A Russian Diary (26 page)

“We are homeless. We are allowed to live here only through people's kindness.” Lyudmila Alexeyevna shows us the apartment. “We have nothing, nowhere to live, no property. Only that iron is mine, and the sewing machine. And the television. The young people are so kind, they help us a lot. Without them we would have died. It's because of Igor that they look after us, even though none of them knew him.”

The “young people” standing in a line by the wall look at the floor and say nothing. They are Verkhny Tagil “Chechens,” soldiers and officers who have fought in Chechnya, and they have formed a local association of ex-servicemen.

“Our aim is very simple,” Yevgeny Bozmakov, the chairman of the association, tells me. “It is to help each other to survive. That is our only mission, and it is why we are helping the parents of Hero Khomenko.”

“It was they who managed to get me and Father Russian citizenship,” Lyudmila Alexeyevna continues. “They visited all the offices for us, otherwise we wouldn't even have a pension.” Such are the rules of Russian life. Somebody who is not a citizen of Russia, even if they worked in the USSR for their whole life, is not entitled to a pension.

Lyudmila Alexeyevna begins to cry, quietly and very sadly. Vladimir
Kuzmich, moving behind her, strokes her shoulder and she says, now speaking to him, “No, no, that's right, I know. I'll stop crying. I'll just tell her. What's to become of us?”

She shows us a stack of papers, the correspondence between the parents of a Hero of Russia with various official organizations and the Ministry of Defense. The officials’ letters are full of haughty disdain.

As relatives of a Hero of the Russian Federation who died in the North Caucasian Region of the Russian Federation, you are entitled to enhancement of your living conditions drawing on funds of the National Military Fund. At the same time I have to inform you that, consequent upon a dearth of voluntary contributions, the program “Homes for Servicemen” is in abeyance. Act. Dir. of the Directorate of Military Welfare of the Central Board of Education of the AF of the RF, V. Zvezdilin.

We send people into the fire of battle, then bury them with great pomp and ceremony, award them posthumous medals—and forget them. It is a Russian tradition to shirk responsibility for our debts. It has never occurred to Putin, at least no one has ever heard him admit it, that he is responsible for those who have paid with their lives for his decision to begin the second Chechen war.

I have come to Verkhny Tagil with Lyudmila Leonidovna Polymova, the mother of another soldier killed in Chechnya, another mother whom the state forgot after it had taken the life of her son. Lyudmila Leonidovna breaks down when she sees the scene in the Khomenkos’ house. “My own boy died protecting an officer with his body. They gave him the Order of Valor posthumously.” She urges that they should unite their efforts. In Yekaterinburg, where she lives, Lyudmila has already created an association called Mothers Against Violence.

The following day Vyacheslav Zykov, the chairman of the ex-servicemen's association of Yekaterinburg, another “Chechen” soldier, takes Lyudmila to Bolshaya Rechka, a little township on the outskirts of Yekaterinburg in which the military cemetery is located. Here are buried the remains of her son, Pvt. Yevgeny Polymov, which she had to find herself
in a mountain of soldiers’ bodies in Rostov-on-Don. The generals are not going to look for you, nor is anybody else. Parents have to travel to Rostov-on-Don themselves, and look for the remains of their sons in the mortuary of the North Caucasus Military District.

A funeral party advances slowly toward us from the cemetery. They have just buried an officer killed in Chechnya. Through the windows of the bus we see women in black.

“The latest,” Lyudmila Leonidovna comments, and goes off alone to her son's grave. She doesn't ask us to join her. She bears her suffering alone, and tries to help others in the same situation.

Many young men were taken from Sverdlovsk Province to fight in Chechnya, and more than 20,000 “Chechen” ex-servicemen live there now. The region is dotted with memorial plaques and monuments to those who died there. Beside the Officers’ Club in the central square of Yekaterinburg they have already added a Chechen section to the Black Tulip memorial, a kind of annex to the monument to the men of the Urals who died in Afghanistan in the last war of the Soviet era. This new section already has 412 names etched in gold. There are blank obelisks to either side for those who, we can be sure, are going to die.

How many more such coffins will we tolerate? How many new cripples with arms and legs missing? Every soldier killed or maimed in the second Chechen war brings the state greater responsibility, when it isn't yet servicing its existing debts. Like a bankrupt, it begins to default, trying to conceal its bankruptcy with measures like this wretched reform of benefits in kind. It removes even those small privileges from the disabled, the “Chechens,” the mothers of soldiers who have been killed, privileges that were some gesture of compensation for its escapade in the North Caucasus.

The number of those to whom the state is now indebted runs into millions, which is why we find Putin and Zurabov saying the number of people with privileges in Russia is artificially high. No other country has so many claimants (happily) and accordingly “something needs to be done.” The number is artificially high, of course, because of the constant aggressive policies of our state, which produce casualties of war like mushrooms after rain.

“Many of our people end up in jail,” Vitalii Volkov tells me. He is the chairman of the Verkhnyaya Salda Association of Ex-Servicemen of Chechnya. He has 200 members. “We are penniless. We can't get work. Many who have come back from Chechnya start thieving, and the next stop is prison. Who is going to come out of our prisons still a human being? If before prison you were in Chechnya, and before Chechnya you were a schoolkid?”

These associations run by Lyudmila Polymova, Vitalii Volkov, and Vy-acheslav Zykov have been set up when misfortune befell their founders personally. They admit they never dreamed they would become involved in welfare activities or start fighting the state machine. Their organizations have no political aims. They are a product of despair and exist purely to help people survive. Surviving is so hard it leaves no time for anything else.

How long will people put up with this? That is the decisive question for Russia, as it is also for Ukraine.

August 29

In Chechnya the election of Putin's next president has gone ahead. Needless to say, the Kremlin's candidate came in with an “overwhelming majority of votes.” Alu Alkhanov may nominally be the new president, but the real boss is the deranged Ramzan Kadyrov, the twenty-seven-year-old son of Alkhanov's assassinated predecessor, who in his time was, of course, also elected with an “overwhelming majority of votes.”

Who is Ramzan? For the past year and a half he ran his father's security detail. After the president's assassination he was, perhaps surprisingly, not dismissed for this lapse, but promoted by Putin personally to the exalted post of first deputy prime minister of the Chechen government with special responsibility for security. He is now in charge of the militia, all manner of special operations subdivisions, and the Chechen OMON. Although he has no education, he does hold the rank of captain in the militia. This is surprising, because he is not a militiaman, and higher education is required in Russia before you can become a captain. Be that as it may, he now has the right to give orders to career colonels
and generals, which he does. They do as they are commanded, because they know that Ramzan is Putin's favorite.

What kind of person is Ramzan? What kind of qualifications do you need to be a favorite of Putin? To have ground Chechnya beneath your heel, and forced the entire republic to pay you tribute like an Asiatic bey, is evidently a plus.

Ramzan is rarely seen outside his village of Tsentoroy, one of the unsightliest of Chechen villages, unfriendly, ugly and swarming with murderous-looking armed men. The village is a collection of narrow, winding, dusty streets hemmed in by enormous fences, behind most of which live members of the Kadyrov family and the families of Kadyrov's most trusted bodyguards and soldiers of the “presidential security service.”

Two or three years ago, those villagers of Tsentoroy whom Kadyrov didn't trust were simply expelled and their houses given to the bruisers of the security service. The security service is illegal, but well provided with federal armaments. As it is not formally attached to any of the security ministries, it is an “illegal armed formation,” its status no different from that of Basaev's troops, except that it is led by a favorite of Putin. So that's all right.

Kadyrov's men take part in combat operations as if they were soldiers with the Ministry of Defense; they arrest and interrogate people as if they were agents of the Interior Ministry; and they hold people prisoner in their cellars in Tsentoroy, and torture them like gangsters.

No procurator challenges any of this. It is all hushed up. They know better than to poke their noses in. Tsentoroy is above the law, by Putin's will. The rules that apply to other people do not apply to Ramzan. He can do as he pleases because he is said to be fighting terrorists using his own methods. In fact he's fighting nobody. He is in the business of robbery and extortion, disguised as “the fight against terrorism.”

The capital of Chechnya has effectively moved to Ramzan's estate. Pro-Russian Chechen officials come here to bow down before his fatuous, degenerate countenance either to seek whatever permission they need or when they are summoned. All of them come, including even
Sergey Abramov, the young prime minister of Chechnya who is supposed to report directly to the prime minister of Russia, and who is not supposed to report to Ramzan Kadyrov.

The reality is, however, that Tsentoroy is where the decisions are made. It was here that the decision was made to nominate Alkhanov for the presidency, and now he is president.

Ramzan rarely travels to Grozny because he fears assassination. The journey takes one and a half hours. That is why Tsentoroy is such a fortress, with a security filtration system on its approaches that would do credit to the Kremlin: a series of control posts, one after the other. I get through them all and find myself in what the armed men surrounding me describe as “the guesthouse.” I am held there for six or seven hours. Evening falls. In Chechnya this means you should lose no time in finding shelter. Anyone who wants to live hides away in their burrow.

“Where is Ramzan?” I ask. He has agreed to meet me.

“Soon, soon,” the guardian of the guesthouse, and now of me, mutters.

There is always somebody with me. Vakha Visaev introduces himself as the director of Yugoilprodukt, the new oil refinery at Gudermes, the second largest city in Chechnya. He offers to show me around the guesthouse. It is not badly set out. There is a fountain in the courtyard, ugly, but a fountain nevertheless. Bamboo furniture graces an open terrace with pillars. Vakha makes a great point of showing me the labels, which indicate that it was made in Hong Kong. Most likely, he paid for it. People fall over themselves to give gifts to Ramzan, to buy him off. Everybody remembers that the head of the nearby Shali Region, Akhmed Gutiev, didn't pay the required tribute to Ramzan. He was abducted, tortured, and his family had to ransom him for $100,000. Akhmed promptly emigrated, and a new would-be suicide was appointed to govern the Shali Region. I met Gutiev. He was a promising, clever young man who respected Putin and thought his choice of Ramzan was right in the circumstances, given that the first priority must be to drive out the Wahhabis.* I wonder whether he still thinks that.

But back to Ramzan's estate. Opposite the main entrance he has a
gray-green marble fireplace. To the right are a sauna, a Jacuzzi, and a swimming pool. The highlight, however, is the two cavernous bedrooms endowed with stadium-sized beds. One is in blue, the other pink.

Everywhere there is massive, dark, oppressive furniture, all with the price tags in full view, denominated in thousands of “conventional units” (in effect, dollars). There is a price tag on the mirror in the bathroom, on the toilet pedestal, on the towel holder. This is evidently the fashion in Tsentoroy

The excursion takes in a viewing of Ramzan's modest and very dark study adjoining one of the bedrooms. Its chief decoration is a Dagestani wall rug depicting, in the style of socialist realism, the deceased Akhmed-hadji Kadyrov wearing an astrakhan papakha on his head, against a black background. He is portrayed with a seraphic expression on his face, his chin jutting forward.

After dark, Ramzan appears, surrounded by armed men. They are everywhere: in the courtyard, on the balcony, in the rooms. Some of them subsequently involve themselves in our conversation, commenting loudly and aggressively. Ramzan sprawls in an armchair crossing his legs, his foot, in a sock, almost level with my face. He doesn't appear to notice. He is taking it easy.

“We want to restore order not only in Chechnya, but throughout the North Caucasus,” Ramzan begins. “So that we can go any time to Stavropol, or Leningrad. We will fight anywhere in Russia. I have a directive to operate throughout the North Caucasus. Against the bandits.”

“Whom do you call bandits?”

“Maskhadov, Basaev, and the like.”

“You see the mission of your troops as being to find Maskhadov and Basaev?”

“Yes. That is the main thing, to destroy them.”

“Everything that has been done so far in your name has been about destroying and liquidating. Don't you think perhaps there's been enough fighting already?”

“Of course there has. Seven hundred people have already surrendered to us and are living a normal life. We have asked the others to stop
their senseless resistance, but they carry on fighting. That is why we have to exterminate them. Today we took three. We exterminated two. One of them was a big emir, Nashkho from Doku Umarov's group. He was a big man there. Anyway, we killed him. In Ingushetia. They all rest up there.”