A Russian Diary (46 page)

The Kosa District, close to the Astrakhan Kremlin, is lined with historic houses from which you can see the Volga, that same Volga in which, in the seventeenth century, the local brigand Stenka Razin drowned his ill-starred bride. No. 53 Maxim Gorky Street is a fine merchant's villa, which even today, after the fire in March, is still magnificent.

Last winter investors, as they called themselves, began visiting the people here. They said, “We will move you to a new house.” People said, “Thanks, only we want to stay in this area. We are used to living here.”

On March 20, seventy-eight-year-old Lyudmila Rozina was visited by “investors” for the last time. “The old lady condemned us,” Alexey Glazunov, a pensioner who used to live in the no longer existent Apartment 7, tells me. “She said she would move, but only into this new upmarket apartment building they are building next door.”

That night the villa was set alight from all four sides. In two or three minutes the place was roaring like a furnace. Some old ladies jumped from the windows, breaking limbs, but others didn't manage even that. Lyudmila was burned in her bed, because the walls of her apartment had been doused with accelerant, as the subsequent investigation revealed.

Lyudmila's son, fifty-five-year-old Alexander Rozin, survived and was taken to the hospital with severe burns. Three days later an unidentified criminal arrived at the hospital, supposedly bearing humanitarian aid from the mayor's office. The food brought was poisoned, as the later inquiry
showed, and on April 12 Rozin died. Anna Kurianova, eighty-six, who had been carried alive from the burning building, succumbed to the stress and died shortly afterward.

The appalling truth in Astrakhan is that, in recent months, six people have died in fires, and seventeen houses have been destroyed in confirmed arson attacks. There have been a total of forty-three fires, but it is not easy to obtain the rigorous investigation that might lead to a criminal prosecution. Most cases relating to them are immediately closed, or there is a complete, mysterious lack of evidence, which means they are never opened. Meanwhile, the construction of prestigious houses, casinos, restaurants, and commercial offices on sites cleared by fires continues apace.

Viktor Shmedkov is the head of the Kirov District Interior Ministry office, and it is in his territory that most of the instances of what is known in Astrakhan as “commercial arson” occur.

“I would not say that the problem is too serious,” he opines, looking straight into the eyes of old ladies who had been left in the street in their nightdresses. “The Kirov District Office is pursuing five cases relating to five instances of arson,” he continues. “I would not say that the militia are not doing all they can. The causes are being investigated, and all possibilities considered …” The eyes of the militiaman suddenly widen and he says, lowering his voice, “Even the most audacious …”

The “audacious” hypothesis is that the entourage of Mayor Bozhenov are party to the arson. They have a commercial interest in clearing the city, sharing out real estate between the mayor's deputies and the commercial organizations that support them, and thus repaying “election debts.” Somebody, after all, paid for the mayor's election campaign. It was an investment. Now it is time for them to realize their profit.

The militia bosses admit there is nothing they can do about the wealthy brigands of Astrakhan, who enjoy an incestuous relationship with the city administration. They are powerless in the face of the total criminalization of the top level of government. The laws do not operate. There was a time when the militia used to catch brigands, and knew it was doing its job. Now the person appointed to guarantee the effective functioning of the law is himself a brigand. The arson has been going on for half a year, and yet no inquiry has been set up to look into those far
from random fires. Nobody wants to piece together the overall picture of serial commercial arson.

“What happened after our fire?” Alexey Glazunov asks. He is a member of the Society of Astrakhan Fire Victims. “The chronology is this: the fire at fifty-three Maxim Gorky Street began at half past three in the morning,” Glazunov points out. “At around nine a.m. workmen arrived with sledgehammers and started knocking everything down, wrecking what the fire had not destroyed, right in front of the militia. During the day, those victims who were not hospitalized went to see the mighty Madame Svetlana Kudryavtseva, accommodation tsaritsa of Astrakhan, the mayor's deputy for building and architecture, and she made it clear that she was glad the house was being demolished. She said the city needs to get rid of these ancient buildings, and that the victims would be rehoused in a hotel.”

What is the moral of this story? The elite are interested only in getting their hands on money and property, which they can do only if they first get their hands on political power. They see an opportunity, and the citizen ceases even to be noticed. You can burn citizens if they get in the way. You can dump them in a slum “hotel” if they fail to die, and they can die there. There is a moral vacuum at the heart of the present political system in Russia, and in Astrakhan it has reached crisis point.

July 27

Another hearing for the National Bolsheviks, and cross-questioning of the witnesses begins. The judge invites Natalia Kuznetsova to say how the National Bolsheviks behaved on December 14. She works at the Kitai-Gorod internal affairs office, close to the presidential administration's building, from where she observed what was going on. Natalia proves to be a guileless woman and admits that actually she had only seen the “disorder” on television. She does, however, have firsthand evidence relating to the metal detector, that, according to the charge against them, they wrecked and which is the main item in the claim for damages from the president's residential services office. Well, anyway, this metal detector, Natalia testifies, had been mended by the morning of December 15, and
has been working fine ever since. Has Judge Shikhanov taken that in? Has the main charge just self-destructed? Can the accused all be released? No. You cannot deprive Russian young people who have dared to question the fairness of the authorities of their right to go to prison, and they must be fully reassured on that score. Especially if they are starting to get ideas about politics.

July 28

Everybody has justified complaints about the militia, but they did actually manage, after searching for more than a year, to catch Sergey Melnikov, extortionist and right-hand man of the head of the Togliatti mafia. The jubilant militiamen went to seek powers to detain him from the office of the procurator general of Moscow, and Vladimir Yudin, deputy procurator of Moscow, told them to get lost. He refused to issue a warrant because, in his view, the extortionist Melnikov was not a danger to society. The grounds written by Yudin on the rejected application are “There is no incontrovertible proof of guilt.”

The gangster was duly set free. This is the same Yudin who concocted the charges against the National Bolsheviks and insisted that they should be kept in prison for month after month, and fettered in court, because of the immense danger they pose to society. That is the reality of selective justice. Criminals are freed while political prisoners get put in chains, thrown in prison, kept in cages. The authorities rely on criminal elements to prop up the system of state power.

That this really is their doctrine recently received further confirmation when the presidential administration created a clone to oppose the National Bolsheviks. It is called Nashi (Our People), and was cobbled together in February at a meeting between Vasilii Yakemenko, leader of that earlier clone, Marching Together, and Vladislav Surkov. Yakemenko is the “federal commissar” of Nashi, which is the presidential administration's very own street movement to insure against revolution. The stormtroopers of the Nashi youth movement are soccer hooligans armed with knuckle-dusters and chains. So far they have confined themselves to assaulting the National Bolsheviks, and the authorities prevent the investigative
agencies from bringing criminal charges against them. They have two units, one consisting of thugs who support the Central Sports Club of the army soccer team, and the other of thugs who support the Spartak team. They all have an impeccable record in street fighting. Under the leadership of Vasya the Hitman and Roma the Stickler, thugs who support Spartak, Nashi has also set up a private security agency called White Shield. Vasya the Hitman is one of our most violent soccer hooligans, and it is his followers who organize attacks on the National Bolsheviks. They have twice occupied the National Bolsheviks’ bunker, from where Vasya once gave a press conference. Vasya (known on his passport as Vasilii Stepanov) and Roma had a number of criminal cases pending against them, which were first put on hold, and then kicked into the long grass.

Roma was even seen at the famous shish kebab meeting between Putin and the “Nashists,” when our president was lecturing them about how young people are already Russia's civil society. When this obnoxious event, dreamed up by Surkov, was shown on television, one National Bolshevik who had been beaten up by “unidentified persons” recognized his assailant as Roma the Stickler, known in secular life as Roman Verbitsky

Why did Khodorkovsky come to grief? He was no different from the rest of those who have amassed fabulous fortunes in record time, no different from others who had the opportunity and the inclination. When he was a billionaire, however, he said, “Stop! Yukos will become the most transparent and noncriminal company in Russia, using Western business methods.” He began creating a new Yukos, but all around him people remained at large who had absolutely no desire for transparency, people whose very nature is to work in the shadows, away from the light. They set about devouring Yukos, because light is unwelcome in the midst of darkness.

Discriminating against bad political prisoners in favor of good criminals has deep historical roots in Russian justice and Russian politics. It is not easy to eradicate, but it would be a disgrace to become reconciled to it. The only question is: who is going to protest? There are no meetings outside the Nikulin court. There are plenty of militia, vast numbers of
police dogs, but almost nobody to show solidarity with these illegally detained political prisoners: only a small handful of National Bolsheviks, and occasionally Limonov. It is a bacchanalia of indifference.

Khodorkovsky had the best lawyers in the country and they managed to attract supporters for the persecuted oligarch, but the poor have almost nobody. The National Bolsheviks are from lower-income groups, the children of research workers, engineers, the impoverished Russian intelligentsia in general. They are high school and college students. Occasionally a lone human rights campaigner turns up, but that is the extent of their support.

August 3

At 4:00 a.m. today in Syktyvkar, capital of the northern republic of Komi, the editorial offices of a democratic opposition newspaper,
Courier Plus,
were burned down. The building also accommodated two oppositional television programs,
Tele-Courier
and
The Golden Mean,
produced by Nikolai Moiseyev, a local Yabloko Party member and deputy of the city council.

Moiseyev was highly critical of the mayor of Syktyvkar, Sergey Ka-tunin, and on July 14 he and a group of other deputies tried to strip the mayor of his powers, but he fought them off. In the procurator's office they have no doubt that it was arson; Moiseyev recently had the door of his apartment and his car set on fire. The previous Syktyvkar opposition newspaper,
Stefanov Boulevard,
ceased to exist in August 2002 when it too was burned out.

August 4

Jihad in Russia. Again. The beginning of September will see the sixth anniversary of the “counterterrorist operation” in Chechnya. Peaceful life, according to the Kremlin's propaganda, has long since returned to the towns and villages, and almost all the fighters they wanted to get have been put out of action by the pro-federal forces. But what is this? Jihad?

Against whom? Nor is this the first jihad to be declared in Chechnya in the eleven years since the first Chechen war began. They have been declared, they have been called off.

This time it is jihad against Wahhabis and terrorists, and the official line is that it was declared by the pro-Moscow boss of the republic's Muslims, Mufti Sultan Mirzaev. He summoned the mullahs of all the districts for a pep talk at which, in the presence of the commanders of all the Chechen security units (Yamadaev, Kadyrov, Alkhanov, Ruslan, et al.), he read out the directive. It means that now the troops of Yamadaev, Kadyrov, Kokiev, and the rest, and Chechen militiamen, can with a clear conscience murder other Chechens and, needless to say, non-Chechens, if they suspect them of terrorism or Wahhabism. There will be no need for court proceedings or investigations. They can also be sure that, as Muslims, they are doing the right thing. Mirzaev went so far as to declare that he was prepared to take up arms himself.

Given that all these Chechen paramilitaries and their commanders are technically federal soldiers subject to the law of Russia, which does not recognize jihad, this would seem to mark a further stage in “Chech-enizing” the war.

So why has jihad been declared today? After the events at the hill village of Borozdinovskaya on the border of Chechnya and Dagestan (a brutal “cleansing” on June 4, during which Yamadaev's troops abducted eleven people and carried out mass robbery, murder, and arson), hundreds of the inhabitants fled to Dagestan. There was, however, great consternation among all these state cutthroats. In Chechnya the Russian-imposed system of extrajudicial rough justice and executions looked like being under threat.

For a long time the arrangement has been, “We kill those you tell us to, and in return you look after us.” “We” refers to the foot soldiers. “You” refers primarily to the Yamadaevs and to Ramzan Kadyrov. These are the field commanders of Chechenization, the protagonists of a civil war pitting Chechen against Chechen, for which success they have been given federal epaulets, weapons, and immunity from prosecution.