Nothing but the Truth

[AS THE FOLLOWING pieces illustrate, a recurrent theme in Anna Politkovskaya’s articles is the regime’s application of state resources to bolster its stranglehold on power rather than to deal with the huge and pressing problems of the population it rules.]

Yielding to the desire to find a contrarian way to start the new century, our newspaper decided to leave its mark somewhere nobody has left a mark before. Apart from the Tunguska Meteorite.

On 22 December, the day of the winter solstice, we arrived at the very spot which, since the demise of the USSR, has been the geographical centre of the Russian Federation, the Evenki Autonomous Region. There, in the main square of the township of Tura, the capital of Evenkia, we erected a suitable monument designed by the Moscow artist, Dmitriy Krymov.

Admittedly, the square in Tura doesn’t yet have a name, so if you do decide to visit it you will have to ask a passer-by where the monument to the centre of Russia is. Anybody will be able to point it out, though, because everybody in Tura, apart from infants and the very ill, came to the opening ceremony. Oh, and also those who went instead to the local Palace of Culture for a concert by Dmitriy Kharatian and Alexey Buldakov. At Novaya gazeta’s invitation they made the more than seven-hour indirect flight from Moscow to provide a top quality celebration of the unveiling of the monument.

Ivan Bakhtin, the Deputy Governor of Evenkia, told us that even half a day before the celebrations in Tura nobody really believed the monument would be erected, or that the visitors from Moscow would arrive, or that there would be a fireworks display, and a concert, and presents.

‘Because today’s temperature is 48 degrees below zero, which for us is considered warm.’

But now, what our readers really want to know is what the centre of Russia is like. There is no escaping the fact that it is highly symbolic. What gives meaning to life here, in all its variety, is the struggle for survival. If you want to live, you need to be focused. Relax, and you die. If you want to eat, make sure you shoot plenty of game in season. If you want felt boots and a fur coat so as not to freeze, barter the pelts of bears, reindeer and sable you have killed for clothing. And never be on your own. If you are alone and you have a fall, you are dead. The world is ordered in a primitive but strict and logical manner, as befits a symbol.

We learned that it is a stone’s throw from the centre of Russia to the pole of cold. The snow was not just very abundant, it was all you could see. Fir and pine trees do not survive, and even birch trees eke out a dismal dwarf existence. The local taiga is exclusively larch so the larch tree should be the symbol of this symbol of Russia, ginger-red and recalcitrant, not the blond, languid birch.

There does seem to be a vast supply of land rich in diamonds, oil and gas. The trouble is that first you have to get here.

There are no cities at the centre of Russia, only townships, villages and factories. There is no gas in the houses, although there is plenty underground; no water, no drains, no avenues or embankments, neither along the Podkamennaya River nor over the Nizhnyaya Tunguskaya. Both rivers flow this way and that the length and breadth of Evenkia. Nobody has thought of trying to build anything we would recognise as a respectable road. There are no railways, no metalled roads, only an all-season dirt road 14 kilometres long which links Gorny Airport and Tura. All the other ‘highways’ are passable only in the winter. Hence the work routine of the local administration consists of just three things: firstly, keeping the winter roads in good order; secondly, monitoring the forces of Mother Nature as she constantly destroys them; and thirdly, starting all over again. If you let your mind wander and stop monitoring the infrastructure every day, you will soon be unable to move at all. Your world will contract to the size of your own inner world and you will exist in a snowbound cell.

Who, you might ask, is capable of enduring such hardship? The answer is, only 20,000 citizens of Russia. Here, in the very heart of Russia, a meteorite fell in the early years of the departed century. It became known as the Tunguska Meteorite. And now we are here too.

They sit ranged along an institutional wall, old ladies who abandoned Grozny in various years and in various wars. Their coats date from the 1980s, their boots from Soviet times. Everything is worn and looks like somebody’s cast-offs. Hopelessness is in their faces and there is a sense such as you find in wards for people who have been abandoned and attempted suicide. This is a meeting of ‘Our Home’, a voluntarily run circle of 53 families which refugees of the ‘Russian language persuasion’ from Chechnya organised for themselves. All are now of pensionable age, and what brought them together was a determination to fight the state for their legal rights, to obtain registration, official status, accommodation and pensions. We are in Moscow and it is now October 2004. For many, it is 10 years since their exodus and the start of their struggle. What success have they had?

Taisiya Tolstova is 81. She listens, sees, moves, and is altogether very active. Taisiya was wounded in the Second World War. She worked for 58 years, 34 of them as a teacher and 30 of those in Norilsk. She returned from the Far North to the capital of Chechnya where she was born, a fourth-generation Russian Groznyan. Now, three times a week, Taisiya cleans all 16 floors of an apartment block in the centre of Moscow, all the stairwells and the landings in front of the lifts. She has no choice.

Her remuneration is exactly what she needs, a place to sleep, a little room for the concierges. The women are paid to be there for 24 hours, but instead go home at night, leaving the room free for Taisiya. It is a small, cramped space, into which only a narrow divan can be fitted, but you can sleep there, even if you have to take turns with your mentally disturbed son, Volodya.

Taisiya prays for the people who live in this block. They are her only hope of not sinking into living in filthy cellars. Under the rules of our amazing country, she has lost the legal right to work. She has no status, and without registration you can’t have a job or any other rights. In the 10 years which have passed since she fled Grozny, having lost everything she possessed, she has received nothing from the state which might even partially compensate her losses, enable her to get her life back on the rails, and provide a future for her son.

Taisiya has a daughter who is herself a pensioner. She lives in Norilsk, but the city authorities refuse to allow old women to move there. Taisiya couldn’t go there directly when she left Grozny. Apart from her daughter the old lady has two brothers of her long-dead husband living in Moscow and the Moscow Region. At their invitation she went to stay with them 10 years ago, and one did everything he could for the widow. He went to great lengths to have her registered to stay in his accommodation, but he too is far from young. His family finally questioned why they had to go to such trouble. It was the state’s responsibility to look after the old lady. Of course it was, and here the old lady is now, cleaning 16 floors three times a week, with all her possessions in a mop cupboard.

‘Wherever we go people scold us. “Why have you all come back to Moscow?” they ask. But where else could I go? This is where my family were.’

‘I also look after the people who sleep in the entrance to the block. This is a big building, there are always people lying there. That is where I cook.’

‘Am I going to die under a roof of my own?’ Taisiya wonders. She says to passing residents of the block where she is allowed to live, ‘Look, a journalist has come to see me. Tell her, does anyone have a bad word to say about me? Am I a bad person? Or quarrelsome?’

Most of the residents don’t understand what she’s talking about. At 81 you shouldn’t really need to prove that you are not the worst member of society. At that age all you want is to be able to rest at the end of your life, on a state pension.

At the meeting of ‘Our Home’ Wanda Voitsekhovskaya has been sitting motionless for several hours. Everybody has been talking except her. She holds her head proudly and her beautiful eyes have a firm gaze. She looks indomitable. But one to one, Wanda is nervous and much less self-possessed.

‘I am homeless, an outcast and a beggar. I have no sleep, no life, no rest.’ Wanda has great difficulty speaking because of high blood pressure. ‘I had everything then: a house, a dacha, a garage, a car. In Grozny. I lived there from 1950. I was sent there when I graduated from the Kiev Engineering Institute. I worked for 38 years in the same place as a planner. My husband was crippled in the Second World War. In 1992 my daughter married a very good man and came here to Moscow. He has a room in the Komsomol Automobile Factory hostel and that’s where all of us live now. My husband died in 1996. I was in a terrible state when my neighbours in Grozny saw me to the train and sent me back to my daughter. I thought it was just for a short while. I thought I would qualify for a pension.’

Wanda sleeps on a divan now with her 12-year-old grandson. On the neighbouring divan is her younger grandson. It is a tiny room where you can either sleep or get up and go somewhere else. There’s nowhere to sit. For someone old and ill it is intolerable. Because her age means she gets very tired, Wanda has become convinced she is just a burden on her children.

‘I am very ill, facing complete immobility. I want to stay on my feet as long as I can so as not to be a trouble to anyone. I collect empty bottles to pay for medicine. Why has the state shifted its problems on to our children’s shoulders? I can’t understand. Why can’t I be allocated my own little corner? It wasn’t me who destroyed everything I had in Grozny.’

Valentina Kuznetsova is frail and beautiful. She does not take off her headscarf or her coat. Her hands are clenched and her lips pursed. Valentina holds herself in so as not to burst into tears. A feverish flush blotches her cheeks but she is constantly shivering and shifting, even when sweat is pouring off the others because of the stuffiness. Chronic malnutrition is the companion of refugees. It strikes everybody regardless of their merits and Valentina, who was an engineer in Grozny, had many of those in her former life. She is 78 now. In January 1995 she and her elder sister Alexandra were dragged half alive from their cellar in Grozny by soldiers of the Ministry for Emergency Situations and sent to Moscow when it was discovered that they had relatives there. It was a perfectly reasonable course of action.

Almost ten years have passed, and throughout that time Valentina has lived in Moscow with her bedridden 80-year-old sister in the utility room of School No. 1142.

‘Of course the conditions are a nightmare,’ says Headmaster Iosif Protas. ‘Valentina at first worked as the school caretaker, but then we were ordered to employ private security firms. We couldn’t just throw them out on to the street. My conscience wouldn’t allow that. The old ladies have been taken in by their nephew now. He is off travelling somewhere and his apartment will be free for a time. They have left us, but their accommodation problem is no nearer a solution. The authorities won’t allocate them anything. I don’t understand how they can behave like that.’

They can behave like that very easily. The legal situation of elderly Russian refugees from Chechnya is as follows: under the law they are ‘internally displaced persons’. That status is awarded for only five years and some of the old ladies gained it. They fought to get it from the Migration Service, which in the last decade has been reorganised several times. Refugees with that status at least had the right to move unhindered around Moscow and to receive free medical care. Others were less fortunate: the migration officials firmly refused it to these guiltless victims.

When the five years came to an end, those with the status found themselves no better off than those without. In the eyes of the Migration Service they had no rights whatsoever. So, five years is as long as the state is prepared to take any responsibility for fulfilling its obligations towards citizens who have lost everything through the state’s own actions. For five years the state is obliged to look after internally displaced persons, to provide accommodation, a welfare payment and health insurance. This supposedly gives them time to build a new life, to start afresh after they have irretrievably lost what they had.

Our state has simply cheated the ‘internally displaced persons’ from Chechnya. It has strung them along for five years and provided them with nothing. The Migration Service announced that its assistance was time-limited and when that expired it would divest itself of all responsibility for them.

Who would dispute that the five-year rule is reasonable for young and middle-aged people who can be expected to find work and look after themselves? But what about those in their seventies and eighties? The disabled? How are they supposed to make a fresh start?

You may wonder why this report is confined only to Russian refugees from Grozny rather than including everybody who was forced to leave the zone of this never-ending ‘anti-terrorist operation’ engulfing their beloved city.

It is because Chechen families, even if they themselves are living in poverty, will never fail to support their relatives. Such is the way they behave, and you simply will not find an 81-year-old Chechen lady scrubbing floors on 16 storeys. But Russian old ladies do. What is to be done? How is this situation to be resolved, quickly and effectively? The old ladies cannot wait.

In ‘Our Home’ there are 53 families. These are the very poorest of all the homeless, people with no prospects. It is senseless to hope that resources from Russia’s super-abundant ‘proficit’ budget are going to come their way. The officials would rather die than do without their kickbacks.

They must pin their hopes on the world of ‘socially aware business’, in favour of which [pro-Putin oligarch] Vladimir Potanin recently spoke so feelingly on television. The President bears personal responsibility for what is happening in Chechnya and for all its consequences, so let the Presidential Commission on Human Rights intercede for them with business. The Commission’s members include illustrious representatives of civil society like Svetlana Gannushkina, the Head of Citizen’s Aid, the most active voluntary committee in Russia defending refugees; and also Ludmila Alexeyeva, head of the Moscow Helsinki Group. The President himself must be persuaded to support their petition by its Chairwoman, Ella Pamfilova. Fifty-three Moscow businesses should each buy an apartment, one for each family. They shouldn’t find that too difficult.

The meeting of ‘Our Home’ dispersed. ‘The state wants to wait for us all to die so as not to have to spend money on us. I’m quite sure of that,’ Zoya Markaryants remarks in parting. A former educationalist, her house in the centre of Grozny suffered a direct hit. With the destruction of her home she lost everything she had, and now she is just another refugee from the war.

Anybody who watches the national Russian television channels saw the item. It was claimed that Adam Chitayev, a former resistance fighter with a federal warrant out for his arrest, had been detained in Ust Ilimsk, Irkutsk Province. He was supposedly guilty of abducting both Russian servicemen and members of international missions, and was said to have been masquerading as a schoolteacher of English.

Russia has long been trained to believe this sort of thing. If a Chechen has been arrested, that’s as it should be, or if it’s not quite as it should be, then it’s better to be safe than sorry. Nobody gave a damn about Chitayev. Hundreds of criminal cases relating to so-called international terrorism are cooked up like Siberian pelmeni dumplings the length and breadth of the country, on the principle of the more the merrier, and anyway you can’t tell the innocent from the guilty. Naturally, the arrest of some Chitayev or other was regarded as only proper, as what the law enforcement agencies are there for. But only by anybody who doesn’t know who Adam Chitayev is and, more broadly, who the Chitayev brothers are. In Strasbourg an increasing number of people do know. That, in fact, is where the answer is to be found as to why a man who was not hiding from anybody was suddenly arrested in faraway Ust Ilimsk, only for it to be announced to the whole of Russia that he had been hiding.

The Chitayevs are appellants in Strasbourg v. the Russian Federation. What is more, they have almost won. This summer the procedure of having a case considered by the European Court of Human Rights, which takes many years, ended in an interim victory, a so-called ‘Decision on the Admissibility of Appeal No. 59334/00’.

The story of the Chitayev family is one to which Novaya gazeta has returned several times. Their fate was not unusual by Chechen standards in 2000. It befell many people, but very few decided to seek redress through the courts.

Arbi, born in 1964, was an engineer who had always lived in Grozny. Adam, born in 1967, was a schoolteacher. Like many Chechens he lived in Kazakhstan for a long time before returning to Chechnya in 1999, immediately before the war. Together with his wife and two small children he moved in with his brother in Grozny. ‘In autumn 1999 armed clashes began in Chechnya between Russian troops and Chechen rebels,’ the European Court ruling reads, and, in accordance with the rules of Strasbourg, it is is based on documentation which confirms every word. ‘Grozny and its suburbs were the target of large-scale attacks by Russian soldiers.’

Arbi’s flat in Grozny was destroyed (as is confirmed by a certificate, attached to the case files in Strasbourg, from one of the apartment management boards in Grozny). ‘The plaintiffs, together with their families and possessions, moved to their father’s house in Achkhoy Martan. On 15 January 2000, members of the Interior Affairs Temporary Office (temporarily occupied by militiamen from Voronezh Province) conducted a search of the plaintiffs’ house. They took with them a new cordless telephone in its packaging.’

On 18 January one of the Chitayevs went to complain to the Interior Affairs Office and to demand the return of the telephone. It actually was returned, but on 12 April retribution followed. There was another search and more looting, but also an arrest, followed by yet more looting. Things went from bad to worse, despite the fact that everything of any interest had already been stolen: a video, a printer, televisions, a computer, a heater, and ‘two files of documents’. Interestingly enough, a list of the stolen goods was provided to Strasbourg over the signature of one Vlasenko, an officer of the Achkhoy Martan Interior Affairs Temporary Office.

Arbi and Adam were arrested. On 14 April their father, Salaudi, went to find out what had happened to his sons and was himself arrested, officially for violation of the curfew. He was released five days later. The brothers were held in the Interior Affairs Office for 17 days.

They were fettered to a chair by their handcuffs and beaten. Various parts of the body, including their fingertips and ears, were subjected to electric shocks; their arms were twisted; they were beaten with rubber truncheons and plastic bottles full of water; they were suffocated using adhesive tape, polythene bags and gas masks; dogs were set upon them; and pieces of skin were torn from them using pliers. Plaintiff No. 1 (Arbi Chitayev) had a gas mask put on his head which was pumped full of cigarette smoke. Plaintiff No. 2 (Adam Chitayev) was brought into a room and told he must confess to being a resistance fighter and taking part in kidnappings. When Plaintiff No. 2 refused to sign the confession, he was gagged with tape and beaten on the back and sexual organs. Simultaneously, another person pointed a rifle at him and threatened to shoot him if he moved.

On 28 April the Chitayevs, along with others detained in the Office, were taken away blindfolded and told that they were going to be shot. In fact they were dropped off at the Chernokozovo pre-trial detention facility where

They were forced to run to an interrogation room, bending down and with their hands on their heads while the guards beat them on the back. In the interrogation room were an iron table and chair and there was a hook on the wall. They were kicked, and beaten with rifle butts and hammers on various parts of the body, concentrating on their kneecaps; straitjackets were put on them which were attached to the hook so that they were hanging from it, and beaten. Their fingers and toes were crushed using hammers and door jambs; their hands and feet were tied together behind their backs (the ‘sparrow’ position) … The detainees were not allowed to pray under threat of further beatings.

The Chitayevs were lucky. They emerged from Chernokozovo in October 2000, having passed through all the circles of hell which are customary there but at least they were alive. They were outraged by their illegal arrest and torture, which made them rare among survivors of Chernokozovo, and this in itself testifies to their firm belief that the Russian regime had no grounds whatsoever for impugning them. The Chitayevs were not and never had been members of the Chechen resistance. It also mattered that they are educated, serious, socially active and progressive. Their indignation took them first to the Russian legal institutions – the Prosecutor’s Office and the courts – and then, when they were unable to raise any interest in their sufferings there, on to Strasbourg. Arbi and Adam Chitayev lodged official complaints, and Arbi took the difficult decision to emigrate from Russia, seeing no possibility of continuing to live in a country where such humiliations were possible. We met him abroad, where he was not enjoying exile and finding it difficult to make a living, but at least feeling safe. Four years on, remembering the details of his months of detention as he looked out of the window at life in Europe, he was shaking as if he had Parkinson’s disease. Adam, however, decided to stay, moved to Siberia, and got a teaching job. In Strasbourg, meanwhile, the case, with the slowness which seems to be essential, edged up the queue of many thousands of appeals of his suffering compatriots, towards examination.

The Chitayev brothers knew that Chechen appellants to Strasbourg were in a uniquely dangerous situation. Before hearing any verdict, very many of them would be murdered by ‘masked members of unidentified security agencies wearing combat fatigues’, as they are routinely described.

The Chitayevs did not, however, withdraw their appeal. On the contrary, they responded conscientiously to every inquiry from the European Court of Human Rights, wrote supplementary explanations, and were very active. Neither did the Russian state authorities leave them in peace. They were threatened with criminal cases, arrests and retaliation. The more vigorously the Chitayevs defended themselves, the greater the pressure which was brought to bear on them.

On 30 June 2005 their case was finally considered in Strasbourg. You read the court record with a sense that something is missing. Everything the Chitayevs allege has documentary confirmation: all our government’s replies to inquiries from the Court of Human Rights about the degrading treatment of the Chitayevs are bald, unsubstantiated assertions, mere fantasy along the following lines: ‘On 12 April when the plaintiffs’ house was inspected eight military greatcoats and four military jackets were found … video recordings of interviews with Shamil Basayev, a videotape of the documentary film Nokhcho Chechnya: Day of Freedom, photographs of Arbi Chitayev with a rifle.’

The suggestion is that here was a hotbed of resistance fighters and abductors of soldiers, never mind that the greatcoats belonged to the Chitayev brothers themselves, of whom there are four; or indeed that these are Soviet-era military greatcoats dating back to the days when the brothers were serving in the Soviet Army.

The result of this approach does not reflect well on Russia: a ‘decision on admissibility’ is effectively a ruling in favour of someone whose appeal has been accepted for consideration. The basis and approach of the future verdict is already evident in the decision on admissibility, as is obvious in the Chitayevs’ case. The Chitayevs will win their case against the Russian Federation because it has failed to provide any justification either for their arrest or for the looting of their home.

Every stage of the deliberations in Strasbourg has been followed by the Russian authorities, indeed an official government representative has been present at every hearing, including the last one on 30 June. While they still had time, before the final verdict, the regime resuscitated their criminal case against Adam, Arbi being beyond their reach. Here we again find the eight military greatcoats and tape of an interview with Shamil Basayev. A warrant was issued for Adam’s arrest and locating him was not difficult as he was not hiding, indeed living at his officially registered address. Not merely a law-abiding citizen, but one tenaciously determined to have the law respected, Adam was arrested and sent under convoy to Chechnya.

This is barefaced retaliation for his appeal to Strasbourg, the state’s attempt to get even with someone who is not prepared to behave like a sheep.

People divide into those who believe in conspiracies and those who don’t. I belong to the latter category. Conspiracy stories strike me as dull, whether they are about the violent seizure of power, or the Count of Monte Cristo. The weird tangles produced by real life are a thousand times more dramatic.

I have before me a document which, however, has not come Novaya gazeta’s way by chance. It was brought here by its author, a self-assured individual with a military bearing. He produced his identification documents, his passport, certificate of graduation from a military college, and certificate of release from a place of detention.

‘In February this year,’ the document reads, ‘I agreed to take part in a certain operation. The location was Krasnokamensk in Chita Province. Its nature was as follows:

‘During the night a group of six persons in two armoured vehicles, having rammed through the fencing surrounding Institution 14/10, were to break into the compound of the labour camp. Having broken through to the sector indicated by the group’s Commanding Officer, they were to adopt a defensive position and retain it for five minutes. After this they were to leave by the same route, abandoning the vehicles after a few kilometres and disappearing.

‘The rendezvous was to be on 20 April in Khudzhand, Tajikistan. There all the participants would receive genuine passports as citizens of Tajikistan and, in the guise of seasonal workers, would be transported overland to the place of the planned events. They would be registered and prepared for the operation approximately 100–150 kilometres from Krasnokamensk. All equipment essential for conducting the operation would be prepared by another group functioning independently. The group would move out at the very last moment. The precise destination was known only to two of six men, myself and the group’s Commanding Officer. The others were operating blind and would receive material recompense. Now, concerning the reasons why I am appealing to you. My principled belief is that MBK has the basic right to take decisions concerning his own destiny. In reaching my decision on 10 February to participate I was certain that he was behind this operation. Now I am no longer 100 per cent certain of that.’

Obviously MBK is the imprisoned ex-oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and Krasnokamensk is a town on the outskirts of which Penal Colony 14/10 is located, where he is imprisoned.

If I understand correctly, the document describes a plan to organise an enforced ‘escape’. There could be only one outcome of any such attempted departure from the colony for Khodorkovsky (and not only for him): a bullet. ‘Shot while attempting to escape during a break-out planned by members of the Yukos oil company organised crime group.’ And that would be the end of the ‘Decembrist Exile’ soap opera with its endless court cases on every pretext, its indefatigable lawyers, its Open Russia Foundation, its chemicals and destinies, its discussion of the right to scholarly activity in prison camps, the visits widely reported in the press, and so forth. The soap opera would have a stop put to it, and no doubt Khodorkovsky’s colleague, Leonid Nevzlin, would finally be extradited from Israel. Is all this credible? Entirely.

Then again, perhaps it is all complete nonsense, the lunacy of an individual citizen. Such things happen. But what if it isn’t? There could be yet another possible outcome: a prison uprising might appear to have happened, and who would be the ringleader of a riot in 14/10? Naturally, a person who aspired, or so the Kremlin claims, to great power. They would have been quite right to detain him in punishment cells, and indeed to have liquidated the rioter.

There are stories, as every journalist knows, which it is better to publish than keep to yourself. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that this may save somebody’s life. If we are to give credence to the plan outlined above and our informant’s explanations, then the lives of prisoners in Corrective Labour Camp 14/10, of Khodorkovsky, and also of officers staffing the colony are presently under threat.

Should a newspaper report the probability of a deadly threat to somebody? Undoubtedly, in order to avert a possible tragedy. The enforced ‘escape’, no matter who was preparing it or for what purpose, is hardly in Khodorkovsky’s interests. The attempt to implement the escape might lead to the death of other prisoners and officers of the camp, the more so because the ‘seasonal workers’ for the ‘breakthrough group’ proved on closer inspection to be former military men, some of them ex-KGB officers, with a less than unblemished reputation. Some, indeed, had served prison sentences.

And what if it is a complete hoax, and Novaya gazeta is merely being implicated in an imaginary plot? We will sigh with relief, and thank God it was nothing more serious. And will ponder a fact which is in any case obvious: that in the expanses of the former USSR the spinners of government PR have a place for retired officers with a prison record. Good old USSR.

AN ALLEGED PARTICIPANT IN A PLANNED ATTACK ON KHODORKOVSKY’S PENAL COLONY HAS BEEN FOUND GUILTY

In the Basmanny Court in Moscow sentence has been passed in the case of Vladimir Zelensky. Zelensky informed Novaya gazeta’s columnist, Anna Politkovskaya, of a supposedly imminent attack on the penal colony in which Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former head of the Yukos oil company, is imprisoned. Zelensky was sentenced to three years in a strict-regime corrective labour colony for ‘knowingly communicating false information about an act of terrorism’.

This bizarre episode has amazed Zelensky’s lawyer and other participants in the trial, and left numerous questions unanswered. Zelensky himself refused to give evidence, readily pleaded guilty, and asked only that the trial should be over and done with as quickly as possible.

What Zelensky actually said before his arrest is described in Anna Politkovskaya’s article. Zelensky phoned Anna Politkovskaya in spring this year, saying he trusted only her and had important information relating to Khodorkovsky. He gave her a note about the alleged plot to force Khodorkovsky to ‘escape’.

Zelensky named a certain Babakov as the organiser of the plot, a former agent of the Tajikistan KGB, and insistently asked for a meeting to be arranged between him (Zelensky) and Khodorkovsky’s relatives or some of his former colleagues, like Leonid Nevzlin.

The tale had the air of a hoax or complete nonsense, but a subsequent psychiatric examination of Zelensky revealed no mental problems. When arrested in Chita he was found indeed to have a fake passport in the name of a citizen of Tajikistan which he had been using to cross the border and also a plan detailing the attack on the colony.

A native of Sochi, Krasnodar District, Vladimir Zelensky is a former soldier who graduated from the Saratov Higher Military Command Academy of Chemical Warfare Defence. He had been sentenced to six years in jail by a Novosibirsk court for causing grievous bodily harm but was released on parole in August 2004 with almost three years of his sentence suspended, which the Basmanny Court has now re-imposed. He confessed unconditionally to the charge of knowingly communicating false information about an act of terrorism.

Zelensky refused to choose a defence lawyer and the court appointed Anatoliy Avilov, Chairman of the Basmanny Court in 1992–5, to act for him. Avilov finds the case puzzling. He suggests that Zelensky’s story was so implausible from the outset that no crime was committed. Neither can he understand why Zelensky should have admitted the charge before he had even been formally identified, hence before it was clear whether the man who came to Novaya gazeta’s offices was in fact him or a different person with a passport in his name.

‘It is all very strange,’ Avilov says. ‘Anyone making a knowingly false statement will usually try to stay out of sight, but Zelensky came forward. Why he should have done that is something only he knows, but I believe it is entirely possible that somebody impersonated him.’

A number of curious coincidences invite us to think this has been a deliberate dirty trick. After Zelensky came to the newspaper with his story, two public statements were made: the first by a Deputy of Zhirinovsky’s far-right Liberal-Democratic Party, who informed the press that Novaya gazeta was in possession of important information which it was withholding from the law enforcement agencies. The second, by a prominent political commentator, also accused the editors of withholding information about an imminent crime.

These speakers made their declarations very categorically and with great aplomb, unaware that by then we had passed all the information to the relevant agencies.

Following Vladimir Zelensky’s sentencing on the basis of these very strange happenings, we have a number of questions:

Why would a man who had not been identified and who could have pleaded not guilty completely accept the charge, decline a lawyer, and wish to return to a strict-regime labour colony from which he had only recently been released?
Where would a former soldier, unemployed and only recently released from prison, have found the money to travel around the country; and how did he come by a false passport in the name of a citizen of Tajikistan of such high quality as to enable him to pass freely through border controls?
Is not the conclusion of this case against Zelensky a ploy designed to preclude a deeper investigation and to conceal the identity of those behind this failed dirty trick?

[On 11 October 2006 Anna Politkovskaya was to have given evidence in court in relation to the Zelensky case, either confirming or not confirming the identity of the man in the dock.]