A Russian Diary (5 page)

December 9

At 10:53 a.m. today a suicide bomber blew herself up outside the Nationale Hotel in Moscow, across the square from the Duma and 145 meters [160 yards] from the Kremlin. “Where is this Duma?” she asked a passerby, before exploding. For a long time the head of a Chinese tourist who had been next to her lay on the asphalt without its body. People were screaming and crying for help, but although there is no shortage of police in that area, they didn't approach the site of the explosion for twenty minutes, evidently fearing another explosion. Half an hour after the incident the ambulances arrived and the police closed the street.

December 10

There is little comment on the terrorist incident, or on why such acts take place.

Russia's upper chamber, the Soviet of the Federation, has announced the date of Putin's reelection. Putin immediately goes into top gear, using all sorts of anniversaries and special days to present himself to the country and the world as Russia's leading expert on whatever is being
celebrated. On Cattle Breeders’ Day he is our most illustrious cattle breeder; on Builders’ Day he is our foremost brickie. It is bizarre, of course, but Stalin played the same game.

Today, as luck would have it, is International Human Rights Day, so Putin summoned our foremost champions of human rights (as selected by him) to the Kremlin for a meeting of the Presidential Commission on Human Rights. It began at 6:00 p.m. and was chaired by Ella Pam-filova,* a democrat from the Yeltsin era.

The pediatrician Dr. Leonid Roshal spoke for one minute about how much he loves the president; Lyudmila Alexeyeva of the Moscow Helsinki Group spoke for five minutes about improper use of state resources during elections (which Putin didn't deny); Ida Kuklina of the League of Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers spoke for three minutes about the exploitation of soldiers as slave labor and other army horrors; Valerii Abramkin of the Center for Reform of the Criminal Justice System spoke for five minutes about the things that go on in places of detention (the president seemed to appreciate his speech more than the other speeches); Ella Pamfilova spoke at great length about the dismal relations between human rights campaigners and the law enforcement agencies; Svetlana Gannushkina of the Memorial Human Rights Center had three minutes to explain the implications of the new law on citizenship; Tamara Mor-shchakova, adviser to the Constitutional Court, had seven minutes to present proposals for making the state authorities publicly accountable; Alexey Simonov spoke for three minutes on freedom of speech and the predicament of journalists; and Sergey Borisov and Alexander Auzan of the Consumers’ Association talked of the need to protect small businesses.

Ranged against them were the head and deputy head of the presidential administration; the procurator general of Russia, Vladimir Ustinov; the minister of the interior, Boris Gryzlov; the minister of justice; the minister for the press; the chairmen of the constitutional, supreme, and business arbitration courts. Nikolai Patrushev, director of the FSB, was also present at the beginning, but left shortly afterward.

All the campaigners in turn set about Procurator General Ustinov. In between their attacks, Putin would also give him a dressing-down and accuse
him of unjustifiable rulings. Tamara Morshchakova kept up a legal commentary on what was being said, urging for example that a social worker should be present during the questioning and court appearances of minors. This is standard practice in many countries, but to the Kremlin it sounded radically new. Ustinov parried by claiming this would be contrary to Russian law, and Morshchakova brought him up short by pointing out that the laws he was referring to simply did not exist. This meant either that the procurator general did not know the law, which is clearly unthinkable, or that he was deliberately misleading his hearers. With Putin present this was hardly thinkable either, which led back to the first possibility, which is incompatible with holding the office of procurator general.

“It is only when they have direct personal experience of something that you can get anywhere,” Svetlana Gannushkina told me. “While the president was talking on the telephone to Bush, I went over to Viktor Ivanov, the deputy head of the presidential administration and chairman of a working group on migration legislation. I unexpectedly found that we had equally negative feelings about residential registration. Ivanov's wife had recently spent five hours standing in line to get temporary registration of friends who had come to stay with them in Moscow. It had made her furious.”

This prompted Ivanov to recognize the folly of reviving residential registration, and he vowed to fight it. An FSB general, he offered to set up a joint working group with Gannushkina to reform it. “Give me a call,” he said. “Draw up a list of members for the group. We'll work on it together.”

Another example of the triumph of personal involvement over bureaucratic inertia came when Valerii Abramkin, a champion of prisoners’ rights, told the president a dreadful story about two juvenile girls who had been wrongfully convicted. Their juvenile status was overlooked both by the court and the prison authorities and was picked up only after the girls had been transported under guard into exile, at which point they were released. Unexpectedly, Putin reacted very strongly to this. Something human flashed in his eyes. It turned out that his family had come across a similar incident involving two young girls who had suffered
from disregard for the law, and to whom his wife was now giving support. It really seems that some personal experience is a prerequisite to the administration focusing on the victims of injustice.

“You have the impression that on certain issues the president's information is very low-grade and sketchy. He doesn't do anything about it,” was Svetlana Gannushkina's reaction.

For the most part, Putin listened to what was being said and, when he did speak, presented himself as being on their side. He mimicked being a human rights campaigner. Evidently, now that the democrats have been silenced, he will represent Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces for us. The prediction of the political analysts on the night of the parliamentary elections has come to pass.

This was probably Putin's main purpose in meeting the human rights campaigners: to show them that their concerns were his. He is an excellent imitator. When need be, he is one of you; when that is not necessary, he is your enemy. He is adept at wearing other people's clothes, and many are taken in by this performance. The assembly of human rights campaigners also melted in the face of Putin's impersonating of them and, despite a fundamentally different take on reality, they poured out their hearts to him.

At one moment someone actually did blurt out that they had the feeling Putin understood them much better than the security officials. Putin was unabashed and fired right back, “That is because at heart I am a democrat.”

Needless to say, after this everyone's joy just grew and grew. Dr. Roshal asked to speak “just for a moment.” “Vladimir Vladimirovich,” he said, “I like you so much.” He has said this before. Vladimir Vladimirovich looked down at the table.

The doctor went on, “… and I do not like Khodorkovsky” Vladimir Vladimirovich suddenly stiffened. Heaven only knew where this pediatrician was heading. And sure enough, his boat was heading straight for the reef. “Although I like you and do not like Khodorkovsky, I am not prepared to see Khodorkovsky under arrest. After all, he is not a murderer. Where do we think he might run away to?”

The president's facial muscles worked, and those present bit their
tongues. After that nobody mentioned Khodorkovsky again, as if Putin were a dying father and Khodorkovsky his prodigal son. The human rights campaigners did not press home the attack, as might have been expected, but tucked their tails between their legs. The sky darkened, and only one person was to be found who, after the slipup over Yukos, dared to broach another topic that the president's entourage always asks one not to mention, for fear of him losing control of himself. Svetlana Gan-nushkina raised the question of Chechnya.

Concluding her short speech on the problems of migration, which had been cleared by the administration, Gannushkina went on to say that she could not expect the president to talk about Chechnya, and accordingly wished simply to present him with a book that had just been published by the Memorial Human Rights Center,
People Live Here: Chechnya, A Chronicle of Violence.

This was unexpected. The minders had no time to intervene. Putin took the book and, also unexpectedly, showed interest in it. He leafed through it for the remainder of the meeting, until 10:30 p.m. In the end he himself started talking about Chechnya.

“In the first place,” Gannushkina recalls, “he is certain that it is all right to trample human rights underfoot in the course of the campaign against terrorism. There are grounds that justify not observing the law, circumstances in which the law can be flouted. In the second place, browsing through the book, Putin commented, ‘This is badly written. If you wrote so that people could understand, they would follow you and you could exert real influence on the government. But the way this is presented is hopeless.’ ”

Of course, what he had in mind was not Chechnya but the defeat of Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces in the election. “Putin is right,” Gannushkina believes. She has long been a member of Yabloko, and worked in the Duma assisting the Yabloko deputies. “We are incapable of explaining to people that we are on neither one side nor the other, but defending rights.”

After that the conversation turned of its own accord to Iraq. The campaigners said there was no comparison: the Chechens were Russian citizens, unlike the Iraqis. Putin parried this by saying that Russia gave
a better impression of itself than the USA, because we have pressed charges against military personnel who have committed crimes in Chechnya far more frequently than the United States has against its war criminals in Iraq.

The procurator general chimed in: “More than six hundred cases.” The human rights campaigners didn't let that pass: how many of those had led to sentences being passed? The question hung in the air, unanswered.

Lyudmila Alexeyeva, leader of the Moscow Helsinki Group and an unofficial doyenne of Russian human rights campaigners, someone whom the state authorities have raised to iconic status as personifying the human rights community as far as the Kremlin is concerned, proposed convening a round table with the same participants to discuss the problems of Chechnya with the president. “We'll need to think about that,” Putin muttered as he was saying his farewells, which meant, “There's no way that is going to happen.”

*

There were indeed no discussions on Chechnya between Putin and the human rights campaigners, but after their December meeting some of them, along with some of the democrats, decided to switch allegiance from the defeated Yavlinsky and Nemtsov to the newly democratic Putin, whom they evidently supposed would serve just as well.

The same fate befell a number of well-known journalists. Reputations were compromised before our very eyes. We watched as Vladimir Soloviov, a popular television and radio presenter, one of the boldest, best informed, and most democratic of reporters, who not long ago had exposed government wickedness, for example, over the chemical attack in the
Nord-Ost
disaster (when 912 members of the audience of a musical were taken hostage by Chechens), suddenly and publicly proclaimed his passionate support for Putin and the Russian state.

This happened to him because he was brought in closer to the Kremlin and sweetened up. He transmogrified. It is a recurrent Russian problem: proximity to the Kremlin makes people slow to say no, and altogether less discriminating. The Kremlin knows this full well. How many of them there have been already, stifled by the Kremlin. First they
are gently clasped to the authorities’ breast. In Russia the best way to subjugate even the most recalcitrant is not money but bringing us in from the cold, at arm's length at first. The rebellious soon begin to subside. We have seen it with Soloviov, with Dr. Roshal, and now even the admirers of Sakharov* and Yelena Bonner* are beginning to talk about Putin's charisma, saying he gives them grounds for hope.

Of course, this is not the first time in recent history that we have seen this coming together of the regime and defenders of human rights, the regime and the democrats. It certainly is the first time, though, that it has been so devastating for former dissidents. What hope is there for the Russian people if one part of the opposition has been bombed out of existence, and another, almost all that remains, is being set aside for later use?

December 11

This morning there was more of the same, a reputation destroyed by the Kremlin's embrace. Andrey Makarevich was an underground rock musician in the Soviet period, a dissident, a fighter against the KGB,* who used to sing with passion, “Don't bow your head before the changeful world. Some day that world will bow its head to us!” It was the anthem of the first years of democracy under Yeltsin. Today, on live television on the state-run Channel One, he is being presented with a medal “For Services to the Fatherland.”

Makarevich came out in support of United Russia and took part in their preelection get-togethers. He really did bow his head to Putin and his United Russia Party. He told the people what a good guy Vladimir Vladimirovich was and, lo and behold, we now see him in receipt of official favors; a former dissident who wasn't embarrassed to join the Kremlin party.

Putin gave a reception for the leaders of the Duma parties, as this is the last day of the Third Duma. He spoke of positive developments in relations between the branches of state power. Yavlinsky smiled wryly.

Soon, across the road from the Kremlin, the final session of the departing Parliament was held in the Duma building. Almost everybody
was there. United Russia was in a holiday mood and made no attempt to disguise the fact. Why would they? Every day newly elected deputies from other parties are defecting to them, moving closer to Putin. United Russia is inflating like a hot air balloon.