A Russian Diary (15 page)

A day of mourning has been declared for those who died, but the television stations barely observe it. Loud pop music and markedly cheerful TV advertisements make you feel ashamed. One hundred and five people
are still in the hospital. Two of those who died are being buried today. One is Alexander Ishunkin, a twenty-five-year-old lieutenant in the armed forces born in Kaluga Province, where he will be buried. He graduated from Bauman University and went to serve as an officer. On February 6 he was going back home to Naro-Fominsk, where his unit is stationed. He had come to Moscow to obtain spare parts for a vehicle and had taken the opportunity to visit some university friends. That morning, he got on the Metro to travel to Kiev station, with a change at Pavelet-skaya. When Alexander didn't return, his mother assumed he had missed the train—just before going to the Metro he had called to say he would be back at 11:00. His uncle Mikhail identified his body in the mortuary. He couldn't believe it. Seven years ago Alexander's father was killed, and since then Alexander had been the very dependable head of the family. His mother wept: “It's as if my soul has been taken from me. He promised me grandchildren.” Even in issuing his death certificate the state can't refrain from dishonesty: the box for “Cause of death” has been crossed through. Not a word about terrorism.

The other person being buried today is Vanya Aladiin, a Muscovite just seventeen years old. The procession of Vanya's family and classmates stretches through half the cemetery. He was a lively, cheerful, friendly boy people called Hurricane Vanya. Three days earlier he had got a job as a courier and on February 6 was traveling to work. On February 16 he would have celebrated his eighteenth birthday.

Rybkin is still missing. Gennadii Gudkov, the deputy chairman of the Duma security committee and a retired FSB colonel, is letting it be known that Rybkin is safe. But where is he? Does the state have no special obligations toward presidential candidates?

Rybkin's wife, Albina Nikolaevna, insists that he has been kidnapped. The Presnya District procurator's office has unexpectedly opened a criminal investigation under Article 105, premeditated murder, but the Central Directorate of Internal Affairs began insisting there is good reason to suppose that Rybkin is alive. An hour later the Presnya office changed its mind about the murder inquiry on orders from the procurator general's office. What is going on?

The political commentators agree that a semblance of competition
has been created, saving the election from being a complete farce, as it would have been if Putin's only opponents had been a coffin maker and a bodyguard. Zero risk, of course, but highly embarrassing. No doubt that is why, in the end, they registered everybody, and decided that a mere 21 percent of Rybkin's signatures were invalid, even though the day before they had said it was 26 percent. The only snag is that Rybkin has vanished. The idea of boycotting the elections, which the liberals and democrats were proposing, has fizzled out. They didn't try very hard.

February 10

In Moscow a further thirteen people killed in the Metro explosion have been buried. Twenty-nine people remain in critical condition. The death toll has risen to forty; one more person has died in the last twenty-four hours.

Rybkin has been found. A very strange episode. At midday he broke radio silence and announced that he was in Kiev. He said he had just been on vacation there with friends and that, after all, a human being has a right to a private life! Kseniya Ponomaryova promptly resigned as leader of his election team. His wife is shocked and refusing to talk to him. Late in the evening Rybkin flew into Moscow from Kiev, looking half dead and not at all like someone who has been having a good time on vacation. Rybkin remarked it had been more heavy going than negotiating with the Chechens. He was wearing women's sunglasses and was escorted by an enormous bodyguard.

“Who was detaining you?” he was asked, but gave no reply. He also refused to talk to the investigators from the procurator's office who had been searching for him. His wife, while Rybkin was flying home, gave an interview to the Interfax news agency saying she “felt sorry for a country which had people like that as its leaders.” She was referring to her husband.

It was later announced that Rybkin might withdraw his candidacy.

Grigorii Yavlinsky's new book on
Peripheral Capitalism
(in Russia) has been launched in Moscow. It has been published in Russian, but on Western money. The book is about the “authoritarian model of modernization,”
which Yavlinsky considers nonviable. In spite of this book, Yavlinsky has effectively given up the struggle against Putin.

In St. Petersburg, skinheads have stabbed to death nine-year-old Khursheda Sultanova in the courtyard of the apartments where her family lived. Her father, thirty-five-year-old Yusuf Sultanov, a Tadjik, has been working in St. Petersburg for many years. That evening he was bringing the children back from the Yusupov Park ice slope when some aggressive youths started following them. In a dark connecting courtyard leading to their home the youths attacked them. Khursheda suffered eleven stab wounds and died immediately. Yusuf's eleven-year-old nephew, Alabir, escaped in the darkness by hiding under a parked car. Alabir says the skinheads kept stabbing Khursheda until they were certain she was dead. They were shouting, “Russia for the Russians!”

The Sultanovs are not illegal immigrants. They are officially registered as citizens of St. Petersburg, but fascists are not interested in ID cards. When Russia's leaders indulge in sound bites about cracking down on immigrants and guest laborers, they incur responsibility for tragedies such as this. Fifteen people were detained shortly afterward, but released. Many turned out to be the offspring of people employed by the law enforcement agencies of St. Petersburg. Today, 20,000 St. Petersburg youths belong to unofficial fascist or racist organizations. The St. Petersburg skinheads are among the most active in the country and are constantly attacking Azerbaijanis, Chinese, and Africans. Nobody is ever punished, because the law enforcement agencies are themselves infected with racism. You have only to switch off your audio recorder for the militia to start telling you they understand the skinheads, and as for those blacks … etc., etc. Fascism is in fashion.

February 11

The Candidate Rybkin soap opera continues. Rybkin makes statements each more startling than the last, for example: “During those days I experienced the second Chechen war.” Nobody believes him. The jokers are asking, “Is there a human right to two days of private life in Kiev?”

Before this, Rybkin had the reputation of being a meticulous person,
not at all given to wild living, highly responsible, not a heavy drinker, and even slightly dull. “Two days in Kiev” are very much out of character. So what really happened in Ukraine?* And did it happen there? Rybkin reports that after he disappeared he spent a certain amount of time in Moscow Province at Woodland Retreat, the guesthouse of the presidential administration. He was taken from there and, when he could tell where he was again, found himself in Kiev. He says further that those controlling him compelled him to call Moscow from Kiev and talk light-heartedly about having a right to a private life.

*

So what was going on? What was the motive? There has been no inquiry into the Rybkin affair, so I offer these suggestions:

As we know, Putin refused to take part in public debates, on the grounds that the public supposedly already knew whom to vote for. This was clearly an excuse. Putin is not good at dialogue, especially when the topic is one he is uncomfortable with. This has been demonstrated on trips abroad when the administration is unable to gag reporters; journalists ask questions the president finds awkward and he flies off the handle. Putin's preferred genre is the monologue, with leading questions prepared in advance.

We have allowed our political firmament to configure itself in such a way that there is now only one luminary. He is infallible and enjoys a sky-high rating, which appears invulnerable to everything except the man himself and his murky past.

But then, out of the rabble of candidates knocked together by the Kremlin, in the week preceding February 5, Rybkin jumps up and starts hinting at compromising materials that discredit the luminary and his illustrious past, the obvious suggestion being that he is going to reveal some of this. Moreover, Rybkin had the audacity to describe Putin as an oligarch, a sound bite that was completely off-message, since our luminary's campaign is based on showing the people how bad the oligarchs who are “not on our side” really are.

Rybkin was beginning to give our No. 1 presidential candidate grounds for serious unease. There was, moreover, the shadow of Boris Berezovsky behind Rybkin. Perhaps he really had something.

In the week before the abduction Rybkin was beginning to look like a loose missile with a warhead of materials that might seriously damage the Kremlin.

But what could they be about? That was why they needed to employ psychotropic drugs, which are now so sophisticated that a person cannot stop himself from blurting out everything he knows. The main source of information was Rybkin himself not those around him, not his staff, but his brain. That is why they switched it off while they fished around in it. The likelihood is that Rybkin himself has no idea what he told them in those days, or to whom he told it.

There is also Woodland Retreat, a secluded place conveniently closed to outsiders, and Kiev, and the blatant compromising of him after his reappearance when even his indignant wife, talking to an official news agency, was made use of.

Let us look at the detail, the practicalities of the operation. The fact that Rybkin was taken to the Woodland Retreat guesthouse is evidence that the presidential administration was privy to his abduction, as was the FSB. The president's secretariat is an outfit that has long been described as a subdivision of the FSB. These two offices are the principal managers of Russia and do not merely work hand in glove, but function as a single entity. In addition, the fact that Rybkin had been seen at Woodland Retreat and would shortly return there was blurted out by Gudkov, who had evidently either elicited the information from old contacts or had it leaked to him. Immediately after Gudkov blabbed his mouth, the guesthouse administration was able to deny that Rybkin was there.

And indeed he was no longer there. They were already arranging for his return via Kiev. An important detail is that the presidential candidate was secretly smuggled from Russia into Ukraine. (There is no customs or passport record of his crossing the border.) Technically this is quite possible; there are holes in the border, and it is no secret that Ukrainian guest laborers drive into Russia through these holes, which are large enough for vehicular traffic, when they want to avoid unnecessary encounters with officials whom they would have to bribe.

However, what is interesting in the Rybkin case is not the technique
of how he was transferred over the border, but the fact itself that he was spirited from the guesthouse of the secretariat of the administration of the current president of the Russian Federation to VIP apartments in Kiev controlled by the administration of the current president of Ukraine. Leonid Kuchma* is close to the administration because he is an accomplice in their political crimes, and in return for that we might well help him out in a similar way, if he were ever to need assistance. This is also the reason the state wants to develop the Commonwealth of Independent States, but not to make its borders too watertight, so that former colleagues in the KGB of the USSR should be better able to carry out joint special operations both here and there.

Let us look next at personalities. Who could give the order to shake information out of Rybkin, after first having switched off his conscious mind? Cui bono? Our luminary, surely.

We are not talking here about orders, needless to say. Our top cats have only to raise an eyebrow, hinting at their august displeasure, for their serfs to rush immediately to carry out their wishes. In our political Wonderland this eyebrow twitching even has a name: it is known as “the Pasha Grachev effect,” referring to the time when the former minister of defense was apparently thoroughly fed up with the fact that Dmitry Kholodov, a journalist, was unearthing his dark secrets. The minister of defense is said to have hinted to his military friends how greatly Kholodov was pissing him off; the next thing you know, the journalist was blown to pieces.

No doubt the Grachev effect was in play here too. Rybkin, thank God, was not murdered, but only because to have the angel of death intervening so blatantly in the election would have worked against the interests of Candidate No. 1.

These are the kinds of criminal goings-on, complete with psycho-tropic drugs, that we get when one candidate, who happens to be the current president, is simply incapable of performing in preelection debates, is incapable of discussion, is irrationally afraid of opposition, and, moreover, has come to believe in his own messianism. We are not so stupid as to believe that Rybkin was running away from his wife.

To all appearances, then, Rybkin had relatively little compromising
material. The soap opera had no further episodes. Everybody forgot about him, including Putin. The end result, crucially for a society short of alternatives, was that Rybkin failed to confront the regime publicly.

Throughout January, people were being abducted in Chechnya, only for their bodies to be found later. The number of those abducted is comparable to the number killed on February 6 in the Moscow Metro. In Chechnya, everyone is at war with everybody else. There are armed men everywhere, the so-called Chechen security forces. The commonest expression on people's faces is gloom. There are large numbers of half-insane, traumatized adults. Children, who resemble children only in their physical appearance, make their way to school. The armored personnel carriers plow arrogantly past, and from them soldiers point their submachine guns at you as contemptuously as ever. Those they look down on look up, no less unforgivingly, at them. At night there are firefights, “softening up” by artillery bombardment, battles, and bombing in the foothills. In the morning there are fresh shell craters. It is a war in stalemate. Do we want an end to it, or are we actually not all that bothered?