A Russian Diary (43 page)

July 7

Terrorist acts in London, as the G8 meet at Gleneagles, near Glasgow. Putin is there. Casualties and blood are shown on our television screens,
but it is better not to listen to the commentary: there is very little sympathy and a lot of malicious satisfaction. It is as if we are pleased that the British are suffering the same as we do. They are particularly careful to insinuate that Great Britain is now prepared to extradite Akhmed Zakaev to Russia, although the British government has said nothing of the sort.

What is it with us? We are always ready to exult at the suffering of others, and never prepared to be kind. Throughout the world we are held to be good, fair people. I have no sense of that at present.

In Moscow, the Heroes continue their hunger strike, but not one television channel reports the fact.

Marina Khodorkovskaya, the mother of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, has delivered to our
Novaya Gazeta
an open letter to the cosmonaut Georgii Grechko, who has signed a notorious open letter of fifty actors, writers, producers, and cosmonauts—people well known throughout Russia. They write to the effect that they condemn Khodorkovsky and are glad he has been given a severe [nine-year] sentence. The letter is wholly in the spirit of the Stalin epoch, when the populace would write ecstatic exhortations to The Leader to continue destroying his opponents, real or imagined.

“I am hurt and ashamed for you,” Khodorkovsky's mother writes. “I find it hard to believe that you, a well-informed and not unfeeling person, knew nothing about the vast amounts my son and his company invested in educational projects for young people and teachers in various regions of the Russian Federation. If you did know that, where is your conscience? If you did not know it and are kicking someone who has been condemned on instructions from above, then where are your honor and manliness? I am not asking you to defend Khodorkovsky and to criticize our so-called justice system—every person has a right to their own opinion—but before publicly vilifying someone, you need to be in full possession of the facts, and without that there can be no question of elementary justice.”

We published the letter, but no response was forthcoming from Cosmonaut Grechko, who, incidentally, also opposes his colleagues’ hunger strike. That is his choice.

July 8

Hearings continue in the case of the thirty-nine National Bolsheviks. They have been in various Moscow prisons for seven months now. New cages reaching to the court ceiling have been installed, two for the young men, one for the young women. All three are packed tight. Ivan Mel-nikov, a prominent Communist deputy of the Duma, and also a member of the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe, cannot believe what he is seeing: the ridiculous appurtenances of a trial of political prisoners. Working in the Duma, you would never expect such a thing. There the state authorities appear to work by consensus, by deals and accords; here, however, there is no mistaking the pitiless attitude toward “enemies of the Reich.” Deputy Melnikov also teaches at Moscow University; most of the National Bolsheviks are students, some of them from Moscow University, and he has come to act as a character witness for them, but the judge rules this out.

The defendants are accused of having caused damage amounting to 472,700 rubles [$16,500]. If you divide that between the thirty-nine accused, it transpires that the procurator general is demanding that each be imprisoned for up to eight years for causing just over 12,000 rubles [$420] of damage. Why such severity? Because they shouted, “Putin—
you
get out!” and other similar suggestions in Putin's public reception area.

They made their view of the president known and here they are, caged like puppies on a dog farm. They look at us so seriously that it breaks your heart. One has grown a bushy, black beard in prison and shaved his head. In photographs before he was locked up he looks quite different. Another is still too young to grow a beard, but he has been eaten alive by bedbugs; he is covered in sores. A third keeps scratching— he is suffering from prison itch, erysipelas. They are a danger to society because of their viewpoint on life in this country.

The judge evidently feels that everything is going to plan, in accordance with the instructions he has received. He knows whose side he is on.

Almost all the liberals and democrats, current and ex-, turned up at the trial of Khodorkovsky and Lebedev. Nobody turns up to this trial. There are no pickets, no demonstrations, no protest meetings, no slogans chanted. This is very odd, because it is by now absolutely clear that this is no less a show trial than the Yukos trial. It is, of course, a show trial to intimidate a different age group, people in a different income bracket. Yukos was about putting the super-rich clearly in the dock, while here the accused are low-income young people, mostly students. The message is, however, exactly the same—see what will happen to you if you dare to defy us: prison, bedbugs, erysipelas, prison camp, doing time with thugs.

For many years we had great hopes that trial by jury would force real independence on the courts. The state authorities had to allow it because, if they hadn't, they could have said good-bye to any prospect of being admitted to the Council of Europe. Since 2003, juries have gradually begun to consider criminal cases, and if conventional courts acquitted fewer than 1 percent of defendants, jury trials were at least finding 15 percent not guilty.

Those acquitted, however, were more often than not gangland bosses and “heroes” of the war in Chechnya, federal soldiers who had committed atrocities there, murders with aggravating circumstances in the main. After the acquittal of Yaponchik, a well-known criminal boss, respect for trials by jury gradually fell to zero. They were just another false dawn.

July 12

Bad news from Blagoveshchensk. The last militiaman held on charges has been released from jail. While human rights campaigners were making waves in Moscow, in Bashkiria they were quietly releasing Officer Gilvanov, one of the most brutal characters in the whole episode, who had beaten up young men from the village of Duvanei. Now all the beasts are free again. The district court in Ufa decided that Gilvanov was not a danger to society, although he personally attacked a boy whose leg was in a frame, knowing that he was completely helpless with a complex fracture
of his leg. Even more disgusting is the fact that the Interior Ministry of Bashkiria has allowed Gilvanov to return to work as a militiaman.

The authorities are now planning to get their own back for all the fuss that was raised after the outrages.

The materials of the criminal case were lodged, supposedly in complete security at the department for the investigation of serious crimes, in the republican procurator general's office. Now, however, it transpires that the lawyers’ applications to have major charges brought for illegal detention at the so-called filtration points have disappeared. The current charges are merely for “exceeding their authority.”

At the same time, the victims of the “cleansings” are subjected to unprecedented administrative harassment, dismissed from their jobs for refusing to withdraw their statements. This is happening to the victims most brutally mistreated and to their parents, who complained to Moscow-based journalists and human rights campaigners about the extreme violence of the local militia and OMON. Nor have the lawyers who agreed to represent the victims’ interests been having an easy time. When Stanislav Markelov from Moscow and Vasilii Syzganov from Vladimir arrived in Blagoveshchensk at the request of Moscow human rights associations and met their clients, a drunken hooligan with a knife rushed into the house. It was only because the owner of the apartment, Vitalii Kozakov, took the blows on himself that the lawyers were saved. Kozakov's blood was all over the apartment and staircase, but when the militia were called they turned and drove away, refusing even to arrest the knifeman. At this point the attacker spilled the beans; he admitted the militia themselves had instructed him to provoke a drunken brawl. They wanted a pretext to arrest the lawyers defending the victims of their own earlier violence.

The victims of Blagoveshchensk have formed a Society of Victims of Filtration, Cleansing, and Militia Violence, appealing to all citizens who have had similar experiences:

We have no rights, just like you. In those dark December days we knew what the civilian population of Chechnya has been through, because we experienced it all ourselves. Militia violence in our city marked the beginning of heavy-handed actions in many regions of Russia. They are starting off in small towns, but in no time at all filtration will also be seen in the great cities. We no longer have any confidence in the state authorities or the courts. We can rely only on ourselves and on mutual help from others in our situation. We ask you, no matter who you are, no matter where you live, no matter what your nationality is, to contact us. We must stop this now, before we are all destroyed.

The hunger strike of the Heroes, which began on July 6, continues. On July 12 officialdom finally showed itself in the person of Ombudsman Vladimir Lukin, by which time some of those fasting had already had to be replaced. His first act was to ask the journalists to leave. Out we trooped. His visit coincided with the arrival of a delegation of widows of Heroes who had come to show their solidarity.

Larisa Golubeva's husband, Dmitry Golubev, was a submarine captain first class and Hero of the Soviet Union. He was the commander of the second atomic submarine ever built in the USSR. “When he was dying, he kept saying to me, ‘What are you crying for? You will have everything. You will be well looked after. You are the wife of a Hero.’ Of course, that was not what I was crying about, but he could never have imagined how things would turn out.”

Commanding only the second Russian atomic submarine to be built was never going to be good for your health, as the commanders of those vessels were being experimented on. Larisa spent her life in garrisons: Kamchatka, Severomorsk, Sebastopol … It was a life of waiting, and hoping that her husband would return alive from his ordeals.

What is Larisa, who shared everything with her heroic husband, entitled to now? Well, nothing. Under the new law, a Hero's widow is entitled to no supplement to her pension. A state that has sunk into unbelievable corruption, bringing equally unbelievable wealth to its top functionaries, is cutting back the budget. The benefit payable to the Hero's widow is so low that she is better off renouncing it and settling for the standard old-age pension, because you can't have both. That is what Larisa has done.

She has her old-age pension, and also receives the president's monthly 500 rubles [$17] as a survivor of the siege of Leningrad. In total, she gets 3,200 rubles a month [$112]. That is the legacy of a Hero.

The hunger strikers have no regrets about their past, but they do regret the present and fear for the future. Their protest will end, they are certain, with the opening of a genuine dialogue between the citizens of Russia and the state authorities.

Gennadii Kuchkin is a fifty-one-year-old Hero of the Soviet Union from Kinel in Samara Province. As a senior lieutenant he found himself fighting in Afghanistan with the tank corps. He took part in 147 battles, and in 1983 was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. Only yesterday he flew in from Samara to join his comrades’ strike.

“As I understand it, the aim is to force our state authorities to be honorable.” For all his 147 battles, he is still an innocent. He is a romantic, and he needs to be, in order still to feel like a hero when his country spits on his heroism. Gennadii had to wait ten years after the award of his title to get an apartment, living in other people's accommodations with his family and his wounds. It took twelve years before he got a telephone.

“The lying begets cynicism,” he says. “I sometimes give talks in schools. What are the children interested in nowadays? Money, mainly. They want to know if I am a rebel fighter. They generally ask me two questions: how many people have I killed, and how much money do I get for that? When they find out how much I get, they no longer regard me as a hero. They lose interest. It is a very fundamental question, of course, who makes up the elite in Russia nowadays. The elite are anybody with money or power, from the boss of a small district like ours up to our First Citizen.”

I personally asked Boris Nemtsov of the Union of Right Forces to go and visit the hunger strikers: “Go out there and give them some moral support!” He was not very taken by the idea and said, rather oddly, “They will expect me to bring them something. I can't go there empty-handed.” Nemtsov assumed they would be expecting him to bring good news of some kind from the regime, but they would have been happy if he had just brought himself because he wanted to be there.

Our society isn't a society anymore. It is a collection of windowless,
isolated concrete cells. In one are the Heroes; in another are the politicians of Yabloko; in a third there is Zyuganov, the leader of the Communists; and so on. There are thousands who together might add up to be the Russian people, but the walls of our cells are impermeable. If somebody is suffering, he is upset that nobody else seems concerned. If, in other cells at the same time, anybody is in fact thinking about him, it leads to no action, and they only really remember he had a problem when their own situation becomes completely intolerable.

The authorities do everything they can to make the cells even more impermeable, sowing dissent, inciting some against others, dividing and ruling. And the people fall for it. That is the real problem. That is why revolution in Russia, when it comes, is always so extreme. The barrier between the cells collapses only when the negative emotions within them are ungovernable.

July 13

The Heroes have suddenly been invited to the session of the Soviet of the Federation where the legislation relating to them is to be discussed. They were as pleased as children who had been bought a long-anticipated bicycle. Burkov kept saying, “The ice is breaking up. I told you, the authorities are beginning to communicate with us. Excellent!”