A Russian Diary (23 page)

Ella Pamfilova also spoke. At one time she was an enthusiastic democrat who campaigned against the privileges of party bigwigs. Now she enthusiastically supported Putin and his new attitude toward human rights workers. She said, “I do not agree that we have a crisis of ideology in the human rights movement. There can be no crisis of something that by definition cannot exist! There is a crisis in particular human rights associations whose leaders, who in many ways are still in the last century, are trying to fight a totalitarian state that disappeared long ago. They are accustomed to appealing to the leaders of Western states to try to influence our state authorities. I repeat, we ought not to associate the whole human rights movement in Russia with five or ten well-known people, most of them from the old days, who long ago confused campaigning for human rights with politics, who still regularly confuse one thing with the other, radically defend positions that have no support among the majority of the population or the informed public. I do not think they represent a great danger for us. I believe that we are now witnessing the birth of a human rights movement of a new quality in Russia … and that there are many young leaders of human rights organizations who are working in the interests of our people…”

There certainly are, but they are not going to gladden the heart of Pamfilova. The radicalization of young people is an obvious fact. The
children of the defeated Yabloko and Union of Right Forces supporters are going off to join the National Bolsheviks, the party of Limonov.
^*

The final act in the destruction of Yukos has begun. Overnight on July 1-2 the company's accounts were frozen. The extraction of oil has ceased, causing the oil price to jump sharply on the world's markets. Yukos offered a package of shares in the Sibneft oil company to settle their new debts. The state turned the deal down, insisting on the liquidation of Yukos. It is a calamity and amounts to what President Putin likes to refer to as “kicking the shit out of them.” Nobody cares.

July 6

A meeting in the Chechen hill village of Sernovodskaya to demand the return of the latest group of men abducted by the federals has been dispersed with gunfire. Women from the neighboring village of Assi-novskaya and from the district town of Akhchoy-Martan blocked the state highway with the same demand: stop these arbitrary abductions of their sons, husbands, and brothers. (Nothing changed. Only human rights campaigners in Russia itself supported these protests.)

July 7

In the Chechen town of Shali there has been a gathering of the mothers of those who have been abducted. The women state that they are prepared to go on hunger strike indefinitely, their patience exhausted by the failure of the law enforcement agencies to search for the victims. They ask that European human rights campaigners and international organizations hear their cry of despair for a simplification of the procedure for according refugee status to Chechens. “We have been driven out of Ingushetia, we are being murdered and our sons kidnapped in Chechnya, and in Russia we are second-class citizens.” Such is the resolution of the gathering.

That same night federal forces furtively continued taking men from their homes in Grozny, Nazran, and Karabulak. There is a flood of letters from Chechnya to Strasbourg.

July 9

The latest atrocious death of a Russian soldier killed by the Russian Army.

Soldiers die in the army for all sorts of reasons; the army has made it easy for them to be killed. You may be keen to serve, you may have enlisted before you had to, like Yevgeny Fomovsky, but that will not save you. There will be scum who take a dislike to you, or who don't like your size, or the size of your feet, and they will kill you.

“His schoolfriends were taking their final exams while my son was being buried,” Yevgeny's mother, Svetlana, tells me. She is from the town of Yarovoye in the Altai Region. “Zhenya took all his exams early in order to be in time for the spring conscription into the army.”

“Why?”

“In order to get it over with more quickly, in order not to be harassed by the local military commissariat, and then to go on to college.”

Things didn't turn out that way. Yevgeny Fomovsky's career in the army lasted from May 31 to July 9, less than one and a half months. He arrived at his FSB border guards unit on the outskirts of Priargunsk in Chita Province on June 8. On July 4 he swore allegiance. On July 6 this big, healthy Siberian was sent into the hills, to a summer training camp 8 miles from Priargunsk. At dawn on July 9 Yevgeny was found hanged, using two belts tied together, by the wall of a half-ruined building 100 yards from the training camp tents. At nine o'clock that evening the postman arrived at Altaiskaya Street in Yarovoye with a telegram that read, “Your son, Fomovsky, Yevgeny Anatolievich, committed suicide on July 9, 2004. Advise place of burial immediately. Date of dispatch of coffin to be notified separately. Commanding Officer of Military Unit…”

So what had happened? Yevgeny was strong and well equipped to be a soldier. He was an accomplished sportsman, and by the time he was eighteen he had acquired several army skills. The army, however, does not need educated conscripts, it wants run-of-the-mill recruits. The root of the tragedy is that Pvt. Yevgeny Fomovsky took size-13 boots and was 6 feet
5 inches tall. He was issued with size-10 1/2 army boots and forced to wear them during a daily three-mile cross-country run in 104°F heat.

Torturing new conscripts is a way of life in the Russian Army. By the day before his “suicide,” Yevgeny was no longer able to walk in anything other than slippers.

“When we went to the mortuary, his longest toe was rubbed down to the bone,” his aunt, Yekaterina Mikhailovna, tells me.

Russia is a big country. When Yevgeny's mother and aunt set out from Yarovoye on the five-day journey to Priargunsk to visit him, they had no idea what was awaiting them. “We were too late,” his mother weeps. “We arrived in Priargunsk on July 10, and on July 9 Zhenya died.” Priargunsk is a town on the remote border of our land with China and Mongolia. The mortuary is a building attached to the district hospital.

“When we were at the mortuary I saw Zhenya,” his aunt Yekaterina tells me. There was a mark on his neck, apparently from a noose. There were cuts on his left wrist. We were told that Zhenya had first tried to open his veins. His whole body had been beaten, his head was covered in bruises. It was soft to the touch as if there were no bones there, they had all been broken. On the back of his head there was a clear indentation from some heavy object. His sexual organs were swollen and crushed: they were one enormous black bruise. His legs were swollen, just one wound after another, braised as if he had been dragged. His back had all the skin flayed from it, also as if he had been dragged. There was a burn on his foot. There were bruises on his shoulders as if somebody had been pressing down hard on them. I think he was tortured, and then hanged in order to cover up the murder.”

Yevgeny had not wanted to submit to the torment of his undersized boots and had been demanding the proper size. They decided to teach him a lesson in accordance with long-established army practice: with the blessing of the officers, this is carried out by the “granddads”— sergeants, soldiers in their second year of service, older servicemen. The officers expect them to “maintain order” in the barracks.

The fact that Yevgeny was murdered was later confirmed by first-year soldiers who said his tormentors hadn't meant to kill him, just to teach
him a lesson so that he didn't try to get above himself. They overdid it and Yevgeny died while he was being tortured. The murderers then decided to pretend he had committed suicide.

The tragedy of Private Fomovsky, eighteen, killed because his feet were too big, did not cause any particular public outcry at such savagery in the army. Nobody insisted that the minister of defense, Sergey Ivanov, and the director of the FSB, Nikolai Patrushev, should undertake to ensure the future provision for our soldiers of an orderly environment, with food, clothing, and footwear fit for human beings; or that they should accept personal responsibility for the lives of the young men we conscript. Everything went on just as before, until the next unlawful killing of a soldier.

Late in the evening of July 9, Paul Klebnikov, the editor in chief of the Russian edition of
Forbes
magazine, was fatally wounded. Klebnikov was a descendant of the Decembrist Pushchin, a friend of Alexander Pushkin; he was an American who had long been researching the development of oligarchy in the new Russia. The murder of Klebnikov was a puzzle, and the suggestion by the law enforcement agencies that the perpetrators were Chechens taking revenge for a badly written book about the adventurist Hoj-Ahmed Noukhaev is manifest nonsense. They were in a flap because they couldn't solve a crime that caused widespread international outrage. Noukhaev is a strange, contradictory figure. At one time a field commander, he left the resistance and started representing himself as a philosopher, which he was not. His authority was never great among the Chechens, and it is difficult to imagine anyone carrying out a murder on his behalf.

Mukhamed Tsikanov has been appointed vice president of Yukos-Moscow, the holding company of Yukos. A former deputy minister of economic development, Tsikanov is in reality an emissary of the state inserted to ensure a “correct” sell-off Needless to say, Tsikanov is wholly in the pocket of the state authorities. Before this he was engaged in the “restoration of Chechnya,” an enterprise admitted to have been a failure, even though all the money in the budget was spent. The man in charge of all that enjoys his life without untoward consequences, and has even been promoted.

July 10

The last edition of Savik Shuster's
Free Speech
has been broadcast on NTV. The only remaining political talk show anywhere on Russian national television has been axed. The
Personal Affairs
program has been closed down too, also on NTV. It was a weekly news analysis run by Alexander Gerasimov. Gerasimov was the deputy director general for news of NTV, and he too is leaving. The crushing of all freethinking and unpredictability on Russian television is a fait accompli.

July 16-17

In the Chechen hill village of Sernovodskaya on the border of Chechnya and Ingushetia, soldiers arrived in armored personnel carriers and abducted six men: the two Indarbiev brothers, one a major in the militia; the three Inkemirov brothers, aged fifteen to nineteen; and the disabled Anzor Lukaev. A protest meeting held by their womenfolk to demand their return was dispersed by warning gunfire. The first to fire were bodyguards of Alu Alkhanov, the “chairman of the Public Committee for the Restoration of Chechnya.” He is the leading presidential candidate, a member of the militia and minister of the interior—the same Alu Alkhanov who never tires of telling us on television that “the wave of abductions is declining, we have succeeded in achieving that.” It is easier to make that claim when you shoot at anyone who reminds you that it is not the case.

July 20

At about 4:00 a.m. today in Galashki, Ingushetia, Beslan Arapkhanov, a tractor driver, was beaten up in front of his wife and seven small children before being shot dead. By mistake. The security forces were attempting to arrest the fighter Ruslan Khuchbarov. According to highly secret intelligence, Khuchbarov was sleeping that night at No. 11 Partizanskaya Street.

For some reason, however, the soldiers came and shot the guiltless Arapkhanov at No. 1 Partizanskaya Street. Immediately after the murder, an officer entered the Arapkhanovs’ house, introducing himself to the shocked wife as FSB Investigator Kostenko, and presented a warrant to search “No. 11 Partizanskaya Street.” At this point the error became evident, but Kostenko did not so much as apologize to the grieving widow.

That is the reality of our “antiterrorist operation.” What are the seven children of Beslan Arapkhanov going to make of this? What chance is there that they will forgive and forget?

*

Kostenko was not to apologize either to the mothers of the children who died in the subsequent terrorist atrocity at the First School in the town of Beslan, which was directed by the same Khuchbarov whom Kostenko had failed to arrest.

July 23

The team investigating the
Nord-Ost
hostage taking has been disbanded. In three months’ time it will be the second anniversary of
Nord-Ost,
and the public have wearied of hearing about it. This is precisely why the investigation has been wound up, even though it had yet to identify most of the terrorists, to establish the composition of the gas with which people were poisoned, or say who made the decision to use it.

An inquiry of crucial importance to the political progress of the Russian state has been put on ice. Of the entire team, supposedly “a group of our best investigators working to repay a debt of honor,” as our official spokesmen put it, there remains in their empty rooms at the Moscow procurator's office only Mr. V. I. Kalchuk.

He is meeting those who have suffered—hostages who survived and relatives of those who died—and gives them his findings to read: there was no criminal guilt on the part of any of the personnel of the security agencies, who used a deadly gas to simplify the “rescue operation” at the cost of 129 lives and the health of hundreds of others.

His findings are shocking in their cynicism. In the document everything is blamed on Basaev:

Investigator V. I. Kalchuk established: that Basaev after 1995 … devised … committed … selected … delegated … an international search warrant was issued through Interpol on May 5, 2003 … under the pretext of fighting for the freedom and independence of the illegal, self-proclaimed state of Ichkeria … in the period indicated, in order to induce the state institutions of the Russian Federation to make a decision to withdraw troops from the territory of the Chechen Republic where an antiterrorist operation is being conducted, did conspire with leaders of an illegal armed grouping and of Chechen separatists not identified by the investigation to cause explosions in densely populated and socially significant places and to take hostage a large number of people…