A Russian Diary (39 page)

On 15 August 2003 Ingushneftegazprom signed a contract, guaranteed by the government of Ingushetia, with a Norwegian firm [name provided] to supply technologies to increase oil production. For the work carried out Ingushneftegazprom was to transfer funds provided by the republic amounting to U.S. $775,000 to the company's current account. The money was transferred by two payment orders on December 19, 2003, and March 10, 2004, respectively, but the conditions of the contract were not fulfilled.

Overall:

As a result of impropriety on the part of the management of Ingushneftegazprom, the enterprise and the state have suffered material losses amounting to more than 25 million rubles [$909,000]. In the course of the present audit, the procurator general of the republic has on October 5, 2004, instigated criminal proceedings under Part 2, B, Article 171; Part 2, B, Article 199; and Part 1, Article 201 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation …

Inspection of the use of resources allocated to deal with the consequences of natural disasters in Nazran, Sunzha, and Malgo-bek districts revealed that in 2003 payments totaling 9.5 million rubles [$345,000] were improperly received by citizens not registered at fixed addresses at the time of the flood. Four criminal cases have been opened for financial irregularities totaling 3.1 million rubles [$113,000] … In the Ministry of Construction, because of an overstatement of cost of sewage treatment plants in Malgo-bek district [to replace those destroyed by the floods], misappropriation of funds was discovered amounting to 546,600 rubles [$19,800] … In 2003 and the first half of 2004, the auditing of 253.9 million rubles [$9.2 million] received from the federal budget to implement the federal South Russia aid program [which is primarily for accommodations] revealed financial irregularities amounting to 48.9 million rubles [$1.7 million], or 20 percent of the total allocation. For the period 2003-2004, 185 criminal prosecutions have been instigated in respect of the theft of budgetary funds. These include thirty-eight cases of serious or very serious misappropriation of resources. The majority relate to misappropriation of resources allocated to overcome the consequences of the flood of June 2002. Thirty-three cases relate to losses that total 17.7 million rubles [$643,000].

The criminal cases for embezzlement were indeed opened but have since been frozen. This is the main technique for ensuring the loyalty of officials in Russia. First, get compromising materials on them, then sit back and watch as they rush to join the United Russia Party.

When I published this information and these figures—and there was a ban on publishing them in Ingushetia—Zyazikov threatened to sue me. Not for having defamed or libeled him, but for having supposedly stolen official documents. I was hauled off to the procurator general's office for questioning. Then I was left in peace. These are not secret documents, so why would anyone need to steal them? In order to prove theft they would need my fingerprints on somebody's safe. What a lot of nonsense.

Needless to say, General Napalkov, the Interior Ministry official in charge of this audit and by whom it was signed, has been fired. The Interior Ministry came under such heavy pressure from the presidential administration to fire the whistle-blowing general that they decided it was simplest to sacrifice him.

April 11

Mikhail Khodorkovsky's last words before sentencing: “I am not guilty of the crimes with which I am charged, and accordingly I do not intend to ask for clemency. It is a disgrace to me and my country that it is considered perfectly legal for the procurator to directly and openly deceive the court. I was shocked when the court and lawyers explained this to me. It is a very unfortunate state of affairs if the whole country is convinced that the court is acting under the influence of officials in the Kremlin or the procurator general's office.

“The court is in effect being asked to rule that the very creation, management or possession of a successful business is proof of a crime. Today I have no great amount of property left. I have ceased to be a businessman. I am no longer one of the super-rich. All that I have left is the knowledge of my own rightness and my determination to be a free man.”

Most had predicted that Khodorkovsky would plead for clemency. Nobody could believe that an oligarch would remain a decent human being, whatever the cost. The oligarchs are not trusted. Their thieving was too public, and the basis of their wealth is our national impoverishment. People will not forgive that, but they might just feel sorry for Khodorkovsky if he is totally crushed.

April 15

A second sentence has been passed on Mikhail Trepashkin, who was framed for defecting from the KGB and taking part in an independent inquiry into the blowing up of apartment buildings in Russia immediately before the second Chechen war was started. Five years’ imprisonment in a penal colony. The court found him guilty of an even graver charge than
the procurator had proposed. Throughout the trial, Trepashkin was kept in unreasonably severe conditions of detention. His case is being reviewed by the European Court of Human Rights, but meanwhile he is in prison.

April 17

At one of his appearances in Moscow, Garry Kasparov has been struck on the head with a chessboard. Somebody approached him, supposedly wanting him to autograph the board. Recovering from the blow, Kasparov quipped, “I'm glad Russians prefer chess to baseball.”

April 23

Today Putin received Mikhail Fridman of Alfa Group in the Kremlin. The Moscow business elite have been viewing him as a likely candidate for the Khodorkovsky treatment. The reception in the Kremlin was a typical PR act by Putin, this time for the benefit of the TNK-BP oil company. In the language of the Kremlin, they were “giving moral support” to Fridman.

Fridman is accordingly in favor for the moment. He has been given the opportunity of sharing his wealth and will certainly avail himself of it. You are in a bad way if the authorities don't even give you the chance of buttering them up. Lord Browne, group chief executive of BP, was also received in the Kremlin. Viktor Vekselberg was there too, the man who lays Fabergé eggs in the Kremlin's basket. Throughout the meeting Fridman and Vekselberg radiated happiness.

Sergey Glaziev, a deputy of the Duma from the Rodina Party who was minister of foreign economic affairs in the early 1990s and is now in the opposition, commented, “They prefer Fridman to Khodorkovsky because he does not finance opposition projects.”

April 23–24

Vladimir Ryzhkov has joined the political council of the Russian Republican Party. He has financial backing from Lukoil and this is now his
party. Ryzhkov warned that the democrats must unite no later than this summer, if they are to stand a chance in the Duma elections in 2007.

Garry Kasparov was an ally of Ryzhkov in the winter, but has not joined the RRP. They have in common the view that the present political system needs to be done away with, not compromised with. If Kasparov had stayed with Ryzhkov, he could have been the one with charisma, with Ryzhkov as the smarter political fighter. Ryzhkov is saying that the door is still open, and that the RRP is still hoping to welcome Kasparov.

April 25

Putin's annual address to the Federal Assembly was both sensational and comical. It was a veritable manifesto of liberalism, but by their fruits shall ye know them!

His theme was “A free country of free people,” but how can you be free without an independent judiciary? Or genuine, democratic electoral rights? With a politically directed procurator general's office, and a stifled civil society?

April 28

The government has decided that recipients of the title of Hero of Russia, of the USSR, or of Socialist Labor will be paid an extra 2,000 rubles [$72] a month in place of their privileges.

Thus began the main political scandal of the summer of 2005: a three-week hunger strike by the Heroes, which Putin's administration called blackmail.

May 1

In Russia, May 1 is traditionally a day of meetings and parades. This year the opposition were at sixes and sevens.

They assembled at Turgenev Square, marched along Myasnitskaya Street past the great gloomy buildings of the FSB, and held a meeting on Lubyanka Square at the Solovki Stone, which commemorates victims of
the Communist era. Their placards read, “For freedom, justice, and democracy! Against the violation of civil, political, social, economic, and cultural rights in Russia!”

There were about a thousand people. Not too bad, not a disaster. The day before, in Minsk, fourteen of our fellow citizens had been released from custody. They had traveled to Belarus to take part in a procession organized by the local opposition. Ilya Yashin, leader of the youth wing of Yabloko, got back to Moscow this morning. From a rostrum beside the Solovki Stone, he gave us an insider's view of a Lukashenko* prison, and told us that in Minsk Ukrainian supporters got beaten up much more violently than Russian protesters.

As the democrats were finishing, the Union of Right Forces started their meeting right there in Lubyanka Square. The authorities must have been delighted to see that liberals and democrats don't even stop quarreling on public holidays.

The main protest was organized by the left wing, who assembled almost 9,000 people. Most of the young people were there. The Communist Party, the National Bolsheviks, Rodina, Labor in the Capital, the Union of Soviet Officers, and others had agreed to hold a joint meeting. For the first time in four years Eduard Limonov was able to lead the column of the National Bolsheviks, now that his suspended sentence has expired.

Yevgeny Baranovsky, Lev Dmitriev, and Alexander Chepalyga have begun a hunger strike at the headquarters of the National Bolshevik Party in Moscow. They are demanding the release of their fellow party members who are in prison.

Overall, throughout Russia, the left brought out one and a half million May Day demonstrators.

In Ingushetia, the May celebrations were marked by arrests. Musa Ozdoev, the leading campaigner for the removal of President Zyazikov, was arrested during the night. The previous day he was in a square where an anti-Zyazikov meeting was to be held and was arrested by the militia. At midnight Judge Ramazan Tutaev was brought to the militia headquarters in Nazran; he dispensed justice in the holding cell, thereby giving
symbolic expression to the further melding of the judiciary and institutions of law enforcement into a single repressive state mechanism.

Tutaev sentenced Ozdoev to seventy-two hours’ imprisonment, officially for “petty vandalism.” It was falsely alleged that he had broken a stool. As a deputy of the republican Parliament, Musa cannot legally be arrested without the sanction of the People's Assembly, but, as that is difficult at night, they dispensed with the formality.

In prison, Musa promptly went on hunger strike in protest. He discovered his cellmates were in for a collective suicide attempt.

May 2

Ozdoev has been unexpectedly released, a day early. The decision was made by Judge Alikhan Yaryzhev of the Nazran district court. Ozdoev considered this insulting. “I told Judge Yaryzhev,” Musa told me, “that I wouldn't leave. I needed no concessions from them.” The militiamen, however, took the oppositionist out into the street and shut the door firmly behind him.

The real reason was evidently that he had entered a world the authorities want kept secret. In the cell he met people who had been tortured into “voluntarily” confessing that they were “organizers of and participants in a terrorist act against Murat Zyazikov.” Ozdoev learned that the torture employed by agents of the Interior Ministry against these prisoners was so extreme that the North Ossetian directorate of the FSB refused to accept some of them for further questioning because of the severity of their injuries. Ozdoev also met Bekkhan Gireyev, whom the Interior Ministry claims was “the mastermind behind the terrorist plot.” His kneecaps had been shattered and he had no fingernails left on his hands. They had been torn out during interrogation.

“I learned things that I would never previously have believed,” Musa told me, “if I had not seen them with my own eyes. Of course, after this sort of thing these people and their relatives will rush to join the resistance.” The deputy considers his own misadventure entirely trivial.

May 3

From Israel, Leonid Nevzlin has made an offer to the presidential administration to sell off Menatep Group's shares in Yukos in return for the freedom of Khodorkovsky and Lebedev.

Through his lawyers, Khodorkovsky from Matrosskaya Tishina prison rejected his friend and erstwhile business partner's offer. Khodorkovsky stated that he did not consider himself guilty and had no intention of allowing himself to be ransomed. He would fight for his freedom by legal means.

Nevzlin became the owner of a controlling share in Menatep after Khodorkovsky transferred 59.5 percent of the company to him in order to “concentrate on creating a civil society in Russia.” This focusing of his efforts was the beginning of all his troubles, as the Kremlin decided he was its most dangerous enemy. If he had dutifully paid the Kremlin its cut, no harm would have come to him.

The Yukos shareholders have announced that they see no point in continuing their attempts to save the company.

The authorities are insinuating ever more busily, on television and in speeches by their most prominent figures, that Stalin was really not as bad as he was subsequently made out to be. The unveiling of new monuments to Stalin in recognition of his great contribution to victory in the Second World War features prominently on the news. The Human Rights Association has urged opposition to these attempts to impose official veneration of The Leader. In a statement it commented: