A Russian Diary (9 page)

Now, as it is almost time for the Kremlin chimes to ring out at midnight, a final thought for the year. Why are so many people emigrating? In the past year, the number of our citizens applying to live in the West has increased by 56 percent. According to the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Russia is ahead of every other country in the world in terms of the number of its citizens seeking to emigrate.

January 4, 2004

The conference of the Party of Life confirms Sergey Mironov as its presidential candidate. He repeats that he hopes Putin will win.

Mironov is one of a number of props for the candidacy of Putin. Leaving nothing to chance is one of the main features of this campaign. Why are they so worried?

In the Chechen village of Berkat-Yurt, Russian soldiers have abducted Khasan Chalaev, who works for the Chechen militia. His whereabouts are unknown.

January 5

Putin holds a cabinet meeting. “We need to explain the government's priorities to the Duma deputies,” he insists repeatedly. He is not in a good mood. The Rose Revolution* has triumphed in Georgia and [Mikhail] Saakashvili* is celebrating victory. Provisional results suggest he gained about 85 percent of the vote. This is a wake-up call to the heads of the other countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States.* All those sitting around the table with Putin are well aware of this. There is a limit to how long you can trample people underfoot. When they really want change, there is nothing you can do to stop it. Is this what they are afraid of?

January 6

The final day for presidential candidates to lodge their documents. Kharitonov, Malyshkin, Gerashchenko, and Mironov have been proposed by parties in the Duma. There are now six independent candidates (Putin, Khakamada, Glaziev, Rybkin, Aksentiev, and Bryntsalov). Khaka-mada has problems with her right-wing political colleagues. Neither the Union of Right Forces nor Yabloko is in any hurry to support her or help with the collection of signatures. This makes her something of an outcast, which in itself might make Russians vote for her. We like pariahs, but we also like winners. People admire Putin for the way he manages to cheat everybody else. Those in the middle lose out.

This is the night before the Russian Orthodox Christmas, when people traditionally give presents and do good deeds (although not in public). Putin flew by helicopter to Suzdal. He has an election to win, so his personal life is public property. In Suzdal he walked around the ancient churches, listened to the singing of the novices in one of the convents, and posed for the television cameras and, no doubt, the press pack at the beginning of the Christmas service. The television shot was arranged to show Putin alone with the simple village congregation of little children
and local women in their headscarves. Not a bodyguard in sight. He crossed himself. Thank God, there is progress in the world; he crosses himself very competently nowadays.

Another Russian tradition is that those at the top and bottom of our society might as well be living on different planets. Exhibiting Putin among ordinary people at Christmastime does not mean life will change for them. I set off to see the most underprivileged of all in a place where none of the elite set foot: Psycho-Neurological Orphanage No. 25 on the outskirts of Moscow.

Moscow's outskirts are not like the city center, which nowadays is improbably opulent. The outskirts are quiet and hungry. Here there are no benefactors with toys and gifts, books and Pampers. Not even at Christmas.

“Let's go to see the children,” says the wise Lidia Slevak, director of this orphanage for the very smallest children, in a tone that suggests this will answer all my questions.

Little Danila is sticking out like a candle from the adult arms of a caregiver. He seems to be with you, in that he has almost put his arms around you, but also not with you, lonely, distant. The world has passed him by, he is on his own. He holds his thin little back very straight, like a yogi. His shock of fair curly hair is like the candle's flame. The slightest breeze wafting in through the door from the corridor makes his silken locks flicker. He is a Christmas miracle, an angel.

The only question is: to whom does this angel belong? Nobody is allowed to adopt him because of our idiotic laws. Danila's official status is a problem to which there is no solution. His natural mother did not officially renounce her maternal rights before running away. The militia are supposed to track her down, but they have more important things to worry about. This means that he cannot be adopted, even though he is such a little wonder. The sooner he is adopted, the better his chances in life will be, the sooner he will recover and will forget all that has happened to him. But the state too has more important things to worry about.

The surroundings here are warm and clean, as in a good nursery. A sign above the door tells us that the group to which Danila and eleven other little boys and girls belong is called the Baby Starlings. Their patient
caregivers are kind, very tired, overworked women. Everything here is good, except that the children don't cry. They are silent or they howl. There is no laughter to be heard. When he is not grinding his teeth, fifteen-month-old Danila is silent, peering attentively at the strangers who have arrived. He does not look at you as you would expect of a fifteen-month-old baby; he peers straight into your eyes, like an FSB interrogator. He has catastrophically limited experience of human tenderness.

It is the night before Christmas in the orphanage on Yeletskaya Street and a Christmas present has just been delivered. His name is Dmitry Dmitrievich and he has severe liver and kidney insufficiency. He was born in December 2002 and in May 2003 his mother “forgot” him in the entrance to an apartment building. Amazingly enough, the militia managed to track her down and she wrote out the necessary declaration: “I apply to renounce my parental rights.”

Dmitry Dmitrievich has been brought to the orphanage from the hospital. He has spent half his life in intensive care and now has no hair on the back of his head. It has rubbed off because he has always been lying on his back. The new boy in the group sits in a special baby walker and studies this unfamiliar place. There are rattles and toys in front of him, but Dmitry Dmitrievich seems more interested in people. He examines the consultant. He wants to take a good look at her but does not yet know how to work his little legs, which, since he's been bedridden for so long, are not helping him to turn the baby walker to face Lidiya Konstanti-novna. She doesn't intervene. She wants him to learn how to get what he wants.

“Come on, Dmitry Dmitrievich,” she says. “Take a grip on life! Fight back!”

Unaided, Dmitry Dmitrievich does fight back, and a few minutes later he has won and is facing Lidiya Konstantinovna.

“What kind of work do you feel you are doing here? The work of Mother Teresa, or of someone who has to clean up after our society? Or do you just feel very sorry for these children?”

“The children do not need pity,” Lidiya says. “That is the most important lesson I have learned. They need help. We are helping them to survive. Because of the work we do they can hope to find foster parents. I
and my staff never refer to this as an orphanage in front of them. We call it a nursery so that later, in a quite different life if they are adopted, the children will not have even a subconscious memory of having once been in an orphanage.”

“You are working so that the children entrusted to your care should be adopted?”

“Yes, of course. That is the most important thing I can do for them.”

“What do you think about adoption by foreigners? Our patriotic politicians demand that we put a stop to it.”

“I think adoption by foreigners is a very good thing. There are some horror stories about Russian foster families too, only they don't get mentioned. Right now there is talk of withdrawing one of our children from his Russian foster parents. He will be coming back to us. Another problem is that Russian foster parents will not take children from the same family. Foreigners are happy to do that, which means that brothers and sisters are not separated. That is very important. We had a family of six children adopted in America. Natasha, the youngest of the six, was brought in to us wrapped in a piece of wallpaper. Her four-year-old brother wrapped her up in that to keep her from freezing because there was nothing else in the house to use. So what is bad about the fact that all six of them are now in the United States? I feel very happy when I look at the photograph I was sent from there. Nobody would believe the state they were in here. Only we remember that. In the past year, fifteen of the twenty-six children who have been adopted from our orphanage have been taken by foster parents from abroad, mainly from the USA and Spain. There were three pairs of brothers and sisters. Russian people just wouldn't take them.”

“They didn't want to or they couldn't afford to?”

“They didn't want to. And, as a rule, rich people in Russia don't adopt children at all.”

What kind of people will they grow up to be, the way our country has turned out now?

The wave of charitable giving in Russia came to a stop in 2002 when the Putin administration revoked tax privileges for charities. Until 2002,
children in our orphanages were showered with gifts and New Year's presents. Now the rich no longer give them presents. Pensioners bring them their old, tattered shawls.

The World Bank has a special program called A Chance to Work, which gives disadvantaged children work experience and an opportunity to learn valuable job skills. If anyone did that in our society they would most likely be viewed with suspicion. “What's in it for them?” the neighbors would wonder.

It is the orphans themselves who show compassion. Nadya left the orphanage when she was too old to remain, and was allocated a room by the local authority as the law requires. She promptly moved in four other orphans. Completely unfamiliar with the ways of the world, they had exchanged their own rooms for mobile phones and had found themselves on the street.

Now Nadya is feeding them, but she is penniless. None of them can find work. Hers is true charity. She can see no point in trying to approach the banks and other wealthy institutions. They wouldn't let her past security.

Meanwhile, our nouveaux riches are skiing this Christmas in Courchevel. More than two thousand Russians, each earning over half a million rubles [$17,400] a month, congregate there for the “saison russe” in the Swiss Alps. The menu offers eight kinds of oysters, the wine list includes bottles at 1,500 euros [$1,980], and in the retinue of every nouveau riche you can be sure of finding the government officials, our true oligarchs, who deliver these vast incomes to the favored two thousand. Not a word is heard in the televised Christmas reports from Courchevel about hard work having led to the amassing of these fortunes. The talk is of success, of the moment when everything just fell into place, of the firebird of happiness caught by its tail feathers, of being trusted by the state authorities. The “charity” of officialdom, otherwise known as corruption, is the quickest route to Courchevel. It is a modern version of the tale of Ivan the Fool, who just couldn't be poor, no matter how badly his brothers cheated him: just pay the Kremlin and riches and power will come your way.

January 8

Zhirinovsky's bodyguard has been registered by the Central Electoral Commission as the first candidate in 2004 for the presidency of Russia. Hip-hip-hooray! Zhirinovsky has power of attorney over Malyshkin.

In Krasnoyarsk Region the peasants are being paid in sick calves. The potentate ruling over this region is the oligarch closest to Putin, indeed his representative there, Vladimir Potanin. No wages have been paid in cash at the dairy farm in Ustyug for over three years; the peasants are given calves instead. All the machinery has been sold off to settle debts. The vet was fired long ago, so there is nobody to look after the ailing calves.

January 9

This really is a first for us. The pupils of the International Orphanage in Ivanovo are on hunger strike. The orphanage was founded in 1933 to provide for children from many different countries whose parents were in the prisons of “states with reactionary or fascist regimes.”

The children are demanding that the International Orphanage be left alone, not broken up and privatized and the building sold. (They were successful.)

January 10

In the Chechen village of Avtury unidentified soldiers have abducted the human rights campaigner Aslan Davletukaev from his home. The kidnappers drove up in three armored personnel carriers and two armored UAZ jeeps.

January 13

Today is Russian Press Day. In anticipation, the ROMIR public opinion survey asked people, “Which social institutions do you most trust?” Nine percent trust the media; 1 percent trust political parties, 50 percent trust
Putin, 28 percent trust nobody, and 14 percent trust the Russian Orthodox Church. The government and the army scored 9 percent each. Local government and the trade unions scored 3 percent, and the law enforcement agencies managed 5 percent. People were, of course, at liberty to trust more than one institution. Some did.

Victims of the terrorist acts of recent years have sent an open letter to all the presidential candidates. It reads:

The presidential election is a time for reviewing the past and for the outgoing authorities to account for what they have been up to while in office. There must be few people in Russia who have suffered more in this period than we. We lost those dear to us when apartment buildings were blown up in 1999 and when the theater on Dubrovka was seized by terrorists in 2002. We call upon you to include investigation of these terrorist acts in your manifestos.

… We would like to know what each of you will do if elected. Will you set up genuine, independent, and impartial inquiries, or will the conspiracy of silence surrounding the deaths of our loved ones continue? We have tried in vain to obtain credible explanations from the state authorities. The present president of the Russian Federation was under an obligation to reply, not only by virtue of his position, but simply as a matter of conscience. The deaths of our loved ones were, after all, directly related to his political career and to decisions made by him. The blowing up of apartment buildings persuaded the Russian people to support his hard line on Chechnya during the last presidential election, and he personally gave the order to use gas in Dubrovka.