A Russian Diary Read online

  “We are mature enough now to found a party,” says Valentina Mel-nikova, chairperson of the organizing committee. “We have been talking about it within the movement for a long time, but previously we could call on the support of the Union of Right Forces and Yabloko in our campaign for reform of the army, to help soldiers, for the abolition of conscription and legislative initiatives. Yavlinsky and Nemtsov were still players, but now everything is in ruins. We're standing amid a political Hiroshima, but we still have problems that need to be resolved. There is nobody left for us to turn to, nobody on whom we can pin our hopes. All the present political parties are a continuation of the Kremlin by other means. You half suspect that the Duma deputies scuttle off every morning to Red Square to receive their instructions from the Lenin Mausoleum, and then go away to do as they have been bid. That is why we have decided to form a party ourselves.”

  The Party of Soldiers’ Mothers, then, is a party of desperation, born of the complete political hopelessness that is the sum total of the last four dismal years. In an era when everything is under the Kremlin's control, this is a straightforward grass-roots initiative, which has appeared without the benefit of “administrative resources,” in which Vladislav Surkov, Russia's ubiquitous political fixer, has been allowed absolutely no part.

  The decision to create the party was made very simply: after the Duma elections, women from Miass, Nizhny Novgorod, Sochi, and Nizhny Tagil called the Moscow office of the League of Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers. The committees in these cities were the driving force behind the creation of a new political party.

  The remnants of Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces are, of course, a sorry spectacle, but a concomitant is the appearance of public initiatives from deeply committed people with an immense dissident potential. Putin wants everything close cropped, but from his coppicing of the opposition something positive is sprouting. A time for new initiatives is coming. The devastation of the political arena emboldens those who refuse to live under the old Soviet clichés and intend to fight. In order to survive in enemy territory, when no one else will fight for you, you have to summon up your resolve and start fighting for yourself. In the language of the soldiers’ mothers, that means fighting for the lives of soldiers against the army recruitment machine that devours them.

  The last straw was an incident involving Ida Kuklina and Putin. Ida has been working for ten years in the Moscow committee and is now even a member of the Presidential Commission on Human Rights. She had put a lot of energy into getting the pension raised for conscripts who have been reduced to the state of Category 1 invalids (the current pension is 1,400 rubles, or around $49 a month). Category 1 invalids are amputees and those bedridden with spinal injuries or confined to wheelchairs.

  Ida Kuklina handed a petition to Putin personally at one of the meetings of his commission. He wrote a generally encouraging, if not very specific, recommendation on it—“The question is posed correctly. Putin”—and forwarded it to the government and the pensions department.

  The deputy prime minister for social welfare, Galina Karelova, responded tartly that there would be a revolt of the disabled if the attempt was made to raise the level of pensions for conscripts who had just been crippled to the level of ex-servicemen disabled during the Second World War or the Afghan and other local wars. That, Karelova opined, would be unethical.

  Ida again approached Putin, again received a positive response, and was again turned down by the officials. This happened three times in succession. It was at this point the mothers decided that the only solution was to become legislators themselves. The intention is to have deputies from the Party of Soldiers’ Mothers in the Duma after the parliamentary elections in 2007.

  “Who will be the leader of your new party? Are you going to invite some clued-up politician?”

  “One of our own people,” Valentina Melnikova replies emphatically.

  While I was speaking to the soldiers’ mothers about the future, we heard about a fresh atrocity within the army. Pvt. Alexander Sobakaev was brutally tortured in the Dzerzhinsky special operations division of the Interior Ministry's troops. His family last heard his cheerful voice on the telephone late in the evening of January 3. Alexander, not quite twenty years old, was in his second year in the army, already a lance corporal and dog handler in the sapper battalion. He called to say that everything was fine. They recalled the day they had seen him off to the army, and laughed at the thought that they would soon be celebrating his return. That very night, in the early hours of January 4, if we are to believe the documents that accompanied the zinc coffin, Alexander hanged himself using his own belt, and “there were no suspicious circumstances.” On January 11 his body was brought home to the tiny forest village of Velvo-Baza, 180 miles from Perm. The representatives of his division, who brought the coffin, explained to his parents that “it was suicide.” There was no coroner's certificate. The parents did not believe this and demanded that the coffin be opened. The first to back off in horror were his service colleagues. Alexander's body was not only covered in bruises and razor cuts, but the skin and muscles on his wrists were cut to the bone, baring the tendons. A doctor from the local hospital was asked to come and, in the presence of the local militiaman, a cameraman, a CID photographer, and officers from the district military commissariat, recorded that this mutilation had occurred while Alexander was still alive.

  The parents refused to bury their son, demanding an inquiry. His mother stayed home, but his father went straight to Moscow to the Dzerzhinsky special operations division and to the capital's newspapers. That is how the outrage came to light.

  Putin did not react on this occasion. Indeed, if he were to react to every atrocity in the army he would be doing so almost every day and the electorate would start to wonder why these occurrences were so common, and why the commander in chief—i.e., Putin—hadn't done anything about it before.

  Accordingly, no attempt was made to track down Alexander's killers. The military procurator's office did everything in its power to ensure that the truth remained hidden. Alexander fared less well than Volodya Ber-yozin, for whose death from cold and starvation officers will appear in court, thanks only to the fact that Putin's election campaign had just begun, and that he got his hands on the story first.

  Alexander's death is not being investigated with any urgency. Although his parents refused to bury the body of their son until an independent inquiry made public the truth about his death, this was refused. The family ran out of money to pay for keeping his body in the Kudymkar district mortuary, and Alexander was buried as a suicide. How many more of our sons will have to be sacrificed before a great joint campaign by the public sees this army reformed root and branch? It is a question that refuses to go away.

  Do we see a change in the mood of society, a civil society beginning timorously to emerge from the kitchens of Russia in the same way that, after a purge in Chechnya, people very quietly, very cautiously creep out of their cellars and bolt-holes?

  As of yet, no, although many are beginning to realize what people in Chechnya have realized after being subjected to the “antiterrorist operation”: you have to rely on yourself if you want to survive; you have to defend yourself if nobody else will. The rampaging of the bureaucracy is more out of control than ever after the triumph of their United Russia Party, and there are still far too few public initiatives.

  As election day approaches, the television news bulletins increasingly resemble heartening dispatches on Putin's achievements. The greater part of the news is taken up with bureaucrats reporting to Putin in front of the cameras, but without any semblance of independent commentary. Today, Sergey Ignatiev, the chairman of Tsentrobank, was briefing him on the improbable growth of the gold and currency reserves.

  To the accompaniment of a lot of political chatter about the welfare of the people, the Fourth Duma is passing lobbyist-driven legislation even more blatantly than the Third Duma. There is, for example, a proposal for a significant reduc
tion of value-added tax for estate agents. This is simply laughable, because estate agents in Russia are millionaires. Nobody raises the matter in the mass media, although they whisper about it a good deal. Journalists practice rigorous self-censorship. They don't even propose such stories to their newspapers or the television stations, certain in advance that their bosses will ax them.

  The Eighth World Gathering of the People of Russia has ended. It was touted as the big event of February and almost resembled a congress of the United Russia Party, with all the top government bureaucrats turning up. Funnily enough, though, nobody can remember when the Seventh World Gathering took place.

  At the gathering the president's oligarch banker, Sergey Pugachev, sat at the right hand of the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church. Pugachev is one of the Putin oligarchs who replaced the Yeltsin oligarchs, and the government even goes so far as to refer to him as “a Russian Orthodox banker.” At Pugachev's instance, the gathering adopted an odd kind of Ten Commandments for businessmen, called A Code of Moral Rules and Principles for the Conduct of Business.

  The code pontificates on matters such as wealth and poverty, nationalization, tax evasion, advertising, and profit. One of the commandments informs us that “wealth is not an end in itself. It should serve to create a goodly life for the individual and the people.” Another warns that “in misappropriating property, failing to respect communal property, not giving fair recompense to a worker for his labor, or deceiving a business partner, a person transgresses the moral law, harming society and himself.” Moreover, on the subject of tax evasion, not paying one's dues is “stealing from orphans, the aged, the disabled, and others least able to protect themselves.

  “Transferring part of one's income through taxation to provide for the needs of society should be transformed from a burdensome obligation grudgingly fulfilled, and sometimes not fulfilled at all, into a matter of honor, deserving of the gratitude of society.” On the poor: “The poor man is also under an obligation to behave worthily, to strive to labor efficiently, to raise his vocational skills in order to rise out of his impoverished condition.” Again: “The worship of wealth is incompatible with moral rectitude.”

  The code contains allusions to Khodorkovsky, and to Berezovsky and Gusinsky “There should be separation of political from economic power. The involvement of business in politics and its influence on public opinion must always be transparent and open. All material assistance given by business to political parties, public organizations, and the mass media must be publicly known and monitored. Clandestine support of this nature deserves to be publicly condemned as immoral.”

  In that case, of course, the entire election campaign of United Russia was immoral, as is the fact that Putin's oligarch is a senator.

  All this is intended to reinforce the idea that it is right and honorable to be a “good” businessman in Putin's pocket, but that if you try to be independent you are bad and must be destroyed. The code is manifestly anti-Yukos. Although it is supposedly voluntary, it is, like everything in Russia nowadays, “compulsorily voluntary.” You don't have to join United Russia, but, if you don't, your career as an official is going nowhere. Metropolitan Kirill, tipped as the successor of the rapidly declining and constantly ailing patriarch, conducted the session when the code was discussed. He said quite openly, “We will go to everybody and invite them to sign. If any refuse to sign, we shall make sure that their names become known to all.” Some priest!

  In any case, who is preaching this morality to us? That same Russian Orthodox Church that gives its blessing to the war in Chechnya, to arms trading, and to the fratricide in the North Caucasus. The adoption of this code of moral principles for businessmen is an extraordinary bid by the Russian Orthodox Church, which is disestablished, to involve itself in internal and foreign policy. The RUIE commented that “The Church itself needs to be reformed. Its own stagnation is the reason that it comes out with such bizarre fancies.”

  Viktor Vekselberg, one of the oligarchs rumored to be next in line for imprisonment by Putin, has suddenly announced he is buying the collection of Fabergé Easter eggs that belonged to the family of our last emperor, Nicholas II. Nobody doubts that Vekselberg is simply trying to ransom his way out of trouble by demonstrating that he is “on the side of Russia,” which the administration accepts as a coded way of saying “on the side of Vladimir Vladimirovich.”

  Vekselberg insists that “the return of these treasures to Russia is something personal to me. I want my family my son and daughter, to have a different understanding of their place in life. I want big business to participate intelligently in public works. I am not seeking advantage, proving anything to anybody, or whitewashing anything.”

  The oligarch doth protest too much, methinks.

  February 5

  In Cheremkhovo, in Irkutsk Province, seventeen workers of the No. I Sector Communal Residential Services Office have gone on hunger strike. They are demanding payment of their wages, which are six months in arrears. They are owed a total of about two million rubles [$70,000]. They are following the example of their colleagues in another sector who had to go on hunger strike at their workplace for only three days to get their wages paid.

  In Moscow, there has been a meeting of Open Forum, an event attended by political analysts; not necessarily the main ones, but reputable people who have been involved as political advisers in all the national and regional elections. They agreed on one important matter: in the four years of Putin's rule, the modernizing of Russia has been sidelined by the goal of strengthening the power of one individual. Those associated with him are neither a class nor a party, just people who are “in step with Putin.” The analysts also agreed that the model of a managed democracy does not work.

  February 6

  8:32 a.m. Three months after the terrorist attack outside the Nationale Hotel, there has been an explosion in the Moscow Metro, at the interchange between the Paveletskaya and Avtozavodskaya-Zamoskvoretskaya lines. The train was heading into the city center during the rush hour when a bomb exploded beside the first door of the second carriage. The device had been placed 6 inches above floor level in a bag. After the explosion the train's momentum carried it a further 330 yards and a fierce fire broke out. Thirty people died at the scene, and another 9 died later from their burns. There are 140 injured. There are dozens of tiny unidentifiable fragments of bodies. More than 700 people emerged from the tunnel, having evacuated themselves in the absence of any assistance. In the streets there is chaos and fear, the wailing sirens of the emergency services, millions of people terrorized.

  At 10:44 the Volcano-5 Contingency Plan for capturing the culprits was implemented, more than two hours after the explosion. Who do they think they are going to catch? If there were any accomplices they will have fled long ago. At 12:12 the police started searching for a man aged thirty to thirty-five, “of Caucasian appearance.” Very helpful. At 1:30 Va-lerii Shantsev, the acting mayor of Moscow while Luzhkov is in the USA, announced that the victims’ families will receive 100,000 rubles [$3,479] in compensation, and the injured will be paid half that amount.

  Terrorists with explosives can move around Moscow without hindrance, despite the extraordinary powers granted to the FSB and militia, and still the people support Putin. No one suggests a change of policy in Chechnya, despite the ten terrorist acts involving suicide bombers in the past year. Red Square is now almost permanently closed to visitors. The Palestinization of Chechnya is obvious. An hour after the explosion a statement was issued by the “Movement Against Illegal Immigration,” an organization created by the security forces. Its leader, Alexander Belov, declared:

  Our first demand is to forbid Chechens to travel outside Chechnya. To this day in the USA and Canada there are special reservations set aside for awkward peoples. If an ethnic group does not want to live like civilized human beings, let them live behind a barrier. Call it what you like: a reservation, a pale. We need somehow to defend ourselves. We can no longer pretend that
the Chechens, of whom the majority are linked in one way or another with the Chechen resistance, are citizens in the same sense as Chuvashes, Buryats, Karelians, or Russians. For them this is a continuation of the war. They are taking revenge. The Chechen diaspora in Russia, including Chechen businessmen, are a hotbed of terrorism. I am only saying what 80 percent of Russians think.

  He is right. That is exactly what the majority thinks. Society is moving toward fascism.

  Only a few members of the state authorities continue even trying to think. Gen. Boris Gromov, the governor of Moscow Province and a Hero of the Soviet Union for service in Afghanistan, spoke out: “When I heard about the explosion in the Metro, my first thought was that all this began back in Afghanistan. The decision of the leaders of the USSR to send troops to Afghanistan was irresponsible in the extreme, as was the later decision of the leaders of Russia to send troops to Chechnya. These are the fruits of those decisions. They said they were going after gangsters, but entirely innocent people are now suffering as a result. This will continue for a long time into the future.”

  On the state television channels they keep drumming into people that terrorism is a disease of liberal democracy: if you want democracy, you must expect terrorist acts. They somehow overlook the fact that Putin has been in power for the past four years.

  Putin, despite the explosion, is having talks with the president of Azerbaijan, Ilkham Aliev, who is in Moscow. Putin merely mentioned in passing, “I wouldn't be surprised if this were to be exploited in the runup to the election as a means of putting pressure on the current head of state. There is a marked coincidence between the explosion and the fact that plans for peace in Chechnya are again being put to us from abroad. Our refusal to conduct negotiations of any kind with terrorists …”