A Russian Diary (18 page)

March 8

International Women's Day. In accordance with an old Kremlin tradition, Putin assembles token working women. There has to be a tractor driver, a scientist, an actress, and a teacher. Words spoken from the heart, a glass of champagne, television cameras.

This is the last moment for candidates to withdraw from the race. Nobody has done so, and six remain on the ballot paper: Malyshkin, Putin, Mironov, Khakamada, Glaziev, and Kharitonov. A great deal of television coverage is devoted to early voting by reindeer breeders and those at faraway border posts.

March 9

From today campaigning and the publication of opinion polls are banned, but everybody gave up campaigning after Fradkov was appointed. There seemed no point.

March 10

Putin is on all television channels meeting sportsmen to ask what they need in order to win in the Summer Olympic Games. They need more money. Putin promises it.

March 11

It is fifty years since Khrushchev's campaign to cultivate the virgin lands of Siberia and Kazakhstan. Putin receives prominent public figures at his residence and asks them what they need. They need more money. Putin promises they shall have it. The formation of the “new” government is looking unpromising. There was talk about reducing the number of top-level bureaucrats, but the number has actually increased. All the supposedly fired ministers have been reinstated as deputy ministers in amalgamated ministries, which means we get one new bureaucrat plus two old ones. In total, from twenty-four old ministries and departments they have created forty-two new ones. The government is just the same, but minus Kasianov. An oligarchic government, controlled by different oligarchs, close not to the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Property, but to Putin. Putin is a political oligarch. In earlier times he would have been called an emperor.

March 12-13

Silence and apathy. Nobody can be bothered to listen to the drivel coming from the television. Let's just get it over with.

March 14

Well, so he's been elected. The turnout was, as the presidential administration required, very high. The speaker of the state Duma, Boris Gryz-lov, emerging from the polling station, told the assembled journalists, “Campaigning today is forbidden, but, anticipating your curiosity, I will say that I have voted for the person who for the past four years has ensured the stable development of Russia's economy. I have voted for policies as clear as today's weather.”

In the evening Alexander Veshnyakov, director of the Central Electoral Commission, informed the Russian people that only a single infringement of electoral law had been noted during the poll: “Vodka was being sold from a bus near one of the polling stations in Nizhny Tagil.”

In Voronezh, the Central Board of Health issued Order No. 114 to the effect that no hospitals should admit anybody during the period of voting who was not in possession of an absentee ballot. All the patients duly turned up with absentee ballots in order to be allowed to be ill. The same process was repeated in Rostov-on-Don. In the contagious diseases department of the city hospital, mothers were told they could not see their children unless they had arranged an absentee ballot.

In Bashkortostan,* President Rakhimov* delivered 92 percent of the vote for Putin; Dagestan, 94 percent; Kabardino-Balkaria, 96; Ingushetia,* 98. Were they running a competition? During the thirteen years of our new, post-Soviet life, this is the fourth time Russia has elected a president. In 1991, it was Yeltsin; in 1996, Yeltsin again; in 2000, Putin; in 2004, Putin again. The eternal cycle repeats for Russia's citizens, from an upsurge of hope to total indifference toward Candidate No. 1.

March 15

Now we know the official figures: Putin got 71.22 percent. Victory! (May it be pyrrhic.) Khakamada got 3.85; Kharitonov, 13.74; Glaziev, 4.11; Malyshkin, 2.23; Mironov, 0.76. Mironov had absolutely nothing to his candidacy other than a doglike loyalty to Putin. His result reflects that. By and large, the concept of ruling the country by the same methods used in conducting the “antiterrorist operation” has been vindicated:
L’état, c'est Putin.

FROM THE REELECTION OF PUTIN TO
THE UKRAINIAN REVOLUTION

ATERRIBLE SENSE OF ENNUI HUNG OVER OUR CITIES AND VILLAGES
after Putin's reelection. Everything seemed as boring and wretched as it did in the days of the Soviet Union. Even those who had supported the losers seemed unable to rouse themselves to anger. It appeared that people had simply given up, as if to say “Who cares what happens now!” Russia relapsed into sociopolitical hibernation, into a new period of stagnation whose depth can be judged by the fact that not even the tragedy of Beslan, a cataclysm of biblical proportions, could disturb it.

April 6

In Nazran, the capital of Ingushetia, President Murat Zyazikov* has been blown up in his Mercedes but survived. He is one of Putin's placemen and was “elected” two years ago in a highly original manner. FSB agents flooded into the republic, not bothering to conceal that they were acting on the direct orders of Putin. He was extremely keen to ensure that, even though it had to be by means of a popular vote, power in Ingushetia should be in the hands of someone under his control. Ingushetia borders Chechnya.

Nobody really imagines that the election of FSB General Zyazikov was legitimate, but there was no way of mounting a legal challenge. The republic's courts will not bring actions against Zyazikov any more than the courts in Moscow allow lawsuits against Putin, and when there is no provision for the steam to escape, you get an explosion of terrorism.

Zyazikov survived the attack thanks to his armored Mercedes. He
called it an outrage against the people of Ingushetia. There was not a shred of sympathy for him, but there was interest in what lay behind the attack. One possible motive is that it was provoked by the corruption that has flourished more than ever under Zyazikov and Ruslanbi Zyazikov, his cousin and principal bodyguard. Throughout the winter before the assassination attempt, Ruslanbi was being warned by people who included relatives of the president that he should rein in his misconduct. The same was being said to Zyazikov. When these words produced no effect, Ruslanbi's spanking-new jeep was burned out in March in the middle of Nazran right under his nose. Naturally, the destruction of a jeep belonging to the president's main bodyguard was hushed up. Neither Ruslanbi nor Zyazikov made an issue of it. The explanation that it was a warning to officials who had got out of hand is taken much more seriously in Nazran than the idea that it was an assassination attempt.

The second explanation relates to a series of recent abductions in Ingushetia. Under Zyazikov, abductions began occurring in accordance with the pattern established in Chechnya. Victims were seized by “unidentified masked soldiers” and spirited off to an unknown destination in unmarked vehicles. To date there are forty names on a list compiled by their relatives. Zyazikov categorically denies state lawlessness on this scale and has imposed a blackout on information about the abductions. They cannot be reported within the borders of Ingushetia, and in the procurator's office and the Interior Ministry officials will talk to relatives only off the record.

Naturally, the families are undertaking their own investigations, and this encourages them to take matters into their own hands, just as in Chechnya. Where there is no justice there is rough justice. People lose patience.

There comes a knock at my door. I am in a hotel in Nazran. Outside is a line of old people. These are the mothers and fathers of the disappeared of Ingushetia. They tell me that people are being slaughtered like poultry. Unidentified detachments of federal troops drive through the streets by day and night. Mahomed Yandiev, a pensioner from Karabulak,
has lost his son, Timur. He was a very well known computer programmer, and accordingly popular with young people. It happened in the early evening. Timur was leaving his office sometime after 5:00 p.m. on March 16 when armed men wearing masks and camouflage fatigues pushed him into a white Niva with no number plates and drove off. The Niva was covered by a Gazelle, which also had no number plates. The kidnappers proceeded without hindrance into Chechnya via the Caucasus border post, the main military checkpoint on the border between Ingushetia and Chechnya. There the abductors showed their ROSh passes: they were accredited to the Regional Operational Headquarters of the counterterrorist operation. These are the findings of the Yandiev family. The law enforcement agencies did nothing.

“I have been everywhere,” says Mahomed Yandiev, weeping. He has been crushed by what has happened. “I have asked everybody: the procurator's office, the Interior Ministry, the FSB. I have begged them to tell me why he was taken. No matter what he has done, I should know. In reply I get silence. I have many questions. Are those masked people superior to the Ingush agencies of law and order? Who are they? Our Interior Ministry employs 6,000 people. That is a great many for a republic of only 300,000 people. Can these 6,000 really not police the republic's territory? Or is it they who are allowing individuals who cannot be identified to abduct people? I am outraged that President Zyazikov has never said anything in public about the problem. Since he is saying nothing, he knows where our people are and he is covering up for the kidnappers. They have unleashed a war against their own people. Chechnya is a base for bringing Stalinism back to Russia as a whole; we Ingushes are the next in turn after the Chechens, because we are the people closest to them. I hate Putin and his spawn Zyazikov.”

Mahomed Yandiev leaves and his place is taken by Tsiesh Khazbieva and her son Islam. On March 2, right in front of her, “unidentified masked soldiers” shot her twenty-four-year-old daughter Madina. They were driving that day from Nazran to visit the family's grandmother in the village of Gamurzievo.

“It was just before we reached Gamurzievo,” Tsiesh weeps. “The cars
in front of us began braking and then they blocked the road. We were forced to a halt. We saw masked soldiers drag a young lad out of the front vehicle. They threw him to the ground and shot him on the spot, although he was offering no resistance. Naturally I started shouting, ‘What are you doing?!’ In reply they shot at us. They hit my daughter in the carotid artery. She didn't even have time to get out of the car. My husband was seriously wounded in the shoulder and leg. He survived, but the doctors were unable to remove the bone fragments. I almost never leave home now, I am so afraid of people. There were no expressions of condolence from the authorities. There wasn't a word about it in any of the newspapers or on television. From what they show on television you would think we lived in paradise. I don't see why my Madina had to die. Who is answerable for shooting her?”

Later I sought out Idris Archakov, the investigator into the murder of this totally innocent girl. Idris had little to say. He was terrified of the truth, and kept shifting about. “You must understand … I want to work…” In Ingushetia fear now fetters everybody, from the peasant to the procurator, like a dragon that looks down on everybody from above. I am talking to Idris as if we are at a secret meeting, sitting in a borrowed car with the engine running.

Here is a bare summary of the words of Investigator Archakov, in which there is more cowardice and fear than any desire to carry out the duties of his position: Madina was shot by one of the federal death squads that regularly raid Ingushetia. On March 2 they were engaged in killing Akhmed Basnukaev, a field commander.

“Why did they need to liquidate Basnukaev by shooting at every living thing in the area? Basnukaev was from the moderate wing of the Chechen resistance. Not only did he not try to shoot his way out when they arrested him, but he had long been living quite openly in Ingushetia and had even, at the request of the pro-Moscow Chechen authorities, tried to mediate between official Grozny and some of the field commanders about laying down their arms voluntarily.