A Russian Diary (50 page)

August 30

The military collegium of the Supreme Court has been considering an appeal against the acquittal of a special operations unit by the North Caucasus military court. The unit, subordinate to the Central Intelligence Directorate, shot six people and burned their bodies in the Shatoy District of Chechnya in January 2002. The verdict has been deemed unlawful and the case sent back for reconsideration.

This is extremely unusual. The basic objections to the earlier verdict were gross procedural violations in the selection of jurors, and the conduct of the judge in giving them political instructions before they withdrew to consider their verdict.

Eduard Ulman's unit was acquitted on the grounds that while the
soldiers had indeed killed and burned their victims, they could not be held responsible because they were only carrying out the orders of their superiors, which they were not at liberty to dispute. The court entirely ignored the fact that there were no written orders, only veiled hints from a shadowy director of the operation whose voice was heard over a walkie-talkie. The Supreme Court also disregarded this very important detail.

What happens next? This will be the third time the case has been reviewed, but unfortunately it is still going to be tried in Rostov-on-Don. If the military collegium was seriously expecting a guilty verdict, Ulman and his unit would be back in detention and the case would not have returned to Rostov, where it is quite impossible to form a jury radically different from the earlier ones. The Rostov jurors took the red-blooded view that Ulman was perfectly within his rights; he was carrying out a mission for the Motherland, and anyway, all Chechens are a priori guilty. Strong anti-Chechen sentiment is a fact of life in the south of Russia.

Why has the verdict been set aside on this occasion? The Supreme Court has, after all, a long record of turning a blind eye to inconvenient matters. It is playing up to Putin. When he met the human rights campaigners at the beginning of the summer, the president said he had been shocked by the acquittal of Ulman and his codefendants. The Supreme Court has accordingly hastened to help him over his shock by referring the case back, and whatever happens after that is not its concern.

The Central Intelligence Directorate, the GRU, may nevertheless be forced to pull in its horns for a short time. The special operations subdivisions of this murderous organization continue their “sanitizing” of Chechnya, which is what Ulman and his detachment were involved in, and the fact that we do not know of similar major cases is simply because they do not get reported. The atrocities in the hill village of Borozdi-novskaya on June 4 were also committed by a GRU detachment. The assassination on July 4 of Abdul-Azim Yangulbaev, head of the administration of the hill village of Zumsoy, is another example.

The background to Yangulbaev's case is that, in January, four people were abducted from Zumsoy by a group of soldiers parachuted from helicopters.
Nothing has been heard of the four since. The soldiers then went berserk, beating up villagers and helping themselves, for example, to 250,000 rubles [$8,700] that had just been received by one of the families as compensation for the destruction of their home. Abdul-Azim Yangulbaev, the village head of administration, made every effort to find the abducted villagers. He appealed to human rights organizations and spoke out forcefully about the soldiers’ excesses, which is unusual in Chechnya nowadays. And not only in Chechnya.

In the spring, he forwarded to the Memorial Human Rights Center and the procurator's office a draft report by one of the soldiers involved in the January operation, which gave the names of those in command of the abductors, and mentioned the shelling of homes and the murder of one of the villagers.

On July 4, Yangulbaev's UAZ jeep was stopped on a mountain road by three masked gunmen, who presented GRU credentials and ordered him to get out of the vehicle to show them his ID. When, on their orders, he went to open the trunk of his vehicle to allow them to inspect it, he was shot three times at point-blank range with a gun fitted with a silencer.

August 31

In Beslan there is a split. Should the mothers go to Moscow to meet Putin on September 2 or not?

Putin, it seems, is very keen that they should: a special plane will be sent to collect them. This is unprecedented, but then, so was Beslan. Many of the mothers, however, are refusing. Today the delegation of those going to the Kremlin does not consist solely of mothers who lost their only children and who had for so long wanted to tell Putin everything that was on their minds. It includes, of course, Teimuraz Mam-surov, the father of two children who survived in the school, and who, at the time of the terrorist act, was leader of the republican Parliament.

He is now the “director” of North Ossetia. The republics no longer have presidents, but if he is its director he clearly enjoys Putin's trust.

Mamsurov is not going to make a fuss in the presence of Putin to discover the truth about the terrorist outrage. He is not going to commit political suicide.

Another member of the Beslan delegation is Maierbek Tuaev, director of the public commission for the distribution of humanitarian aid. Maierbek's daughter, a pupil in one of the senior classes, was killed, but after the atrocity, when humanitarian aid flooded into the town from around the world, he was appointed to distribute it. There is also Azamat Sabanov, the son of Tatarkan Sabanov, a former headmaster of the First School who, as he did every year, had gone to the September 1 parade and was killed in the attack. Azamat is Maierbek Tuaev's deputy for distributing humanitarian aid, which is like a narcotic in a town that spends most of its time at the cemetery.

I call Marina Park and she tells me, “I am at the cemetery.” I can hear many voices around her. She is an extremely active member of the Committee of the Mothers of Beslan. Marina was one of the leading signatories of the committee's many letters to institutions involved in the inquiry into the tragedy, but she has decided against attending the meeting with Putin on September 2. “There is no point in going a thousand kilometers to receive condolences,” Marina is adamant as she stands in the cemetery. “He is receiving us not to move the inquiry forward, but because he wants to be photographed with us.”

Alexander Gumetsov, whose twelve-year-old daughter Aza was killed, also no longer wants to see the president.

I have known Alexander for almost the whole of this year. He was, and still is, deeply depressed. Aza was his only child. There was a time when he very much wanted to tell all about what their family went through before they finally received the remains of their daughter, identified only after DNA testing. Now, however, like most people in the town, Alexander feels he has been deceived so many times in the past year that nothing is likely to restore his faith in the state authorities. Even if Putin were now to spend the whole of September 2 with the people from Beslan; if there were to be no mention of money and only discussion of the need for a genuine inquiry; if Putin were to compel the procurator
general, the director of the FSB, the minister of the interior and all those bemedaled “heroes of Beslan” to report the truth to the mothers in his presence; even if he were himself suddenly to repent and kiss the hands of these women, before whom he will forever be guilty, and swear a terrible oath to beat the truth out of his security services—even then they would not believe him.

And so, two or three mothers, out of the twenty who were invited, will be going to the Kremlin. They will serve to leaven the more politically reliable men invited to Putin's meeting with the Committee of the Mothers of Beslan.

Aza's mother, Rimma Torchinova, is one of those going. She wants to look Putin in the eye as she asks him some important, unanswered questions. Rimma has no illusions, but this is how she understands her duty to her daughter's memory. She is going to Moscow, come what may. She will be seeking answers about the headquarters from which the operation was directed, about the assault, the grenade launchers, the role of the federal helicopters overhead.

We can only try to imagine how difficult this will be for her on September 2, as also for the other women who are going to see the president. What solidarity can society offer them at this moment? We could at least hold out a hand so that they should feel not only their pain, but also the country's support as they confront the chill of the Kremlin. Perhaps our president would then find it more difficult to cynically “manage” everything, and be forced to answer their questions honestly.

There is little evidence of social solidarity. We watch the drama of the mothers of Beslan on television. We see them weeping in the courtroom in Vladikavkaz, locking themselves in in protest, holding meetings, blocking the highway, demanding to see Deputy Procurator General She-pel, who is visibly wilting from having to lie to them endlessly. The country is sedated by this soap opera, inclined to murmur only that “they are out of their minds with grief” and, after all, time will heal them and there is nothing to be done.

We will watch the evening edition of the
Vremya
news program, and go to bed forgetting the women wearing black headscarves until the next
episode of
The Mothers of Beslan.
The men of Beslan will carry on going out of their minds, blaming themselves for everything, while the women continue to live at their town's new cemetery.

Tomorrow is September 1. A year has passed and not one of the bungling bureaucrats, generals, directors of the intelligence services, officials at the operational headquarters, or even the heads of the militia have been called to account. Nobody is really demanding that anyway. Whatever happened to public opinion?

By September 1, 2005, it has become clear that the democratic movement is in a state of collapse. There is not going to be any united front, either in reality, or in the elections to the Chechen parliament in November, the Moscow Duma elections in December or, indeed, in the Duma elections in 2007. Committee 2008 has given up the ghost. The Citizens’ Congress is in a coma. The Russian intelligentsia does not have a single forum in which it could exert itself to real purpose and influence the governance of the state.

Yes, Garry Kasparov has created his United Citizens’ Front, although it does not seem to be attracting many members. It formulates its mission as follows:

In the near future, stagnation under Putin will be replaced by a severe political crisis created by the state authorities themselves, and not at all by the democrats. The main task facing us before this crisis occurs is to create an organization capable of uniting all responsible citizens against the regime when it finally loses its mind. We must learn to organize our opposition.

Those are very true words, but the problem that stifles all good words is that everybody in the United Citizens’ Front, apart from Kasparov himself, has a record of electoral failure. Among these people, who were part of the democratic movement in the early pre-Yeltsin years, there are some who behaved disastrously in the late Yeltsin period and made possible the coming of the era of Putin.

To put it bluntly, I do not believe their democratic convictions run that deep. I do not trust any of them, other than Kasparov, and I doubt that he
will be able to move mountains on his own. Millions of other Russians do not trust them, either.

Vladimir Ryzhkov is still running the Republican Party of Russia, and people view it with even greater skepticism. It has been around for fifteen years. It grew out of an improbable grouping of the Yeltsin period, the “Democratic Platform of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,” because there was such a monster, and very progressive it seemed at the time. People are not signing up with him, either.

Yavlinsky has publicly quarreled with the Union of Right Forces, to the extent of refusing to have anything to do with Nikita Belykh, their new leader. That puts paid to any hope of uniting the URF and Yabloko. The only active element in Yabloko is its youth section under Ilia Yashin. Its protests increasingly resemble those of Limonov's National Bolsheviks. Young Yabloko does not think too highly of Yavlinsky himself, perhaps because its members are far purer, more honest and, most importantly, more impassioned than the old democrats, of whom Yavlinsky is typical. The view that the old democrats are past it is very widespread now.

The Union of Right Forces is busy trying to curry favor with the presidential administration by emphasizing that it “has nothing against Putin.” Over the summer Belykh stumped through forty-five regions of the country trying to mobilize people on the right. He failed.

Anybody trying to do anything worthwhile in Russia at the moment is moving toward the left. Khodorkovsky is correct, although all the democrats condemned his thoughts from prison. Russia's Left March is a fait accompli, which also rules out any Russian Orange Revolution. There will be no splendid revolutionary breakthrough with oranges, tulips, or roses in Russia.

Our revolution, if it comes, will be red, because the Communists are almost the most democratic force in the country, and because it will be bloody. The Orange Revolution in Ukraine brought all our democrats and liberals together for a time, but subsequently it divided them all even more. In their place, like a carbuncle, has come the presidential administration's “democratic” Nashi movement.

The threat of a bloody revolution comes today from the state authorities
themselves, or possibly from oppositionists who lose their cool when confronted by Nashi. As things stand, the color of any revolution in Russia will be red, and nobody can be sure that Surkov's street-fighting Nashists will not turn their knuckle-dusters and chains against their present political masters.

AM I AFRAID?