A Russian Diary (37 page)

February 23

Maskhadov surfaces on the Internet and proposes an extension of the unilateral cease-fire he declared. No official response, as usual.

Nor will there be. The administration seems to have come up with a way to explain to the West what is going on in Russia. Putin, in an interview given to the Slovak press before his meeting with Bush in Bratislava,
says, “The fundamental principles of democracy, the institutions of democracy, must be adapted to the reality on the ground in Russia today, to our traditions and history. And we shall do that for ourselves.”

Thus is born the theory of “traditional democracy” (that is, democracy that accords with national traditions). We also hear tell of “sovereign democracy” and “adapted democracy,” which, being interpreted, means: “Our democracy will be the way we want it, and we don't need anyone to lecture us on the subject. So the rest of you can just push off!”

Putin was asked about his attitude to the revolutions in the countries of the former Commonwealth of Independent States: “We are not bothered one way or the other. It is for the peoples of those countries to decide how they build their lives, through revolutions or in accordance with the law.” He plainly is bothered.

February 24

Putin meets Bush in Bratislava. In Russia people were eager to hear what Bush would have to say to Putin. Everybody knew that yesterday, at a meeting in Brussels with the leaders of NATO and the European Community, under obvious pressure from the Baltic States and the states of Eastern Europe, Bush promised that he would raise the matter of Putin's move away from democracy.

We thought that was a breakthrough, but Bush failed to challenge him. Oil, and friendship for the sake of oil, won out. Those in Russia who hope for help from the West need finally to recognize that winning back our democratic freedoms is up to us. It depends on the quality of our people and cannot come about through outside pressure. Only a few individuals in our democratic movement understand this. Most meetings of democrats end with the incantation, “Let's complain to Europe.” Europe, unfortunately, is tired of hearing how wicked Putin is. It would prefer to be fooled and to hear how good he is.

According even to official results from ROMIR Monitoring, one-third of the public consider meetings between Putin and Bush to be a waste of time.

February 26

The ultimatum to Murtaza Rakhimov, president of Bashkiria, to restore benefits or resign, has expired. He has done neither, but the leaders of the opposition are nowhere to be seen. People are certain that Rakhimov simply bought them off by giving them a small stake in Bashkiria's petrochemical industry. That would seem to be the end of the revolution in Bashkiria for now. Long years of poverty mean that everything has its price, and until everybody has enough to eat, people will not be too bothered about democracy. What they don't understand is that, without a social system based on democratic principles, you are unlikely to get enough to eat.

February 27

Throughout February the official Russian media have very persuasively been assuring us of the impossibility of a revolution in Kirghizia: President Akaev was sincerely striving to introduce democracy for the good of his people; he was inviting his people to set up businesses, although rather few apparently want to. The overall suggestion seemed to be that the Kirghiz were not up to much and that if a revolution did start, it would be at the instigation of criminals wanting to displace Akaev, rather than through any fault of his. Alexey Simonov, director of the Glasnost Defense Foundation, commented that “The press is betraying society and society is betraying the press. There is a shortage of professionalism and honesty all around.”

Today, however, parliamentary elections were held in Kirghizia, and it was curtains for Akaev.

*

Akaev came to live in one of the presidential administration's dachas in Moscow. After parliamentary and presidential elections, the Kirghiz were to receive worldwide support for their efforts to build a new society. Russia excoriated the new rulers for a while, but then decided to live with them.

March 8

Aslan Maskhadov, democratically elected president of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria in 1997 and latterly leader of the Chechen resistance, has been killed in the village of Tolstoy-Yurt.

His stripped dead body was shown all day in close-up on television. In Chechnya even those who did not support Maskhadov said this was the vilest thing Moscow could have done. The Maskhadov era has ended, but whose era has begun?

The new Maskhadov will be Basaev, which means an end to the ceasefire and negotiations. Chechnya has had four presidents, and to date three of them have died a violent death. The legitimacy of the fourth, the still living Alu Alkhanov, is highly debatable. There is no other territory in present-day Europe with such a chaotic military and political situation and such continual bloodshed.

Maskhadov is reputed to have died, like thousands of other Chechen men and women, as the result of information from one Chechen implicating another. Torture has been the most common method of interrogation and investigating criminal cases during both the first and second Chechen wars. To that extent Maskhadov has shared the fate of his people. He will most likely be remembered in Chechnya as a great martyr, whatever his previous actions.

Maskhadov was killed while his unilateral cease-fire was in force, which, if it has not been fully observed, was nevertheless the first such move in the second Chechen war. It was a gesture of goodwill, a hand held out to the Kremlin indicating willingness to begin negotiations, to stop the shooting, to bring about demilitarization and a mutual extradition of war criminals.

Maskhadov, almost alone and to the utmost of his ability, restrained extremists on his side who believe Russia must be opposed by all available means, including those demonstrated at Beslan. Now there is nobody to hold them back. The leadership of the Chechen resistance, regardless of whom the clandestine State Defense Committee of Ichkeria appoints, will devolve to the main opponent of Maskhadov's moderate
methods: Shamil Basaev. The end result of the operation to assassinate Maskhadov, which, it is now officially claimed, was organized by the special operations unit of the Russian FSB, will be to hand the reins of government to Basaev, who is not the least interested in political legitimacy.

We are left with two figures in Chechnya equally bloodthirsty, loathsome, and barbaric: Basaev and Kadyrov Junior. Everybody else, including everybody in the whole of Russia, will find themselves caught in the middle.

In this way, the era of Maskhadov, a former Communist and Soviet colonel who turned to Islam only in his last years, and the unremittingly idiotic campaign fought against him personally, has brought into existence a younger generation that is no longer interested in moderate Islam. They prefer to be extreme toward authorities that destroy moderates.

The hero of this underground is Basaev. For a long time Maskhadov stood in their way, but now the road has been cleared. Basaev has obtained what he has dreamed of for the best part of a decade. It no longer matters that he does not have Maskhadov's political legitimacy. He is interested only in the technical aspects of preparing terrorist acts against Russia and causing as much pain as possible. The killing of Maskhadov proves irrefutably to Basaev the correctness of his well-publicized view that there can be no negotiations, and that all methods are justified in the war against Russia.

This evening the state channels put on our screens the lunatic Kadyrov Junior, who informed us that the killing of Maskhadov was a present to women on March 8, International Women's Day.

March 15

The FSB claims to have paid someone $10 million for the information on the whereabouts of Aslan Maskhadov.

His body has not been returned to his relatives. Through all this medieval barbarity Putin remains silent, which means it is taking place on his personal orders. I wouldn't be surprised if he had demanded the head of Maskhadov on a charger, as was the wont of the tsars of medieval
Muscovy. For some reason Maskhadov's body was brought secretly to Moscow, though nobody believes it was for a supplementary postmortem examination. They think it was for Putin to reassure himself. Such is the morality of those at the pinnacle of power in Russia.

Soldiers have again deserted from a frontier post, this time the Sretensky FSB border unit in Chita Province. At two o'clock in the morning four of them shot their commanding officer, his deputy, and one other officer. When they fled the soldiers took with them four Kalash-nikov rifles with 500 rounds of ammunition. Desertion by border troops occurs at least once a month.

In Hasavyurt, Dagestan, the major town nearest to Chechnya and a place where many Chechens live, there have again been attempts to capture fighters. A house in which they were believed to be was surrounded and reduced to rubble, but the fighters apparently escaped through a triple cordon of militia with all their weapons.

The Ministry of Defense has announced that in 2005 it will not be increasing officers’ pay in line with inflation. They also failed to index it in 2004. Price increases in 2005 are predicted to be around 25 percent.

March 16

In Shali in Chechnya, relatives of those abducted recently are picketing the town administration for the third day in a row. The protesters are demanding their release, or at least information about them.

Among them are the family of Timur Rashidov, twenty-eight, a Category 1 invalid from the village of Serzhen-Yurt, who was abducted from his home by Russian soldiers. His mother, Khalipat Rashidova, relates that the soldiers arrived in an armored personnel carrier, burst into the house, turned everything upside down without explanation, and stripped her eighteen-year-old daughter Polina in order to check “whether she had any marks left from bearing arms” on her body. They then took Timur and drove off toward the outskirts of Shali, where the Interior Ministry's Special Operations No. 2 Division is deployed.

The family of Ruslan Usaev from Novye Atagi are also outside the administration building. He is twenty-one and a third-year student at
Grozny University. On March 13 he too was abducted by Russian soldiers and taken off in the direction of Shali, since when no more has been heard of him.

The protest secured the release of one villager from Serzhen-Yurt and four men from the village of Avtury They had all been tortured and brutally beaten. All this passed without comment from the democrats in Moscow.

Now, in early 2005, the Chechen war has finally burst beyond the bounds of Chechnya into neighboring regions like Ingushetia, Dagestan, North Ossetia, and Kabardino-Balkaria. In each republic people protest in their own way. Associations of families whose members have been abducted do not exist there. Chechnya continues to live like a separate state; nobody travels there from the other republics, not even from Ingushetia, and after Beslan nobody sympathizes with the Chechens.

March 19

Early this morning, Adam Karnakaev was abducted in Grozny by unidentified armed men. He was on his way to the mosque.

(On April 5 the procurator general's office asked the family to collect Adam's body from the mortuary in the North Ossetian city of Mozdok. It is a familiar story.)

March 23

At about five o'clock this morning, masked soldiers broke down the front door of a home in Nekrasov Street, Achkhoy-Martan. They took Ismail Viskhanov, thirty-one, and his nephew Rustam Viskhanov, twenty-three. The abductors arrived in vehicles without number plates and were a mixture of Chechens and Russians. None of the security agencies of Chechnya admit to being involved. Neither of the men had ever been fighters.

At 5:23 a.m. the same group of twenty-five to thirty persons burst into another house in Achkhoy-Martan on Naberezhnaya Street where the Masaevs live. They roused Said-Mahomed Masaev, thirty-one, from his
bed. He is the driver of a regular bus between Grozny and Achkhoy-Martan. They took him, without allowing him to get dressed. Nobody has seen him since.

In Moscow everything continues in the old way. The discussion club of the National Citizens’ Congress debates the topic: “Referendums: should they be held, and on which issues?” It is all remarkably dull and flat, with no spark of initiative. A handful of democratic nonentities are there who are clearly not going to play a role in anything. The journalists in attendance titter. Democrats in the capital no longer take an interest even in their own affairs, let alone in Chechnya where purges and abductions are in full swing.

March 25

A big protest meeting on the issue of benefits is held at the farthest reaches of our land in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, although the wave of protests is almost over. Here, nevertheless, is part of the resolution adopted by the protesters in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk:

We, veterans of war and of labor, workers of various organizations, disabled people, pensioners, and young people, have come in order to express our indignation at the continuing undermining by government agencies of the social and political rights of all Russian citizens, especially those in the North and Far East. We protest against the curtailing of the basic democratic freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution, against the usurping by the state authorities of the freedom of the mass media, against attacks on social welfare, on the independence of the courts, on local self-government, and on the rights of the people to elect the institutions of state power. We oppose monetarization, which does not cover the real expenses either of those receiving benefits or of those who provide services for them. We oppose the division of people into blacks and whites, obstacles placed in the way of honest private enterprise, the abolition of conscription deferral for students and militarization of the country, political exploitation of antiterrorism, the vulgarization of the sacred ideals of the Motherland and of democracy. We demand respect for our interests, our wishes, our petitions to the authorities, our right to engage in a dialogue with the leaders of the state so that they should take account of the opinions of those in opposition to them when making important decisions.