own and registered it in Moscow. This body has made decisions on what should be done for people living on the coast, what should be done for people in Irkutsk, what should be done for the Buryats, and where it would be in their best interests for the pipeline to pass. When a project of this kind is being built in Russia, there are international repercussions. Their behavior is now common knowledge, there is a lot of fuss, and that can only be to our disadvantage. These companies, in which the state has a substantial presence, need to be told politely that this kind of conduct is just not acceptable.
“We have a system for assessing ecological costs. Eighty-five percent of the private companies we approached were prepared to give us, the public, access to their own ecological accounts: not a single state enterprise would do so.”
Putin replied, “I would like you to understand the logic of the situation in which state organizations find themselves in respect of ecological audit. You have just mentioned one of our most vital projects, comparable in importance with the Baikal-Amur Highway, which took decades to build. I hope this will not be such a mega-project, but its value to the state might eventually be much greater than the BAH itself, which is already struggling to cope with the demands on it. This pipeline gives us an outlet for our energy resources to the markets of the rapidly developing countries of the Asia-Pacific region, to the Chinese market where we are both buyer and seller, to South Asia, Japan, and so forth.
“Let me draw your attention to the fact that our country lost five major seaports in the West after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In effect, we became dependent on the countries through which our energy resources have to pass, and they abuse their geopolitical situation. We come up against this all the time. It is extremely important for Russia to have a direct outlet to other markets. When we were talking about a pipeline from East Siberia directly to Datsin, in China, along the southern end of Lake Baikal, we decided to diverge from that route after taking account of the opinions of ecological associations, ecologists, and inspectors. The cost went up by hundreds of millions of dollars. It was decided to skirt the northern shore of Lake Baikal and go farther to the east.
“These ecological audits should not be allowed to hold back the development of the country and the economy. I do not for a moment question what you have just said. No doubt we need to look very closely at the situation, but one of the ways of attacking us is invariably by raising ecological issues. When we started building a port adjacent to Finland, our partners in the neighboring countries (and I have this from reliable sources) put money into ecological associations purely in order to torpedo the project, because it would create competition for them in the Baltic. Our partners, including those from Finland, came and inspected ten times, but in the end were unable to find anything to object to. Now the ‘ecological problems’ have moved to the Danish Straits, and there is some objection to the vessels we are using. These are not even Russian vessels, they are leased from international companies. In the Turkish Straits, the Bosporus, there are ‘ecological problems’ too.
“Why do I mention this? I mention it because, of course, we need more contact and trust if we are to interact properly with national ecological associations working in the interests of our country, and not as agents whom our competitors can use to obstruct the development of our economy. This is precisely why I said that when this kind of ecological work is financed from abroad, it raises suspicions and ends up compromising all sorts of voluntary associations. That is what I am talking about. We need associations that help to resolve our own problems, so that major decisions can be taken optimally. For that, of course, we need them to have more contact with state organizations too.”
ZABELIN: “Certainly, the most important thing is establishing contact, and our national interests. As far as that great pipeline is concerned, the main thing is that it should be built. No reputable ecological association is saying it is not needed. We are talking about specific issues of routing and where the terminal should be located. The current choice, purely from the viewpoint of minimizing ecological damage, is the very worst option. There are plenty of alternatives, and I am prepared simply to hand over to you the analysis of those scientists in the Far East who say there are other options that are more beneficial economically, socially, and ecologically. We are partners in this, just as in respect of public ecological monitoring. As regards ecological audits, people just need to obey the law. We have an excellent law on ecological auditing, dating from 1995. It needs to be observed.”
PUTIN:“I would like to return to this in the future. I think it would be right to establish a more sensitive mechanism for interacting with our national ecological associations, because we cannot afford to make mistakes, and at the same time we cannot allow this issue to be used, as I have said, as a lever by our competitors. Just look at what is happening in the Caspian: Lukoil had only to erect an oil rig there to be told the ecology meant they couldn't. None of the other companies there have technologies as clean as ours. It is more expensive, but we have taken that on board. The same thing is going on now in the Baltic Sea.”
In Astrakhan, as throughout the country, the authorities are waging a war on the people for money and property. There the main weapon is arson. It is a war in which people die, looters sift the ruins, and ordinary people become homeless refugees.
The Ostroumovs are the last people not to have been burned out of their part of Maksakova Street, where an opulent house is being built in the prestigious old town. Of course, building sites are to be found now in all our cities; there are wealthy people around. The rules for how things should be regulated in such cases are that the local authorities allocate land to the developers and, if anybody is living on it, they are rehoused. After that the site is fenced off and building commences.
That is not quite how things are done in Astrakhan. A company called Astsyrprom obtained the rights to a development site on Maksakova Street. Unfortunately, it was covered with buildings where people were living in their recently privatized apartments. Astsyrprom brought in a subcontractor, a certain Nurstroy, both to build the new house and to move the current owners out. At first Nurstroy negotiated terms with some and bought their houses, but then the approach suddenly changed. Nurstroy began offering people in exchange apartments that were manifestly unacceptable. The Ostroumovs were offered a one-room apartment for the five of them.
When the residents began to dig their heels in and make demands, the response was an ultimatum, followed by military-style action. The director of Nurstroy, Mr. Timofeyev, told Alexander Merzhuev straight to his face, “I'll burn you out.” Shortly afterward his house was indeed consumed by fire. The conclusion of the fire department's inspection team was arson using an accelerant but the evidence was deemed insufficient for a prosecution. The problem of the encumbrance of the left-hand side of Nurstroy's building plot had been resolved. The Ostroumovs occupy the right-hand part of the site.
The Kosa District, close to the Astrakhan Kremlin, is lined with historic houses from which you can see the Volga, that same Volga in which, in the seventeenth century, the local brigand Stenka Razin drowned his ill-starred bride. No. 53 Maxim Gorky Street is a fine merchant's villa, which even today, after the fire in March, is still magnificent.
Last winter investors, as they called themselves, began visiting the people here. They said, “We will move you to a new house.” People said, “Thanks, only we want to stay in this area. We are used to living here.”
On March 20, seventy-eight-year-old Lyudmila Rozina was visited by “investors” for the last time. “The old lady condemned us,” Alexey Glazunov, a pensioner who used to live in the no longer existent Apartment 7, tells me. “She said she would move, but only into this new upmarket apartment building they are building next door.”
That night the villa was set alight from all four sides. In two or three minutes the place was roaring like a furnace. Some old ladies jumped from the windows, breaking limbs, but others didn't manage even that. Lyudmila was burned in her bed, because the walls of her apartment had been doused with accelerant, as the subsequent investigation revealed.
Lyudmila's son, fifty-five-year-old Alexander Rozin, survived and was taken to the hospital with severe burns. Three days later an unidentified criminal arrived at the hospital, supposedly bearing humanitarian aid from the mayor's office. The food brought was poisoned, as the later inquiry showed, and on April 12 Rozin died. Anna Kurianova, eighty-six, who had been carried alive from the burning building, succumbed to the stress and died shortly afterward.
The appalling truth in Astrakhan is that, in recent months, six people have died in fires, and seventeen houses have been destroyed in confirmed arson attacks. There have been a total of forty-three fires, but it is not easy to obtain the rigorous investigation that might lead to a criminal prosecution. Most cases relating to them are immediately closed, or there is a complete, mysterious lack of evidence, which means they are never opened. Meanwhile, the construction of prestigious houses, casinos, restaurants, and commercial offices on sites cleared by fires continues apace.
Viktor Shmedkov is the head of the Kirov District Interior Ministry office, and it is in his territory that most of the instances of what is known in Astrakhan as “commercial arson” occur.
“I would not say that the problem is too serious,” he opines, looking straight into the eyes of old ladies who had been left in the street in their nightdresses. “The Kirov District Office is pursuing five cases relating to five instances of arson,” he continues. “I would not say that the militia are not doing all they can. The causes are being investigated, and all possibilities considered …” The eyes of the militiaman suddenly widen and he says, lowering his voice, “Even the most audacious …”
The “audacious” hypothesis is that the entourage of Mayor Bozhenov are party to the arson. They have a commercial interest in clearing the city, sharing out real estate between the mayor's deputies and the commercial organizations that support them, and thus repaying “election debts.” Somebody, after all, paid for the mayor's election campaign. It was an investment. Now it is time for them to realize their profit.
The militia bosses admit there is nothing they can do about the wealthy brigands of Astrakhan, who enjoy an incestuous relationship with the city administration. They are powerless in the face of the total criminalization of the top level of government. The laws do not operate. There was a time when the militia used to catch brigands, and knew it was doing its job. Now the person appointed to guarantee the effective functioning of the law is himself a brigand. The arson has been going on for half a year, and yet no inquiry has been set up to look into those far from random fires. Nobody wants to piece together the overall picture of serial commercial arson.
“What happened after our fire?” Alexey Glazunov asks. He is a member of the Society of Astrakhan Fire Victims. “The chronology is this: the fire at fifty-three Maxim Gorky Street began at half past three in the morning,” Glazunov points out. “At around nine a.m. workmen arrived with sledgehammers and started knocking everything down, wrecking what the fire had not destroyed, right in front of the militia. During the day, those victims who were not hospitalized went to see the mighty Madame Svetlana Kudryavtseva, accommodation tsaritsa of Astrakhan, the mayor's deputy for building and architecture, and she made it clear that she was glad the house was being demolished. She said the city needs to get rid of these ancient buildings, and that the victims would be rehoused in a hotel.”
What is the moral of this story? The elite are interested only in getting their hands on money and property, which they can do only if they first get their hands on political power. They see an opportunity, and the citizen ceases even to be noticed. You can burn citizens if they get in the way. You can dump them in a slum “hotel” if they fail to die, and they can die there. There is a moral vacuum at the heart of the present political system in Russia, and in Astrakhan it has reached crisis point.
Another hearing for the National Bolsheviks, and cross-questioning of the witnesses begins. The judge invites Natalia Kuznetsova to say how the National Bolsheviks behaved on December 14. She works at the Kitai-Gorod internal affairs office, close to the presidential administration's building, from where she observed what was going on. Natalia proves to be a guileless woman and admits that actually she had only seen the “disorder” on television. She does, however, have firsthand evidence relating to the metal detector, that, according to the charge against them, they wrecked and which is the main item in the claim for damages from the president's residential services office. Well, anyway, this metal detector, Natalia testifies, had been mended by the morning of December 15, and has been working fine ever since. Has Judge Shikhanov taken that in? Has the main charge just self-destructed? Can the accused all be released? No. You cannot deprive Russian young people who have dared to question the fairness of the authorities of their right to go to prison, and they must be fully reassured on that score. Especially if they are starting to get ideas about politics.
Everybody has justified complaints about the militia, but they did actually manage, after searching for more than a year, to catch Sergey Melnikov, extortionist and right-hand man of the head of the Togliatti mafia. The jubilant militiamen went to seek powers to detain him from the office of the procurator general of Moscow, and Vladimir Yudin, deputy procurator of Moscow, told them to get lost. He refused to issue a warrant because, in his view, the extortionist Melnikov was not a danger to society. The grounds written by Yudin on the rejected application are “There is no incontrovertible proof of guilt.”
The gangster was duly set free. This is the same Yudin who concocted the charges against the National Bolsheviks and insisted that they should be kept in prison for month after month, and fettered in court, because of the immense danger they pose to society. That is the reality of selective justice. Criminals are freed while political prisoners get put in chains, thrown in prison, kept in cages. The authorities rely on criminal elements to prop up the system of state power.
That this really is their doctrine recently received further confirmation when the presidential administration created a clone to oppose the National Bolsheviks. It is called Nashi (Our People), and was cobbled together in February at a meeting between Vasilii Yakemenko, leader of that earlier clone, Marching Together, and Vladislav Surkov. Yakemenko is the “federal commissar” of Nashi, which is the presidential administration's very own street movement to insure against revolution. The stormtroopers of the Nashi youth movement are soccer hooligans armed with knuckle-dusters and chains. So far they have confined themselves to assaulting the National Bolsheviks, and the authorities prevent the investigative agencies from bringing criminal charges against them. They have two units, one consisting of thugs who support the Central Sports Club of the army soccer team, and the other of thugs who support the Spartak team. They all have an impeccable record in street fighting. Under the leadership of Vasya the Hitman and Roma the Stickler, thugs who support Spartak, Nashi has also set up a private security agency called White Shield. Vasya the Hitman is one of our most violent soccer hooligans, and it is his followers who organize attacks on the National Bolsheviks. They have twice occupied the National Bolsheviks’ bunker, from where Vasya once gave a press conference. Vasya (known on his passport as Vasilii Stepanov) and Roma had a number of criminal cases pending against them, which were first put on hold, and then kicked into the long grass.
Roma was even seen at the famous shish kebab meeting between Putin and the “Nashists,” when our president was lecturing them about how young people are already Russia's civil society. When this obnoxious event, dreamed up by Surkov, was shown on television, one National Bolshevik who had been beaten up by “unidentified persons” recognized his assailant as Roma the Stickler, known in secular life as Roman Verbitsky
Why did Khodorkovsky come to grief? He was no different from the rest of those who have amassed fabulous fortunes in record time, no different from others who had the opportunity and the inclination. When he was a billionaire, however, he said, “Stop! Yukos will become the most transparent and noncriminal company in Russia, using Western business methods.” He began creating a new Yukos, but all around him people remained at large who had absolutely no desire for transparency, people whose very nature is to work in the shadows, away from the light. They set about devouring Yukos, because light is unwelcome in the midst of darkness.
Discriminating against bad political prisoners in favor of good criminals has deep historical roots in Russian justice and Russian politics. It is not easy to eradicate, but it would be a disgrace to become reconciled to it. The only question is: who is going to protest? There are no meetings outside the Nikulin court. There are plenty of militia, vast numbers of police dogs, but almost nobody to show solidarity with these illegally detained political prisoners: only a small handful of National Bolsheviks, and occasionally Limonov. It is a bacchanalia of indifference.
Khodorkovsky had the best lawyers in the country and they managed to attract supporters for the persecuted oligarch, but the poor have almost nobody. The National Bolsheviks are from lower-income groups, the children of research workers, engineers, the impoverished Russian intelligentsia in general. They are high school and college students. Occasionally a lone human rights campaigner turns up, but that is the extent of their support.
At 4:00 a.m. today in Syktyvkar, capital of the northern republic of Komi, the editorial offices of a democratic opposition newspaper, Courier Plus, were burned down. The building also accommodated two oppositional television programs, Tele-Courier and The Golden Mean, produced by Nikolai Moiseyev, a local Yabloko Party member and deputy of the city council.
Moiseyev was highly critical of the mayor of Syktyvkar, Sergey Ka-tunin, and on July 14 he and a group of other deputies tried to strip the mayor of his powers, but he fought them off. In the procurator's office they have no doubt that it was arson; Moiseyev recently had the door of his apartment and his car set on fire. The previous Syktyvkar opposition newspaper, Stefanov Boulevard, ceased to exist in August 2002 when it too was burned out.
Jihad in Russia. Again. The beginning of September will see the sixth anniversary of the “counterterrorist operation” in Chechnya. Peaceful life, according to the Kremlin's propaganda, has long since returned to the towns and villages, and almost all the fighters they wanted to get have been put out of action by the pro-federal forces. But what is this? Jihad?
Against whom? Nor is this the first jihad to be declared in Chechnya in the eleven years since the first Chechen war began. They have been declared, they have been called off.
This time it is jihad against Wahhabis and terrorists, and the official line is that it was declared by the pro-Moscow boss of the republic's Muslims, Mufti Sultan Mirzaev. He summoned the mullahs of all the districts for a pep talk at which, in the presence of the commanders of all the Chechen security units (Yamadaev, Kadyrov, Alkhanov, Ruslan, et al.), he read out the directive. It means that now the troops of Yamadaev, Kadyrov, Kokiev, and the rest, and Chechen militiamen, can with a clear conscience murder other Chechens and, needless to say, non-Chechens, if they suspect them of terrorism or Wahhabism. There will be no need for court proceedings or investigations. They can also be sure that, as Muslims, they are doing the right thing. Mirzaev went so far as to declare that he was prepared to take up arms himself.
Given that all these Chechen paramilitaries and their commanders are technically federal soldiers subject to the law of Russia, which does not recognize jihad, this would seem to mark a further stage in “Chech-enizing” the war.
So why has jihad been declared today? After the events at the hill village of Borozdinovskaya on the border of Chechnya and Dagestan (a brutal “cleansing” on June 4, during which Yamadaev's troops abducted eleven people and carried out mass robbery, murder, and arson), hundreds of the inhabitants fled to Dagestan. There was, however, great consternation among all these state cutthroats. In Chechnya the Russian-imposed system of extrajudicial rough justice and executions looked like being under threat.
For a long time the arrangement has been, “We kill those you tell us to, and in return you look after us.” “We” refers to the foot soldiers. “You” refers primarily to the Yamadaevs and to Ramzan Kadyrov. These are the field commanders of Chechenization, the protagonists of a civil war pitting Chechen against Chechen, for which success they have been given federal epaulets, weapons, and immunity from prosecution.
After the Borozdinovskaya incident, the rank-and-file soldiers of Chechenization demanded an additional indulgence for working as hired killers. Ramzan Kadyrov fixed it with the mufti, who agreed to declare jihad. For some of the Russian state's Chechen hitmen, this is very important. They feel much better with the backing of a jihad. Much better means much less inhibited.
Confirmation of this was not long in coming. The very evening jihad was declared, the hitmen celebrated by committing a murder in the hill village of Shelkovskaya, in the Yamadaevs’ territory. It was a murder of exceptional brazenness and brutality.
At about 10 p.m. several silver Niva off-roaders drove up to the house of Vakhambi Satikhanov, a teacher of Arabic and the fundamentals of Islam at the local school and the forty-year-old father of a large family. Armed Chechens wearing camouflage fatigues took him some one hundred meters from his house and drew their Nivas up in a circle to form a small arena. His neighbors and fellow villagers tried to intervene, but the paramilitaries threatened to shoot them. Throughout the night people saw cars driving off and others appearing out of the darkness; they heard cries and shooting, but only at dawn did the butchers lift their blockade and drive away. Where the circle had been they found the body of Vakhambi with dozens of knife wounds, his fingers broken, his nails ripped off.
Vakhambi's neighbors are certain that he was murdered by men from the Vostok battalion of the Central Intelligence Directorate of GHQ. Its commander, Sulim Yamadaev, was awarded the title of Hero of Russia by Putin after the atrocities in Borozdinovskaya, thereby giving the highest possible sanction to what Yamadaev's paramilitaries had done there.
The declaration of jihad in Chechnya is further proof that the republic is allowed to live by customary law, to take life in defiance of Russian law. How does this differ from the lawless executions of Maskhadov's time?
The silence and failure to take corrective action are also the surest sign that the jihad has the tacit blessing of Putin himself. It is simply one more step along the dead-end road of Chechenization that Putin is traveling. Now the entire muftiate of Chechnya is implicated, just as at one time the Russian Orthodox Church was complicit in sanctifying the crimes of the Stalin and Khrushchev eras.
Life is savage now, even more savage than in the Soviet period, but the Russian people appear not to mind. Nobody has called upon the procurator general to declare the jihad null and void.
The mysterious deaths of people very close to the state authorities continue. In Sochi, Pyotr Semenenko has fallen from a window on the fifteenth floor of the White Nights Hotel. For the past eighteen years he had been the CEO of Russia's largest machine tools factory, the Kirov, which produces everything from sanitary ware to the turbines for nuclear submarines.
Semenenko was a major industrial player, and from St. Petersburg to boot. Most people suppose the main reason he was murdered is disagreements over the sharing out of major industrial assets under the Putin system of state capitalism. That he was helped to fall from the fifteenth floor nobody has any doubt.
In the Matrosskaya Tishina prison, meanwhile, Mikhail Khodor-kovsky has been moved from investigative detention cell No. 4, which holds four prisoners, to investigative detention cell No. 1, which holds eleven. He is no longer allowed to receive newspapers or watch television. The reason is undoubtedly his article “Left Turn,” written in prison and published in the newspaper Vedomosti. These are its main ideas:
In spite of all the state's deviousness, those on the left will win in the end. What is more, they will win democratically, in complete accord with the expressed will of a majority of the electorate. There will be a turn to the left, and those who continue to pursue the policies of today's authorities will lose their legitimacy …
We should not overlook the fact that our compatriots have become much cannier than they were ten years ago. People who have been fooled on more than one occasion will not fall for another bluff, no matter how ingenious or eloquently presented. Pulling off the Successor-2008 project is not going to be that easy.
The resources of the post-Soviet authoritarian project in Russia have been exhausted.
Not completely, I fear.
Novaya Gazeta invited our readers to submit questions to Khodor-kovsky by e-mail and published replies that he sent from prison.
SERGEY PANTELEYEV, a student from Moscow: “The bureaucrats have decided to own the state, not to be its hired servants. Am I right in believing that this was the real reason for the seizure of Yukos?”
KHODORKOVSKY: “Dear Sergey, they do not want to own the state, but to own tangible assets, and in particular the most successful company in the country, Yukos. More precisely, they want to get their hands on its income. You are right that the seizure and plundering of Yukos is being carried out behind a smokescreen of talk about the interests of the state. Of course that is not the reality. Destroying Yukos will cause colossal damage to the interests of Russia. These bureaucrats are simply trying to deceive society by presenting their personal interests as those of the state.”
A question from GOBLIN (presumably a pseudonym): “Are you not hurt that your friends fled abroad, instead of ignoring all the risks and coming back to join you and Platon Lebedev?”
KHODORKOVSKY: “ Dear Goblin, being thrown into prison is not something I would wish on my worst enemy, let alone my friends. Accordingly, I am very happy for all my friends who have managed to avoid arrest. What I most regret is that some of my comrades and colleagues have been arrested in connection with the Yukos affair, notably Svetlana Bakhmina, who is the mother of two small children.”
A question from VERA, Tomsk: “You are being forced to start life all over again. Will you find the strength in yourself, or is your life's main work already in the past?”
KHODORKOVSKY: “ Dear Vera, in prison I have understood one simple but difficult truth: the main thing is not to have, but to be. What matters is the human being, not the circumstances in which he finds himself. For me business is a thing of the past, but I am not starting my new life from scratch, because I carry forward an enormous amount of experience. I even thank fate for the unique opportunity of living two lives, despite having paid so heavily for the privilege.”
On the same day, August 9, Khodorkovsky's and Lebedev's lawyers received an order setting a deadline for completing their study of the records of the court hearings. They had been allowed to see them at the Meshchansky district court from July 27, but all kinds of difficulties now began to arise. On July 28, lawyer Krasnov was not given the records to read “for technical reasons.” Lawyer Liptser was also turned down the same day, because part of the record was “currently being studied by the state prosecutor.”
Between July 29 and August 8 the lawyers were able to read only the records for 2004, because those for 2005 were said to be with the state prosecutor. On August 5 the lawyers received through the post a “second” notice (although there had been no first) instructing them to come to the court on August 5 (i.e., that same day), to receive “copies of the records of the court hearing.” When they read these, they discovered that they differed from the original and from the audio recording of the court hearings. Moreover, the supposed copies had not been officially certified, nor was there any numbering of the volumes, internal pagination, or a list of contents. The lawyers were indignant and lodged complaints and an official refusal to accept “copies” that did not correspond to the originals. In reply the court dumped the unsatisfactory “copies” on them through their chambers.
On August 9 permission to view the original records was refused point-blank. In order to prevent the lawyers from being able to complain to Strasbourg, the acting chairman of the court, Kurdyukov, refused to confirm in writing that they would not be given access to the official records of the court hearings and must work solely from the “copies.” They were given until August 25 to comment on them.
Why is Svetlana Bakhmina, whom Khodorkovsky mentioned in one of his replies, being held in prison?
The employees of Yukos saw their colleague's arrest as a warning. It was obvious to practically everybody in the company that, as part of the campaign against Yukos, the procurator general was targeting rank-and-file employees. In fact, if Khodorkovsky was being accused of things that could apply to the vast majority of leading Russian businessmen, then the accusations against Bakhmina could be applied to nearly all ordinary citizens.
Svetlana Bakhmina was paid a salary by Yukos throughout the almost seven years she worked there. According to the accusation concocted by the procurator general, for the greater part of this time she was guilty of a crime under Part 2 of Article 198 (“Non-payment of exceptionally large amounts of tax by private individuals”). Under this article, Bakhmina faces three years in jail, even though she has not in fact broken any law, any more than Yukos has when paying her through a so-called insurance scheme.
These schemes became widespread in Russia during the period when income tax was set at the punitive level of 35 percent, with even more punitive social welfare contributions. The essence of the scheme was that the employee insured his or her life using the company's money, and then received contractual insurance payouts that were effectively the wages due. Since insurance payments were not subject to income tax and were permissible under the tax legislation then in force, the system was used by many private companies, state institutions and ministries, including, let it be noted, the Ministry of Taxation and Excise Revenue.
Now it transpires that you can be imprisoned for this. You could imprison the vast majority of the adult working population for exactly the same offense. If the court finds Bakhmina guilty, the country's workers will be in serious jeopardy. The authorities would be able to bring criminal charges against huge numbers of people at will. No matter how law-abiding you might be, you could still be imprisoned for the tax policies of your employer, even if you knew nothing about them.
*
Putin was supposed to have nominated by today the forty-two citizens he wanted as the leading lights of his Social Chamber. He has been unable to, because those he would like to get, especially those with a reputation for independent-mindedness, have no wish to be involved, while those who do want to get in are too minor to attest to the democratic credentials of Putin, or so servile that the chamber would be a laughingstock.
In Urus-Martan six unidentified paramilitaries have abducted Natasha Khumadova, forty-five, the sister of the Chechen field commander Doku Umarov. Umarov is the second most senior field commander after Basaev. Nothing is known of her fate. In Urus-Martan this is thought to have been the work of Kadyrov troops.
The seizure of counter-hostages is becoming increasingly common, and this was clearly one such maneuver, intended to coerce Umarov into surrendering to federal forces. Some Chechens think this is fair enough, and that primitive methods work better than legal methods. Others are simply waiting for the right moment to wreak revenge on Russia.
In Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, forty-five members of the Union of Communist Youth have held a march for freedom and democracy. They marched through the center of town bearing anti-Putin slogans. People called after them, “Well done! To hell with their Putin!,” but didn't join in. By no means everybody cares for the Communist Youth. People are even rather afraid of them, with their portraits of Che Guevara and his ilk. I would not march under those portraits. These young people have no experience of the consequences of revolution and were born at the very end of the “period of stagnation,” or in the Gorbachev-early Yeltsin era; the ideas of Communism appeal to them.
Kasparov's United Citizens’ Front is aiming to bring everybody together: the Young Communists, provincial supporters of Rodina, what remains of the democratic right, Yabloko supporters in the regions who have given up on Yavlinsky, the National Bolsheviks, and the anarchists. All unite against the regime! After we have won, we can decide what to do next. That's the best program the democrats can manage.
Today, an appeal was heard in Zamoskvorechiye court, with Judge Ye-lena Potapova presiding, against Deputy Procurator Yudin's refusal on July 22 to grant the militia a warrant for the arrest of Sergey Melnikov, a “simple Russian entrepreneur.”
Attempting to challenge the actions of the procurator's office is highly unusual, if not impossible. It is also very rare for Russians to agree to be witnesses against mafiosi, as the retaliation can be brutal and the state authorities give no support. Corruption, now more widespread than ever, ensures that those who can't pay get no protection. Accordingly, when Yudin refused to sanction the arrest of Melnikov, those of his victims who had given evidence were in quite a quandary when the deputy procurator decided to use his powers in favor of their tormentor rather than them.
Judge Potapova was nervous and irritable, but lawyer Alexey Zav-gorodny appealed to her to put herself in the shoes of Melnikov's victims, from whom he had been extorting protection money. Melnikov himself, of course, was not there, but his lawyer and confidante, Natalia Davydova, was.
Ms. Davydova is a loud, sarcastic woman who has been representing and advising some forty members of the Togliatti mafia for several years. The Moscow city procurator's office ought to be taking no nonsense from a lawyer with clients like these, but today its representative in court is Yelena Levshina. Levshina repeats to the court exactly what Davydova has already said. We seem to be listening to a monstrous, well-rehearsed duet, as the two ladies insist to the judge that it is impossible to create a precedent where the procurator might appear not to be in the right: he is always right. It is a reduction to absurdity of the principle that the procurator must be independent of the courts.
Davydova turns up the pathos and paints a touching picture of decent, law-abiding gangsters. Melnikov gave himself up to the militia voluntarily, they heard what he had to say, were sympathetic and let him go on his way. Accordingly, Melnikov had de facto invalidated the federal search warrant, and his detention on July 22 was illegal; Deputy Procurator Yudin had merely restored the rule of law that had been violated. This, of course, is complete poppycock. There is no suggestion in the Melnikov file that he voluntarily surrendered himself to anybody.
Judge Potapova retired to consider her verdict, and soon returned to declare that the procurator is always right, and had been right in this case too when he decided not to sanction Melnikov's arrest, even though a nationwide manhunt had been conducted to find him. She rejected the complaint, and found that the deputy procurator's actions did not infringe the constitutional rights of Melnikov's victims. Other, of course, than the very important right to life.
“Russia's social and political arrangements are profoundly unjust,” Vladimir Ryzhkov tells everyone. He is one of the hopes for a democratic revival, young and from the provinces, which goes down well with the public.
It is, however, precisely these “unjust arrangements” that reinforce social apathy and keep people extremely reluctant to stick their necks out. The habit of considering yourself a “small person” is like the red button in the president's nuclear suitcase—he has only to press it and the country is in his hands. I am quite sure that Putin and his entourage fight corruption solely for PR purposes. In reality, corruption is very much to their advantage; it plays an important role in conditioning people to keep quiet. While the courts are pulled this way and that by the criminals and the politicians, he has nothing to fear.
Today is the third time Poles have been beaten up in Moscow, and this cannot be coincidental. Polish embassy staff and a Polish journalist have been attacked in the course of just a few days.
This is the response of Nashi to the fact that on July 31 the children of Russian diplomats in Warsaw were beaten up after a disco: an outbreak of brotherly Slavonic xenophobia with a political subtext, which is very much in the style of Putin's Russia. The Poles have been getting above themselves recently, people are beginning to say, including some who are perfectly decent and educated. What Lenin called “vulgar great-power chauvinism,” which Putin suffers from, is back in fashion. So, if you beat up three of ours, we beat up three of yours. The fact that the official government response has been very sluggish and formal only shows that they approve.
Yabloko demanded that Putin intervene personally and afford the Polish embassy special protection. The problem is that all the liberals and democrats can do nowadays is appeal to Putin, and appealing to Putin while simultaneously demanding his resignation is just not sensible.
Nikita Belykh, the leader of the Union of Right Forces, has declared that “In the heart of most Russians is an urge to be better people. Our task is to make this clear to them.”
Unfortunately, in the heart of most Russians is an urge to not stand out, and it is particularly in evidence today. We do not want to attract the evil eye of repressive institutions. We want to stay in the shadows. What you get up to in the shadows depends on your personality. Many would not want to emerge under any circumstances; there is a striving for self-improvement, of course, but keeping to the shadows lies much deeper in the heart of every Russian. After all that has happened here in the twentieth century alone, it is perhaps hardly surprising.
An official survey has put Russia seventieth in the world in terms of the use it makes of its human potential.
The latest grassroots initiative to give Putin a third term has come from Adam Imadaev, a deputy of the legislative assembly of the Primorsky Region and well-known political bootlicker. He announces that he has found a loophole in the legislation that would allow Putin to be elected for a third time. The legal committee of the Primorsky Parliament instantly resolved to examine the matter in September.
The Supreme Court has caused a sensation by rescinding the Moscow provincial court's ban on the National Bolshevik Party. Old man Limonov was so touched that he said outside the court building that he had almost had his faith in Russia restored. The procurator general is very upset and has vowed to appeal against the decision to the Presidium of the Supreme Court.
The National Bolsheviks celebrated by infiltrating the inaugural day of Putin's pride and joy the prestigious Moscow Aerospace Show 2005. All sorts of Arab sheikhs had flown in, as had representatives of the Indian military-industrial complex, and King Abdullah II of Jordan, a descendant of the Prophet. Despite incredible security measures, as soon as Putin began his speech opening the show, the National Bolsheviks (God only knows how they had got in) started yelling only 30 meters away from him, “Down with Putin!” and something about his being responsible for Beslan. They were immediately pinioned and bundled off to the militia station in the nearby town of Zhukovskoye.
Three hours later they were released without so much as a fine. They were totally amazed, having expected to end up in jail. It is possible that the militiamen at Zhukovskoye have no time for Putin. Strange things do happen.
Putin got into a bomber at an airfield near the Aerospace Show and flew off with great aplomb to Murmansk Province. The defense people were quietly grinding their teeth; it might be good PR for Putin, but it was a security headache for them. Our generals are well trained, however, and know when not to answer back. They gave orders for Putin to be put in the cockpit, even though it is categorically against regulations. He briefly piloted the aircraft while it was cruising. The state-run mass media wept with delight: Putin was personally inspecting our military aviation! But why? Perhaps to boost his popularity rating?
That evening the Nashists again beat up the National Bolsheviks. There is no point in even trying to talk to the Nashi, none of whom can explain coherently why they have joined the organization. The National Bolsheviks and other left-wing young people are a complete contrast, and highly motivated. Poor people on the left are potentially the most dynamic revolutionary force in Russia. The middle class is very plodding and aspires to no more than a bourgeois way of life, regretting only that, so far, they haven't quite got the means to support that level of consumption.
Active left-wing organizations include the youth wing of Yabloko, which has become the backbone of Defense, the Russian equivalent of the Pora movement, which was so important to the success of the Ukrainian Orange Revolution. Defense also includes the youth wings of the Union of Right Forces, Marching without Putin, Collective Action, and Our Choice. The coordinator is Ilia Yashin, leader of the youth wing of Yabloko, which has about 2,000 members. Defense is drifting increasingly toward the left, and their protests resemble those of the National Bolsheviks more and more. For their part, the National Bolsheviks are moving toward mainstream democratic policies.
The most high-profile groups are the National Bolsheviks, although their core has been depleted by the arrests; the Avant-Garde of Red Youth; and the Union of Communist Youth. They handcuffed themselves to the railings of the procurator general's office, demanding a meeting. They did not get it.
The ideology of Nashi was worked out by official spin doctors like Sergey Markov. He declared, “Youth organizations with the ideology of Russian sovereignty, like Nashi, are a panacea against the Orange Plague.” It is interesting that no anti-Orange movement appeared spontaneously. Many are afraid of Nashi, but I think they will just fall apart after a while.
It is still a moot point what will bring about the demise of this regime. How will it collapse? The present opposition is too weak and lacking in purpose to bring it down. Spontaneous protest from the Russian people appears even less likely.
One possibility is that, if Putin does construct a neo-Soviet system, it may collapse, as before, through economic inefficiency. The trademark of Putin's administration is building state capitalism, creating a loyal bureaucratic oligarchy by taking control of all the main national revenues (which are mostly delegated to deputy heads or others in the presidential administration). For this, they need to renationalize successfully functioning enterprises, turning them into financial industrial conglomerates or holding companies.
That is proceeding apace. Conglomerates such as Vneshekonom-bank, Vneshtorgbank, and Mezhprombank (so-called Russian major financial holdings to counterbalance the more Western-looking Alfa Group and others) swallow ever greater chunks of collateral, successful enterprises raised from their knees after the Soviet collapse.
This is facilitated by the administration, naturally. Swallow it they may, but they can't really digest it, as they don't have sufficient highly qualified managers. The conglomerates can't cope effectively with what they already have their hands on and the enterprises begin to fail after being taken over. As a result, economic growth in the last half-year has slowed to 5.3 percent, the export of capital was more than 900 billion rubles [$31.4 billion], and the rate of growth of incomes halved. These statistics were provided by the People's Government, formed as an alternative to the one we've got, by an independent Duma deputy, Gennadii Semigin.
Oleg Shulyakovsky is resigning. He has managed the Baltic Factory, the most important surface shipyard in the northwest of Russia, since 1991. Shulyakovsky was such a major figure that he was retained by all its various owners after it was privatized in the early 1990s. He is finally leaving now because of the de-privatization model imposed on the factory in 2005, after it was bought by United Industrial Corporation, which belongs to Mezhprombank. It is being merged with three design bureaus and some other enterprises, with an obvious loss of efficiency. What the presidential administration does now without Shulyakovsky at the helm (and Mezhprombank was able to swallow the 150-year-old company only because of its contacts with the administration) remains to be seen.
Shulyakovsky was a pillar of the shipbuilding establishment, but even he has given up because Mezhprombank is creating a state capitalist holding of naval shipbuilding. The defense companies Almaz-Antei and Milya Helicopters were both de-privatized in a similar way recently. Mezhprombank is controlled by Sergey Pugachev who, although a senator and hence disqualified from running a bank, continues de facto to do so. He is one of the so-called Orthodox oligarchs, a comrade-in-arms of Putin in creating a state oligarchy.
The only problem with Putin's system is that it will take decades to collapse through creeping stagnation. Nobody doubts that this fate awaits the Baltic Factory, even if Putin manages to prevent foreigners and those of other tribes from advancing another inch onto Russian territory. In order to preserve their system, they will start passing down the presidency from one useless successor to the next. Their principal characteristic will be their facelessness, and they will get in after elections rigged in the Soviet fashion.
The main problem is that while collapse is inevitable, we will not see it in our lifetime. That's a pity, because we would like to.
Today's court hearing of the National Bolsheviks’ trial descends into farce.
“On December 14 I look and see a commotion. I was standing beside Room 14. I saw everything that happened. I was there the whole time. So then I see the frame of the metal detector lying in a horizontal, prone position …” With the single-mindedness of a provincial sleuth, Yevgeny Posadnev delivers this damning evidence from the witness stand. He used to be the director of some Soviet corrective labor institution, and now works for the presidential administration as a “Reception Adviser,” which means that he mediates between Putin and his suffering people. Posadnev's countenance is extremely grave. He is denouncing enemies.
“What condition was the metal detector in after these young people knocked it over?” the state prosecutor asks.
“It was lying down like a letter L,” Posadnev explains, “but it should have been standing up like a letter Haitch.”
Even Judge Shikhanov is laughing.
“The lads from our security unit,” the witness continues, as if telling teacher that Vasya has been stealing apples again, “blocked their route with this metal detector, so that this group of persons should be prevented from dispersing throughout the entire administration building. The lads from the unit blocked the corridor with this L and thereby diverted the mob into Room 14!”
The prosecution roll their eyes in horror. What on earth is their witness saying?
“That is, the crowd were directed into Room 14?” the defense immediately interjects. “They didn't burst in there themselves?”
The indictment, in support of which Posadnev is supposed to be testifying, says in black and white that the gravity of the offense committed by the thirty-nine defendants was that they had seized Room 14. This impertinence is the official reason they have been held in jail for almost nine months.
“No, they didn't go in there by themselves,” the witness insists, trying to show how bravely the Federal Security Service had acted and supposing that he is bringing out the full gravity of the invaders’ offense. “They wanted to run all through the administration, but were forced into the room with the L-shaped metal detector.”
“And were the doors of the room locked?” the defense asks.
“No, they were open.”
“But then they locked the doors?”
“No, the first of the doors, the outer one, stayed open.”
“Then why was it broken?” Total destruction of that door is the second most serious item of material damage of which they stand accused.
“I saw it, I saw everything, I saw them barricading the second door with a safe. Barricading themselves in.”
“But the outer door was not locked? So why did they break it? And where is it now?”
“It was repaired. It was scratched.”
One might well ask who scratched it. The state prosecutors realize this only too well. They are scowling at “their” witness, their lips moving. Can they be cursing? The level of all their witnesses has been so abysmal as to be laughable.
“But nevertheless, did you personally witness any of these people creating a riot?” the defense team asks sternly. This is the crux of the accusation.
“No,” the crestfallen witness murmurs. “There was no riot.”
He hangs his head. After all, how much can they expect you to make up?
This trial is without legal foundation, but there is an ideological imperative to demarcate those who are from those who are not “on our side.” This is part of a wider national process of demarcation. The National Bolsheviks are to have the shit kicked out of them—pardon my use of the president's French—whether there is a legal basis or not.
Of course, the methods on display in the Nikulin court are ridiculous, but who can see or hear them? Only the handful of people present. The rest of the country gets the message that the authorities are not joking, and that you go to jail for not being on our side. Beat the hell out of people like these. Show them no mercy, and your career will flourish.
Platon Lebedev, Khodorkovsky's friend and codefendant, has meanwhile been transferred to a punishment cell for refusing to go out for exercise. One week ago, Lebedev, who suffers from cirrhosis of the liver, was transferred from the prison hospital to an ordinary communal cell, and his health deteriorated sharply. He refused to go out to exercise because he was not fit enough. They have latched on to this: a punishment cell is an extremely hard place; there is no bed linen, no heating, and the diet is bread and water. The second reason is that the Michurin court has given him until August 25 to read the records of the Yukos court hearings. Lebedev will be in the punishment cell until August 26 and, as you are not allowed to take any papers or books in there, he will be unable to prepare an appeal against the verdict.
Lebedev, of course, still has Khodorkovsky, and Khodorkovsky is evidently writing up his comments at present. The verdict is effectively shared between the two of them and they have excellent lawyers. Nevertheless, such vindictiveness toward someone whose only crime is to have failed to plead guilty is quite monstrous.
There is good reason to worry about this country. Today's world leaders put their tails between their legs and exchange kisses with Putin rather than pull him up short.
Another anniversary of the 1991 putsch against Gorbachev and our liberation from it. About 800 people went to a celebration organized by the Free Russia Party. I felt no inclination to stop as I drove past the meeting. There is no freedom, so what is there to celebrate? The years since then have been spent bringing back what we had before, only now in an even more twisted form.
Officially, 58 percent of those surveyed approve of the slogan “Russia for the Russians.” Another 58 percent, when asked what they would do if they earned a decent salary, said they would immediately buy property abroad and emigrate. That is a death sentence for “Free Russia,” and it also explains why we have not had any revolutions of late. We're waiting for someone else to do it for us.
Some of the mothers of children who died at Beslan have locked themselves in the court building in Vladikavkaz, North Ossetia, where Nur-pasha Kulaev is being tried. Officially, he is the only surviving terrorist of all those who seized the school.
After the tragedy, the mothers said they trusted only Putin and had every confidence he would ensure an objective inquiry. Putin promised that he would. A year has passed. The inquiry, however, exonerated all the bureaucrats and security agents who planned and carried out the assault that led to the deaths of so many children and adults. The women are now demanding that they themselves be arrested. They consider themselves responsible for the deaths of their own children, because they voted for Putin. Their sit-in is an act of desperation.
Khodorkovsky has gone on a total hunger strike in Matrosskaya Tishina prison, refusing even water, as a mark of solidarity with his severely ill friend Platon Lebedev. Through his lawyer Khodorkovsky stated that moving Lebedev into a punishment cell was evidently in retaliation for the articles that he, Khodorkovsky, published in the newspapers after the verdict.
Bravo, Khodorkovsky! I didn't think he had it in him. I am glad I was wrong. Now he is one of us. Oligarchs do not go on hunger strike; it is people like us who do that.
In the past six months hunger striking has become the sole means of asserting the right to free speech, a right supposedly guaranteed by the Constitution. There is much you can no longer say, but you can still go on hunger strike to show that you have been silenced. Sounding off at protest meetings has become virtually useless, mere preaching to the converted; those who share your views already know the situation, so why keep telling them about it? Standing in picket lines is pointless, unless it is to salve your conscience. At least you'll be able to tell your granddaughter that you did more than vent your spleen in your own kitchen. Even writing books that don't get published in Russia because they are off-message doesn't have much impact. They are read only by people living abroad.
So, in 2005, the hunger strike is one of the few ways of getting your protest noticed. Moreover, it is something any of us can do. We all eat. We can all not eat. What is more, you don't need to apply for a permit from the state before you can do it.
Another important plus: in Russia everybody suspects everybody else of hypocritical PR spin, but what kind of PR is a hunger strike? It is clearly evident that it is being done by someone who is in despair.
So, as we enjoy this Indian summer, what has the new tactic achieved? For three weeks in July the Heroes of Russia, of the Soviet Union, and of Socialist Labor were on hunger strike. Putin in the meantime gave PR support to neofascist thugs by eating shashlik with them in a clearing in Tver, ostentatiously insulting the Heroes. Nevertheless, their hunger strike was very effective.
The prisoners in the Lgov penal colony also went on hunger strike, to draw attention to the torture they were enduring. Although the consequences were grim, they are being tortured less. In any case, there was a big enough rumpus to disturb the smooth working of the European Court of Human Rights. The government was obliged to react, and who knows, perhaps the brutes who run other prisons in Russia will be just a bit more circumspect in future.
Victims of beatings by the militia in Rasskazovo in Tambov Province went on hunger strike, warning that “We will no longer endure humiliation, insults, and physical violence from the law enforcement agencies.” The aggressors laid off. One more hunger strike, and the butchers may even be put behind bars.
Finally, the National Bolsheviks in the December 14 case went on hunger strike in their Moscow detention cells, demanding the release of all political prisoners. Who now can fail to see that the National Bolsheviks are themselves political prisoners?
The authorities have quietly taken note of this summer of hunger strikes, even if they refer to it only obliquely, as they did today in Sochi when they remarked that officials should remain at arm's length from the people. The state is, however, plainly wising up to the fact that people are not joking. These are people who will not under any circumstances come to terms with them. A hunger strike is not a dialogue with the authorities, but with your fellow citizens.
I catch myself reflecting that you could never imagine Prime Minister Fradkov, Surkov or Putin himself going on hunger strike. It's not their style. To take a ride in a bomber or a beat-up Volga, supposedly without bodyguards, is fine. Protest, however, of the kind Khodorkovsky has now shared with the people, is out of the question.
The mothers have gone back to Beslan.
“We, the mothers of Beslan,” Marina Park says, “are guilty of having given life to children doomed to live in a country that decided it did not need them. We are guilty of having voted for a president who decided children were expendable. We are guilty of having kept silent for ten years about the war being waged in Chechnya, which has brought forth rebels like Kulaev.”
Ella Kesaeva, another bereaved mother, breaks in: “The main culprit is Putin. He hides behind his presidency. He has chosen not to meet us and apologize. It is a tragedy that we live under such a president, who refuses to take responsibility for anything.”
Shortly after this it became known that Putin was inviting representatives of the Committee of Mothers of Beslan to meet him in Moscow on September 2. At first the women were indignant: September 2 was a day of commemoration of the dead. They could not possibly go. The presidential administration then bluntly informed them that a meeting between Putin and the people of Beslan would go ahead with or without them; someone would be found to tell Putin in front of the television cameras how much everyone in Beslan loves him. You can always find some of those in Russia.
What should they decide? Immediately after the atrocity Putin promised that the whole truth would be made public. Many believed him, including the “black mothers” who had lost their children. At the president's personal behest, a parliamentary commission was set up to investigate the causes and circumstances of the events in Beslan, chaired by Alexander Torshin, who promised that the commission's detailed and honest report would appear no later than March 2004.
Nothing happened. To this day there is no report, and the investigation has become a mockery. Large numbers of those held hostage in the school were so incensed that they refused to give evidence in the absurd, face-saving trial of Kulaev.
“Obviously nobody was guilty, or they would not all have been given medals,” as Marina Park puts it caustically. The citizens of Beslan are still alone with their grief. People come to photograph them, like animals in the zoo, and depart. They are asked if they need money, and reply that the only thing they want is the truth.
The chairman of the Parliamentary Commission on Beslan, Alexander Torshin, deputy speaker of the Soviet of the Federation, admits that the report for which Beslan has been waiting so long simply does not exist. “There are only a few odd pages.” Russia shrugs its shoulders.
In the Nikulin court, in the entire course of the summer, only thirteen of the twenty-six witnesses for the prosecution have been questioned. None of those for the defense have yet been called.
The authorities are deliberately dragging out the National Bolsheviks’ trial while keeping them in prison, because they imagine it will make others think twice. In fact, it only strengthens their convictions. The parents of the thirty-nine have, while their children have been in prison on plainly trumped-up charges, started following their lead. They are organizing protest meetings, shouting in picket lines, joining opposition movements.
The Communists now let the National Bolsheviks hold their weekly meeting at their premises, and the alliance of those on the left is becoming very solid. This evening, however, as the National Bolsheviks were arriving, they were attacked and brutally beaten by masked individuals in combat fatigues wielding baseball bats.
After the attack the assailants calmly got into a bus that was waiting for them and drove off. The militia were called and pursued and stopped the bus. They entered it, only to come back out stating that it was full of “our people.” What was going on? Quite simply, those “on our side” have a license to beat those who are “not on our side.” The Nashists have been attacking the National Bolsheviks with baseball bats since early January. On January 29 and March 5 there were large-scale attacks by Nashi activists on the National Bolsheviks’ bunker, which they ransacked. Then as now, politically inspired hooligans arrived and left on a small bus, equipped with baseball bats. They even brought a mobile generator with them in order to saw through the door.
The hooligans were told off by the militia and released. On February 12, on the Moscow Metro Circle line, thugs waylaid and beat up not only National Bolsheviks, but also the father of one of the thirty-nine in prison. Again, they were taken to a militia station, then released. Each time the militia made a record, subsequently even began to press criminal charges, but then either dropped them or put them on ice. “You must understand,” the investigators sighed. “It's politics …”
“There is no urgency on the part of the investigators,” Dmitry Agra-novsky, the lawyer representing the father who was assaulted, tells me. “The files have not even been sent to court yet, even though the offenses are far clearer than those of the National Bolsheviks who invaded Putin's reception area, and the violence was far greater. So many people were seriously injured. We are trying to prevent them from closing the case completely, but it is clearly going nowhere.”
Now this new attack. The gladiators of Spartak needed protection from the law. They found it, and now they are using their fists to repay the trust placed in them by the presidential administration.
It is all just the way it is in Chechnya. The regime takes people under its wing who have, preferably, several criminal cases pending against them. These are quashed in return for a guarantee that “While you are with us, nobody can raise a finger against you. You beat up those we point out.” (In Chechnya, “You kill on our say-so.”)
Are we really going to see the day when the president decrees that Roma the Stickler, following in the footsteps of Ramzan the Nutter, should receive honors from the Russian state?
It is also very obvious that the regime is eager to pit one youth group against another so that, when the chips are down, there will be a balance between the two sides, so that the hatred should not just leach away out of society. Fear and confrontation are far more useful; the pursuit of social harmony is not their agenda. They are hoping that having different social groupings at loggerheads will be the magic carpet on which they fly to their goal of another four years in power and in control of the country's revenues, while the rest of us carry on beating each other up. This is what I see behind the attacks on the National Bolsheviks by well-organized teams wielding baseball bats.
The military collegium of the Supreme Court has been considering an appeal against the acquittal of a special operations unit by the North Caucasus military court. The unit, subordinate to the Central Intelligence Directorate, shot six people and burned their bodies in the Shatoy District of Chechnya in January 2002. The verdict has been deemed unlawful and the case sent back for reconsideration.
This is extremely unusual. The basic objections to the earlier verdict were gross procedural violations in the selection of jurors, and the conduct of the judge in giving them political instructions before they withdrew to consider their verdict.
Eduard Ulman's unit was acquitted on the grounds that while the soldiers had indeed killed and burned their victims, they could not be held responsible because they were only carrying out the orders of their superiors, which they were not at liberty to dispute. The court entirely ignored the fact that there were no written orders, only veiled hints from a shadowy director of the operation whose voice was heard over a walkie-talkie. The Supreme Court also disregarded this very important detail.
What happens next? This will be the third time the case has been reviewed, but unfortunately it is still going to be tried in Rostov-on-Don. If the military collegium was seriously expecting a guilty verdict, Ulman and his unit would be back in detention and the case would not have returned to Rostov, where it is quite impossible to form a jury radically different from the earlier ones. The Rostov jurors took the red-blooded view that Ulman was perfectly within his rights; he was carrying out a mission for the Motherland, and anyway, all Chechens are a priori guilty. Strong anti-Chechen sentiment is a fact of life in the south of Russia.
Why has the verdict been set aside on this occasion? The Supreme Court has, after all, a long record of turning a blind eye to inconvenient matters. It is playing up to Putin. When he met the human rights campaigners at the beginning of the summer, the president said he had been shocked by the acquittal of Ulman and his codefendants. The Supreme Court has accordingly hastened to help him over his shock by referring the case back, and whatever happens after that is not its concern.
The Central Intelligence Directorate, the GRU, may nevertheless be forced to pull in its horns for a short time. The special operations subdivisions of this murderous organization continue their “sanitizing” of Chechnya, which is what Ulman and his detachment were involved in, and the fact that we do not know of similar major cases is simply because they do not get reported. The atrocities in the hill village of Borozdi-novskaya on June 4 were also committed by a GRU detachment. The assassination on July 4 of Abdul-Azim Yangulbaev, head of the administration of the hill village of Zumsoy, is another example.
The background to Yangulbaev's case is that, in January, four people were abducted from Zumsoy by a group of soldiers parachuted from helicopters. Nothing has been heard of the four since. The soldiers then went berserk, beating up villagers and helping themselves, for example, to 250,000 rubles [$8,700] that had just been received by one of the families as compensation for the destruction of their home. Abdul-Azim Yangulbaev, the village head of administration, made every effort to find the abducted villagers. He appealed to human rights organizations and spoke out forcefully about the soldiers’ excesses, which is unusual in Chechnya nowadays. And not only in Chechnya.
In the spring, he forwarded to the Memorial Human Rights Center and the procurator's office a draft report by one of the soldiers involved in the January operation, which gave the names of those in command of the abductors, and mentioned the shelling of homes and the murder of one of the villagers.
On July 4, Yangulbaev's UAZ jeep was stopped on a mountain road by three masked gunmen, who presented GRU credentials and ordered him to get out of the vehicle to show them his ID. When, on their orders, he went to open the trunk of his vehicle to allow them to inspect it, he was shot three times at point-blank range with a gun fitted with a silencer.
In Beslan there is a split. Should the mothers go to Moscow to meet Putin on September 2 or not?
Putin, it seems, is very keen that they should: a special plane will be sent to collect them. This is unprecedented, but then, so was Beslan. Many of the mothers, however, are refusing. Today the delegation of those going to the Kremlin does not consist solely of mothers who lost their only children and who had for so long wanted to tell Putin everything that was on their minds. It includes, of course, Teimuraz Mam-surov, the father of two children who survived in the school, and who, at the time of the terrorist act, was leader of the republican Parliament.
He is now the “director” of North Ossetia. The republics no longer have presidents, but if he is its director he clearly enjoys Putin's trust.
Mamsurov is not going to make a fuss in the presence of Putin to discover the truth about the terrorist outrage. He is not going to commit political suicide.
Another member of the Beslan delegation is Maierbek Tuaev, director of the public commission for the distribution of humanitarian aid. Maierbek's daughter, a pupil in one of the senior classes, was killed, but after the atrocity, when humanitarian aid flooded into the town from around the world, he was appointed to distribute it. There is also Azamat Sabanov, the son of Tatarkan Sabanov, a former headmaster of the First School who, as he did every year, had gone to the September 1 parade and was killed in the attack. Azamat is Maierbek Tuaev's deputy for distributing humanitarian aid, which is like a narcotic in a town that spends most of its time at the cemetery.
I call Marina Park and she tells me, “I am at the cemetery.” I can hear many voices around her. She is an extremely active member of the Committee of the Mothers of Beslan. Marina was one of the leading signatories of the committee's many letters to institutions involved in the inquiry into the tragedy, but she has decided against attending the meeting with Putin on September 2. “There is no point in going a thousand kilometers to receive condolences,” Marina is adamant as she stands in the cemetery. “He is receiving us not to move the inquiry forward, but because he wants to be photographed with us.”
Alexander Gumetsov, whose twelve-year-old daughter Aza was killed, also no longer wants to see the president.
I have known Alexander for almost the whole of this year. He was, and still is, deeply depressed. Aza was his only child. There was a time when he very much wanted to tell all about what their family went through before they finally received the remains of their daughter, identified only after DNA testing. Now, however, like most people in the town, Alexander feels he has been deceived so many times in the past year that nothing is likely to restore his faith in the state authorities. Even if Putin were now to spend the whole of September 2 with the people from Beslan; if there were to be no mention of money and only discussion of the need for a genuine inquiry; if Putin were to compel the procurator general, the director of the FSB, the minister of the interior and all those bemedaled “heroes of Beslan” to report the truth to the mothers in his presence; even if he were himself suddenly to repent and kiss the hands of these women, before whom he will forever be guilty, and swear a terrible oath to beat the truth out of his security services—even then they would not believe him.
And so, two or three mothers, out of the twenty who were invited, will be going to the Kremlin. They will serve to leaven the more politically reliable men invited to Putin's meeting with the Committee of the Mothers of Beslan.
Aza's mother, Rimma Torchinova, is one of those going. She wants to look Putin in the eye as she asks him some important, unanswered questions. Rimma has no illusions, but this is how she understands her duty to her daughter's memory. She is going to Moscow, come what may. She will be seeking answers about the headquarters from which the operation was directed, about the assault, the grenade launchers, the role of the federal helicopters overhead.
We can only try to imagine how difficult this will be for her on September 2, as also for the other women who are going to see the president. What solidarity can society offer them at this moment? We could at least hold out a hand so that they should feel not only their pain, but also the country's support as they confront the chill of the Kremlin. Perhaps our president would then find it more difficult to cynically “manage” everything, and be forced to answer their questions honestly.
There is little evidence of social solidarity. We watch the drama of the mothers of Beslan on television. We see them weeping in the courtroom in Vladikavkaz, locking themselves in in protest, holding meetings, blocking the highway, demanding to see Deputy Procurator General She-pel, who is visibly wilting from having to lie to them endlessly. The country is sedated by this soap opera, inclined to murmur only that “they are out of their minds with grief” and, after all, time will heal them and there is nothing to be done.
We will watch the evening edition of the Vremya news program, and go to bed forgetting the women wearing black headscarves until the next episode of The Mothers of Beslan. The men of Beslan will carry on going out of their minds, blaming themselves for everything, while the women continue to live at their town's new cemetery.
Tomorrow is September 1. A year has passed and not one of the bungling bureaucrats, generals, directors of the intelligence services, officials at the operational headquarters, or even the heads of the militia have been called to account. Nobody is really demanding that anyway. Whatever happened to public opinion?
By September 1, 2005, it has become clear that the democratic movement is in a state of collapse. There is not going to be any united front, either in reality, or in the elections to the Chechen parliament in November, the Moscow Duma elections in December or, indeed, in the Duma elections in 2007. Committee 2008 has given up the ghost. The Citizens’ Congress is in a coma. The Russian intelligentsia does not have a single forum in which it could exert itself to real purpose and influence the governance of the state.
Yes, Garry Kasparov has created his United Citizens’ Front, although it does not seem to be attracting many members. It formulates its mission as follows:
In the near future, stagnation under Putin will be replaced by a severe political crisis created by the state authorities themselves, and not at all by the democrats. The main task facing us before this crisis occurs is to create an organization capable of uniting all responsible citizens against the regime when it finally loses its mind. We must learn to organize our opposition.
Those are very true words, but the problem that stifles all good words is that everybody in the United Citizens’ Front, apart from Kasparov himself, has a record of electoral failure. Among these people, who were part of the democratic movement in the early pre-Yeltsin years, there are some who behaved disastrously in the late Yeltsin period and made possible the coming of the era of Putin.
To put it bluntly, I do not believe their democratic convictions run that deep. I do not trust any of them, other than Kasparov, and I doubt that he will be able to move mountains on his own. Millions of other Russians do not trust them, either.
Vladimir Ryzhkov is still running the Republican Party of Russia, and people view it with even greater skepticism. It has been around for fifteen years. It grew out of an improbable grouping of the Yeltsin period, the “Democratic Platform of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,” because there was such a monster, and very progressive it seemed at the time. People are not signing up with him, either.
Yavlinsky has publicly quarreled with the Union of Right Forces, to the extent of refusing to have anything to do with Nikita Belykh, their new leader. That puts paid to any hope of uniting the URF and Yabloko. The only active element in Yabloko is its youth section under Ilia Yashin. Its protests increasingly resemble those of Limonov's National Bolsheviks. Young Yabloko does not think too highly of Yavlinsky himself, perhaps because its members are far purer, more honest and, most importantly, more impassioned than the old democrats, of whom Yavlinsky is typical. The view that the old democrats are past it is very widespread now.
The Union of Right Forces is busy trying to curry favor with the presidential administration by emphasizing that it “has nothing against Putin.” Over the summer Belykh stumped through forty-five regions of the country trying to mobilize people on the right. He failed.
Anybody trying to do anything worthwhile in Russia at the moment is moving toward the left. Khodorkovsky is correct, although all the democrats condemned his thoughts from prison. Russia's Left March is a fait accompli, which also rules out any Russian Orange Revolution. There will be no splendid revolutionary breakthrough with oranges, tulips, or roses in Russia.
Our revolution, if it comes, will be red, because the Communists are almost the most democratic force in the country, and because it will be bloody. The Orange Revolution in Ukraine brought all our democrats and liberals together for a time, but subsequently it divided them all even more. In their place, like a carbuncle, has come the presidential administration's “democratic” Nashi movement.
The threat of a bloody revolution comes today from the state authorities themselves, or possibly from oppositionists who lose their cool when confronted by Nashi. As things stand, the color of any revolution in Russia will be red, and nobody can be sure that Surkov's street-fighting Nashists will not turn their knuckle-dusters and chains against their present political masters.