A Russian Diary (13 page)

Potanin was given prime time on television to say all this. Everyone takes that to mean that he had the blessing of Putin himself.

February 2

On television Putin cuts the price of bread by using the old Soviet method of stopping grain exports. Why were we exporting grain anyway, if the country is going hungry? There is nobody to put this question as the opposition has no access to the media. Putin hears reports that in many regions the cost of bread has doubled over the past month, and demands that these uncontrolled price rises be stopped immediately.

On television he promises to look into the payment of pensions to people disabled in childhood during the Second World War. Zurabov [the minister of health and social welfare] reports to him that he is quite sure the necessary legislation will go through all its readings in the Duma very rapidly. It is as if the Duma had no timetable for other legislation. All that matters is the president's requirements for his election campaign, which seems to consist of constantly doling out money.

At the same time Zurabov reports to Putin on pensions for priests. Putin takes a great interest in the welfare of priests! Zurabov reminds him that before the fall of the USSR priests had no entitlement to a pension at all.

In place of genuine preelection debates we get yet another episode of the ongoing political soap opera that is the Rodina Party: a furious row between Rogozin and Glaziev instead of debates about the future of the country. Rogozin heaps abuse on Glaziev, Glaziev blusters a lot of nonsense in reply and nobody talks about what it is that Putin might have to offer the country in a second term. Almost none of the candidates who are supposed to be opposing Putin have any ideas at all.

In Moscow, Yelena Tregubova was almost blown up by a small bomb planted outside her apartment building. Was it just hooliganism? She recently published an anti-Putin book,
Tales of a Kremlin Digger.
She was a member of the Kremlin press pool, but then saw the light and wrote a book about the inner life of the Kremlin that shows him in a highly unflattering light.

[Tregubova was shortly to emigrate from Russia.]

February 3

At about 5:00 p.m. there was a terrorist outrage in Vladikavkaz. A Zhiguli car was blown up just as military cadets were driving past on a truck. One woman died and ten people were injured. One cadet is in critical condition.

February 4

In Grozny, unidentified armed men wearing masks and camouflage fatigues abducted Satsita Kamaeva, twenty-three, from her home on Aviatsionnaya Street. Her whereabouts are unknown.

Meanwhile, in Moscow, Putin's election campaign headquarters are said to have been set up, but they are just as virtual as Putin himself. The address is No. 5, Red Square, only nobody is allowed in. Putin has appointed as leader of his election team Dmitry Kozak, the first deputy
head of the presidential administration in charge of legal and administrative reform. Kozak has the reputation of being the cleverest person in the administration, after Putin, of course. Like Putin, he is a graduate of the Law Faculty of Leningrad University. He worked there in the procurator's office and in the St. Petersburg City Hall, and in 1989-99 was deputy governor of St. Petersburg. In other words, he is one of Putin's Petersburg brigade.

The League of Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers is to set up a political party. In Russia parties are born for one of three reasons: because there is a lot of money somewhere; because somebody has nothing better to do; or because somebody has been driven to desperation. The Party of Soldiers’ Mothers is entirely a product of the December 7 parliamentary elections, born in the wilderness of a Russian politics purged of all democratic forces.

“We are mature enough now to found a party,” says Valentina Mel-nikova, chairperson of the organizing committee. “We have been talking about it within the movement for a long time, but previously we could call on the support of the Union of Right Forces and Yabloko in our campaign for reform of the army, to help soldiers, for the abolition of conscription and legislative initiatives. Yavlinsky and Nemtsov were still players, but now everything is in ruins. We're standing amid a political Hiroshima, but we still have problems that need to be resolved. There is nobody left for us to turn to, nobody on whom we can pin our hopes. All the present political parties are a continuation of the Kremlin by other means. You half suspect that the Duma deputies scuttle off every morning to Red Square to receive their instructions from the Lenin Mausoleum, and then go away to do as they have been bid. That is why we have decided to form a party ourselves.”

The Party of Soldiers’ Mothers, then, is a party of desperation, born of the complete political hopelessness that is the sum total of the last four dismal years. In an era when everything is under the Kremlin's control, this is a straightforward grass-roots initiative, which has appeared without the benefit of “administrative resources,” in which Vladislav Surkov, Russia's ubiquitous political fixer, has been allowed absolutely no part.

The decision to create the party was made very simply: after the Duma
elections, women from Miass, Nizhny Novgorod, Sochi, and Nizhny Tagil called the Moscow office of the League of Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers. The committees in these cities were the driving force behind the creation of a new political party.

The remnants of Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces are, of course, a sorry spectacle, but a concomitant is the appearance of public initiatives from deeply committed people with an immense dissident potential. Putin wants everything close cropped, but from his coppicing of the opposition something positive is sprouting. A time for new initiatives is coming. The devastation of the political arena emboldens those who refuse to live under the old Soviet clichés and intend to fight. In order to survive in enemy territory, when no one else will fight for you, you have to summon up your resolve and start fighting for yourself. In the language of the soldiers’ mothers, that means fighting for the lives of soldiers against the army recruitment machine that devours them.

The last straw was an incident involving Ida Kuklina and Putin. Ida has been working for ten years in the Moscow committee and is now even a member of the Presidential Commission on Human Rights. She had put a lot of energy into getting the pension raised for conscripts who have been reduced to the state of Category 1 invalids (the current pension is 1,400 rubles, or around $49 a month). Category 1 invalids are amputees and those bedridden with spinal injuries or confined to wheelchairs.

Ida Kuklina handed a petition to Putin personally at one of the meetings of his commission. He wrote a generally encouraging, if not very specific, recommendation on it—“The question is posed correctly. Putin”—and forwarded it to the government and the pensions department.

The deputy prime minister for social welfare, Galina Karelova, responded tartly that there would be a revolt of the disabled if the attempt was made to raise the level of pensions for conscripts who had just been crippled to the level of ex-servicemen disabled during the Second World War or the Afghan and other local wars. That, Karelova opined, would be unethical.

Ida again approached Putin, again received a positive response, and was again turned down by the officials. This happened three times in
succession. It was at this point the mothers decided that the only solution was to become legislators themselves. The intention is to have deputies from the Party of Soldiers’ Mothers in the Duma after the parliamentary elections in 2007.

“Who will be the leader of your new party? Are you going to invite some clued-up politician?”

“One of our own people,” Valentina Melnikova replies emphatically.

While I was speaking to the soldiers’ mothers about the future, we heard about a fresh atrocity within the army. Pvt. Alexander Sobakaev was brutally tortured in the Dzerzhinsky special operations division of the Interior Ministry's troops. His family last heard his cheerful voice on the telephone late in the evening of January 3. Alexander, not quite twenty years old, was in his second year in the army, already a lance corporal and dog handler in the sapper battalion. He called to say that everything was fine. They recalled the day they had seen him off to the army, and laughed at the thought that they would soon be celebrating his return. That very night, in the early hours of January 4, if we are to believe the documents that accompanied the zinc coffin, Alexander hanged himself using his own belt, and “there were no suspicious circumstances.” On January 11 his body was brought home to the tiny forest village of Velvo-Baza, 180 miles from Perm. The representatives of his division, who brought the coffin, explained to his parents that “it was suicide.” There was no coroner's certificate. The parents did not believe this and demanded that the coffin be opened. The first to back off in horror were his service colleagues. Alexander's body was not only covered in bruises and razor cuts, but the skin and muscles on his wrists were cut to the bone, baring the tendons. A doctor from the local hospital was asked to come and, in the presence of the local militiaman, a cameraman, a CID photographer, and officers from the district military commissariat, recorded that this mutilation had occurred while Alexander was still alive.

The parents refused to bury their son, demanding an inquiry. His mother stayed home, but his father went straight to Moscow to the Dzerzhinsky special operations division and to the capital's newspapers. That is how the outrage came to light.

Putin did not react on this occasion. Indeed, if he were to react to every atrocity in the army he would be doing so almost every day and the electorate would start to wonder why these occurrences were so common, and why the commander in chief—i.e., Putin—hadn't done anything about it before.

Accordingly, no attempt was made to track down Alexander's killers. The military procurator's office did everything in its power to ensure that the truth remained hidden. Alexander fared less well than Volodya Ber-yozin, for whose death from cold and starvation officers will appear in court, thanks only to the fact that Putin's election campaign had just begun, and that he got his hands on the story first.

Alexander's death is not being investigated with any urgency. Although his parents refused to bury the body of their son until an independent inquiry made public the truth about his death, this was refused. The family ran out of money to pay for keeping his body in the Kudymkar district mortuary, and Alexander was buried as a suicide. How many more of our sons will have to be sacrificed before a great joint campaign by the public sees this army reformed root and branch? It is a question that refuses to go away.

Do we see a change in the mood of society, a civil society beginning timorously to emerge from the kitchens of Russia in the same way that, after a purge in Chechnya, people very quietly, very cautiously creep out of their cellars and bolt-holes?

As of yet, no, although many are beginning to realize what people in Chechnya have realized after being subjected to the “antiterrorist operation”: you have to rely on yourself if you want to survive; you have to defend yourself if nobody else will. The rampaging of the bureaucracy is more out of control than ever after the triumph of their United Russia Party, and there are still far too few public initiatives.

As election day approaches, the television news bulletins increasingly resemble heartening dispatches on Putin's achievements. The greater part of the news is taken up with bureaucrats reporting to Putin in front of the cameras, but without any semblance of independent commentary. Today, Sergey Ignatiev, the chairman of Tsentrobank, was briefing him on the improbable growth of the gold and currency reserves.

To the accompaniment of a lot of political chatter about the welfare of the people, the Fourth Duma is passing lobbyist-driven legislation even more blatantly than the Third Duma. There is, for example, a proposal for a significant reduction of value-added tax for estate agents. This is simply laughable, because estate agents in Russia are millionaires. Nobody raises the matter in the mass media, although they whisper about it a good deal. Journalists practice rigorous self-censorship. They don't even propose such stories to their newspapers or the television stations, certain in advance that their bosses will ax them.

The Eighth World Gathering of the People of Russia has ended. It was touted as the big event of February and almost resembled a congress of the United Russia Party, with all the top government bureaucrats turning up. Funnily enough, though, nobody can remember when the Seventh World Gathering took place.

At the gathering the president's oligarch banker, Sergey Pugachev, sat at the right hand of the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church. Pugachev is one of the Putin oligarchs who replaced the Yeltsin oligarchs, and the government even goes so far as to refer to him as “a Russian Orthodox banker.” At Pugachev's instance, the gathering adopted an odd kind of Ten Commandments for businessmen, called A Code of Moral Rules and Principles for the Conduct of Business.

The code pontificates on matters such as wealth and poverty, nationalization, tax evasion, advertising, and profit. One of the commandments informs us that “wealth is not an end in itself. It should serve to create a goodly life for the individual and the people.” Another warns that “in misappropriating property, failing to respect communal property, not giving fair recompense to a worker for his labor, or deceiving a business partner, a person transgresses the moral law, harming society and himself.” Moreover, on the subject of tax evasion, not paying one's dues is “stealing from orphans, the aged, the disabled, and others least able to protect themselves.

“Transferring part of one's income through taxation to provide for the needs of society should be transformed from a burdensome obligation grudgingly fulfilled, and sometimes not fulfilled at all, into a matter of honor, deserving of the gratitude of society.” On the poor: “The poor
man is also under an obligation to behave worthily, to strive to labor efficiently, to raise his vocational skills in order to rise out of his impoverished condition.” Again: “The worship of wealth is incompatible with moral rectitude.”