A Russian Diary (44 page)

Their delegation sat for several hours in the Soviet of the Federation, gradually beginning to feel that something was wrong. The law was put to the vote. Burkov jumped up and shouted to the whole chamber, “And what about us? Is nobody going to listen to what we have to say?”

They were reluctantly allowed to speak. Clearly nobody had been expecting actually to have to listen to them. They had been invited merely to get them to call off their hunger strike.

Burkov began speaking, but was rudely interrupted. The chairman of the Soviet of the Federation, Sergey Mironov, irritably put the legislation to the vote and the senators passed it. Mironov invited the Heroes to his office and assured them that the Soviet understood their concerns, but that those upstairs had a different view. He repeatedly asked them to abandon the hunger strike, after which “it will be possible to begin a dialogue
with the administration.” They left feeling they had been humiliated, and returned to their little cell.

July 14

The trial of the National Bolsheviks continues as the procurator reads out the indictment. The state has decided to use the case to establish the fundamental concept of collective guilt, something not heard of since Stalin's show trials. In later years, Soviet and Russian procurators and judges have always been at pains to personalize guilt as far as possible, distancing themselves from totalitarian practices, but in 2005 they are with us again. Procurator Smirnov gabbled out the names of the National Bolsheviks, claiming that they had all “participated in mass disturbances involving violent behavior … a criminal plan had been devised to infiltrate … obstructed agents of the Federal Security Service … leaflets containing antipresidential sentiments … demonstrating manifest disrespect for society … chanted unlawful slogans about the removal from office …”

During a break in proceedings, defense lawyer Dmitry Agranovsky commented, “I have participated in a great many trials, and invariably the guilt has related to specific individuals. Here, however, they clearly intend to give a precedent-setting verdict based on collective guilt for dissidence. This is a political fiat from above.”

We are sometimes called a society of millions of slaves and a handful of masters, and told that is how it will be for centuries to come, a continuation of the serf-owning system. We often speak about ourselves in that way too, but I never do.

The courage of the Soviet dissidents brought forward the collapse of the Soviet system, and even today, when the mobs chant “We love Putin!” there are individuals who continue to think for themselves and use what opportunities exist to express their view of what is happening in Russia, even when their attempts seem futile.

A rare example of an intelligent, detailed, articulate protest has come from a campaigner of the Human Rights Association in Tyumen. Vladimir Grishkevich has sent the Constitutional Court a supplementary
deposition to his complaint about the unconstitutional nature of the law on appointing regional leaders. He agrees to its being considered together with complaints from Committee 2008, Yabloko and a group of independent deputies of the Duma. His statement is a very important fact in the history of our country and will show that by no means everybody remained silent in 2005, even though no revolution has come about. Moreover, those who raised their voices were not only to be found in Moscow. After a long and detailed analysis of the illegality of Putin's move to nominate governors, he concludes:

On the basis of the above, I request the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation to give an official assessment of the circumstances described above in which the federal law was adopted and signed. I refer to the law “On the Introduction of Changes and Additions to the Federal Law ‘On the General Principles of Organization of Legislative (Representative) and Executive Organs of State Power of Constituent Territories of the Russian Federation’ and in the federal law ‘On the Basic Guarantees of Electoral Rights and the Right to Participate in Referenda of Citizens of the Russian Federation.’ ”

The court failed to respond. Society failed to protest.

July 15

Our people seem to wake up only when it hits them where it hurts. Revolutionary passions run high only when money is involved.

In Ryazan, the trade union of the Khimvolokno factory mounted a picket outside the provincial government offices. The trade unionists do not want their enterprise to be closed. They are certain that the synthetic-fiber plant is being deliberately bankrupted to enable someone to buy it on the cheap. A directive was first issued to cease production for three months, then to cease production completely on the grounds that it was losing money.

This was when the workers woke up. There are very few jobs in the
town and the factory's management informed twenty-five workers, who included members of the trade union committee, that they were being put on the minimum wage of 800 rubles [$28] a month. The workers from Khimvolokno found no support, however, not even in Ryazan, because they had never supported anyone in the past. They just stood there picketing the government offices, with nobody paying any attention.

Ulianovsk is a more militant town. A sticker protest has begun there: “No more bureaucracy, no more Putin!” It is being organized by a national youth movement called Defense, together with the local ecological and youth organizations. The activists covered the town in little labels reading, “No more lies!,” “Say no now and fight back!” They call for nonviolent civil protests against a bureaucracy that is leading their region and the country to ruin. They are not trying to defend their pay packet. Theirs is a prologue to revolution.

Why Ulianovsk? The province is one of the poorest, turned into a mere source of raw materials for big companies based elsewhere and, worse, into a rubbish tip for waste materials. This is thanks to the efforts of the governor, effectively imposed on the voters by the presidential administration, that great hero of Chechnya, Gen. Vladimir Shamanov. Under him the crime bosses of Ulianovsk came out of the underground. Shamanov openly depended on them and was surrounded by ex-soldiers who had retrained as gangsters, a minor sideways movement in Russia. Shamanov himself was thoroughly stupid and incapable of managing civilians.

Wrapping themselves in democratic slogans and brandishing the support of Putin, these supposed helpmates of the state openly robbed, and continue to rob, the province, even though Shamanov has now been transferred to the presidential administration.

The Defense movement in Ulianovsk is like a local fragment of the Ukrainian protest movement. Members of Defense believe that, within the framework of the law, they can hold nonviolent demonstrations, protest meetings, pickets, and distribute leaflets and now stickers. Defense in Ulianovsk has rallied the local youth wing of Yabloko and of the Union of Right Forces, and the ecological organization Green Yabloko.

In Moscow a demonstration took place outside the Interior Ministry
to protest against brutality on the part of the law enforcement agencies. About twenty people turned out. Their banners read, “No more secret orders! Press charges against those guilty of violence in Blagoveshchensk and other towns and villages.” The demonstrators demanded the resignation of Rashid Nurgaliev, minister of the interior of Russia, the bringing of a criminal prosecution against Rafail Divaev, minister of the interior of Bashkiria, and against all the officers and officials of the law enforcement agencies guilty of acts of violence.

The protest was against attempts by the militia to intimidate the Russian people, but the Russian people didn't show up. It lasted two hours. Nobody came out from the Interior Ministry to speak to the protesters, because they only worry about mass demonstrations. If the numbers are not there, they laugh at us and go about their business.

July 16

The eleventh day of the hunger strike. The participants are very weak. What lies ahead? The regime is silent. Do they need some of these people to die? Most of the hunger strikers are old, disabled, or ill. Still not a single politician has come to speak to them.

July 18

The hunger-striking Heroes face a stalemate. The authorities contemptuously ignore all their suggestions.

“What's the point?” I ask Svetlana Gannushkina in bewilderment. We are talking shortly before a meeting, attended by Putin, of the improbably named Presidential Commission for the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights, of which Svetlana is a member. “Why can't they just listen? Why do they always insist on doing everything in the worst possible manner? Why do they force one stalemate after another?”

“Why? Because they want to create a country it is impossible to live in,” Svetlana replies sadly. She is the only member of the human rights commission brave enough to agree to hand Putin the Heroes’ appeal. Perhaps the
barin
is a good man after all.

This afternoon a jury at the Moscow City Court acquits Vyacheslav Ivankov, also known as Yaponchik, of shooting dead two Turkish citizens in a Moscow restaurant in 1992. All the television stations lead with this, with live link-ups to the court. They also report that Mr. Ivankov is intending to write a book. The hunger strike doesn't get a mention, and the trial of the National Bolsheviks gets just a couple of words here and there. We hear nothing of what they might be planning to do if they were to get out of prison.

How can we go on living such a lie? We pretend that justice has been done in the case of Yaponchik, we rejoice that justice was not done in the case of Khodorkovsky We applaud both these just outcomes. This is not your enigmatic Russian soul; this is the long-standing tradition of living a lie about which Solzhenitsyn wrote long ago, mixed with a lazy refusal to take your backside off your chair in a warm kitchen until they take the warm kitchen away from you. At that point you might join a revolution, but not before.

July 19

The fourteenth day of the hunger strike. Surkov, Putin's chief ideologist, calls them blackmailers: “We will not allow anyone to twist our arms.”

Actually, what has Surkov to do with anything? Why should it depend on this political manipulator, who has to his credit only the virtual achievements of United Russia and the bloody Chechenization of Chechnya—the same Surkov who dares to think this makes him a political heavyweight—why should it depend on him whether 204 Heroes of the country get a hearing or not?

*

In the course of the hunger strike, they have written many letters, sending them by fax, e-mail, and even by hand to the offices of important persons. They have given many interviews mentioning these letters, although few were ever broadcast.

What this episode has demonstrated is that many of our most prominent figures, leaders, and deputy leaders of parties inside the Duma and out, of movements and alliances, and even the leader of the Soviet of the Federation, Sergey Mironov himself, who, according to the Constitution,
is the third most powerful man in the country, seem to sympathize with the hunger strikers, their demands, their feelings, their desire to serve the country. They do so, however, only in private. Publicly, for the television cameras and information agencies, for the president, they stand united in opposition to it. They voted in favor of the humiliating amendments that sparked this whole confrontation, one that shows no signs of concluding in dialogue.

Why are the independently minded of our political establishment so two-faced? That is the question. Is it not a matter of straightforward blackmail by the administration: if you do not say what we require you to, we will take away your perks?

Nobody wants to go without their perks nowadays. Our political “elite” is profoundly infected with cowardice and scared stiff of losing its power. Not of losing the respect of the people, just its seat. They have no more to them than that.

*

A terrorist act in the Chechen village of Znamenskoye. A vehicle was seen at the central crossroads, in the front passenger seat of which was a dead body. The militia were called, but, when they approached the vehicle, it was blown up, killing fourteen of them. A child was also killed, and many, including young boys, were injured.

It turned out that in the early evening of July 13 Alexey Semenenko, twenty-three, was abducted from the hill village of Novoshchedrinskaya. The kidnapping took place in front of his younger sisters. In recent months, Alexey and his young wife had been saving up to get out of Chechnya. His relatives had lived in Novoshchedrinskaya for a hundred years and it was a large, united, hardworking family, but what could they do? The more firmly Kadyrov becomes ensconced, the greater the lawlessness and the more remote the hope that life will come right. That was what Alexey had decided.

He decided to take seasonal employment reaping the harvest, which can bring in good money in a short time. Alexey returned home from the fields on July 13 to find four armed men in combat fatigues waiting for him. They were Chechens and had arrived in two silver UAZ off-road vehicles. Nearly everyone in Novoshchedrinskaya is certain these were
Kadyrov's troops. Anyone living in Chechnya can distinguish Kadyrov's from Yamadaev's troops, the OMON from Baisarov's or Kokiev's troops (all of them paramilitaries of the “Chechen Federal Security Units,” as they are called) by the vehicles they drive and the weapons they favor. The paramilitaries talked to Alexey, then bundled him into one of the vehicles and drove off. The neighbors memorized the number plates, but they turned out to be false.

The following morning, the family notified the authorities of the abduction, and Chechen local militiamen who had known Alexey from childhood spent two days looking for him in all the security subdivisions. They didn't find him. At this point the local procurator's office scented danger and reverted to its usual cataleptic state.

On July 19, the first person to approach the vehicle was a nearby militiaman. He opened the door and saw a corpse in the passenger seat, which, judging by the smell and state of decomposition, had been dead for a considerable time. He also noticed that the body had bullet wounds to the face.