A Russian Diary (21 page)

Koryakov, director of the FSB of Ingushetia, is a dreadful person to have in our system, although he claims to have been sent to work there by Patrushev [the national head of the FSB] and Putin personally. This contemptible louse destroys people solely because they are Ingushes or Chechens. He has some grudge and hates them.

Koryakov forced me and my colleagues—there were five of us working for him—to systematically beat up everybody we arrested, while pretending to be agents of ROSh. Everything was planned: special clothing, masks, false documents, camouflage, vehicles (which usually belonged to those who had been arrested, but with the number plates changed), special passes. While pretending to take the victims away from [Nazran], we would usually circle and return in different vehicles to our building, where we carried on beating the people. All this was done at night. During the day we slept. Koryakov had to report to Moscow that the work was proceeding and to justify the title of general, which he had recently been awarded. For this there was a plan requiring processing of at least five persons per week. In early 2003, when I had just arrived, we really did arrest people who were up to something. But after Koryakov went ape over what he called “some procurator,” we started pulling in people without any grounds, just going by their appearance. Koryakov said what difference does it make, they are all lice. Personally Sergey and I crippled more than fifty people. We buried about thirty-five.

Today I have returned home. I have been rewarded for irreproachable service because of the last operation to take out the local procurator, because he had compromising material on Koryakov. I destroyed the ID and personal weapon of the procurator
and broke all his limbs. That night Koryakov gave orders to some different people to get rid of him.

I am guilty. I am ashamed. This is the pure truth. Igor N. On-ishchenko.

(Even after this monstrous document was published, nothing changed. There was no popular protest, and the procurator's office just let it slide.)

April 22-23

A meeting between Kuchma and Putin in the Crimea. This is the moment Putin decides whether or not to support Yanukovych. So far it looks as though he will not, thank God. Yanukovych was not invited into the meeting, although he was waiting in the wings the whole time.

April 28

At 11:20 a.m., on Staraya Basmannaya Street in Moscow, a hitman shot Georgii Tal at point-blank range. Tal was a fledgling of the Yeltsin nest, the director from 1997 to 2001 of the Federal Service for Financial Recovery and Bankruptcy. Tal died in the hospital this evening without recovering consciousness. His murder is part of a process of destroying those involved in the redistribution of Russia's prime industrial assets through an organized system of bankrupting enterprises. During Tal's years as director there was a reallocation of ownership, primarily of the oil and aluminum industries, by this means. Under Putin many criminal bankruptcies have begun to be investigated. It is a factor in the Yukos case. The aim of the investigations is to carry out a new redistribution in favor of Putin's supporters. In fact, the system of bankruptcy under Yeltsin was perfectly legal, and it was exploited by all those who are today the wealthiest people in the country, the oligarchs who made their fortunes under Yeltsin. Putin has a rabid hatred of most of these. Few people doubt that Tal was murdered to prevent him from speaking about the principles on which the bankruptcy service operated. He simply knew too much about those who
are now highly influential. The murder of insolvency practitioners by hitmen was itself part of the business of bankruptcy in Russia.

Tal was a key professional in the management of the property of bankrupt enterprises. After 2002 he headed a nonprofit partnership called the Interregional Self-regulated Organization of Professional Insolvency Administrators. The organization existed under the aegis of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, and mainly advised members of the board of the RUIE on who should be bankrupted and when, so that the enterprise could be put in administration. These are our oligarchs: Oleg Deripaska, Vladimir Potanin, Alexey Mordashev, Mikhail Fridman, and others. It is unlikely, however, that Tal's murder was in the interests of these people.

The murder caused no surprise at his own organization, at the RUIE, among big business or the government bureaucracy. The general population was even less surprised. As if that was perfectly fine.

Late April

We lived through April with the feeling of being constantly deceived, a sensation that suited many, who wanted just that.

We lived also in anticipation of another piece of offensiveness, arranged for May 7: Putin's second inauguration. You could not exactly say that the air was filled with anticipation. The majority of the population really don't care what sort of inauguration there is, or whether it takes place at all.

On the eve of major official events it is traditional in Russia to pause and reflect on the future. An inauguration might be expected to prompt the main political players to tell us what their plans are for the period between now and 2007.

There is none of this. Total silence from the opposition tells us that it has caved in. The failure to generate any new movements tells us that the “old” opposition will be in no state to fight for seats in the Duma in 2007, or to put forward credible presidential candidates in 2008. Nobody believes in revolution, either.

The Kremlin's social-survey unit, TsIOM, asked the Russian public,
“If there were mass demonstrations in your region by the population in defense of their rights, would you take part?” Only 25 percent answered yes; 66 percent said no. We shall not be having a revolution anytime soon.

May 7

Putin's inauguration in the Kremlin. A demonstration of our First Citizen's autocratic power and magnificence, of his separateness and remoteness.

Even from his own wife. During the live television broadcast the commentators actually said, “Among those invited to the solemn ceremony of President Putin's taking of office is the wife of Vladimir Vladimirovich, Lyudmila Putina.” It is laughable of course, and people did laugh, but not very cheerfully. She stood throughout the inauguration among the VIPs, behind a barrier past which Putin trotted down the red carpet.

He arrived alone, marched past his wife to the podium, then back to the Tsar's Porch to review the parade. All the time alone. No friends, no family. The man is barking mad. It is a sure sign that he trusts nobody, and that is a fundamental characteristic of Putin's rule. The concomitant is the certainty that only he, Putin, knows what is best for the country.

We do not really know what the inauguration of a leader is like in other countries. Is it a time of popular celebration? Or is it, as in Russia, merely an embarrassment?

May 9

Akhmed-hadji Kadyrov,* Putin's main placeman in Chechnya, has been assassinated. He had attended Putin's inauguration and yesterday flew back to Chechnya, not disguising his displeasure at the place allocated to him by Putin's entourage. He was in the second hall, not in the first ranks of the most honored guests, and saw it as a worrying cooling of the First Citizen toward him.

He had good cause to be nervous. Putin was his only hope of power and survival. Kadyrov had presided over the process of “Chechenization”
of the conflict in his republic, the initiation of a civil war between Chechens, with the Kremlin supporting the “good” ones who side with Kadyrov and Putin against the ones who are “not on our side” and have to be exterminated.

Kadyrov was killed while viewing the Victory Day parade at the Di-namo Stadium in Grozny. The explosive device was concreted into the supports beneath the grandstand.

*

There were persistent rumors that Kadyrov was blown up by “our people.” His security in the last months of his life meant that nobody but “our people” could get anywhere near him. Whenever he appeared in public, everything was cordoned off far in advance and checked repeatedly for explosives. Those responsible for Kadyrov's assassination were never found, no matter how frequently we were shown on television how hard everyone was trying.

Who are “our people” in this context? Agents of the federal special operations units working in Chechnya. State hitmen. Soldiers of the Central Intelligence Directorate of the army, the GRU; the center for special missions of the Federal Security Bureau; and secret subsections of the FSB for carrying out particularly sensitive missions, which usually means assassinations.

On May 9 it seemed that Kadyrov's death, no matter at whose hands he died, spelled the end of Chechenization and, with it, of Putin's moronic policy in the North Caucasus. Kadyrov, people supposed, had been removed in order to bring this policy to an end. The surmise was shortlived. On the evening of May 9 the murdered president's psychopathic and extremely stupid younger son, Ramzan Kadyrov, was illogically elevated to prominence in Chechnya. Ramzan had been in charge of his father's personal security, into which he had brought all the criminal dross of Chechnya, attracting them with promises of immunity from prosecution.

Putin received Ramzan in the Kremlin that evening. He turned up in a bright blue tracksuit and gave Putin every assurance that he would continue the policy of Chechenization begun by his father. The meeting was shown on all television channels and seen throughout Chechnya, and
made it clear that Kadyrov's gangs were being granted immunity to carry on as before. For some reason Putin's administration had suspected that, after his father's death, Ramzan would make a run for it into the mountains to join the fighters. Instead he was granted permission to continue to terrorize the population of the republic.

This led to even more divisiveness and violence in Chechnya in order to underpin the position of the vacuous Ramzan Kadyrov. The armed resistance was strengthened by an influx of new volunteers after the death of Kadyrov senior, but people were soon humbly bowing down before the new idiot, and in no time at all he deluded himself that he actually was of real significance.

May 26

Putin has delivered his annual address to the Federal Assembly. This is how the Russian people are informed of the president's plans for the coming year. He was in top form and in aggressive mood. He talked with total contempt about civil society, claiming it was all corrupt and that the defenders of human rights were a fifth column feeding from the hand of the West. The following is a verbatim quotation: “For some of these organizations [of civil society] their first priority is to obtain finance from influential foreign foundations… When there is a problem with fundamental and basic violations of human rights, infringement of the real interests of the people, the voices of these organizations are sometimes not heard at all. This is hardly surprising. They simply cannot bite the hand that feeds them.”

*

Thereafter, of course, Putin's absurd attack on human rights campaigners was vigorously taken up by the officials of his administration, primarily by his chief ideologist and spin doctor, Vladislav Surkov. Human rights campaigners attending protest meetings against the war in Chechnya subsequently carried placards reading, “I am the West's fifth column.”

After Putin's May 26 speech, the state authorities started setting up a new variety of “human rights associations” under their own patronage.

This came to nothing, but the idea was that this parallel civil society, “on our side,” should be financed by Russian business, the oligarchs. They stubbornly refused, no doubt mindful of the fate of Khodorkovsky, who was now in prison for having financed nongovernmental organizations.

Why did Putin suddenly mount this onslaught on the human rights associations? By the summer of 2004, after the collapse of the democratic and liberal parties, it seemed clear that if opposition was going to crystallize anywhere, it would be around the human rights community, as in the Soviet period. That is why Putin vilified these organizations in his message, why he was so eager to discredit them.

In May the democrats remained quiescent. Ramzan Kadyrov's rise to prominence in Chechnya was the key event of the month, overshadowing the inauguration, but they made no protest. Indeed they made no comment at all.

June 1

Leonid Parfyonov, a brilliant television journalist, has been fired by the NTV television station. In his very popular news analysis program,
The Other Day,
he screened an interview with the wife of Zelimkhan Yandar-biev, the Chechen leader murdered in Qatar. It was fairly unexceptional, the widow said nothing particularly startling, but she was inconsolable. The topic, however, was impermissible.

Parfyonov is not an aggressive broadcaster and, if anything, sought compromises between what the authorities wanted and what he wanted to show in his program. His firing is political censorship of NTV.

Kakha Bendukidze, an erudite Georgian who is also a Russian industrial oligarch, has been appointed minister of industry in the new Georgia. Saakashvili quickly made him a citizen of the republic.

Bendukidze was persuaded to take the job by the Georgian prime minister, Zurab Zhvaniya. He has announced that he intends to introduce “ultraliberal reforms” in his old homeland. He studiously avoided all comment on the nature of any reforms that might be needed here, but his departure speaks for itself. There is evidently no place for him as a liberal in Putin's Russia. Even before the Rose Revolution in Tbilisi, Bendukidze
had spoken both in public and in private of his disappointment with Russia's economic development and his desire to get out of business. He was already in the process of selling off his Russian business interests.

In Moscow the Central Electoral Commission is beginning a propaganda campaign to get the electorate to accept the abolition of the right to vote in the Duma elections for individual candidates in constituency seats, rather than for parties through a system of proportional representation. This is a right we stubbornly fought for, and it is vitally important in our post-Communist society. The Kremlin's aim is to allow people to vote only for party lists. They also intend to increase the share of the vote required before a party is allowed to be represented in Parliament. In other words, only major parties will be allowed to participate in elections.