A Russian Diary (22 page)

Such a system would return us to the Soviet past. It would make it impossible to form new parliamentary parties, and new nonparliamentary parties would be marginalized. The effect would be to enable the Kremlin to deal only with two or three “old” parties, which have already shown themselves capable of accepting major compromise. The Communist Party, the Liberal Democratic Party, and, with some reservations, the Ro-dina Party would operate under the preeminence of that bloated party of bureaucrats, United Russia.

The underlying aim is to enable the Kremlin to take away the unpredictability of elections. The planned result will be the actual result. The democratic parties will instantly be marginalized, because support for Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces is below the 7 percent threshold on which the presidential administration is insisting. This proposal was immediately referred to as if it were a done deal by Alexander Vesh-nyakov, the far from independent director of the commission.

Veshnyakov explained that elections based on proportional representation could become law in June 2005 by introducing amendments to the law “On Basic Guarantees of Electoral Rights and of the Right to Participate in a Referendum of Citizens of the Russian Federation.”

*

That is exactly what happened. It was explained that the new system was “more responsible.” There were no protest demonstrations, and only
human rights campaigners tried to warn the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and European leaders that Russia no longer had a democratic electoral system. The Europeans noted that there had been no popular protest, so they accepted it too.

June 2

In Chechnya, Zelimkhan Kadyrov, the elder son of Akhmed-hadji Kady-rov, has been buried. It was well known that he was a drug addict, and he died of a heart attack three weeks after the assassination of his father. Relatives of the Kadyrovs said Zelimkhan was completely opposed to the brutal policies of his father and younger brother and took refuge in heroin.

June 19

In St. Petersburg, Nikolai Girenko has been shot dead in his apartment. This is a political murder of a well-known human rights champion and antifascist scholar. The murder was carried out by Russian fascists, who made no secret of the fact. It was a show of strength on their part. First they passed a “death sentence” on Girenko, posted it on the Internet, the state authorities ignored it, and then Girenko was killed in accordance with their “sentence.”

Who was Girenko? He was a St. Petersburg academic ethnographer, a prominent research fellow of the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He was called as an expert witness in the very infrequent court cases brought against fascist organizations. He would analyze the texts of radical nationalist publications and the manifestos of neo-Nazi groups and demonstrate that they were extremist. His forensic analyses were precise and scholarly, and were often the basis on which neo-Nazis were convicted. These trials are rare. In 2003, of seventy-two crimes identified as being racially motivated, only eleven made it to court. The other cases collapsed when investigators were either unable or, more commonly, unwilling to prove racial motivation.

The neo-Nazis hated Girenko because, when he was an expert witness, they often received prison sentences, rather than the more usual pardon or suspended sentence. He testified at the beginning of this month at the trial in Novgorod of members of a local branch of the Russian National Unity Party.

Few scholars will today agree to give evidence in open court at such trials. They are afraid of retaliation from the fascists, who enjoy the support of the state authorities and of a significant proportion of the population. They cannot rely on witness protection schemes, because the law-enforcement agencies are themselves shot through with chauvinism and xenophobia. They always have been, but the Putin period and the second Chechen war have seen an upsurge of hysterical fear of those from the Caucasus.

“When I heard about Girenko's murder, I was sure there would be a wave of social protest,” the writer Alla Gerber, president of the Holocaust Foundation, commented. Until December she had been a long-standing Duma deputy of the Union of Right Forces. Once again, however, there was no protest, only a wave of social satisfaction as the websites of the nationalistic organizations posted the joyful news of Girenko's murder. “Nationalists were jubilant to hear the news of the death of this academic!” The Russian National Unity Party announced that it had “heard of the untimely demise of this antifascist with a sense of relief.” The Slavic Union (its initials in Russian are “SS”) displayed a poster that, it stated, had been prepared in advance of the shooting. It depicts a young man in the uniform of a nationalist storm trooper with a pistol. The caption reads: “In memoriam Girenko.” Nobody stopped them. The procurator's office had nothing to say, let alone take the action that the law required. None of the sites was closed. Their owners will face no criminal charges.

At the same time, a list of “foes of the Russian people” was posted on the website of another ultranationalist organization, the Greater Russia Party. It lists forty-seven names, including that of Svetlana Gan-nushkina, director of Citizens’ Aid, the major association assisting refugees and those forced to resettle. Alla Gerber is also there, a well-known champion in the fight against anti-Semitism in Russia. So too is
Andrey Kozyrev, ex-minister of foreign affairs, for his pro-Western leanings; as are the television presenters Nikolai Svanidze, because he is a Georgian and, incidentally, a relative of Stalin, and Yelena Khanga, because her mother was married to an African. So too is the author of these lines.

The Slavic Union claims: “It is well known that numerous so-called human rights associations, generally made up of venal non-Russian human rights campaigners and surviving on funds from foreign well-wishers, foundations closely related to the CIA, MI6, and Mossad, are compiling dossiers against Russian activists.” Lower down, the leader of the SS, Dmitry Demushkin, openly threatens those on the list: “The Night of the Long Knives is near!”

There is no doubt that all this vileness has been triggered by the murder of Girenko—which the state authorities were reluctant to disclose, and even attempted to hush up—but also by the example from above of how one should deal with “venal human rights campaigners.” In his address to the Federal Assembly, Putin used almost the same words as the SS.

June 21-22

During the night, the five-year-long “antiterrorist operation” reached its apotheosis when fighters took control of Ingushetia.

Some time after 11:00 p.m. I started receiving phone calls from the republic, where I have many friends. “Something terrible is going on here! It's a war!” women were screaming into the telephone. “Help us! Do something! We are lying on the floor with the children!” I could hear the rattle of rifle fire and a lot of people shouting “Allahu akbar! [Allah is great!]”

The virtual war over the telephone went on until dawn, the whole night filled with a sense of helplessness. At night in Moscow there is nothing you can do to help anyone. The television stations have closed down, the news service staff have gone home. The law enforcement agencies have switched off their mobile phones and are sleeping. You
can murder if you like, you can steal, but the generals will give orders only in the morning.

That is what happened in Ingushetia. When the fighters began leaving at dawn the soldiers, with whom Ingushetia and the adjacent regions are overrun, finally came out from their “positions of permanent deployment” and started organizing a pursuit. Helicopters thundered overhead, air support appeared.

It was too late. The fighters had left. Bodies lay in the streets, both civilian and uniformed. The great majority of the dead were militiamen from the Interior Ministry of Ingushetia, from the Nazran office of internal affairs, and the Karabulak militia department. Procurators and FSB agents had also been killed. Middle-ranking officers of the security agencies of Ingushetia had been cut down, vehicles and buildings burned out. It became clear that more than 200 fighters had managed to take complete control of Nazran, and that there had been simultaneous raids in the town of Karabulak and the hill village of Sleptsovskaya. They had set up roadblocks wherever they wanted, and killed anyone arriving at them whose ID indicated that they worked for the law enforcement agencies, along with others who just happened to fall into their hands. Witnesses claimed that those manning the roadblocks were Chechens, Ingushes, and people “of Slavonic appearance,” all of whom said they were with Shamil Basaev*

Can Basaev, then, muster a 200-strong group? When all the security agencies, including those in Chechnya, have been reporting to their superiors for the past three years that there are no more than fifty fighters left, and perhaps as few as twenty or thirty?

This was a brilliantly organized guerrilla operation of which the intelligence services gave no warning, an operation resisted neither by the half-witted Kadyrov and his regiment (which may scare the Kremlin, but evidently does not scare Basaev); nor by the thousands of Russian soldiers in Hankala; nor even the further thousands in reserve in Mozdok; nor by the 58th Army, based in Ossetia, where some of the fighters had come from. There are also more than 14,000 militiamen in Chechnya, and 6,000 in Ingushetia.

So do the intelligence services actually exist? Does Kadyrov's regiment? The 14,000 militiamen plus another 6,000 in Ingushetia? Are Hankala and Mozdok really there?

The raid on Ingushetia proves that, as a genuinely effective security force, they do not. Our system of defense is as virtual as Putin, created purely to make a show of fighting, but not actually to fight. This is precisely why all those thousands of people disappear without a trace after encountering “unidentified masked soldiers wearing camouflage.” Someone needs to send his superiors a new “antiterrorist” report. He needs a result. These “forces” are capable only of furtive abduction and looting. That's all the Russian Army and security forces are good for now.

Those reckless people who left their homes in the night and went to the fighters’ roadblocks to ask them to leave discovered that the “invaders” included just as many of their own people, Ingushes, as Chechens.

When, in the winter and spring of this past year, the abductions began on a grand scale, and young people in Ingushetia began taking to the hills rather than endure it any longer, the authorities brought down thunder and lightning on the heads of those who said openly that this was enormously dangerous and would lead to an escalation of the war. They continued to insist on their own stability. On June 22 that myth cost almost a hundred lives. The militiamen who defended themselves and, waiting in vain for help to arrive, died in battle, carried out their duty to the end. But who takes responsibility for the civilian deaths?

The fighters, of course, bear full criminal responsibility for all these deaths, but equally culpable are the so-called state authorities. They never tire of telling us that they “take responsibility for everything.” The authorities have lied, done nothing, worried only about staying in power, and thereby condemned innocent people to death.

Where was Zyazikov during this night? Zyazikov ran away, disguised as a woman. He dismissed his bodyguard in order not to be identified from his security detail, and returned only when the danger was past, when people were searching among the corpses for their loved ones. It was unheard-of behavior for a man, and not only in the Caucasus. While all this grand nonsense remains in place, with Zyazikov as a condign part
of the system, and if Putin does not change his blinkered rampaging in Chechnya, which is entirely without a future, for the tactic of peace, tragedies like that of June 22 are inevitable. Our collective lying over many years about the Chechen war, our failure even to learn from
Nord-Ost,
has brought about these monstrous events in Ingushetia. We simply must seek a political way out of this dead end.

June 23

Twenty-four hours after the tragedy, while funerals were taking place all over Ingushetia, Alu Alkhanov, minister of the interior of Chechnya, announced to the television cameras that he would be standing as a candidate for the post of president of Chechnya. Alkhanov is one of those personally responsible for failing to catch Basaev, but is nevertheless being presented every hour as Putin's preferred candidate. Putting himself forward, Alkhanov said how much he was looking forward to “peaceful elections on August 29,” and that the main thing now was to consolidate Chechnya's agriculture. He seemed quite oblivious of how objectionable it was to come out with all this one day after the catastrophe in Ingushetia.

July 1

A discussion was held at the Svyato-Danilovsky Monastery in Moscow on the topic of “Freedom and Personal Dignity: the Orthodox and Liberal Views.” Rostislav Shafarevich was there, at one time a colleague and friend of Andrey Sakharov, but today a terrible reactionary and defender of Putin. Ella Pamfilova was present, the director of the Presidential Commission for the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights. There were also present Deacon Andrey Kuraev and Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin. The round table busily set about elaborating Vladislav Surkov's concept of a Russian model for defending human rights: in the first place, it would be funded by Russian business; and in the second, it would be based on Russian Orthodox ethics.

What about those who are not Orthodox? Muslims? Jews? Will they
be excluded from defending human rights? The human rights movement is by its very nature supranational and supraconfessional. In any case, if we are to believe Dostoevsky the Russian is a “universal man.”

That, however, is neither here nor there. Putin has instructed the Russian Orthodox Church to flesh out what he was talking about in his address to the Federal Assembly, to replace “Western” defense of human rights by “Orthodox” defense of human rights. In order to prove yet again its loyalty to the authorities, and in return for being made the main state religion under Putin, the Russian Orthodox Church has agreed. Metropolitan Kirill gave a deeply felt speech on the need to find new leaders for the human rights movement “who love our country.” He seems to have no inkling that “finding new leaders for the human rights movement” is simply not possible. They either are there, generated by life itself, or they are not.