A Russian Diary (11 page)

On September 8, Kazantsev ordered Maj. Gen. Nikolai Cherkashenko, his deputy in charge of the Interior troops, to present a plan to take the adjacent commanding heights in accordance with Kazantsev's general
instruction. On September 9 Kazantsev approved the plan, and at 2130 hours Maj. Yury Yashin, commanding officer of the Armavir unit, received the order to attack and occupy and hold the heights until the arrival of reinforcements, so that fire could be directed down onto Novolakskoye.

The Armavir men did as they were ordered and moved in at top speed, deaf and naked, as they say in the army, without secure means of communication, using only open channel walkie-talkies with batteries that, because there had been no time to recharge them, were flat. How much ammunition they would need had not been calculated, because the Armavir men had not been told how long they would have to hold out. They were expendable, and anyway they didn't even belong to Kazan-tsev's regular forces.

The war in the Caucasus is very odd. All the federal troops are supposedly on the same side, but the reality is quite different. The soldiers under the Ministry of Defense are at daggers drawn with the FSB, and the Interior troops are at loggerheads both with their own Interior Ministry and the army. When officers say, “The casualties were not ours,” that means in army-speak that the fallen were militiamen or soldiers of the Interior troops. This is why a battle has been raging for many years over who should head the joint command of forces and resources in the North Caucasus. If an army man is in charge, there is no way non-army personnel will get the ammunition and walkie-talkies they need.

That is what happened on this occasion. Kazantsev, an army man, was in command of non-army men. By 0100 hours on September 10, ninety-four non-army special operations troops had occupied the heights without losses. At 0600 hours Major General Cherkashenko received a confident report from Major Yashin and passed the information to Kazantsev, who immediately drove off, reassured that the hills had been taken. He was absent until 0840 hours, but at precisely 0620 hours Yashin suddenly found himself with a battle on his hands. At 0730 hours Chechen fighters began to encircle the special operations troops. Yashin radioed for assistance, but Cherkashenko, left to represent Kazantsev at the command post, was unable to help. He knew that another group of
Interior troops, commanded by Maj. Gen. Grigorii Terentiev, had already tried to break through to Yashin's detachment, but had been repelled by stiff opposition. Fourteen men had died and there were many wounded, including Terentiev himself. On the slopes of the heights five armored personnel carriers were in flames.

Apart from Terentiev's detachment, no others would go to the aid of Yashin because they were army men and because Kazantsev was asleep. At 0830 hours Yashin shouted to Cherkashenko that they all had only a single round of ammunition left and needed to retreat. Cherkashenko agreed. At 0840 hours Kazantsev, having woken up, burst into the command post. He couldn't understand why Yashin was retreating. He had ordered him to hold the position at all costs.

At this point all contact with Yashin was lost. The walkie-talkie batteries had run out. The major was “deaf” and entirely on his own. Yashin divided the unit into groups, headed one himself, entrusted another to Lieutenant Colonel Gadushkin, and at about 1100 hours, gathering their strength, they began to retreat downhill. This was the only way the unit could hope to survive. Kazantsev was at the command post and observed the movements personally. He then gave orders to bomb the slopes. Why? Because he had his plan and had already reported “upstairs” the time within which the fighters on the hill would have been eliminated.

At 1500 hours, two low-flying SU-25 attack planes appeared in the sky over Yashin's group and delivered a targeted strike at the Interior Ministry troops who were breaking out of their encirclement. The targeter, on Kazantsev's specific orders, was the commanding officer of the Fourth Air Army and Antiaircraft Defense Forces, Lt. Gen. Valerii Gor-benko. As the bombs were dropped, these two heroes, Kazantsev and Gorbenko, were standing at a field observation point and saw with their own eyes that Yashin's group were launching signal flares to indicate where the bombs should not be dropped.

Why was the Armavir special operations unit punished in this manner on September 10? Because it had been set up. They were sacrificed to protect Kazantsev and his idiotic plan. They were invited to die as heroes rather than escape the encirclement and be potential witnesses, but
failed to take the hint. This is the method of our security bosses, later employed many times in Chechnya and elsewhere.
Nord-Ost
was a clear enough demonstration of the same thing. It is a method sanctioned repeatedly by Putin. If you survive, you must be vilified and punished.

The military procurator's office of the North Caucasus military district is, under our monstrous judicial system, effectively dependent on the commanding officer of its district, in this case Kazantsev, for the allocation of promotions, accommodations, and privileges. It considered a criminal case regarding the killing of the Armavir men, brought by their relatives. The court acquitted Kazantsev on all counts. More than that, it depicted him as a hero surrounded by cowards. Here is a quotation from the court records:

In reality, the Interior troops were retreating in disarray. The situation was close to critical. Kazantsev made the decision to move to the forward sector himself. He personally halted the subdivisions of Interior troops who were fleeing in disorder, and personally identified a new mission to them, attempting to deploy the remainder of the Interior troops’ subdivisions to cut off the fighters.

Kazantsev is an army hero and the Interior troops are cowards. This is the verdict of the court.

The soldiers certainly were fleeing, but from a death trap they had been put in. They tried to survive the bombing as best they could, which was being directed at them on the orders of imbeciles. They were dragging their wounded, calling for assistance to retrieve the bodies of those who had been killed. Kazantsev observed all this.

The final toll from that single treacherous bombing of the heights at 1500 hours by two SU-25 attack aircraft was eight dead and twenty-three wounded. Only one soldier was killed in combat with the Chechen fighters.

The overall losses of Interior troops in the course of Kazantsev's operation of September 9-10 were “over eighty men,” according to the
inquiry. No further details are available. The soldiers of Major Yashin's doomed detachment were making their way back to their own lines for several days afterward. Alexander Slesarenko's body was returned to his home in Ryazan Province two weeks later, in a sealed coffin. The coffins were buried in the graveyards of Russia, and the state stuck into their grave mounds the very cheapest of memorials, an insult to the men who lie beneath them.

Overcoming her grief, Alexander's mother applied to the Basmanny court, within whose jurisdiction the Ministry of Defense lies. Judge Voz-nesensky directed the treasury to pay her 250,000 rubles [$8,700] in compensation. Needless to say, it did not come from the pocket of Kazantsev, who was by then a favorite of the president and Putin's personal representative in the North Caucasus. Kazantsev has been showered with medals, orders, and titles by Putin for his part in the so-called antiterrorist operation, for bringing Chechnya to the state the president wanted it in.

Judge Voznesensky is a young man, dynamic and modern, and doesn't clam up at the mention of administrative interference in the judicial process. He knows exactly what you are talking about. I know him well. He is brilliantly educated and peppers his conversation with Latin expressions, revealing a level of erudition unheard of among Russian judges. Voznesensky did not, however, delve too deeply into the details of Private Slesarenko's death, or indeed bother summoning that “Hero of Russia,” Gen. Viktor Kazantsev, to the courtroom.

So, once again, the taxpayers of Russia uncomplainingly pick up the tab for the second Chechen war and the idiocies of its generals, plus all the other expenditure on successive military escapades in the North Caucasus.

How long is this going to continue? The tragedy of the second Chechen war has been the launch pad for the stellar careers of all those implicated in it as comrades-in-arms of the present president. The more bloodshed, the higher they rise. So who takes responsibility? It simply does not matter how many people Kazantsev sends to their death; it does not matter how often he collapses drunkenly into the arms of others, including
journalists. It is water off a duck's back. The only thing that matters in Russia today is loyalty to Putin. Personal devotion gains an indulgence, an amnesty in advance, for all life's successes and failures. Competence and professionalism count for nothing with the Kremlin. The system that has evolved under Putin profoundly corrupts officials, both civilian and military.

Alexander's mother tells me, “I shall never reconcile myself to the fact that my Sasha was sacrificed to a general's ambition. Never.”

January 15

In Moscow there is a fuss over a new history textbook. Members of United Russia are demanding that Putin require that “pride at the events” of the Russo-Finnish War of 1939 and of Stalin's collectivization of agriculture be included. They insist that our children should once more read a Soviet treatment of the Second World War and the supposedly positive role played by Stalin. Putin is going along with this.
Homo sovieticus
is breathing down our necks. Another textbook has meanwhile been banned for including the comment by academician Yanov that Russia is in danger of turning into a national socialist state armed with nuclear weapons.

Relatives of the
Nord-Ost
victims have a meeting at the procurator general's office in Moscow with Vladimir Kalchuk, a Serious Crimes investigator running the inquiry into the theater hostage taking. They have asked me to accompany them in order to reduce the likelihood that Kalchuk will deceive or insult them. When there are no outsiders present, Kalchuk constantly insults the relatives of those who died, and has never been brought to book for this. He is under personal instructions from Putin to falsify the investigation and ensure that information about the gas used should be suppressed.

“Passports on the table!” Kalchuk barks, signaling the beginning of the meeting. “
‘Nord-Ost
Association?’ What is that? Who has recognized this organization?”

“Can we talk like civilized human beings?” Tatyana Karpova asks. She
is the mother of Alexander Karpov, one of the hostages who died, and she is the chairperson of the
Nord-Ost
Association. “How many terrorists were killed? How many managed to escape?”

“According to our data, all the terrorists in the building were killed, but it is impossible to give a hundred percent guarantee.”

“Why were all the fighters killed?”

“Well, they were, and that's all there is to it. These things are decided by the security forces. They are risking their lives when they go in, and it is not for me to tell them who they should or should not kill. I have my own opinion as a human being, and I have my opinion as a lawyer.”

“Do you consider that a published videotape of a shooting suggests that any of the hostages could have been killed in this manner?” (Tatyana is referring to images from the morning of October 26, 2002, immediately after the assault at the entrance to the theater complex, which show an unidentified woman in military camouflage aiming a pistol at, and possibly shooting, an unidentified man whose hands are tied behind his back.)

“Nobody is ‘finishing off anybody in that clip. Journalists would like to represent it as a killing. We have had it analyzed. What is there is a corpse being dragged from one location to another and the woman is merely indicating where it is to be put. We know whose corpse it was.”

“Whose?”

“If I tell you, you will only say it is all lies.”

“Is it the body of Vlakh?” (Gennadii Vlakh was a Muscovite who entered the occupied building on his own initiative to search for his son.)

“Yes, it is. The examination will demonstrate that.”

Kalchuk knows perfectly well that Vlakh's son and his ex-wife have studied this tape carefully, and categorically denied that the person being dragged about is Gennadii. Nothing fits: not his build, his hair, or his clothing.

Tatyana continues, “Do you admit that there was looting in the hall after the assault?”

“Yes. The rescuers, the security forces, were in there and if they saw a purse, they popped it into their pocket. They are only human. It's the kind of country we live in. Their salaries are wretchedly low.”

“Are you investigating instances of looting?”

“Oh, come on… Of course not.”

“We desperately want to know the truth about how our relatives died. Are you intending to press charges against any officials for failing to provide [medical support in the aftermath]?”

“If you were all given a million dollars like they do in the West, you would shut up straight away. You would do a bit of weeping and then just shut up.”

Vladimir Kurbatov, father of a thirteen-year-old member of the
Nord-Ost
cast who died: “I would not shut up. I would still seek the truth about when and where my daughter died. As it is, nobody knows.”

Lyudmila Trunova, a lawyer present at the meeting: “How did the body of Grigorii Burban, one of the hostages who died, come to be discovered on Lenin Prospekt?”

“Says who? I don't know.”

Tatyana Karpova: “Why was the body of Gennadii Vlakh cremated, as if he were one of the terrorists?”

“That is none of your business. Why don't you ask questions about your old man?”

“A question about Terkibaev …”

“Terkibaev was never there. Politkovskaya did not help us. (I wrote in my newspaper about FSB officer Terkibaev's role in the siege.) She refused to give us information about him. She just said she didn't know anything.”