Anna Politkovskaya did not only criticize the Putin regime and Russia’s “security forces;” she was not uncritical of the West. Nevertheless, she admired civilised and enlightened attitudes when she encountered them there, and hoped they might be transplanted.
February 1, 2001
It is generally accepted that we Russians do not like ourselves much. Clear proof of this is the appalling state of our 195 pre-trial detention facilities in prisons. For the second year in succession the inspectors of the Council of Europe have described conditions in these as tantamount to torture. Out of a total of over one million people in detention, almost 300,000 are awaiting verdicts in pre-trial detention facilities and prisons. According to Oleg Mironov, the Human Rights Ombudsman of the Russian Federation, 85,000 of these have no place to sleep (the facilities and prisons are 226.3 per cent over capacity), more than 90,000 are suffering from an active form of tuberculosis, and more than 5,000 are HIV-positive. Nor are prisoners given an easy time by their warders: in 1999, 3,583 officers in the penal system were punished for violations of the law and 106 were charged with crimes committed in the course of their duties. Their activities directly affect almost two million people, since that is the number of prisoners who each year pass through Russia’s pre-trial detention facilities, almost twice the number of people serving a sentence imposed by a court. The main reason for this is unjustified arrest, which remains the usual means of fighting crime; as a result every fifth man in Russia has experienced prison. In 1999, 263,645 complaints were received by the Prosecutor’s Office about the methods of investigation and questioning used by members of the Interior Ministry, and one in four was upheld. Seventy per cent of complaints about court verdicts received in 1999 by the Human Rights Ombudsman contain claims that violence was used to obtain testimony during interrogation or preliminary investigation, and that this led to the imposition of an unjust sentence.
Novaya gazeta has discovered, however, that there are prisons in this world where Russians are liked, which is not the case in our homeland; where the warders look forward to seeing us, and will do their utmost to help us with any problems. These prisons are in Denmark, an entirely democratic, modern kingdom, and the inspectors of the Council of Europe deem them satisfactory.
“Personally I like Russians very much.” Warder Ani, a large Danish lady with a stylish shock of fair Baltic hair, happily tells me about herself and her world. Admittedly, she paces to and fro out of habit with the military deportment of someone accustomed to discipline, her hands clasped behind her back. “We don’t have to tell your people anything twice. They immediately carry out all instructions. They don’t go on about their rights. They aren’t picky about their food. They are happy to work.”
Ani is in charge of the first floor of the pre-trial facility, here known by the old-fashioned name of “The Bridewell,” in the coastal town of Esbjerg. She energetically demonstrates her work to me, and I can see that this is also the way she does it. She explains that the matter of gender equality is not left to resolve itself in Danish prisons, and that there is a strict quota established by the Ministry of Justice. In closed prisons and pre-trial facilities not less than 45 per cent of the staff should be female. This is believed to foster gentler attitudes and to create a favorable atmosphere. In open prisons the quota is 30 per cent. The Bridewell in Esbjerg is a closed prison, which means that the inmates are awaiting a court sentence or serving brief periods of less than six months’ detention. The entrance doors are firmly locked and you can’t go out for a stroll in the town. We will come to Danish open prisons shortly. Meanwhile, Ani continues:
“As soon as we are brought a Russian who has been detained on a court order, we give him a book in Russian to keep. The book’s title is A Guide to Serving Custodial Sentences. It describes all the minor details of life, the law, and the prisoner’s responsibilities.”
While we are talking somebody leans against the wall outside cell No. 6, and immediately an indignant-looking prisoner emerges. They had accidentally leaned against the light switch for his cell. No. 6 puts it back on and silently goes in again.
“I expect we stopped him reading,” Ani comments. “Many of our inmates are highly strung, which is understandable. Here is our billiards room to help them relax. Here is the gym. Unfortunately the prisoner currently using it has asked not to be disturbed, so we can’t view it. We shall have to wait until he finishes. Here is the exercise yard. Here is a special room for drug addicts suffering withdrawal symptoms, and also for violent alcoholics or mentally ill people undergoing a crisis. It has a bed with restraining straps. There are no spyholes in the doors of the cells, and surveillance is forbidden. There is clean linen on all the beds. Each has its own washbasin. They have to ask to go to the toilet. A fridge? Of course, but you have to bring your own television. There are aerial sockets all over the place. Any more questions?”
Ani, for all her evident good-heartedness, has the cold eyes typical of a screw. She is strict and direct and is, ultimately, a warder, but in the course of our conversation I start having doubts. Whose side is she on? Whose rights is she defending? Is it not the rights of her own prisoners? The first, obvious comment which occurs to anybody used to living not in Denmark but in, say, Moscow, is, “But for heaven’s sake, this is a holiday home, not a prison!”
“I don’t agree. We have strict rules. We are not an open prison. Everybody here is obliged to work daily in the workshops. If you are in prison you have to work all right.” Ani has an iron Danish logic, and a similar manner of social interaction. Nuances, such as her implication that people do not have to work in the world outside prison, completely escape her. “The staff are required to find work for the prisoners. We talk to companies and point out the benefits. The prison workforce is, after all, cheaper.”
Together, Ani and I leaf through the Guide to Serving … She is clearly proud of it, and indeed of the entire Danish penitentiary system. The chapters are headed, “Free Time,” “Dental Treatment,” “Letters.” Finally we come to the icing on the cake: “If you have difficulty reading, please report this to the staff who will help you to record your letter on a tape recorder.” And in the chapter on “Religion”: “If your religion forbids you to work at a particular time, you will be excused from working at this time.” Or in “Visitors”: “If you have no family members or friends to visit you, you can ask the staff to arrange for you to meet members of the Society of Prisoners’ Friends. You may meet representatives of the press.”
Well, that’s enough, indeed too much. I give up! It is only too obvious why Russians are so well behaved here, like children from a good family, and why nobody tries to escape. The Esbjerg Bridewell not only looks from the outside like the better sort of Russian school, but inside its cheery navy and light blue colors, its dinners, billiards and facilities would be the envy of many a Russian kindergarten. And to top it all, they understand that the most important thing to show a prisoner is that, no matter what happened in the past, they are still a human being and should never forget it. What Russian would be unmoved if someone told him, “We know that you are not shit”?
Ani’s boss comes to help her out, as she is increasingly nonplussed as to why we are so amazed by what she is showing us of life in a Danish prison. The senior official in the Bridewell is the District Chief of Police, Jørgen Ilum, a man who looks like a highly paid and very established lawyer and not in the slightest like a provincial militia chief. Jørgen, we are pleased to find, is not fazed by anything. He is a professional and ponders long and deeply, listening attentively to our uniquely Russian questions.
“Do investigators in Denmark torture the accused to extract testimony?”
This admittedly causes some consternation, followed by a lengthy discussion we can’t understand between Mr Ilum and the Deputy Chief of Police, Sten Bolund. Sten is wearing a modish, grey, regally elegant suit with a sparkle in the cloth, set off with a bright super-modern tie. They seem genuinely unable to understand how such a question can arise if the investigators’ salaries are paid by taxpayers. They finally reply, “No.”
“When was a policeman last found guilty of brutality in Denmark?”
Again consternation, and another long discussion in Danish, this time bringing in Nils Hedegger, Head of the Esbjerg Police Association, their trade union. Trade union representatives are required to be present in every police station. The three of them reply that in 1993 there was a complaint against two policemen in the neighbouring district. A man in a bar (the plaintiff) had been behaving aggressively, others in the bar asked for him to be removed and the owner called the police. The aggressive man considered that he had been removed too effectively. The district court found against the policemen but the appeal court acquitted them on the grounds that the force used was justified in order to protect the interests of the other patrons of the bar.
“But we really can’t remember any claims of brutal behaviour during an investigation,” all three confirmed. As both Jørgen and Sten are pushing 50 and Nils is about 40, their collective professional memory must go back at least a couple of decades.
“What are the criteria for assessing your work?”
The policemen smile with relief and start telling us about things which are as clear to them as the sea and the sun. Every three years there is a public opinion poll in Denmark and citizens are invited to say whether they feel safe in their homes, secure in the streets, and whether they find the police courteous, neatly dressed and well trained.
The survey is their performance assessment. If the results are bad the Chief of Police will be replaced and some officers sent for additional training, while others might be fired. There are no targets for solving a set percentage of crimes, statistics which in Russia have to be inflated by fair means or foul and result in such painfully familiar dialogue as, “Confess, you bastard, that you murdered …, stole …, fenced …, or else …”
In another, less direct survey the population are asked which of the public sector employees, paid from their taxes, they rate most highly: doctors, teachers, municipal bus drivers or policemen?
“In recent years,” Mr Ilum informs us proudly, “policemen have come first.”
The police are subject to sanctions if they work too slowly. At the present time, for example, Danish society is making a concerted effort to eradicate violence on the principle that, while stealing is of course bad, physical violence is wholly unacceptable. The Danish Parliament has decided that the police must give priority to investigating violent crime, and such cases must be brought to court within 30 days. If the police fail to meet the deadline, the suspect will receive a reduced sentence even if subsequently found guilty.
“You’re kidding?”
“The public require us to work very quickly,” Chief of Police Ilum adds.
“And do you often have to release criminals on these grounds? For failure to produce the evidence in time?”
“Occasionally.” Sten Bolund, the Deputy Chief of Police, spreads his hands. “But that is our problem. We are held responsible, and the democratically approved laws are not tampered with.”
Travelling on from Esbjerg, you reach the village of Skærbæk. You can enter the village just like any other, although it also hosts the Renbæk Regional Open Prison with 110 inmates and 62 staff. It comprises a group of cottages (cells of a sort), a small shop (the prison store), workshops, a byre, a football field, a golf course and a bus stop. Anybody at all can come here. A wife? A girlfriend? Yes – every day if they like, if you have finished your work. There are no fences or bars here. The only restriction on your freedom is that the houses – ordinary, cosy Scandinavian caravans – are locked at 2200 hours, and unlocked at 0700 by a supervisor who stays overnight with the prisoners. If you are not back by 2200 hours, that counts as an escape attempt. Nobody, however, will go running to look for you. This is considered to be an area of your personal responsibility, and nobody else’s. If you run away, when you are caught you will be transferred to a closed prison, where you will not be free again for a long time and will be allowed visits only once a week. And your sentence will be extended. You will lose the football, the golf, the privilege of personal responsibility and your subsistence allowance. In the open prison you have to feed yourself; each prisoner is allotted 40 kroner a day [£5] and has to buy food, prepare it, clear up and wash up in the kitchen of his little house. The logic behind Danish open prisons is that everything has to be worked for. Is that sensible? Yes. After all, you are not being sent on holiday for committing a robbery.
But here is the Governor of Renbæk, a pink-cheeked giant called Eric Pedersen. It is difficult to distinguish him from the prisoners walking through the village as none of them wear a uniform. The Governor invites us into the conference room, lights candles on the table, and, offering tea and coffee, tells us about his prisoners so that we should be under no illusions: the people walking these streets, playing football and tennis, are genuine criminals.
“The man who was happily playing table tennis when we went past murdered his wife. Fifteen per cent of the prisoners here are in prison for sexual crimes, 25 per cent for violence, and only 25 per cent for robbery.”
“Then isn’t this rather too soft? Perhaps they really are a danger to society and should be isolated?”
“What would be the sense of that? And what should be done with them afterwards, after they had served their time? Work is an obligatory part of being here. Or study, if you don’t already have secondary education. Studying in the classrooms is considered equivalent to working in the prison workshops. We regard this as an attempt at re-education.”
So much for Hamlet and “Denmark’s a prison.” Under the pressure of total democracy, prison, let alone the entire kingdom, resembles anything on earth before it resembles a prison.
Finally, we Russians are constantly hankering after being admitted to Europe. Not in a geographical sense, but as a fully valid European state in the Strasbourg sense. We talk and write a lot about this admirable ambition, and occasionally even fantasise that we are already there. However, it is time now to seek not just the forms but also the content, and that means we need to address our total lack of due legal process, and raise our game to the level of Denmark! To the level of Renbæk, of the gentlemanly Chief of Police, and of the Esbjerg Bridewell where they wholeheartedly like Russians.
PS. This article was prepared with the support of the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights.
May 14, 2001
London, April 30, 2001. The city was unwelcoming. People waiting for spring were still faced with driving rain, a cold, bitter wind, a never-ending twilight, an autumn that couldn’t be shaken off despite the May tulips lining the avenues in the park.
The weather was a fitting background to the task I had set myself: having flown to the British capital, how was I to get the answer to a question I wanted to ask Tony Blair, Prime Minister of this influential island kingdom? Why, for some time now, has he been on such good terms with President Putin? What are the qualities in Putin he finds so appealing?
Any Russian journalist knows that to get an interview with a head of government you need the patience of a saint. In Moscow, miracles do not happen – such is the nature of the Kremlin – but in London on the morning of April 30 I received a personal invitation to the traditional annual lunch of the London Press Club, founded in 1882, with the Prime Minister of Great Britain. Remarkably, I had not made a huge effort to get this invitation. I was just handed it. For 12.30 at Claridge’s, a grand old London hotel. So why not go?
The miracles did not end there, at least in the view of this citizen of the Russian Federation. At 12:20 there was nobody at the entrance to Claridge’s other than an elderly commissionaire wearing a heavy grey wool uniform and a high Dickensian hat. It is customary for the commissionaires of very expensive London hotels to be grey-haired elderly gentleman who would have been retired long ago in Russia.
The commissionaire opened the door of my taxi and suggested that, if I was coming for the lunch with the Prime Minister, I would find it more convenient to use a different nearby door. I knew what he was up to. He was surreptitiously directing me to a queue where the British security services would filter would-be guests. They have their own, Irish, terrorists to worry about, after all.
So I marched through the main entrance, and soon realized I had got it wrong. All the aged commissionaire had wanted was to show me a shorter and more convenient route to the Prime Minister. I returned specially to my starting point to check and, while I was at it, looked around to see which rooftops the snipers were on.
There were none. Neither were there any lantern-jawed, shaven-headed security guards with searching scowls, or the bleeping metal-detector frames through which anyone in Russia is obliged to pass if they are likely to be within a kilometre of anywhere the President might show up.
At 12:45 Tony Blair arrived. At 12:50 the gong sounded for lunch. At 2:00 p.m. promptly we took our seats. My table was next to the Prime Minister’s. We tucked in to the starter, duck in aspic with milk sauce. Not bad but, to be honest, not that special either. Mr Blair was chasing it across his large plate, just like me.
The diners got on with their duck, and the gentlemen, all of them what in Russia we would call “directors of the media,” made no attempt to disturb the Prime Minister’s meal. Nobody ran up to him to ask questions while he was pretending to enjoy the starter.
At 13:19 Dennis Griffiths, the Chairman of the London Press Club, introduced Tony Blair to the guests and invited him to speak. What he had to say was intriguing, but for the most part consisted of declaring his love for the press and joking about the fact that he was wearing spectacles for the first time in his life.
A ripple of laughter ran over the tables and people clapped.
At 13.35, while Blair was still speaking from an improvised podium, orderly rows of waiters glided into the room bearing enormous plates. This was the main dish. Everybody got the same: a small piece of extremely tender braised or boiled pink salmon, with three tiny potatoes, a couple of sprigs of sweet basil, and a modest pile of kidney beans.
Blair, who as everybody knows recently had a fourth child, sat down and set about his salmon in exactly the way the hard-up father of four children would in Russia. The Prime Minister got through his diminutive piece of pink fish rapidly and with obvious relish.
He was now free, and I mounted my attack. The path to him was straight and clear, obstructed only by the remains of the first course and Blair’s press secretary, Alistair Campbell, a former popular columnist of one of the London newspapers. Alistair, however, was eating his fish, and everything was in place.
The response of the Prime Minister of Great Britain to my inquiry regarding the nature of his affection for Putin was brief but comprehensive. He replied, “It’s my job as Prime Minister to like Mr Putin.” And that was that. What more was to be said? The chef’s job is to cook the fish; the doctor’s job is to remove an appendix; the job of one head of state is to demonstrate how much he likes another head of state. It’s as simple as that.
At 14.10 speeches by members of the Press Club began and continued until 14.45. Blair listened politely. At 14.50 he quietly left, as had been previously announced in the program. There were no standing ovations or elaborate farewells. It was all very understated and British.
At this point dessert was brought in: tea or coffee and a piece of chocolate praline gâteau with coffee-flavoured custard. The Prime Minister was leaving but turned to the tables one last time. He glanced sadly at the unattainable plates of gâteau which the waiters, seemingly oblivious to the head of their government, were carrying past.
Everybody has a job to do, and nobody should try to stop them. That really is the British attitude. If a waiter is bringing diners their gâteau you get out of his way, even if you are the Prime Minister.
August 16, 2001
Here we are, almost at the furthest end of the Old World. A very high bank over a brooding black Norwegian fjord, and a small township climbing up this fjord cliff. It is small, self-contained, wonderful, and feels rather carefree. It is called Molde. Molde does not trifle with lakes or seas; what dominates here is the mighty Atlantic Ocean itself. You could get in a boat and sail to America – the whole world is on your doorstep. Within the borders of Russia few people are aware of the existence of Molde.
Molde, however, is not entirely what it seems. There are people in this town whose whole lives were turned upside down by all that has been going on in Russia.
High above the fjord is the town cemetery, a neat, quiet, sorrowful place, and as unnerving as any cemetery where life meets death irrevocably, leaving only a gravestone in place of a once living, rebellious human soul. I heap red roses on the earth around a severe, grey Scandinavian stone which, at the cemetery’s very highest point, looks out towards the ocean. Facing the infinity of the Atlantic, the words chiselled into the stone read, “Død Tsjetsjenia. 17.12.1996.”
That means, “Died in Chechnya.” Ingeborg Foss, a 42-year-old Norwegian nurse who lived in Molde and left this quiet Atlantic coastal town on December 4, 1996, died together with five nurses and doctors, three of whom were Norwegian, in the Chechen village of Starye Atagi on December 17. She was ten days into her Red Cross mission, working in a hospital which had been set up there.
“Ingeborg rang me twice from Chechnya,” Sigrid Foss, Ingeborg’s 82-year-old mother tells me. “She said it was very frightening.”
“Did you ask her to come home? Did you try to persuade her? Did you insist, as a mother?”
“No,” Sigrid replies. “It was her destiny.”
Brief, to the point, betraying no sense of hurt, but what a scree of emotion there is in the heart of this woman, her face incised with wrinkles. Love of her daughter, grief at her passing, but also pride that Ingeborg proved so reckless for the sake of people she did not know but who were nevertheless ill. And, of course, the pain of irredeemable loss.
Long before Chechnya, Ingeborg had dedicated herself to working for the Red Cross. She had worked in Nicaragua and Pakistan but when the Red Cross offered her a contract in Bosnia, she suddenly refused, saying, “I have an aged mother. I can’t.” Nevertheless, she made up her mind to go to Chechnya. The Red Cross assured her that conditions were not as bad as people were saying, and that everything would be fine.
Sigrid catches constantly at her grey braids of hair, blown about by a strong wind which has sprung up here in the cemetery, high above the fjord. She is barely able to hold back the tears. Her eyes redden and her eyelids droop, and then she squats down and lays a hand on the dark brown fjord soil by Ingeborg’s gravestone. She steadies herself for a few moments before catching her grey hair again. She pushes it up, away from her eyes in defiance of the wind, and the gesture seems to help her gather what remains of her strength. They say here that the older women of Norway do not cry. It is not their way. They are strong, indomitable, familiar with suffering, and do not usually give way to tears. They lived through the Second World War, when Norway endured a brutal occupation, with partisans, a resistance, fighting, and many dead. Most later lived through great poverty and hunger, and it was only when they were very old that Norway became rich and was able to provide them with decent old people’s homes and good pensions.
Sigrid is one such Norwegian woman. You can tell that she is by nature very tough, like anyone who lives with the wind and the sea and who is used to seeing their family sail out, never to return. She is fully aware of what someone standing beside her in the cemetery may be thinking.
“Yes, losing my daughter has put ten years on my age,” she nods, swallowing a lump in her throat in order to continue the simple story of her family. All her life Sigrid taught Norwegian and English, and of course brought up her own children, but her husband was a doctor. Sigrid lost first him, and then the daughter who had decided to follow in his footsteps.
Sigrid proudly shows me a certificate, Order No. 589, dated December 11, 1997, issued by President Aslan Maskhadov, awarding Ingeborg the highest decoration of the Chechen Republic. That award and a grave are all that Sigrid has left after the death of her daughter.
“Do you feel Russia has wronged you?”
“No. My grudge is against the Red Cross.”
Sigrid Foss says that she believes the organization in whose cause her daughter died was over-ambitious.
“At that time, between the two Chechen wars, the Red Cross wanted to establish a hospital against all the odds, as if to say, ‘Look at us! We can do something nobody else can do! The Russians are too frightened, and the Chechens don’t have the means.’ Their ambitions led them to assure Ingeborg there was no great danger, when in fact it was deadly.” Sigrid was told this by the Norwegian doctor who by a miracle survived, and who accompanied the stretcher bearing Ingeborg’s body back to Molde.
“A stretcher? Not a coffin?”
“That’s right.”
For Sigrid, 1997 and 1998 passed under the initial shock of bereavement, but then she wanted to establish the truth. Gradually, however, things took a bizarre, heartless turn. As if it was not enough that Ingeborg’s life had been cut short, Sigrid found she had no way, because of everything going on in Chechnya and Russia, to find out who exactly was responsible for her daughter’s untimely death.
What is left for someone whose child has predeceased them? Given that it is impossible to right the terrible wrong that has happened, they do at least want to know what that was. Alas, to this day Sigrid Foss does not even know whether there is an inquiry into the murder of her daughter in Starye Atagi, let alone whether it is making progress.
Everybody has forgotten her: Russia, because her daughter was helping the Chechen population to survive, and at present that is unfashionable in Russia; Chechnya, because Chechnya has no time for anything other than trying to survive.
“Two years ago we had a phone call from the Norwegian Foreign Ministry. I was told they had no information. They did not even know whether an investigation was being conducted in Russia. I couldn’t make out who our Foreign Ministry was in touch with in Moscow about the murders in Starye Atagi. The Red Cross was no better. They sent me a letter a year ago saying there was no news. In five years you are the first person from Russia to remember Ingeborg and come to visit her grave.”
“But what about Norwegians?”
“No Norwegians have come either.”
“Død Tsjetsjenia.” Norway, Molde, Russia. I say goodbye to Sigrid Foss. Do you still think the world is vast? That if there is a conflagration in one place it does not have a bearing on another, and that you can sit it out in peace on your veranda admiring your absurd petunias?
Our greatest problem today is that this most basic and long-established truth has to be reiterated as if it had just come into existence. Neither that modest grave in Molde, nor the thousands of graves all over Chechnya, have acted as a wake-up call for Europe, which continues to slumber as if the war being fought within its bounds was not already in its twenty-third successive month; as if Chechnya were as far from Norway as it is from the Antarctic.
For all that, Chechnya is no less a part of the Old World than any of its other territories. Mr Kruse, a correspondent for Norwegian state television who has worked in Russia for many years, exclaimed in some surprise during our conversation to the effect that, “Oh, but Russia is a different part of Europe. You can’t apply the usual criteria. Even war criminals in Russia are not really war criminals. You can hardly blame the present fate of Miloŝevic on Russia’s leaders, given its great spiritual heritage and sheer geographical scale.”
Alas, this is an all too typical European attitude. Russia has today been categorised as a maverick territory where, with the tacit agreement of the heads of the European states, the European Parliament, the Council of Europe and the OSCE all lumped together, it is apparently acceptable for citizens to live under laws quite different from those which apply to the rest of the European continent, laws which the rest of Europe couldn’t imagine living under in its worst nightmare.
That is why I gave Mr Kruse a hard time. I asked him why he thought it was all right for a Chechen woman to be killed for no reason, just because passing soldiers were in a bad mood, but not for the same fate to befall a Norwegian, or Swedish or Belgian woman. How was a French woman any different from a Chechen woman, or a Russian woman who happened to belong to a “great power”?
It isn’t all right, of course, but many people in Norway are taken aback by questions like that. It is obvious that Chechen women are no different, but that does not square with Europe’s self-contradictory desire not to fall out with Putin while retaining a semblance of civilised values.
All my conversations, meetings and interviews – in the Norwegian Foreign Ministry, with reporters, at the Nobel Institute in Oslo, with the future Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik, even in the Norwegian Human Rights Center (there really is such an office block in Oslo, where most of the human rights organizations operating in Norway are accommodated under one roof) – only served to further persuade me of something I already knew: Europe has no stomach for opposing the war in Chechnya. Europe is mired in double standards when it comes to human rights. One standard applies to most of Europe; it is distilled, splendid, civilised and tidy. For Russia, where democracy was born only a decade ago, there is another, naturally less distilled and pure. For the rebellious enclave of Chechnya, however, there is no standard at all, a void. Europe effectively condones the existence of a territory where atrocities go unpunished, and pretends that the war being waged there does not concern Europeans. There are few protests, no sanctions are imposed on Russian officials, and crimes that would never be tolerated in the rest of Europe – killings, extra-judicial persecution and executions – are seen as unproblematical in Russia and Chechnya. Indeed, there is even tacit acceptance of the monstrous notion that one particular nation should bear collective responsibility for the actions of a few of its members.
Applying double standards is a dangerous game. Europe has been here before, with infamous consequences. In 1933 the Führer of a new Germany was also “democratically elected.” Europe was frightened by his speeches but, until they could no longer be ignored, paid them no attention, preferring to look to its own prosperity and pleasant morning coffee. With Europe turning a blind eye, two nationalities – the Jews and the Gypsies – were held collectively responsible for the deeds of particular individuals. What was the consequence? The consequence was 1945, with millions dead, millions burned in crematoria, and Europe in ruins.
It all started so simply. A particular gentleman with psychological problems took it into his head that one nation was great and the rest were less great, and that some, indeed, should be annihilated. Are we really to say that things are different now? That the Kremlin sometimes gives Chechens honors and medals and even promotes them to top positions and is doing something for them? Hitler did all that too, as a smokescreen for Europe’s benefit. There were “good” Jews, “honest” Gypsies were paraded now and again, and sometimes there were even “civilised” Slavs to be discovered, so that Europe wouldn’t be upset, would not become alarmed too soon. Europe pretended to swallow all this, but that did not save countless men, women and children from dying subsequently at the hands of the people of that “great” nation.
To return to the present. The double standards Europe applies to Chechnya are gradually infiltrating Europe. What did Ingeborg Foss give her life for? Why does nobody in Europe, not even in Norway, not in the OSCE or the European Parliament think it matters that an aged Norwegian mother knows nothing about how or why her daughter died, or that the investigation of the deaths of six doctors and nurses in Starye Atagi has ground to a halt? (That nothing is being done has been confirmed by the Prosecutor-General’s Office of the Russian Federation.)
So what is modern Europe’s moral code? A pretence? Self-delusion for some and a convenient fiction for others who don’t want it to get in the way of pan-European fraternisation between the major powers to crush those who are weaker?
Russia is in the grip of war fever, Europe reacts sluggishly, and here is the result: Ingeborg Foss, a young Norwegian woman, died in Chechnya and now her old mother, Sigrid Foss, is alone in the world. Just like Aishat Djabrailova from Gudermes, who lost her husband and her sons in the Second Chechen Slaughter. Like Ludmila Sysuyeva from Tyumen Province who received an official form advising her of the death of her only son, followed shortly afterwards by a sealed zinc coffin, and who now doesn’t know whom to turn to. We are in close proximity to each other: from Oslo to Moscow is just two hours by air, and another two hours will take you from Moscow to Chechnya. Europe is tiny.
This generation of politicians, to whom we gave the right to rule, have failed us. They act in their own interests, not in the interests of Europe.
As we said our farewells, Sigrid told me, “The fact that you remembered Ingrid has given me a few more years of life.” Behind us the Atlantic roared and the seagulls cried out. “People need answers to the questions which most concern them while they are still alive,” she added. “That may be the most important thing those in authority can do.”
April 15, 2002
Seventeen candidates are registered in the 2002 French presidential election, a record. Among the hopefuls are: Lionel Jospin, present Prime Minister and Head of the Socialist Party (“moderate left”); Jacques Chirac, present President of the Republic (“right,” liberal); Arlette Laguiller (“extreme left”); Jean-Marie Le Pen (“extreme right,” archnationalist and friend of our own far-right Vladimir Zhirinovsky); Alain Madelin (leader of the Liberal Democracy Party); and Noël Mamère (Leader of the Green Party.
Our readers may legitimately be wondering what Novaya gazeta was doing in France when there is more than enough to report on in Russia. Our intention was simple: it has not been at all clear what President Putin’s ideas are for ending the Second Chechen War so we decided to try to find out by asking some of the European leaders with whom Putin, by virtue of his office, has close working relationships. In favor of France was the fact that the intellectuals and politicians here, including Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, have traditionally been more radical on the Chechen issue than the elite of other countries. They have emphatically opposed the war, and helped large numbers of Chechen refugees to settle in France.
After negotiations with his Press Office, Novaya gazeta was granted a day when, in the course of a visit to Lorient, a provincial fishing village on the Atlantic coast, M. Lionel Jospin, Prime Minister of France, would reply to questions we had submitted in advance. The quid pro quo was that we would publish an article about his election campaigning in Lorient. We thought that was fair enough.
All election campaigns are as alike as die-cast nuts coming off a conveyor belt. As in Russia, so in France there is The Candidate, his gaze wandering above the heads of The People. He is weary and, of course, preoccupied with affairs of state. He pretends to understand everything he is told. On the other side, The People, wearing new work clothes and clean helmets specially issued by their superiors in honor of this visit from the metropolis. There is also the clicking and flashing of the press, and a full turnout from the Mayor’s Office.
Everything proceeded according to plan in the port of Lorient, which M. Jospin visited first. He was shown a new fishing boat in dry dock, nodded silently in time with the explanations, shook the hand of a young engineer in the front row of The People, and in a practised manner took up his position for a commemorative photograph with the Mayor. Then it was our turn. The Press Office whispered in our ear, “Keep strictly to the questions!”
“Prime Minister, what do you think about the anti-terrorist operation in Russia, the war in Chechnya? About the massive violation of human rights? Have you talked to President Putin about ending it? About deadlines?”
The Prime Minister of France was clearly taken aback. A puzzled silence hung in the air until the emotionless gaze from behind his spectacles became tetchy. What was all this about?
“Oh no, not that. Lord, that’s all we need,” Jospin said, looking at the crowds surrounding him.
“But why haven’t you?”
“Why are you asking me about these things in Lorient?”
“I am a journalist from Russia, and I was invited here by your Press Office specifically to ask you about these things.”
Jospin is aghast. His press attaché comes out in blotches.
“No, no, and again no. It’s all so complicated.”
“But Prime Minister, please tell us how relations between Jospin and Putin will differ from relations between Chirac and Putin if you do in fact become President. What could Russia expect from France in that event?”
“Oh these questions. Putin … Lord. Oh no, not that. Today I shall only be talking about the sea. Ask me something about the sea!”
“Why is he being so evasive?” I ask those witnessing this strange scene in some perplexity. “Is he afraid of Putin?”
They explain as best they can, journalists from the Prime Minister’s press pool, port engineers and workers. It has nothing to do with fear of Putin. It is just that one of the customs of contemporary French politicians is never to let themselves be pinned down. They express themselves in an opaque manner so that they cannot subsequently be held to account for what they have said. Lite politicians with easy European policies which commit them to nothing. General-purpose politics, nothing too specific.
Evidently this is particularly typical of the Socialists, the party currently led by Jospin. The Socialists in France are in a league of their own. Among France’s moderate Socialist supporters are many people with a non-traditional approach, but this is not by any means seen as a political minus for the party. On the contrary, in France it is seen as a plus, giving them, including Jospin Lite, a good chance of winning elections.
Let me give an example, which, moreover, illustrates the old adage about knowing a man by the company he keeps. Another major left-wing figure, and ideological comrade of Jospin, is Bertrand Delanoë, the current Mayor of Paris. He is famously an “out” gay politician, which recently enabled him to win the mayoral contest, with the result that Paris now has an entire gay quarter. During the election Delanoë trod warily, but now he is in power his policies are quite aggressive, in accordance with his own radical ideas. Because he regards himself as green, the traffic in Paris is being reorganised, very much to the inconvenience of drivers, to encourage them, in Delanoë’s words, to “get on their bikes.” I am not joking. To speak in generalities, but then to reform and micro-regulate is very much the way of today’s French Left.
I was warned not to take too literally Jospin’s airy answer, “Oh no, not that. Lord, that’s all we need.” In the rather twisted political idiom of modern France, I was told, this actually means that Jospin currently favors Putin’s root-and-branch approach in Chechnya but prefers not to say so, because that is not done.
Jospin’s political background is extreme Trotskyism. For almost 20 years of his mature life, between the ages of 30 and 50, he belonged to an illegal, underground Trotskyite cell whose main ideas were permanent revolution, total egalitarianism, and taking everything from the rich and sharing it out among the poor, a little for everyone. In the present election race, Jospin is eager to disown this sectarianism. When questioned about his Trotskyite past he lies, claiming that he was never a member of the cell, that it was his brother in the list of members, and that it is their shared surname which has caused the confusion.
Is this a ploy, or might it actually be true? I discussed this with André Glucksmann, a major contemporary French philosopher. For many years Glucksmann was one of France’s most brilliant leftists, and you will search in vain for anyone better informed about this section of the French political spectrum.
“Of course it is Lionel Jospin,” he told me, “and not his brother. The organization we are talking about existed secretly, it was very conspiratorial, like a sect. Incidentally, nobody is entirely sure whether it has disbanded or not. It is perfectly possible that it exists illegally to this day, and that Jospin is a fully paid up member who is simply carrying out its program.”
“So it’s something like the Freemasons?”
“Yes. The organization in which Jospin’s political personality was formed is essentially a Trotskyite version of Freemasonry. Their aim is to penetrate the institutions and management of the state in accordance with Trotsky’s principles. Nobody knows for certain whether Jospin is still a member or not. Perhaps his presidential ambitions are just a project of this Trotskyite sect.”
It is time to return to the port in Lorient. The Prime Minister of France makes his escape from questions he does not want to answer and heads for the safe haven of his limousine. Shortly afterwards The Candidate arrives at the local Palace of Nations in the town center, where he is due to divulge his thoughts about the sea.
Jospin’s progress to the platform is barred by a crowd of his former fellow thinkers, Communists and representatives of the most powerful Communist trade union in France, the CGT. Red flags, uniforms, slogans through loud-hailers, chanting of “Hands off the Alcatel factory.” Jospin again looks irritated. Alighting from his limousine he casts a hostile glance at this left-wing crowd and, showing a fair turn of speed, runs wordlessly into the Palace of Nations, where there is alas no sound insulation. In the hall you can hear everything going on outside: the shouting and yelling of the demonstrators, the Communist songs. Jospin pretends none of it is happening. The moment arrives for his thoughts about the sea.
“The sea unites and brings together. It bears within itself the values of solidarity … The sea plays a great part in that freedom which Socialists bring to the world in the name of the all-round development of man … The sea is unbounded. It is open to all the winds of firm liberalism, from the rubbish tips on the shoreline to sailors left to fend for themselves … To conduct a policy imbued with the spirit of the sea means to reject liberal deviations … We want to avoid the submerged rocks of excessive liberalisation.”
And finally, “Let us save the sea from the ebbing and flowing tides of liberalism.” This soundbite summarises Jospin’s thoughts about the sea. It is the core of his politics, and if there was a special Guinness Book of Records for political demagogy, would undoubtedly be in it.
We need to translate all this from the idiom of French politics into something more comprehensible. What on earth was he talking about? What did he mean by the references to “firm liberalism,” “rejecting liberal deviations”? This was a uniquely French way of throwing a brick into the political garden of Jacques Chirac, the liberal President and Jospin’s main rival. By criticising him in this metaphorical manner, Jospin managed to avoid all mention of his name. By the local rules, this was considered very cool. And we thought he would talk about Chechnya!
The finale was simple, and followed the script of all election campaign finales. The last ebbings and flowings from the platform were greeted with an ovation. “Jospin – Président! Jospin – Président!” the front rows chanted to the rhythm of “Spartak – Champ-i-on!” A minute later The Candidate, in order to avoid any unpleasant contact with The People outside, was led off through the back door.
Returning to Paris very late that evening on Jospin’s plane, put at his disposal by the private air charter company Darta, the mood was positive as if after a good day’s work. Entirely acceptable wine was passed round, and Jospin’s PR team started singing their favorite songs with gusto. First, many times, “Comandante Che Guevara.” Secondly, a song of the Italian partisans. Thirdly, “Motivé,” a song of the French Communists, conveying the concept that “I am a person with motivation.: The lead singer was a young man who was Jospin’s Press Secretary. For the entire hour until we reached Le Bourget private airport near Paris, he kept the team alternating “Che Guevara,” “Bella Ciao,” “Motivé,” “Che Guevara,” “Bella Ciao”…
[In the 2002 presidential elections, Lionel Jospin made it through to the second round, before losing to Jacques Chirac and the leader of the Nationalists, Jean-Marie Le Pen.]
After the rigours of Moscow, the orderly life of London quickly turns you back into a normal human being, someone with the ways of a free citizen.
I imagine many of our compatriots who, for the time being and against their will, find themselves in Great Britain must experience similar feelings. Here they at last settle back into an ordinary way of life denied them in Russia. They cease to jump at any sound resembling a gunshot, and even take the London Underground without a bodyguard.
The air of London is revivifying. The proof was not long in coming; I went to the theatre – just for the joy of it, not to be seen in society – to a local musical which has had an unbroken run of many years and where, accordingly, no self-respecting New Russian would be seen dead in Russia. London is different. As I was sitting down next to Akhmed Zakayev, the Special Envoy of President Aslan Maskhadov of Chechnya, who is awaiting the verdict of a British court in respect of the Russian Federation’s entirely political demand for his extradition, somebody turned round from the row in front and said breezily, “Hi, guys.” This was none other than Yuliy Dubov, author of the sensational novel Oligarch, and no mean oligarch himself. He too has a warrant out for his arrest from the Russian Prosecutor-General’s Office, for embezzlement involving Zhiguli cars but principally because of his friendship with another oligarch in exile, Boris Berezovsky, who also now lives in London. In a London theatre Yuliy Dubov was charming, while in Moscow you couldn’t have broken through his oligarchic security cordon for love or money. He proved to have a delightful wife, and in the interval ran off to the bar without ceremony to get drinks. He even told us how many stops on the Underground it was from here to his house.
My heart warmed to see how amazingly London’s ordinariness heals people spiritually, but I was to make an even more amazing discovery. Boris Berezovsky himself, I found, is also recuperating morally here.
Like anyone else, he attends parents’ meetings at school. You have to admit, that speaks volumes for Britain’s ability to bring a Russian citizen back to normality, and serves to confirm that today Britain is the most attractive country in Europe for those forced to emigrate from Russia. Apart from Berezovsky, Dubov and Zakayev, London is home to Alexander Litvinenko [assassinated in London by the FSB in November 2006], the ex-FSB officer who came into irreconcilable conflict with his Ministry for refusing to kill Berezovsky without written instructions from his superiors, and then fled to Britain with a false passport by way of Ukraine.
All of them are people to be reckoned with and grandees in their own circles, despite all having warrants for their arrest as criminals issued by the Prosecutor-General’s Office. They are, of course, very different people, but have some things in common. They are all friends here, not only with each other but also with Vladimir Bukovsky, who is respected as the patriarch of Russian dissidents and political émigrés in Great Britain, who acknowledge him as the leader of their unplanned assembly of new political exiles.
When someone no longer refers to the British Prime Minister with a clipped “Bler,” but enunciates a long, drawling, diphthongised “Blai-er” as the British do, he is quite clearly no longer embedded in Russian society. Berezovsky, Zakayev and Litvinenko still come out with a curt “Bler,” but Bukovsky now says “Blai-er.” His alien pronunciation in no wise diminishes the immense attractiveness of this unique man with his palpable inner freedom. Political émigrés of every persuasion are drawn to him.
Bukovsky’s home is a rather dank, rather small, very English house in the university town of Cambridge. Its owner has been through the mill in a way the rest of us can only guess at. Ten years of labor camps and specialist psychiatric hospitals in his former homeland, followed by decades in exile. He lives here incredibly modestly, but very precisely, as becomes a dissident, without evident luxury and with just a single fireplace to warm the room. This is fuelled by a mountain of wine corks piled to the left of it. These indicate frequent, forgivable departures from its owner’s asceticism. Bored by the adults’ conversation, Tolya, Alexander Litvinenko’s eight-year-old son, who already mixes Russian words with English and writes poetry in English, busies himself with setting fire to the corks.
Bukovsky is not young. When he says “we” he means “the British.” That said, he greets his guests as he always has, wearing his traditional Soviet blue tracksuit with its baggy knees and incongruously offering us Courvoisier cognac dating from 1942, the year he was born. Having warmed ourselves with the brandy, we talk.
Why do you think people who have issues with Russia are again gathering in Britain? Is it coincidence or is there an explanation?
There are two aspects to that. Of course, mostly it is just chance. Akhmed is stranded here for the simple reason that he was invited to England by Vanessa Redgrave and, under our European laws, a person is returned to their country of departure. (In October 2002 it was from Britain that Zakayev travelled to the World Chechen Congress in Copenhagen, where he was arrested after Russia demanded his extradition. He was tried by a Danish court, released on December 3, and returned to Britain.)
It was less random in the case of Boris [Berezovsky]. He is a financier, and it is generally acknowledged that we offer the greatest freedom in the world for financial operations. Also, I told Boris, “You are requesting political asylum, which Britain has already granted to Sasha Litvinenko. Your case is directly linked with his. By legal precedent, the Litvinenko case will be aggregated with yours, and he has already received asylum. That means that no other verdict in your case is possible: if they gave him asylum for refusing to kill you, they are quite certain to give it to you, because it was you the Russian state authorities wanted to kill. That is an established fact.”
In other words, it is both coincidence and for good reason that Russians are gathering here. In today’s Europe, out of the members of the European Union (and I emphasise that, because Norway and Switzerland are not members, and they are even more free) Britain is the best country for getting things done. It keeps its distance from the European Union, and there is obviously still a great deal of freedom here.
Do you think that the concentration here of political refugees might seriously impair relations between Britain and Russia, or Europe and Russia?
As far as Britain is concerned, definitely not. Blair will continue to love Putin in spite of Zakayev, purely as a matter of political expediency. No matter how many émigrés accumulate here, Britain never alters its relations with anyone. Such is the tradition. For us in Britain, granting asylum is not a political but a legal decision, no matter what the Soviet – excuse me, Russian – Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Kremlin lot think. Political asylum decisions are taken not by the Government but by the courts. The Government can make only an initial decision and any person has the right to an appeal, which is heard in court. Accordingly, the Government always bears in mind that its decision may be reviewed in court, and tries to second-guess how the courts are likely to rule. That gives a judicial guarantee of protection.
I couldn’t help smiling at the protest by the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr Ivanov, over the fact that an English policeman released Zakayev from Heathrow Airport on Friday night. […] It demonstrates how professionally incompetent they are – they just don’t understand how things work here. The English policeman did not ask the Prime Minister what to do about Zakayev. He simply thought it would cause less trouble if, since he had confiscated Zakayev’s passport, he released this person into England. Zakayev couldn’t leave the country anyway, and if the policeman’s superiors wanted to change that decision they could do so tomorrow themselves. In other words, as a policeman on night shift, he was doing nothing that might harm Britain, and that was his main concern. It was his decision, not the British Government’s. By delivering a completely unnecessary broadside at the British Government, Minister Ivanov merely caused offence and made it even less likely that Zakayev would be returned to Russia. Nevertheless, the general European climate is clearly worsening because of the Zakayev affair. The European Parliament’s delegation was not allowed into Chechnya, and this was expressly linked to Zakayev.
Yes, but that has no bearing at all on Britain’s position. On the general European position, yes, in the sense that this is beginning to irritate people in Europe, but what is irritating them is not that the Chechen problem is fundamentally insoluble, but the way Russia is dealing with it. Listen, the European Parliament is an extremely neutral organization. If it is not Orwellian, it is certainly in the mould foreseen by Huxley. Yet it took the initiative of passing a special resolution approving Denmark’s action in releasing Zakayev, whom they describe as “an outstanding Chechen politician,” and they are giving him a so-called “Passport of Freedom” for Europe. That is very significant.
They passed the resolution, but they have been made to pay for it.
I have many friends in the European Parliament and they are simply laughing. The European Parliament has no great need to travel to Russia. It is Russia which needs that.
But this Commission visit was eagerly anticipated in Chechnya by people who have no other hope. They may well be laughing in Brussels but Europe now has no eyes and ears in Chechnya.
That is a different matter. By refusing to allow them a presence in Chechnya, Russia did not hurt the European Parliament in the slightest. Their presence is important for Chechnya and for Russia, but not for the European Parliament. The Russian authorities don’t seem to understand that.
You are well known as a contemporary political Nostradamus. What do you think, will the Kremlin decide to assassinate Maskhadov?
Of course. They are searching for him right now and want to kill him. Europe would not react even to that. As far as the future resolution of the Chechen crisis is concerned, assassinating Maskhadov will make it practically impossible to achieve any ceasefire agreement, and all the Chechens’ efforts to establish their own state will have come to nothing. For Russia this will mean a perpetually festering wound in the South which nobody will be able to treat. An intelligent person does not allow such situations to develop. He tries to impose a measure of control in order to bring a conflict into at least minimally civilised bounds. Russia is giving no thought to that and is acting in a completely absurd manner. It is an insane policy calculated to obtain short-term advantage but which completely fails to take account of the interests of the vast majority of Russia’s population. It is a criminal policy. You really should negotiate with people who are willing to negotiate, rather than kill them.
Why do you think Europe, which does not seek merely short-term advantage, is so unconcerned about trying to preserve the lives of witnesses of war crimes in Chechnya? If there is to be any prospect of an international tribunal like the one Miloŝevic has been subjected to, their testimony is essential.
Miloŝevic’s presence in the Hague is illegal. He may deserve the gallows, but the charges against him are ludicrous. This was all got up by the New Left in Europe, who were flexing their muscles just at that moment. The NATO operation against Serbia was a crime and an act of aggression as defined by the United Nations. It was entirely without foundation, and was a vile political act of self-affirmation by the new elite in Europe. Nobody was fighting to get Miloŝevic put in prison or to expose war crimes. They simply made up the crimes. They told us a minimum of 500,000 people would die if we did not intervene and Miloŝevic remained in power. In fact, when the dust settled and the graves were opened, they contained 6,000 bodies, and they were from both sides, including victims of the NATO bombing. It was no more than a policing operation. They raised a tremendous hue and cry, comparing what was going on to the Holocaust – a criminal abuse of that historical example. News management. The world has gone mad, like a hammer head flying off its handle. We have idiots here and idiots over there. Do not imagine that the situation now is black and white. It was black and white in my youth: back when there were communists and democrats and it was clear who was the world’s enemy.
What is the situation today then – universally grey?
Everything is shit-colored. Today we are dealing with varying hues of shit.
How do you envisage the end of the Second Chechen War?
If it ever has an end. One of the most likely outcomes is that there will be no end, everything will just drag on for decades. New groups of desperate young people will continue carrying out senseless acts of terrorism, sacrificing their lives for some cause but achieving nothing. A better outcome would be to stop military operations right now. Just stop them, and never mind if we can’t resolve the political questions at present. Stop it, and at least start looking for local solutions to the very smallest, local social problems.
So why is Europe so inactive in Chechnya? The number of humanitarian organizations working in the zone is nothing like what there was, for example, in the Balkans.
The world context is that Europe sees Muslims as terrorists. There are friendly nations and enemy nations. All that matters is the global “war on terror,” an idiotic concept, but in that context no practical politician can do anything at the moment: only cover his ears and wait.
It is strange to hear you say that. After all, in a past, far worse time you did not by any means sit around covering your ears, waiting for something to happen.
I’m not talking about myself but about the world. I am not covering my ears. In Europe I am currently in conflict with the Establishment. I am one of those who oppose the European Union, and I am trying to organise a large coalition to put an end to it. From my viewpoint, the European Union is little different from the Soviet Union; they don’t yet have a Gulag but there are already signs of one. The first arrests for political jokes have been made. For example, in Britain one well-known television presenter joked at a country fête that he would like to have the same civil rights as a pregnant, one-legged Negro woman with a drugs problem. Political correctness here has reached absurd heights; he was arrested. At least Parliament threw out a law on hate speech because comedians rebelled and said that if they couldn’t make jokes they would be out of a job. But the European Union plans to have this law adopted throughout Europe! We are entering a totalitarian period. Many of my old friends are laughing now and say I’ve been settled for too long and am getting fretful, that I’ve decided to take up the cudgels again. Believe me, I have no wish to do that at all. I am an old man, I would like to live out my life with my cat, in my garden. I have done everything I wanted to do, but you can’t live the way we are asked to live.
How, in your view, should a decent person live in today’s Russia?
It is impossible for a decent person to live in Russia today. All the decent people are doing everything they can to get out as soon as possible. Those who remain do so because they can’t leave. But there are still a few people capable of protesting: Andrey Derevyankin is in prison and has been forgotten, but this man went to the military base in his native town of Engels in Saratov Province and held up a placard reading “End the War in Chechnya!” For this he was given several years in jail. I understand where he is coming from. I also recognised when I was living in Russia that, under a dishonorable regime, my place was in prison. So when I was arrested I was happy.
January 20, 2003
Boris Berezovsky is the other magnetic pole, along with Bukovsky, of the new Russian political émigré community in Britain. Here he is straightforward, friends with everyone. Back in Russia, his reputation remains that of a demonic genius. Not here. What Boris most resembles here, in his cream jacket, is a perky sparrow with light-colored plumage.
It is easy to insult an oligarch in exile but far less easy to understand one. Consider what he was in the past. The man who manipulated Yeltsin, the Mr Fix-it of Chechnya, the man who made a fortune out of oil, Zhiguli cars, and Aeroflot. And then it was the turn of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, Berezovsky’s most ambitious project. It was Berezovsky who backed Putin as the future of Russia, and so far he has lost hands down, which, admittedly, takes some of the sheen off his image as a demonic genius. It also makes him seem more human, what with the creature of his “Second President of Russia” project sitting comfortably in the Kremlin while Berezovsky is banished to the Lanesborough Hotel. Of course, this is a high-end hotel, in a top-of-the-range city, with Hyde Park outside his windows. Neither is he lonely; the Lanesborough is where the crème de la crème stay, and you can meet them in the foyer without their bodyguards. Oligarchs Deripaska, barefoot in jeans in the morning, Potanin and Berezovsky with their wives and children. And there’s the Library Bar, the best place on the planet for the world’s Establishments past and present to relax. The armchairs in the library are just like the ones you aren’t allowed to sit on in the Hermitage, only here you are allowed to sit on them and even put your feet on them if you like. They are splendid, but all the same the Lanesborough is not the Kremlin.
Why did you choose Britain for your exile?
It was chance. I just happened to be here in October 2002 when I learned that the Prosecutor-General’s Office wanted to arrest me on an allegation of embezzling Aeroflot funds. That’s when I decided to stay, but that was not the only reason. I had lived in the South of France for a year but, in spite of the lush climate, I found it difficult to work there. The environment is debilitating. Britain is quite different. I find the climate here phenomenal and it suits me very well. The only thing I miss is the snow, but last week there was even some of that. It fell for the first time in 15 months – I felt quite at home. I have lived in France, Germany and America, and can say without hesitation that if I had to choose somewhere to live other than Russia, then this is the most comfortable place to be. Another thing is London itself. The city is super-international. You are left in peace entirely, although at the same time you are not allowed to bother other people. In spite of all the difficulties of my situation – and I am a thorn in the flesh of the Russian Government – nobody has so much as hinted to me that I might not be welcome.
My status in Britain is rather unclear. I have not yet been granted permanent residence and have been waiting for the decision of the British Home Office for over a year, which is a bit disturbing. But imagine this situation in reverse: suppose I am a British citizen and a furious opponent of Blair (and I make no bones about the fact that I am conducting a campaign against the Russian authorities from here), and I am living in Russia; assuming Putin was on good terms with Blair, and Blair says, “Volodya, you have this character living in your country who is such a pain in my neck. Send him back to Britain, would you?” I have no doubt that the very next day, caged and in handcuffs, I would be on a plane back, because in Russia there is no justice and no protection of rights, and that goes not only for foreign citizens, but, for heaven’s sake, even for their own. Britain, in contrast, is a country where the law is tremendously respected. Another significant aspect is that nobody who is here now – Zakayev, Litvinenko – came here of their own free will. They would like to go back to Russia. America is 10 hours’ flying time from Russia. That’s a long way, and communications are difficult, while here you are living in the same information environment as Russia. People emigrate to America who don’t want ever to go back.
How do you see Europe’s current position on the Chechen crisis, after the Zakayev affair has put an end to the peace process which was developing in Europe through him? Does Europe really want to stop the war?
Let us first of all consider the place that events in Chechnya occupy among the political and social concerns of the West. We have to admit they do not have that high a priority. The British have plenty of problems of their own. Number 1 is Iraq and whether there is going to be a war there. But, more generally I would say attitudes have changed radically, and not in Russia’s favor. Serious matters such as the arrest of Zakayev have played a role in this, but also ephemeral things like Putin’s ill-judged remarks at a press conference in Brussels about circumcising a journalist who asked him about Chechnya. Sad to say, the fate of a human being like Zakayev and a stupid remark made by an uneducated man seem to carry roughly the same weight here in the scales of public opinion. The Brussels outburst was simply crude, and people here react strongly to primitive behaviour. For a long time in the West they were asking, “Who are you, Mr Putin?,” and now they think they have the answer.
These things coincided. The Zakayev affair infuriated Putin; he had lost the argument. Denmark’s decision outraged him. Headlines started appearing in the leading Western newspapers equating Putin with Miloŝevic. “Why should we accept Putin and roll out the red carpet for him when he is a state criminal?” Before the Zakayev affair you didn’t hear that kind of remark. Although European governments are forever trying to maintain good relations with Russia, which is understandable from a pragmatic viewpoint because they need Russia’s support in the impending war in Iraq, a chasm has suddenly opened up, between the logical behaviour of the upper echelons of European governments, and opposition politicians who have begun to criticize Putin and Russia harshly. There is also now a clear divide between the upper echelons and public opinion which, as a rule, is articulated by the press. The result is a change of attitude towards the Chechen War which may be important, although not decisive, for stopping it. That decision is one for the Russian Government to take. I would just like to quote what Zakayev once said: “Russia has the right to start a war with Chechnya, and it has the right to stop it.”
What do you mean by “important, although not decisive”?
Europe’s new position will seriously irritate the Russian Government, and push it towards a solution which will only result in its being constantly reminded of this irritant. Putin is very sensitive to personal attacks, and the terminology the West is adopting undermines him psychologically. He does not understand the real nature of the objections, and takes them personally. How the West reacts to Putin as an individual and his personal standing with the Russian public is one of the main sources of his power. After Brussels and Zakayev, the West is never going to view him as a friend because it sees that he does not share ideas which are fundamental to Western society. He does not believe in them, and in the West he is now considered a hypocrite.
The Zakayev incident was a fiasco. Zakayev is one of the most admirable figures in Chechnya. I have no hesitation in saying that. I know him not only from hearsay. I conducted extremely difficult negotiations in Chechnya, and never had any doubt that Zakayev wanted peace or that he was constructive in that respect. Zakayev’s role is plain for everyone in the West to see. There is not a single fact suggesting that he wishes to prolong the war, while there are many which testify to his having consistently defended the idea of a peaceful way out of this slaughter.
I consider that 2002 has been the most damaging year for Russia since 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed. There aren’t enough fingers on one hand to list the defeats. The most important landmark is a qualitative change in the situation in Chechnya. If before 2002 I was sure that we could find a solution ourselves, negotiate peace between the belligerent sides, I consider that is now impossible. 2002 has been a watershed: the hatred on both sides has reached such heights that without international mediation – including involvement of countries outside the former Soviet bloc and the use of force – we can no longer resolve the conflict. This is Russia’s greatest setback. The country has lost its sovereignty in the sense that, without the intervention of external forces, it is incapable of settling its internal conflict. Russia has now suffered a devastating defeat in the Second Chechen War, considerably more serious than in the First, and the defeat is precisely that we have lost our sovereignty.
Russia’s second political defeat has been Kaliningrad [the Russian enclave between Poland and Lithuania]. We shouldn’t have gone on so foolishly and at such length, trying to tie everything down in terms of flight paths, access corridors and high-speed rail links. We should have approached the matter in terms of integration into Europe. We should have said, yes, we accept the option involving visas, but only so as to have guarantees that the whole of Russia will become part of Europe’s borderless Schengen zone within a specified number of years. This discussion never took place for the simple reason that for many centuries the Russian political elite has deeply mistrusted its own powers. Russia does not believe it is capable of taking a bet on what will happen in five or ten years’ time. Russia does not believe in its own strength. We want to be in Europe, but are afraid of that.
In the post-Soviet territories we have also suffered a complete rout. The Commonwealth of Independent States no longer exists as a unified political and economic community. That is a fait accompli. There are American troops in Central Asia and Georgia, the Baltic Region is in NATO. Relations with Belarus have only got worse. As regards more distant borders, the most striking example is Iraq. We are losing it. We took a serious step away from Iraq and lost political and economic influence in the region. I recollect the games played in 2002, manipulating a $40 billion co-operation deal as if it was just a game of “Now you see it, now you don’t.” The Kremlin is occupied by a bunch of sleight-of-hand spivs who think that if they tear up a $40 billion contract the Americans won’t invade Iraq, or will pay us back afterwards.
In addition, Russia has suffered a huge moral reverse. Most people in the West are increasingly coming to the view that Russia is not a democratic country. It is not following a liberal path, but exactly the opposite, destroying the fundamental mechanisms of democratic statehood.
And that was all. On that note my tape ran out. It was time to come back to Moscow. It can happen that even demonic geniuses make mistakes, and if they get it wrong once then what guarantee is there that they will not get it wrong again? It has to be said, though, that however things actually turn out, people think devilishly freely in London. The Kremlin it isn’t.
March 18, 2004
Late information: first, a letter delivered by post to the Office of the Prime Minister of France threatens terrorist acts and is signed by Movsar Barayev, leader of the terrorists who took captive the audience of the Nord-Ost musical. In the letter he styles himself as the leader of an organization called “The Servants of Allah.”
Next, a reference to unnamed sources in the FSB. The FSB has a hand in the projected explosions in France, for which 200 kilograms of explosives was transported some time ago by diplomatic bag to the Embassy of the Russian Federation in Paris, where it is now stored.
Except that Barayev is dead, despite numerous tales that he “was allowed to escape” from Nord-Ost. No less certainly, the diplomatic post cannot be used for transporting 200 kilograms of compounds which every frontier dog in the world has been trained to sniff out.
This is the madness of tribalism. It is a modern, virulent disease which causes more and more people to want to commit acts of retaliative terrorism against someone or something. The prognosis for eliminating the disease is not good. The madness of tribalism is set to spread.
Islamophobia is being ratcheted up, with Muslims viewed as outcasts and pressure put at every opportunity on the Islamic world both generally and at a local level. “Everything is their fault,” because the more we give them a hard time, the more they will return the favor. This is the long-familiar Law of the Conservation of Evil.
The incompetence, inefficiency and perfidy of Russia’s secret services is becoming increasingly evident. They are partners in an international coalition which they cherish and, as we have seen, the more acts of terrorism there are, the more financial resources and power the secret services demand for themselves, including the right to take measures of an extra-judicial character. Their excuse is the need to catch another al-Qaeda cell, but in this they are usually unsuccessful, yet another terrorist act occurs, and everything is repeated. Those who demanded the extra resources and powers are not retired for failing to do their duty. In Russia they expect medals. They continue to furrow their brows and pretend they are doing a great job.
And yet, are the numbers of those wishing to cause explosions being reduced? No. They are increasing. Very few still believe the myth that we have only to catch bin Laden to be able to live in peace. Increasingly, it occurs to people that the secret services find the hullabaloo about international terrorism highly profitable, and that the secret services themselves are part and parcel of what is sometimes the war against terrorism, and at other times just terrorism plain and simple.
We live in times when non-state terrorism is in a deadly embrace with state terrorism, the one complementing the other, and both of them targeting us. There is nowhere to hide. We are equally defenceless against our own secret services and against the growing number of those seeking revenge – for religion, for themselves, for their country, for their beliefs. There is no shortage of causes.
We run round in circles. The general fear of terrorist acts encourages a loosening of control over the secret services, who are supposedly doing what is needed but are in fact doing exactly as they please, and accordingly nothing useful. Who can be trusted in these circumstances? Nobody. The contemporary total lack of faith in the state authorities only strengthens the madness of tribalism.
Judge for yourselves: the lunacy of the notion that the FSB could be involved in the anticipated terrorist acts in France and the transporting of explosives to Paris by diplomatic bag seems clear. One might be tempted to laugh at this latest nonsense someone has put on the Internet. Standing between drivel on the Internet and us, however, are recent events in Qatar. In Doha, agents of the Russian secret services blew up Russia’s enemy Zelimkhan Yandarbiev [a former Acting President of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria]. The agents failed to cover their tracks, were caught, and now have confessed to assassination.
What needs to be added? The Doha bomb proves, quite apart from anything else, that Russia has returned to the Soviet period in the sense that it is not only practising political terrorism within its own borders, in Chechnya, but is also exterminating people wherever it pleases. After Yandarbiev’s assassination, it is not so easy to laugh off the idea of diplomatic explosives.
We now know that for “our people” exploding a bomb in France is merely a matter of technique, not permissibility. Some in Russia support the tactic of political terrorism which came in with Putin, while others are categorically opposed to it. Be that as it may, the tribalism of the FSB (or GRU) is real. Everything is permitted.
We again face that question of who to trust. Who can you trust as you go down into the Metro, as you take your seat in a suburban train, on a steamer or plane, or fall asleep in your own home?
Nobody. This total lack of trust will sweep away the very governments which have sown it – be sure of that. But, as we already know, it is a royal path to ideological radicalism when some, in order to forget everything, join the skinheads; others are Islamic murid devotees seeking enlightenment or jihadists; others again are something else. It is impossible to predict what a brain infected with the madness of tribalism will dream up tomorrow.
The world must start coming to an agreement about our collective survival rather than continuing its coalitions for extermination and destruction. The race between different kinds of madness we are witnessing will, of course, bring this about sooner or later. The question is only, at the cost of how many victims?
September 20, 2004
As we know, in the days immediately following the Beslan nightmare, Messrs Putin and Ivanov (the one who is Minister of Defence) were unable to come up with anything more original than imitating Bush and the gentlemen closest to him, and promised to conduct pre-emptive strikes against the bases of terrorists and the terrorists themselves no matter where they might be found. It was clear to everybody that they were talking about Georgia which, without Eduard Shevardnadze,* is increasingly slipping out of Kremlin control. More precisely, about the Pankisi Gorge, the territory continguous with Chechnya.
Why should the Kremlin so hate Georgia? Why does Georgia so vehemently resist Kremlin control? And why does the Kremlin react so over-sensitively to Georgia’s opposition? What is there now about this country and its foremost representatives that makes the Kremlin think it can bomb its way through their territory? Is Russia’s war against Georgia a predictable result of our foreign policy, or is it an instant excuse generated by the Kremlin’s political imperatives? A post-Beslan, post-traumatic stress syndrome?
In seeking answers to these questions, let us go from the simple to the complex, bearing in mind that the underlying causes of many inter-state cataclysms (and a war between Russia and Georgia would be precisely such a catastrophe) should be sought in elementary matters which lie on the surface.
Of course, Mikheil Saakashvili is a very clever boy. Moreover, he is handsome and a favorite of journalists all over the world. Clever boys, handsome men and other people’s favorites have for a long time been systematically removed by Putin from his entourage. But what about the Georgians’ court? What do Putin and his entourage see and hear when they meet Saakashvili?
Our approach to the President of Georgia begins today with his Senior Adviser.
“Daniel Kunin,” he introduces himself in English, and Daniel’s smile is wholly American, as if you are his best friend. He is very likeable and very young, he’s not wearing a jacket, and his tie has slipped to one side. He has his shirt sleeves rolled up. Daniel doesn’t speak Russian, although he turns out to be a descendant of the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. Savour this: in emigration Bakunin’s family dropped the first syllable of their surname in order not to be identified with their revolutionary kinsman, and now Kunin, with American citizenship, is the adviser to the Georgian President and has his salary paid by the US State Department. The source of his salary is no secret. Daniel himself tells me about it, and very humorously. When “Misha” invited him to become a senior aide, he agreed in principle and immediately sorted out all the details. The miserly salary Georgia could offer was not enough, so Misha organised him a salary in the USA.
Daniel is a very influential figure in the Georgian state civil service, where everybody now speaks English. This is comme il faut here, as it was comme il faut under the Tsarist regime to speak French. Even the President, Mikheil Saakashvili, and Prime Minister Zurab Zhvaniya, and the Speaker of Parliament, Nino Burdzhanadze, and the Deputy Defence Minister, Vasil Sikharulidze, and of course the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Salome Zurabishvili, are keen to be interviewed in English. Of course, that is their right if they find it more convenient.
One can imagine how, in this atmosphere of insistent Westernisation, members of Putin’s Administration must feel, accustomed as they are to seeing everybody in the Commonwealth of Independent States at their feet.
“What language do you usually use when you’re talking to your boss?” I ask Bakunin’s descendant.
“Usually English,” Daniel replies easily and cheerily. “Only during negotiations, when it’s important nobody else should understand us, do we talk in Georgian. I have taken private lessons, and used to work in Georgia in an NGO.”
An “NGO” is what they they call voluntary organizations.
“And you moved from an NGO straight into the position of a senior aide of the President of Georgia?”
“Yes, the entire government administration here is now made up of ex-NGO people,” Daniel laughs.
A bureaucratic apparatus composed of charity workers? One can imagine what our statist President, who hates all these NGOs, must feel when he is obliged to deal with this kind of new Georgian officialdom. And also when this American live wire, Kunin-Bakunin, in the presence of Putin, gives advice in his Anglo-Georgian patois to the recalcitrant Saakashvili.
“What does being an American aide of the Georgian President involve?” I ask Daniel, and he replies:
“Offering new ideas 24 hours a day – morning, noon and night. To have dozens of options and proposals on every issue which interests Misha.”
My diagnosis of today’s official Tbilisi is that it has adopted the characteristics of American workaholic management, exactly as portrayed in American films: hamburgers, no deference, with everybody cheery, optimistic and life-affirming. The managers of the country are totally orientated towards the West, without any nuances. No helmsman to the north-west, none of the political unpredictability in which today’s Kremlin court is mired. Georgia under Saakashvili is manifestly anti-byzantine, anti-bureaucratic, anti-hierarchical. It is an anti-colony rejecting the presence of a governing metropolis. The Kremlin, however, is the exact opposite: neo-Soviet byzantinism, arch-hierarchy, nostalgia for an empire which flows over into practical action to subordinate and suborn former colonies, of which the latest example is the $800 million tax gift to Ukraine and Belarus for supporting a quasi-Soviet status quo. And the politics of provocation.
Mikheil Saakashvili really is charming and smiles a lot. He is direct and precise in what he says:
“We asked the Russians, ‘What have we done wrong? Why do you so dislike us?’ We promised to pay pensions and salaries to state officials in South Ossetia. What’s wrong with that? The Russians did not reply and began provocative exchanges of fire. We have American troops here, but we play it down. We say, ‘We do not want an armed conflict,’ and the Russians increase the pressure. But we will not allow the same thing to be repeated as happened here in 1992 [when a four-man Military Council which included Shevardnadze took power]. That stopped reforms. We want to make Georgia attractive. What’s wrong with that? But frankly it is very difficult to tell what Russia wants from us. All its actions in Georgia are irrational. We asked the international community to organise a conference on South Ossetia, on its status, to suggest a political solution. The UN, OSCE and the European Union supported the idea. The Russians turned it down.”
When did you last talk to Putin?
When I phone they don’t put me through. I have sent two letters to Putin. I have had no reply. (A brief, impromptu meeting took place only on September 16 in Astan, Kazakhstan at a summit meeting of the Commonwealth of Independent States.)
How did you react to the statement by Putin’s Chechen favorite, Ramzan Kadyrov, that he would send thousands of his troops to South Ossetia and “solve the problem”!
“Fuck him!”
On this high point we pretty much concluded. And now about the atmosphere in the Georgian President’s office, which was not spelled out in words and sentences but which was very striking. He is completely in love with his people. He speaks of the death of Georgian soldiers as a catastrophe: “When 16 people were killed, I had to take a decision.” And he took it: to withdraw the Georgian divisions to a safe distance, so that no more Georgian soldiers would die.*
I emerged staggered by the contrast. In Russia not 16 but 16,000 soldiers can die and nothing would induce the President to save the rest by moving units back to a safe distance. It is not Russia’s size which is at fault here, not its millions of inhabitants, but its mean-spiritedness. Saakashvili’s love for his people must, one supposes, be completely baffling to Putin, who has persuaded himself that he is reviving an empire and must not hesitate to squander lives. Once the supposed road to empire has been embarked upon, colonies must prostrate themselves, and anybody who is not with us is against us. These are the irrational causes of the Kremlin’s spat with Tbilisi, but there are other, entirely rational financial and economic, reasons for it.
What are modern Russia’s interests in the territories beyond the Caucasian mountains? What has Putin’s bureaucracy got to fight over in the region? In the first place, Russia wants to strengthen its so-called “Christian (Ossetian) axis” in the Caucasus as a counterweight to its “soft Islamic underbelly” (Chechnya, Ingushetia, Karachayevo-Cherkessia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Dagestan and Adigeya). These axes have a long history and are real enough. There genuinely is a territorial imperative which makes it logical for Russia to focus on South Ossetia, a tiny scrap of land on the other side of the mountains from North Ossetia.
In the second place, Russia has an interest in Abkhazia, a strip of land on the Black Sea coast, which it needs if it is to have overland access to Armenia, the Kremlin’s sole remaining partner in that region (the others all having deserted Russia) where the US does not yet have a strategic presence.
The aims of South Ossetia and Abkhazia are also understandable. They have nowhere else to go. South Ossetia makes no secret of the fact that it would like to be united with North Ossetia, which is impossible without Moscow’s involvement. For its part Abkhazia sees no possibility of returning to the bosom of Georgia and, since it needs someone to snuggle up to, turns to Moscow.
In practice, however, both these conflicts, frozen in Soviet times, have now turned into black holes, and although the political map of the world shows both territories as part of independent Georgia, both Abkhazia and South Ossetia are de facto zones without taxation, without transparent budgets, without legitimate government institutions, without budgetary resources and all the other things which fundamentally differentiate a law-governed territory from a lawless one.
Why does the Kremlin need black holes? For internal puposes, mainly; for a straightforward way of injecting covert funds where they are needed; to facilitate all kinds of plots. Russia’s claims to support the rule of law are just so much hot air. In reality there is still a policy of supporting territories which can be used for injecting or extracting large amounts of money that don’t need to be accounted for. Such zones are needed for covert operations and missions where nobody is accountable to anybody else, or even has to sign a form.
Russian policy continues to be one of cash under the counter. Without it nothing happens. Cash under the counter is a cornerstone of every branch and institution of the Government. Externally supported chaos in place of order and defined norms is essential for such games to succeed.
To have black holes beyond your own borders is extremely convenient, far more convenient than offshore funds, where at any moment somebody may sniff you out and you have to devise elaborate multi-layered structures for purposes of concealment, only increasing the probability that information will leak out. In Abkhazia and South Ossetia nothing like that is needed.
In Soviet times, certain African regimes served this purpose. The Politburo presented them as centers of “national liberation,” pumped in Party funds, and got on with its dodgy financial operations. In Russia Chechnya provided a domestic black hole for a while. The failure to develop a normal banking system there was entirely deliberate, and Chechnya has none to this day. Chechnya, however, is within the Russian Federation and that was a snag. There was always the risk of official inspections, Audit Commissions, even an honest Prosecutor popping up. In any case the appetite of Ramzan Kadyrov and his comrades keeps growing.
Abkhazia and South Ossetia have so far operated without a hitch. You can do many things there which you can’t elsewhere. You can send in money, arms and drugs – and that does go on. You can also pull it back out, and that too occurs. There is no inventorising or stocktaking; you just have to feed the undemanding local regimes and spread a bit of propaganda around about “defending Russian citizens.” It’s as easy as that.
In his first term Putin successfully pressurised Shevardnadze to the point where he, a Soviet oligarch who knew exactly how and why such black holes are needed, caved in and handed over a third of Georgia’s territory as an ask-no-questions zone for Russian dealings. Under the new President business slumped; Saakashvili almost immediately announced a policy of thawing out the frozen conflicts – for example between Georgia and Abkhazia, Georgia and South Ossetia – and thereby became Russia’s Enemy No. 1. Putin let Saakashvili have Adjara back without too much fuss because it was in any case working more in the interests of its own Prince Abashidze than of Moscow, but for the black holes of Abkhazia and South Ossetia he decided to fight.
Russia’s Transcaucasian game calls for severe punishment of the Westernising President Saakashvili, by bombing him, for example, as he openly aligns himself with the USA and tells the old colonial power to “fuck off.” As a result, with every day and hour that passes, we Russians are losing Georgia as a good neighbour, when it is crucial that we should enjoy close and friendly relations with it.
The Putin regime’s current policy of trying to annex two Georgian territories is completely counter to the strategic or indeed any other sensible interests Russia has in the Caucasus.
Finally, a word about love. In the twenty-first century clever rulers do not incite citizens they love and respect to bloodshed. The problems begin if the citizens are unloved, and the rulers a bunch of hopeless dunces.
July 4, 2005
In June, at an international conference on security in Paris, the well-known Russian sinologist, Professor Vilya Gelbras, read a sensational report about Chinese migration into Russia. Here he replies to questions from Novaya gazeta.
Vilya Gelbras, Professor of Economics, Doctor of Historical Sciences, one of Russia’s top sinologists, teaches at the Institute of Asian and African Studies of Moscow State University. He conducts research at the Institute of World Economics and World Relations of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
In recent years you have written two ground-breaking books about Chinese migration into Russia. What is their principal theme? People have been talking about Chinese migration, to the effect that China is virtually seeking to take over the whole of Russia, for a long time. With the aid of my students, I systematically conducted large-scale research into this issue. The first study was in 2001, and for it we selected Moscow, Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, and also Ussuriysk, where the greatest numbers of Chinese shuttle traders get off the train, and from where they head for lucrative markets. This material provided the basis of the first book.
For the second book we selected Irkutsk and again the cities of Moscow, Vladivostok and Khabarovsk. Irkutsk interested us because migrants had already settled there. In addition, a Chinese plan came into our possession which had been considered worthy of the attention of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. In it, Irkutsk was allocated a special role. The plan proposed organised settlement of Chinese throughout the territory of Russia via Amur Province. Retaining control of their commodities, they would concentrate at junctions of the trans-Siberian railway all the way to Moscow, and thus radiate their influence outwards. Irkutsk is important to the Chinese because it is central to the movement both of goods and of people from Kazakhstan and into the Altai, including Buryatia. At the time of our research a Chinese consulate had already been opened in Irkutsk.
The resulting book painted a curious picture. We presented a panorama of the enterpreneurial activity of the Chinese in Russia, what they were doing with their money, how it was transferred to China, how goods came in from China and how, on Russian territory, they were converted into money. We also wrote a more substantial special report for the United Nations.
How much money do you calculate we are today transferring to China in this way, and how much are we spending on purchases from the Chinese? I don’t think we can say very accurately how much we are buying and selling. There is a massive black market, and blatant corruption.
No, it is Russian corruption surrounding Chinese trade. For instance, Chinese delegations have recently turned up in the European part of Russia seeking contracts for lumbering timber. Is there no wood in Siberia? We discovered that along the railways in Siberia the Chinese have been allowed to fell the forests so completely that we are in danger of losing larch altogether.
Do the Chinese particularly prize larch?
It is an extremely precious wood. Larch emits a fragrance in perpetuity. It is a delight to live in a house built of larch.
It is surely not because of the fragrance that the Chinese are cutting it down here?
They use it in all kinds of ways, the oil, the seeds and the cones. Everything is processed. They are no longer felling their own forests. From an ecological viewpoint, if a territory has less than 12 per cent of forest cover, natural disasters are inevitable. China has barely 13 per cent, and that is why rarely a year goes by without torrential rain followed by flooding. It is a result of their having stripped their forests in the past.
Was the plan you spoke of approved by the Politburo?
That is unclear. Much is classified in China. My friends there tried to persuade me not to say anything on the subject. They were afraid of leaks, but now it is clear that there is a second similar plan to move via Heihe to Blagoveshchensk and via Suifenhe to Amur Province and beyond. Heihe and Suifenhe are major population centers. The plan provides for the inflow of both migrants and goods. If in 1998–9, even in 2000, these flows were spontaneous, today major Chinese companies have sprung up which give people precise instructions to sell particular goods.
So you’re saying this is already political?
It was political from the outset. Now, my Chinese sources tell me, if a man marries a Russian woman in Russia, he is paid for it.
The Chinese Government, for putting down roots on our territory. With their policy of birth control (couples are allowed just one child, and preferably a boy) the Chinese have unbalanced the natural reproduction of the sexes. In some districts there is a huge bias in favor of men. Forty to fifty million of them have no prospect whatsoever of finding wives, and now their leaders are looking for palliatives.
What has been the increase in Chinese living permanently in Russia between 2001 and 2004?
It is impossible to say, because the Chinese immigration is forever ebbing and flowing. At present we are talking about half a million or more. Hotheads say two to three million, but that is premature.
What kind of person is the modern Chinese who has settled in Russia?
In the main it is town dwellers, because they are the most literate.
What do the Chinese understand by literacy?
Mostly a Chinese coming to Russia can sign his name. He can read and count, and he is shrewd, able to think quickly in the market. There are only a few peasants in the overall total, and they will have been invited specially. To grow vegetables, for example.
And are they completely illiterate?
It is difficult to say. The Chinese world is such that the foreman speaks for everyone.
And who is the foreman?
The person who assembled the brigade. Nobody will talk to you without his agreement. On many occasions we had to make great efforts to get people to fill in questionnaires themselves. The first surveys were useless because all the questionnaires were filled in by the brigade leader, so they were identical. In agriculture and construction the brigade leader is completely in charge. It is different in trade, where he is more of a supervisor. Very often now in Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod a brigade leader will hire Ukrainian and Russian traders. If the goods are poor quality you find Ukrainians, if they are a bit better, Russians, but they are working under the supervision of a Chinese.
Are these senior figures mafiosi?
It would be wrong to say they are all mafiosi. Many are hard-working people who earn a living by the sweat of their brow. Mafiosi do not usually actually work. Under an ancient Chinese tradition, they protect the traders for a certain payment.
A kind of protection racket?
They negotiate with our militia and Customs officers. Their job is to shift goods across the border.
The Chinese use Russians for “patronage”?
Of course. The Chinese have nothing against militiamen. I have seen that myself. Let me offer one striking example: the Russian press is always publishing figures about the volume of trade between Russia and China based on – Chinese statistics. Do we not have our own? Of course we do, but the Chinese figures are higher. As soon as goods cross the frontier, there are more of them, by many billions of dollars each year. And that continues year in, year out.
Where does this difference come from?
The black market. Ours is a corrupt economy. Mr Vanin, the Head of our Customs Service, is starting to say we need to impose order. It’s not so much the Chinese mafia who are active as our own, and that is what makes it best to use Chinese statistics. The Chinese figures include both the grey economy and the black market. The second factor accounting for the differences is that in Russia the Chinese engage in forms of trade that would never occur to us. For example, they collect frogspawn. It is greatly valued, and they resourcefully collect kilograms of it at a time.
Where do they get licences for harvesting frogspawn?
Why, bless you, what licences?!
Well, what documents do the Chinese show at the border?
I have no idea, but in the forests of the taiga they live very much on their own, very secretively, busily milking frogs. It is a very gruelling form of poaching, and it will backfire on us.
Timber, frogs, marrying Russian women – are these the results of the new policy China calls “going out”?
Yes. This approach started in 1996–7. They came to it by thinking about conquering world markets. All the academic institutes were brought in, including natural science institutes. It was accepted that indigenous geological discoveries would be a long and very costly endeavour, and the Chinese wanted something quick that would change the situation in the country. They decided to break into world markets by producing cheap goods by the billion. And they have succeeded.
Why did the Chinese need to “go out”?
The majority of Chinese in China are peasants. In all ages they have served as a source of revenue, but 500 million Chinese peasants are not what is needed today. After the XVIth Party Congress, in 2000, when the leadership of China changed, they concluded that the economy had no internal mechanisms encouraging increased production. China has 20 per cent of the world’s population, but they account for very little in the way of production: about 80 per cent of peasants earn less than one US dollar a day; about 60 per cent, less than half a dollar a day. What can someone in that situation aspire to in the market? What interest does he have in innovation? No, it was calculated that they needed to leave 150–170 million peasants in the rural economy, and to take 250–300 million out of the villages. Where to? That is how the era of Chinese expansion came about, “going out.” The peasants were allowed to leave the villages. For China that was a revolution. All towns and provinces which produce goods for export now have mini-townships where peasants live and work. That is why they are so cheap. A new migratory phenomenon appeared: China began as it were to split into two parts, one moving towards our border, to Xinjiang, and the other towards the coast.
Yes, that is where the work and the money are, but the Chinese cannot completely abandon their ancestral lands. The peculiarity of the situation is that a proportion remain behind, and those who leave return later. We still know very little about the basis of family and social relations in China. There are families which emigrated to the West, to America 100–150 years ago, but each New Year have to return; in Russia kinship ties were quickly destroyed after the revolution, but that didn’t happen in China.
Where are these 250–300 million peasants who were to be taken out of the countryside?
Everywhere and nowhere. Some here, some there. The catch is that most of them have not settled. Some are milking frogs in Russia.
* Soviet Foreign Minister under Gorbachev, then President of Georgia until unseated by the Rose Revolution in November 2003.
* In the summer of 2004 the Georgian Government tried to put an end to the smuggling through the Roki tunnel, the border between Russia and Georgia. First they took control of the tunnel, only for South Ossetian nationalist slogans immediately to ring out claiming independence. The Georgian Government continued to attack and one day closed down the Ergneti market. The Roki tunnel mafia had a heart attack. Where were they to sell their smuggled goods? At this point the “right of nations to self-determination” came in very handy, and South Ossetia started making a fuss about it, openly supported by Russia. A war began which lasted from August 12 to 21, 2004, and when 16 Georgian soldiers were killed, President Saakashvili withdrew his units from the commanding heights they had previously occupied in order to defend Georgian villages from bombardment. [This note is taken from an article Anna wrote after her assignment in Tsinkhvali, Sukhumi and Tbilisi.]