Death of a Dissident (44 page)

I was not yet convinced, but Sasha and Boris were excited beyond belief. I sensed the thrill in their voices whenever I spoke with them by phone. I could not quite understand it, based on the evidence uncovered so far.

I began to understand their excitement only when they separately made one nearly identical comment.

“Imagine their faces when they read this in Kontora,” said Sasha.

“I’d give a lot to see Volodya’s face when he reads it,” said Boris.

For them the book was not aimed at the general public; it was not supposed to prove anything. It was a personal message to their nemeses, a declaration of war: We think you did it, and we are out to get you. Indeed, I thought, never mind that the book was hardly a best seller; if the FSB had, in fact, blown up those houses, the book would create havoc in the Kremlin and perhaps provoke a reaction that would become a proof in itself.

It has become a cliché to say that September 11, 2001, changed everything, yet for many things in Russia, which had nothing to do with Osama bin Laden, the cliché held true. In exchange for support of the American war on terror, Putin got what may have ultimately saved his presidency: U.S. acquiescence to his war in Chechnya and the dismantling of Russian democracy. After the attacks, Boris and I went to Washington as soon as we could. The news that Putin had become an American ally was told to us by Tom Graham, the senior Russia hand in the Bush administration, who was then on the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department. It was clear to me that from now on, we would be viewed in Washington as the enemy of a friend.

“Volodya is so fucking lucky,” said Boris when we were leaving the State Department building. “If there was no bin Laden, he should have invented him. I wonder whether the Americans understand that he is not their friend at all. He will play them and the Muslims against each other, exploring every weakness to his advantage.”

After nearly a year of pleading to the Brits for forgiveness for smuggling Sasha into the UK I was allowed to return. I got to London just in time for the event that I had been planning from my New York exile: the launch of a campaign to remind the Western world about
the 1999 apartment block bombings. On December 14, 2001, the Union of Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers, the largest NGO in Russia, held a conference in Moscow on the war in Chechnya sponsored by the IFCL. Soldiers’ Mothers came from all over Russia. The hall was packed with international journalists, and it was expected that Boris would address the gathering via teleconference from London. It was his first, albeit virtual, appearance in Moscow since he went into exile more than a year earlier.

Boris used the occasion to state that after reading Sasha’s book, he had become convinced that the Moscow apartment houses were blown up by the FSB. As a result, the foreign press jumped on the story for the first time. Perhaps it was the audience of soldiers’ mothers that did it. Their children were dying in Chechnya, and they seemed to accept the claim as perfectly plausible; no one in the hall raised any objection. Or it could have been the fact that the bombings were retroactively cast as Russia’s 9÷11. Or maybe it was the drama of a fugitive oligarch accusing a president of mass murder. Whatever the reason, Boris’s statement primed a PR avalanche.

The
New York Times’
bureau chief came from Moscow to London to interview Boris, and then traveled to Ryazan to recap the story of the foiled attack there, producing two front-page articles within a week.
Time
magazine compared the Putin-Berezovsky contest to that of Stalin and Trotsky. Then, on March 5, in a packed hall in London, Boris presided over the world premiere of the documentary
Assassination of Russia
. The film was made by two French producers who had initially worked with NTV to expand the “Sugar of Ryazan” program. When NTV was taken over by Gazprom and its journalists defected to TV-6, the project traveled with them. In January 2002, however, the authorities closed TV-6. Boris lost his remaining voice on Russia’s airwaves, and the film, 70 percent completed, hung in limbo. The producers came to Boris to finance the remaining work. From that moment Sasha and Felshtinsky became the film’s principal consultants.

Leaders of Liberal Russia, Sergey Yushenkov and Yuli Rybakov, flew in from Moscow specifically for the premiere. They said they planned to promote the film around the world “to expose the government
cover-up of the horrific crime that led to war.” Admittedly, the film did not present any new facts, but in the words of
Kommersant
, “For the first time, the filmmakers collected all the facts and minor details related to the Ryazan case, placed them chronologically,” and put them in the context of “some controversial testimony and statements made by the highest officials, including then-Prime Minister Putin.”

The London screening was an opening shot in a campaign planned by Yushenkov as a principal theme for the new party.

“The evidence contained in the film is rather persuasive,” declared Yushenkov, as he distributed copies among reporters who met him at Sheremetievo Airport upon return from London. “It demonstrates how the secret services deceived Russian citizens.” He announced that Liberal Russia would distribute copies of the film around the country. Hopefully, “a television channel can be found that is not afraid to show the film,” he told Radio Echo Moscow. He added that screenings at movie theaters were also planned.

From the outset, the FSB mounted a fierce campaign to block the film. Rybakov brought a hundred copies from London to St. Petersburg, but they were confiscated at Customs, in violation of his parliamentary immunity. He later received death threats. His staff members, who organized screenings around St. Petersburg, were harassed and beaten by strangers. Alexander Kostarev, a member of the Liberal Russia governing council, was severely beaten on the street in Perm after he arranged a public screening. No TV station in Russia dared to show the film. However, the main channels in the three former Soviet Baltic republics, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, showed it, under IFCL sponsorship.

In the meantime, Russian video pirates sniffed the money that was to be made; there was a growing demand for the film on the street. The pirates eagerly accepted a couple of master tapes quietly provided by the IFCL and filled the outdoor markets and railway station kiosks with tens of thousands of copies of
Assassination of Russia
, making it an underground best seller. In early April, Liberal Russia
deputies distributed copies of the film in the Duma. Everyone wanted to have it, even though the deputies promptly voted down a motion to set up a parliamentary investigation of the 1999 bombings.

On April 14, Agence France-Presse reported the results of a poll by Russia’s public opinion research center: 6 percent of the respondents said they were sure that the FSB staged the bombings; 37 percent refused to rule out the possibility; 38 percent did not believe the allegation, but only 16 percent were completely convinced that the bombs were planted by Chechen rebels; 39 percent insisted that the allegations should be thoroughly investigated. Over half said that Berezovsky’s film should be broadcast on Russian television.

As paradoxical as these results seemed, we nonetheless counted them as a success beyond our expectations. We had not placed a single ad. The coverage in the government-controlled newscasts was openly hostile. The allegations themselves ascribed an unimaginable monstrosity to the government that, according to the same opinion polls, enjoyed overwhelming popularity. The majority of respondents had neither seen the film nor read the book. Yet everybody had heard of the charges, and almost half accepted Boris’s and Sasha’s claims as credible.

The Russian national psyche is deeply conflicted at its heart. There is a medieval streak of masochism in Russians’ attitude to their
vlast
, which they perceive as divine and fearsome, something that is reflected in the reverence accorded such historical tyrants as Ivan the Terrible (“terrible” is an ambiguous translation of the Russian; a better choice would be the affectionate “awesome”).

In a brilliant analysis of this phenomenon in an article about the film in
Time
magazine, Moscow correspondent Yuri Zarakhovich compared the apartment bombings to the famous episode in Russian history when Boris Godunov, the head of the Kremlin’s secret police, was voted by the Boyars to succeed the heirless Czar Fyodor, the son of Ivan the Awesome. Godunov’s electoral triumph was marred by the allegation that he had cleared his way to the throne by murdering the infant nephew of Fyodor, a grandson of Ivan who might have
claimed the throne. The allegation haunted Godunov throughout his reign, in spite of extensive propaganda efforts that he introduced: he “forced Russians to chant a daily prayer to him, while secret police kept hunting for signs of any sedition, and enticed people to squeal.” Eventually, the country’s economic situation deteriorated, and the fable of the murdered infant became the driving force of a popular uprising.

“Unlike allegations of complicity in one innocent child’s murder back in the 17th century, claims of involvement in 247 innocent deaths will hardly bring the regime down now, not after all the millions of such deaths in modern Russian history,” wrote Zarakhovich. “Still, the worse things become, the more people will talk. One day, the talk might grow into a roar once again.”