A Russian Diary (31 page)

Their main goal became putting an end to the slavery of conscription and replacing it with a fully professional army. All the democratic parties supported them and, with time, the idea of a professional army was accepted by top officials and successive ministers of defense, whose speeches were often taken word for word from their flyers. But in the implementation everything was twisted: contracts were signed on a “compulsory voluntary” basis, wages were not paid, the war continued, and recruits were sent straight to Chechnya. After last December's elections there was nobody left in Parliament to lobby for democratic legislative projects.

In late January 2004 the Soldiers’ Mothers decided it was time to create their own party. Ten months passed, because creating a new party involves a huge amount of bureaucracy and is extremely expensive. During this period they were stigmatized as a fifth column supported by the West
to undermine Russia's combat capability. That is, they were “enemies within” in a period of military extremity.

Their political strength, and the thing that will ensure their survival, is that their policies come from the heart. Until now people here have become politicians at the dictate of their minds. Party passions simmered primarily over who was to be top dog, rather than what could be done for the electorate. In 2003 the state authorities played on this very successfully and sordid compromises undermined what trust people still had in the opposition. In the end no democrats or liberals made it into the Duma.

The Soldiers’ Mothers’ greatest strength is their passion to defend our children, and our trust that they will do this to the best of their ability. They have no other political capital. Their maternal urge sweeps all before it, as was evident within two minutes of talking to any of the delegates outside the conference hall (and, indeed, inside it). We soon found ourselves discussing the fate of some particular soldier who urgently needed help: “Look at what is happening in our region,” Lyudmila Bo-gatenkova from Budyonnovsk said, pulling from her bag a stack of soldiers’ testimonies about the most appalling treatment. She has brought them for the main military procurator's office.

“For as long as there is conscription, the soldier in the army is a nobody,” Lyudmila Vasilievna says indignantly. “He can be used for anything. He can be used as an unpaid laborer. Millions of our people are slaves today, and our mission is to bring about the abolition of this slavery. There can be no compromise about that!”

The main discussion at the congress concerned the wording of the manifesto. Should they campaign for the abolition of conscription, or leave it to one side for the time being? More generally, should the new party follow the usual Russian path of cocking a snook when no one is looking, saying that you are against conscription, but leaving it out of the program so as not to upset the presidential administration and making it easier to get the party registered? Or should they be completely honest and worry only about gaining the respect of the Russian people?

In this major matter of principle, the second approach won. Passionate conviction is impossible without total honesty. Abolition of conscription
went into the manifesto. They will fight for it, and thank God for that, because being trusted by the electorate will be their main asset. If they start trying to strike “sensible compromises,” they will be cheated by the authorities, who know how to manipulate compromise-mongers, and the voters will desert them.

“Yes, it's important that our women should get into the Duma,” Lyud-mila Bogatenkova explains. “Otherwise it would be impossible to push through the abolition of conscription. If we are in the Duma it will also be simpler to help soldiers and conscripts in particular situations, and to prevent the authorities from stonewalling when a crime has been committed.”

One of the few remaining ways to exert influence, after the resurgence of the bureaucracy, is the parliamentary question. A deputy's question can produce rapid and significant results, and speed is often essential. Most of the cases where soldiers have been saved have required prompt investigation and action. When a story gets publicity and a deputy gets through to the procurator general's office, somebody in the closed world of the army has a chance of surviving. The lack of that opportunity often means death.

One of the first toasts proclaimed after the creation of the party was: “To 2007! Look out, Duma, here we come!”

The Party of Soldiers’ Mothers has a lesson to teach the world. It will have to create its own future with the sincere passion that the women in their committees live by. For a long time we have been told that the more cunning a democratic politician, the more effective he is. This has proved to be untrue. Our people do not care for cleverness and cunning, or for those who lack passion. That's the kind of people we are. First the passion, then clear-headed, straight thinking. Never the reverse.

November 9

The Kaluga branch of the Yabloko Party has demanded a referendum on retaining benefits in kind for retired workers, victims of Soviet repression, and those who worked on the home front during the Second World War. The benefits concerned are free travel on suburban buses and free
medicine. The Kaluga Province authorities were planning to abolish all benefits in kind in return for a derisory monthly supplement to pensions of 200-300 rubles [$7–$10.50]. So far, officialdom has paid no attention to protests, but a referendum might force a rethink. This is a very sensitive matter. Who will be entitled to benefits after January 1, 2005? The “monetarization” of benefits was intended to reduce the number of claimants, which we are told is currently half the country. There is certainly scope for rationalization.

(Nothing came of the idea of a referendum. The democrats abandoned it because they thought the resistance was too great.)

November 11

Crisis in Karachaevo-Cherkessia. A crowd has occupied the office of Mustafa Batdyev, the president, and is demanding his resignation. The reason is a case involving the abduction, murder, and destruction of the bodies of seven young businessmen in which Batdyev's brother-in-law was involved. He has already been arrested.

The authorities are in an unenviable position. If Batdyev is thrown out, there may be a chain reaction. Next in turn will surely be Murat Zyazikov in Ingushetia. Batdyev ran away from trouble, just as Zyazikov did earlier in the year, but was sent back by Kozak, Putin's representative in the Southern Federal District. It was Kozak who came to talk to the people in Cherkessk, and a few hours later the television stations were announcing the good news that the “coup” had failed. Kozak had persuaded the crowd to leave Batdyev's office, he would return and his administration would continue as before.

It was another disaster for Putin's human resources policy. The Kremlin-controlled local leaders are incapable of leading, or taking any responsibility at all. At the least sign of danger, they run for their lives. The authorities, meanwhile, react to a mob. Kozak would have gone nowhere if the mob had not seized Batdyev's office by force. If people had requested a meeting with him, they would have had to badger him for a good six months, no matter how serious the issue.

November 26

It is a year now since Khodorkovsky was arrested. The authorities ignore the anniversary. In the days of the Soviet Union the mediator between society and the state was the KGB, which provided the authorities with distorted information about what was going on, and this ultimately led to the collapse of the USSR.

Today's FSB also seriously distorts information going upstairs, but Putin distrusts all other sources. The aorta will duly be blocked again. Let's hope we don't have to wait seventy years this time.

December 11

What speed! The president has already signed the law abolishing the election of governors. It has been our fastest ever passage of a law, and all so that from January 1 Putin should not have to discuss matters with the governors or worry that they might be uncooperative. A tsar should have serfs, not partners. Some of the children massacred at Beslan have yet to be identified and buried, but that's not the priority. The parents are increasingly being left to sort that out themselves. What is really important is to change the structure of the state into something more amenable to Putin.

As for Beslan, the town is quietly going out of its mind. The autumn that began on September 1 is over now, and the onset of winter certainly hasn't made anyone feel better. Certainly not the families whose children have yet to be found, who have no child, no funeral, no grave where they can mourn. Zhorik Agaev, Aslan Kisiev, Zarina Normatova, all junior pupils born in 1997, and eleven-year-old Aza Gumetsova have yet to be found. Zifa, the mother of second-year Zhorik Agaev, almost never leaves home. She stays in waiting for him.

“What if he came back and I wasn't here! What sort of welcome would that be?” Zifa says, smiling somewhere inside herself. Her mouth is twisted: she was wounded at the school. “I know people in this town
think I am crazy, but I'm not. I am just certain that my Zhorik is alive. He is being held somewhere.”

Families whose children are listed as missing divide into two groups. Some, like Zifa, believe they are being held hostage. Others believe they are dead, and that their remains have been buried by somebody else by mistake.

Zifa's strangeness has several causes, which God grant you may never experience. She is the hostage who let the children in the gymnasium drink from her own breast. She gave her breast to all who were sitting near her. Later she squeezed the life-giving liquid out, drop by drop, into a spoon that the children passed around.

“Zhorik will come back and everything will be the same again. Do you know, on September 3 it was very quiet in the hall. The terrorists had gone off somewhere, there were very few of them with us. We were already crawling over the trip wires, we didn't care about anything by then. I began hallucinating, imagining I was in a coffin. Then I imagined I heard a terrorist calling, ‘Agaevs, some water has been brought for you, take it!’ I must have frightened Zhorik, because he crawled away from me.”

Suddenly Zifa was blown out of the window by the blast of an explosion. Everybody who had been sitting near her was burned to death. Half her face was mutilated; she has had operations and there are more to come. Four pieces of shrapnel can't be removed.

“All these scars and fragments don't matter. What matters is Zhorik. When he comes back we will celebrate his rebirth,” she says again and again. “How I'll shout, ‘Look, everybody! Zhorik has come back!’ I won't let him go away ever again … I won't let them bring any of their bags into my house. Zhorik is alive!” By now she is in desperation. “Zhorik in a bag? Never!”

A “bag” is Beslan newspeak for human remains brought from the Rostov-on-Don military mortuary after identification. Zhorik's remains haven't been identified, although there are unclaimed remains of boys of approximately his age. What is going on?

Zifa by now is quiet and calm, her voice just that of a mother devastated by the loss of her child: “When Zhorik comes back, I will take him
to President Dzasokhov and President Putin and say, ‘Look! This is the angel you made no attempt to save!’ ”

Then, in a whisper: “I shall never eat raspberry jam again. For those first two hours we were so afraid. When Zhorik shouted, ‘He's killed him!’ I said, ‘It's just a film they're making.’ Zhorik said, ‘But why is it so real? And what is this running toward us?’ I said, ‘It's just raspberry jam, Zhorik.’ ”

Marina Kisieva is thirty-one and lives in the village of Khumalag, a twenty-minute drive from Beslan. She lost her husband, Artur, and her son Aslan in the atrocity. Aslan was seven and a pupil in Class 2A. Marina now has only her daughter, five-year-old Milena, who is serious beyond her years and never asks where Aslan has gone. She simply refuses to go to nursery, and she used to faint whenever the women in their apartment building began wailing.

Aslan's teacher, Raisa Kambulatovna Dzaragasova-Kibizova, would later say that Artur “was the best father in the class.” It was he who insisted Aslan should go to the best school in Beslan, and it was he who did the driving, although he had a job and was also studying. Marina shows me his last piece of coursework, “Creating Rights,” for the Law Faculty of the Pyatigorsk campus of the Russian University of Commerce and Economics. Just one day before September 1, Artur came back from Pyatigorsk in order to take his son to school himself. Marina was intending to go too, and stayed at home quite by chance.

“Why did I stay behind? I would have got him out of the gymnasium! Aslan was a loppy-eared, thin, funny little boy. Everybody loved him. He was very timid,” Marina says, furrowing her eyebrows, trying not to cry in front of Milena.

Artur was killed almost immediately. They shot him on September 1 when the terrorists took the men away to work on fortifying the building and hanging out explosives. Apparently Artur said, “Do you think I'm going to kill children with my own hands?” and they killed him.

Aslan was left in the gym without his father. He crept over to his teacher, Raisa Kambulatovna, and stayed close to her almost to the end, constantly asking, “Where is Artur?”

Raisa Kambulatovna is sixty-two. On September 1 she had been a
schoolteacher for forty years. “Could I have imagined that I would spend my anniversary not receiving flowers, but under a hail of bullets?” Like many experienced teachers, Raisa Kambulatovna sits very upright and holds her head high, even now when a campaign has started in Beslan— deliberately fomented by the intelligence services and agents from the procurator general's office—to seek “the killers” among the teachers who survived.

“Yes, they're trying to shift the blame onto us, as if to say, ‘They can't have done their duty toward the children if they survived and the children didn't.’ Don't imagine anyone could have done anything to save anyone. There was nothing to be done, either before the explosion or after it. The duty of the teachers in there was to be an older friend, to set an example and give the children strength. That's exactly what they did until the explosion. After that there was nothing anybody could do. By September 3 everybody was completely dazed, having hallucinations. I tried so hard to protect Aslan, but at the very end I was unable to save him.