A Russian Diary (30 page)

There is no special meaning to be found in this act by Putin. He has no idea what needs to be done next. It is Russia's familiar tragedy of having top political leaders who are incompetent, having landed their jobs through the operation of blind chance, and in turn promoting nonentities to positions of great power.

October 23

In Moscow a major demonstration has taken place to protest against the war in Chechnya and commemorate the victims of the terrorist acts. The meeting was held at 5:00 p.m., and from 10:00 a.m. there was a line of demonstrators on Pushkin Square. Those who suffered in the
Nord-Ost
siege were there for the first time, because today is the second anniversary of the hostage taking.

The meeting was not “official.” After Beslan a wave of officially organized antiterrorist meetings rolled over the country on the initiative of the presidential administration. The Central Moscow authorities had agreed to a demonstration of up to 500 people, but around 3,000 turned up and the authorities warned that this was more than had been permitted. The second reason was that the slogans on banners were not only antiwar, but also antigovernment. But then, who is conducting the war?

A lot of those attending arrived in expensive cars, members of the middle class who don't usually attend such meetings. A cold, heavy rain was falling, but people came and stayed, which is significant. As Boris Nadezhdin, a member of Committee 2008 and cochairman of the Union of Right Forces, said: “This is a demonstration that people do not want to be held hostage to an ideologically generated fear that is being imposed on them after Beslan … Chechnya is a terrible wound that has caused both
Nord-Ost
and Beslan. In 1999 Russia was offered a physician who promised to cure the country, and he was elected president. He has not succeeded. Today, when we have no free mass media or Parliament in Russia, there remains only one way of putting pressure on the state authorities; and that is good people coming out to demonstrate.”

The good people stood in the square in the pouring rain, bearing placards reading, “We are the West's fifth column!,” alluding to an interview by Vladislav Surkov in
Komsomolskaya Pravda,
in which he had the gall to say that the opposition was a section of society “irrevocably lost as partners;” that Russia was under siege; that the liberals and nationalists were a fifth column financed by the West; that there was no such thing as Putin's Russia, there was “only Russia,” and that anybody who didn't believe that was an enemy.

This is no longer a neo-Soviet ideology: this is the Soviet regime pure and simple. No sooner has the Communist elite got rid of hindrances such as the decayed Party Central Committee, and gained limitless opportunities for self-enrichment, than it has started resurrecting the ideological frameworks of the past. Surkov is regarded nowadays as Putin's chief ideologist.

It is the autumn of 2004, but a political winter has already set in that makes your blood run cold.

October 25

The magazine
Itogi
asks the governor of St. Petersburg, “Could Russia be a parliamentary republic without a president?” Valentina Matvienko, a close ally of Putin, replies, “No, that wouldn't work for us. The Russian mentality prefers a master, a tsar, a president. In other words, a leader.” Matvienko is capable only of repeating what she hears in Putin's immediate entourage.

The Human Rights Association has responded:

We are outraged by this pronouncement, which is an insult to the national dignity of the Russian people. The sense of these words is clearly that the Russian people are serfs who cannot do without a master, craven subjects who cannot get by without a tsar. The addition of the word “president” only makes it clear that the new ruling elite sees the head of state not as a democratic leader, but as an authoritarian potentate. This assertion of the innate servility of the Russian people is racist. In effect the governor of St. Petersburg has expressed her disagreement with the Constitution's premises of inviolable democratic freedoms … The notion of our national inferiority and the innate servility of the Russian people is at the heart of the main Russophobic theories. It was such doctrines that the ideologists of German Nazism used to underpin their aggressive attitude toward Russia. It is particularly reprehensible that such views should come from the person in charge of the heroic city of Leningrad. We demand the immediate resignation of Valentina Matvienko.

Nobody thought it necessary to reply. The new ruling elite no longer consider it necessary to conceal their true attitude toward the majority of their compatriots and the principles of constitutional democracy.

October 28

A very public split in the Yabloko Party. The youth wing are being shown on the main television stations taking issue with Yavlinsky.

Meetings in support of Putin, organized by United Russia, are taking place in many cities. The largest is in Moscow, and it was there that the leader of the youth wing of Yabloko spoke out.

Students and pensioners are the mainstay of protest meetings organized by the opposition. For the first time, the Communist Party, Yabloko, and the Union of Right Forces are uniting to conduct anti-Putin protests.

October 29

The state authorities remain on course for the abyss, taking all of us with them. The procurator general, Vladimir Ustinov, announced in the Duma that, in the opinion of the main institution charged with supervising citizens’ rights, and of himself, it is necessary urgently to adopt a law regulating action to be taken in the event of a terrorist attack. His main proposals are that fast-track court proceedings for terror suspects be introduced; that relatives of terrorists be seized as counter-hostages; that the property of terrorists be confiscated.

The prospect of having a video recorder, television, or even their Zhiguli confiscated seems unlikely to deter those going off to commit suicide and slaughter other people.

The procurator general's idea of fast-track court proceedings for terrorist suspects is a straightforward revival of what were known under Stalin as “mass purges,” or more recently, to use the language of the “an-titerrorist operation,” “cleansings.” All these simplified procedures are only too familiar in Chechnya and Ingushetia, where they have been in use for five years and more. The security agencies (all of them: the Interior Ministry, FSB, the army's Central Intelligence Directorate, and others) arrest whomever they want, sometimes after receiving operational information, but more often without it. They beat, cripple, and torture as
they see fit, extracting confessions of terrorist activity or at least of sympathy with the terrorists, although in reality they don't really even need the confessions.

There are two possible outcomes: if their victim has been seriously mutilated, they kill and bury him; or if the family has managed to raise a bribe, they put him in court. Nobody has the least interest in evidence. In the “zone of the antiterrorist operation,” fast-track court cases are the only kind they have. Gotcha! You are a member of an illegal armed grouping: fifteen or twenty years. The presence of a lawyer and procurator at the trial is purely decorative, to give a veneer of legality to the statistics of terrorists condemned and terrorist acts averted. The lawyers usually do no more than persuade the accused to confess to everything; the task of the procurator is to tell the family that complaining will only make matters worse.

Our procurator general's stated plans would effectively abolish the presumption of innocence. In the “zone of the antiterrorist operation,” in Chechnya and Ingushetia, there has been a presumption of guilt for several years and in future that will extend to the rest of Russia. For the past five years most people had supposed that the horror of extrajudicial lawlessness on the part of state institutions would affect only faraway rebels, which was nothing to worry about; the rest of Russia would somehow be immune. Unfortunately, miracles do not happen. At some point the practice was bound to spread.

The procurator general's proposal to seize relatives as counter-hostages is undoubtedly innovative. He explained to our Duma deputies that we would seize the terrorists’ relatives, demonstrate what might happen to them, and the terrorists would then free their own hostages and surrender.

This method has also been used in Chechnya, particularly during the second Chechen war when Kadyrov's forces became powerful. Torturing relatives in order to make those they are seeking surrender has become their trademark. Kadyrov-style hostage taking has, however, also been practiced on the state's behalf with the blessing of the directorate of the procurator general in the North Caucasus, and with complete disregard of the law and Constitution by the procurators.

We now find ourselves in a disastrous situation. For five years the
procurator general's office has been encouraging a wave of terrorism in the North Caucasus, carried out in accordance with the wishes of the president of Russia. It has not only condoned this by averting its eyes: procurators have often been present during torture sessions and executions, and have then issued assurances that everything has taken place within the framework of the law.

What kind of arguments can now be found to persuade people like that? How can someone who is in reality an anti-procurator general be made to withdraw his bloodthirsty innovations from the Duma? The procurator general's office is interested solely in its own institutional survival, in ranks and rewards, in concealing the truth about what it has been complicit in. The state authorities hold on to their power at the price of our lives. It's as simple as that.

The procurator general's speech to the Duma was interrupted—by applause. Our Parliament thought it was all a great idea. President Putin, sworn to protect the Constitution, did not remove a procurator general who was proposing massive violations of the law.

The year 1937 marked the height of Stalin's terror. Today Chechnya's 1937 is developing into another 1937 for Russians generally, whether we attend meetings at the Solovki Stone memorial to Stalin's victims or not. Any of us might now go out to buy bread and never return. Or return twenty years later. In Chechnya people say their farewells before going to the bazaar, just in case.

On October 29, 2004, as ever, the Russian people remained silent, hoping it would be the neighbors they would come to get.

November 3

The Soviet of the Federation has rubber-stamped the abolition of the local election of governors.

November 6

Mikhail Yuriev, a former journalist who now works in the Kremlin, has placed an article on behalf of the presidential administration in
Komso-
molskaya Gazeta,
helpfully advising on how to differentiate between someone who is helpful to the president and someone who is an enemy of Russia. The false antithesis is blatant and deliberate. According to Yuriev, an enemy of Russia is anybody who criticizes Putin. Those who spoke in favor of negotiations during Beslan, or against using chemical weapons in the
Nord-Ost
assault, are enemies; as are those who attend protest meetings against the war in Chechnya, or who organize them. Likewise those who call for peace talks on Chechnya and cessation of the civil war.

The Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers have formed their own political party, as they said they would back in February. Their founding congress is no random event. It results from the complete devastation of our political landscape after the Duma elections, when those deputies they could rely on to lobby for military reform and the interests of conscripts all lost their seats. As their chairperson, Valentina Melnikova, said: “Our party program sets out our basic goals as being to ensure that the state takes a responsible attitude toward human beings, and to create a secure framework for life in Russia. Bringing about a democratic transformation of the Russian armed forces is only a part of that larger task. In economics we are a party tending toward liberalism, and as regards the state's responsibilities toward society we incline toward socialism.”

The Party of Soldiers’ Mothers is the first political organization in Russia to state that it will fight to protect our lives. The Russian electorate doesn't really have that great a choice. Our politicians might slip us a hundred rubles before election day, but they have no time to fight for the issues that vitally affect us. They are far too busy fighting for their own place in the sun.

The founding congress took place on board the steamer
Konstantin Fedin,
moored for the winter in the farthest corner of the Northern River Port in Moscow. Why was it held on a steamer? Because nobody would give it house room for fear of the regime's reaction.

The party was established by 154 representatives from more than fifty regions, all of them part of a movement that has saved the lives of thousands of conscripts and new recruits since its foundation in 1989. The movement began back in the USSR. In the late 1980s, women trying to
protect their sons from the bullying of the army's granddads and from universal conscription began forming themselves into committees. In 1989 they were successful in persuading Gorbachev to release 176,000 soldiers from the army ahead of time so that they could continue their education. In 1990 he also issued directives “On the Implementation of Proposals from the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers” and on state insurance benefits for conscripts. In 1991 the committees were successful in having Yeltsin grant an amnesty to soldiers who had deserted, and in 1993-94 their persistence ensured an inquiry into the deaths from starvation, disease, and torture of more than 200 sailors on the island of Russkoye. Between 1994 and 1998 they were the first of Russia's human rights organizations to demand immediate cessation of the war in Chechnya, got President Yeltsin to pardon 500 soldiers who had conscientiously objected to participating in the first Chechen war, forced an amnesty for all who had participated on either side in the Chechen war, and managed to get a specific item included in the state budget for seeking and identifying the remains of soldiers killed in Chechnya. Since 1999 the Soldiers’ Mothers have demonstrated against the second Chechen war, conducting a public campaign against falsification of the true numbers of casualties, and compiling and publishing lists of those who had died and disappeared without trace.