A Russian Diary (36 page)

This morning, forty-eight-year old Yermak Tegaev, director of the Islamic
Cultural Center of Vladikavkaz (the capital of North Ossetia, some twelve miles from Beslan), found himself in jail under Article 222 of the Criminal Code, for “harboring explosive materials and related components.”

“At about six o'clock in the morning, soldiers broke into our apartment,” his wife, Albina, tells me. “My husband was reading the Koran before doing namaz and I was in the bathroom. When I heard noises, I partly opened the door and found a rifle pointed at me. There were people in masks and helmets all over the apartment, about twenty of them. They dragged me out of the bathroom almost naked and didn't let me dress for a long time. For us that is not permitted. My husband was lying on the floor with three people sitting on top of him. I started shouting for the neighbors—I thought robbers had broken in—but they didn't allow them to come in and started searching. My husband told them they couldn't conduct a search without a lawyer, but they had brought their own ‘witnesses’ and started with the toilet. Three or four times they looked there in exactly the same place, and I suspected something bad. We have been searched several times recently and have feared this.

“I tried to keep an eye on them the whole time to prevent them planting anything, but then they grabbed the keys to our car and ran out to where it was parked. They told my husband to get dressed and ordered him out. We refused to approach because we knew they had already planted what they needed to. They opened the trunk and said there were explosives there. They telephoned somewhere and a person appeared with a video camera who started filming us. Then they took my husband away.”

His family and friends and Suleiman Marniev, the imam of the central mosque in Vladikavkaz, are convinced that the explosives were planted. The authorities want to jail the chairman of the Islamic Cultural Center, preferably for a long time, in order to neutralize an unofficial leader of the Muslim community whose existence does not suit them. His only crime is his popularity among his fellow believers, especially the young, and the fact that he won't collaborate with the republican directorate of the FSB.

What kind of collaboration are we talking about? And what is the Islamic
Cultural Center of Vladikavkaz, that its leader should face such major unpleasantness?

Formally the center is only one of the public associations of North Ossetia. It is a religious club whose status is identical, for example, to that of the Religious Board of Muslims of North Ossetia. On paper, the center and the board are exactly the same. Not, however, in practice. The board enjoys the financial support of the state authorities, and openly admits that it collaborates with the FSB. The center keeps its distance. That is the root of its problems.

“After Beslan, the authorities, or more precisely the directorate of the FSB who hold power in the republic nowadays, wanted complete subordination of Muslims,” I am told by Artur Besolov, the center's deputy chairman. “The FSB is keen to control the life of Muslims through the Religious Board, through the chairman, who is an official mufti of the republic, Ruslan Valgasov. We are quite certain that Valgasov was appointed a mufti by the security agencies, which is categorically forbidden in Islam. The only place that sort of thing went on was in the Soviet Union. The majority of Muslims in North Ossetia (who make up 30 percent of the republic's population) oppose such appointing of religious leaders. Tegaev was offered appointment as a mufti but refused, precisely because he feared pressure from the regime. Nonetheless, it is Tegaev who has the greater authority. Valgasov, on the other hand, has only old men around him. The authorities simply decided to resolve the situation by jailing Tegaev.”

Everybody can see that there has to be an accommodation with the Muslim world, but nobody in Russia is opening negotiations. They are pressing ahead with the old Soviet methods: if you can't abolish the Koran, then at least everything should be under control; no revivalist ja-maat communities, and if muftis and emirs are unavoidable in a country with twenty million Muslims, then they had better be on our side.

Today all this jiggery-pokery is embedded in the state's approach to the fight against terrorism, an approach that is above the law. What has happened to Tegaev is simply one of its manifestations. They jail him, send in their report, and think the problem has been solved. In reality, it has merely been made worse. Persecuting Islam throughout Russia has
led to a predictable Islamic backlash, which we have been seeing throughout 2004 and 2005 across the North Caucasus.

In January, the security forces stormed an apartment in an ordinary five-story building in Nalchik, Kabardino-Balkaria. They believed a terrorist group was inside, or at least that's what they claimed afterward. However, those in the apartment were simply Muslims who were “not on our side.” Among them were Muslim Ataev and his wife, Sakinat Katsieva, a young married couple involved in the Islamic underground. They and their friends, another young Islamic family not under state control, were shot.

Muslim and Sakinat had a six-month-old daughter, Leyla. The bodies of the adults were returned to their families after the assault, but Leyla had vanished. There was no body, no baby, no information; all attempts by her grandparents to find their granddaughter were in vain.

They had, of course, also shot the baby. People in the neighboring buildings saw the soldiers carry out a small body swathed in a blanket, but, since the murder of an infant would have been too shocking for the public, they did not return her remains. How does the murder of Leyla differ from the deaths of the children killed during the assault on the school in Beslan?

The more intense the pressure, the more committed the adherents of nonofficial Islam become. Islamic communities reluctant to exist within a system of “religious boards” are becoming ever more isolated, closing themselves off from the outside world and thereby becoming less comprehensible. Needless to say, Orthodox or Catholic Christians or anybody else would behave in the same way under the same circumstances. The situation is no different in Chechnya, where “FSB Muslims” fight Muslims who do not enjoy official sanction, exploiting the long-established religious boards, or “departments of religious affairs,” as they were called in the USSR. These were to be found even in the Communist Party's Central Committee, and in provincial and district party committees.

Today many Soviet-era officials are still in the same jobs. Rudnik Du-daev, a general of the KGB and now of the FSB, was for many years Kady-rov's director of the Security Council of Chechnya and, before that, was also for many years one of the heads of the religious boards of Muslims in Soviet times.

Dudaev “ran” Akhmed-hadji Kadyrov from the moment he entered a madrassa in the 1970s. Working for the KGB, he monitored Kadyrov, Djohar Dudaev, and Maskhadov, and now keeps an eye on Kadyrov Junior. And what good has it done? Are there fewer jamaats now in Chechnya? Or emirs aged between fifteen and seventeen who are completely out of control? What good has come of these religious boards? Has the authority of the official mufti of Chechnya been enhanced? Or the authority of emirs who are “not on our side” diminished?

Mufti Valgasov will benefit to precisely the same extent as Shamaev, the former mufti of Chechnya, and as Mirzaev, who has replaced him. The state authorities may like their malleability, but the charisma and respect enjoyed by religious leaders do not derive from their closeness to the FSB. The fight against Islam, using Soviet methods, leads to the opposite of what is intended. In Chechnya and Dagestan, in Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, and in Karachaevo-Cherkessia, Islam is going underground.

February 3

The presidential administration swings into action. In Tula the clowns have organized a meeting in support of Law 122. This is the new approach of the presidential administration: meetings populated with “their” people. Old folk are paid a fee to attend—how much depends on the circumstances, but money changes hands. The corrupting of our people continues, and our people are wholly willing to be corrupted.

The meetings are organized by local authorities after a coordinating phone call from the Kremlin. Putin's “line management” is alive and well. At these “antiprotest meetings,” governors who have grown fat from bribe taking waddle onto the platform accompanied by their bureaucratic entourage. They promise, as they have been told to, that social welfare payments are on the point of being increased and that everything will again be exactly as it was before the law was passed. Day after day these meetings are the lead item on the television news.

In Tula too we see the governor on stage with a pack of his apparatchiks. The meeting has been organized by United Russia. The governor
announces that everyone receiving a pension of less than 1,650 rubles [$59] will be issued with free season tickets for the city's public transport system (of which there is virtually nothing left). On the other hand, from February 1 a ticket on Tula's private transport system has gone up from 6 to 7 rubles.

Bewilderingly, the people rejoice and give thanks for the season tickets.

February 10

So far, people on the periphery of the empire are not giving in. In Abakan, Siberia, in 33°F of frost, some thirty people picket the building of the Khakassian administration with placards reading “No to the antisocial policy.” In the town of Kyzyl, the capital of Tyva, in 49°F of frost, fifty-six people attend a demonstration against Putin's policy. In Khabarovsk, in the Far Eastern storm wind, a handful of people stand in the central square with a banner reading “United Russia disgraces Russia!”

February 12

In Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk the local human rights association has performed a piece of street theater called “The Funeral of Democracy.” On a life-sized dummy representing youthful democracy the campaigners hung fifteen or so heavy accusatory placards about the recent unconstitutional actions of the state authorities, Law 122, and the abolition of election of governors. Eventually, under the weight of these woes, democracy collapsed and was placed in a coffin covered with stickers proclaiming its demise. Bearing wreaths, to funereal music, the demonstrators nailed down the lid of the coffin and bore it away on a catafalque. The performance took place by the building of the provincial administration, watched with interest by bureaucrats from the windows.

In Tula, a meeting organized by the Communists attracted around a thousand protesters. In Abakan too they held a meeting and almost three hundred people were present this time: it wasn't quite so cold. It was a result
of sorts, but a Nationwide Day of Joint Action, as intended by Social Solidarity (SOS), it was not. There is no nationwide protest.

February 15

The democrats (Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces) have again tried to reach agreement. So far their battlefield is still offices in Moscow rather than the streets of Russia. Everybody is fed up with the democratic functionaries, even their supporters.

Today they almost managed to unite at a meeting of Committee 2008, but once more everything fell through at the last moment. They resolved to continue discussions. The big problem remains the same: who is to be first among equals? How can Yavlinsky make sure that Kasparov and Ryzhkov do not leapfrog him into the front rank? Kasparov and Ryzhkov, meanwhile, have decided to form a new democratic party headed by themselves, as democratic politicians who do not carry the odium of defeat in the parliamentary elections.

I met Kasparov this morning at a session of the steering committee of the ailing National Citizens’ Congress. He was in a very determined mood and commented that the regions are far ahead of Moscow politically. “Would you believe it, at one of the meetings they called me—me! Kasparov!—a compromise-monger. What a change of mood in just two weeks!” he kept saying, referring to the wave of protests. Kasparov is urging Committee 2008 to hold a congress of the new party in one of Russia's provincial towns.

February 16

Garry Kasparov went to St. Petersburg today to a meeting against mone-tarization organized by Petersburg Citizens’ Resistance, which unites several of the democratic parties and groups.

First Kasparov said he wanted to found a new political organization in St. Petersburg. He said, “The capital city of protest is now St. Petersburg, and this is where we need to establish a political movement that can throw down a challenge to the powers that be. That is why I am here.” A
number of those at the meeting then blocked Antonenko Street next to the legislative assembly, demanding the right to broadcast live on St. Petersburg television. Nothing came of it. The one thing the authorities will not give them is live airtime.

The Moscow procurator's office has dropped the charge of violent seizure of power against the National Bolshevik Party members who occupied a reception room in the offices of the presidential administration. They have been charged instead with a new offense of “organizing mass disorder” (Article 212). Thirty-nine of Limonov's supporters are in prison in Moscow.

February 21

The deputy minister of the interior, Sergey Shchadrin, has visited Blagoveshchensk where there was a brutal “cleansing” in December in which about a thousand people were hurt. The Interior Ministry continues to refer to this outrage as “the so-called cleansing.” In Ufa, Shchadrin called the victims “seekers after truth,” only to claim at a press conference the next day that “The actions of the militia were justified, although many considered them excessively rigorous.” This was his assessment of the deployment of filtration points, the use of tear gas, and the physical violence of December. The operation itself Shchadrin called an “excess,” adding that “Every society gets the militia it deserves.”

He is right. For as long as people in Blagoveshchensk stand up only for their own rights, people in St. Petersburg for theirs, and everyone else exclusively for theirs, episodes like this will occur.