A Russian Diary Read online

  No doubt the Grachev effect was in play here too. Rybkin, thank God, was not murdered, but only because to have the angel of death intervening so blatantly in the election would have worked against the interests of Candidate No. 1.

  These are the kinds of criminal goings-on, complete with psycho-tropic drugs, that we get when one candidate, who happens to be the current president, is simply incapable of performing in preelection debates, is incapable of discussion, is irrationally afraid of opposition, and, moreover, has come to believe in his own messianism. We are not so stupid as to believe that Rybkin was running away from his wife.

  To all appearances, then, Rybkin had relatively little compromising material. The soap opera had no further episodes. Everybody forgot about him, including Putin. The end result, crucially for a society short of alternatives, was that Rybkin failed to confront the regime publicly.

  Throughout January, people were being abducted in Chechnya, only for their bodies to be found later. The number of those abducted is comparable to the number killed on February 6 in the Moscow Metro. In Chechnya, everyone is at war with everybody else. There are armed men everywhere, the so-called Chechen security forces. The commonest expression on people's faces is gloom. There are large numbers of half-insane, traumatized adults. Children, who resemble children only in their physical appearance, make their way to school. The armored personnel carriers plow arrogantly past, and from them soldiers point their submachine guns at you as contemptuously as ever. Those they look down on look up, no less unforgivingly, at them. At night there are firefights, “softening up” by artillery bombardment, battles, and bombing in the foothills. In the morning there are fresh shell craters. It is a war in stalemate. Do we want an end to it, or are we actually not all that bothered?

  There has not been a single sizable demonstration against the war in Chechnya during the entire presidential election campaign. The unbelievable long suffering of our people is what allows the horror that is Putin to continue. One can find no other explanation.

  Why has nobody come forward to “claim” responsibility for the explosion in the Metro on February 6? There are two possible explanations:

  Either the intelligence forces were behind the explosion, no matter whose hands they used, which would explain the absence of demands or admissions of responsibility;

  Or individual terrorists were involved in an act of personal vengeance for relatives who had been killed, for the trampling underfoot of their honor and their homeland. This is as shameful and depressing an explanation as that involving the complicity of the intelligence services.

  February 12

  Putin is raising the remuneration of those “working within the zone of the antiterrorist operation” by 250 percent. Perhaps this will lead to less looting in Chechnya.

  Rybkin is still flapping. He has flown to London to consult Berezovsky. He seems determined to complete his political implosion in full public view. Why is it so easy in Russia to put down democratic opposition? It is something in the opposition themselves. It is not that what they are confronting is too strong, although of course that is a factor. The main thing is that the opposition lacks an unflinching determination to oppose. Berezovsky is a mere gambler, not a fighter, and those who line up with him are no fighters, either. Nemtsov is just playing games, and Yavlinsky always looks as if something has offended him.

  Alexander Litvinenko in London and Oleg Kalugin in Washington, former KGB/FSB officers who have been granted political asylum in the West, have suggested that a psychotropic substance called SP117 may have been used on Rybkin. This compound was used in the FSB's coun-terintelligence sections and in units combating terrorism, but only in exceptional cases on “important targets.” SP117 is a truth drug that operates on specific parts of the brain in order to prevent an individual from having full possession of his mind. He will tell everything he knows. According to Litvinenko, “When somebody is under the influence of SP117, you can do anything you like with them and they will be incapable of remembering in detail or explaining coherently what happened, whom they met, or what they said. SP117 consists of two components, the dote and the antidote. First they administer the dote. Two drops are added to any beverage, and some fifteen minutes after taking it the victim completely loses control of himself, possibly for several hours. The effect can be extended by administering additional small amounts of the dote. When the necessary information has been extracted, the victim is given the antidote, two pills dissolved in water, tea, or coffee. After roughly ten minutes he returns to normality. There is a complete loss of memory. He feels shattered. If the drug has been administered over several days, the individual may experience panic and shock because that period of his life has been obliterated from his memory, and he will be unable to understand what has happened to him.”

  These statements by Litvinenko and Kalugin will not save the political career of Rybkin. Putin has won this round against Berezovsky, now his sworn enemy, but his great pal in the late 1990s.

  Today, precisely one day after the effective removal of Rybkin from the election race and his declaration that he will not take part in debates, is the official start of the presidential election campaign. Each of the candidates is entitled to four and a half hours of free airtime on television, on state channels, and this allowance must be in the form of live broadcasts. The only person with compromising materials against Putin, Rybkin, has voluntarily turned down the opportunity of appearing on live television. Which is exactly what the Kremlin needed.

  At 2:00 p.m. hours Putin had a meeting in Moscow State University with more than 300 of his aides and supporters. He was giving an account of what he has done during his first term. All the press and TV reporters were invited to be present, but, as the main state television stations emphasized when broadcasting the event, “Putin was speaking as a private individual.” Putin has refused to participate in televised debates, and this speech was as insipid as the reports of general secretaries to Communist Party congresses in the past. His audience in Moscow University woke up as he spoke his last words and clapped like mad.

  In the course of the broadcast one candidate for the presidency therefore spoke his way through nine million rubles’ ($313,000) worth of airtime. The official tariff of the Rossiya channel for 30 seconds of campaign advertising is 90,000 to 166,000 rubles [$3,100-$5,775]. Did Putin pay? It was a flagrant abuse of state resources for electoral advantage and a clear violation of electoral law.

  Six hundred journalists reported the meeting. They were assembled at the press center of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at 9:30 a.m., and registration continued until 12 noon. Everybody was searched before being put on buses. A member of the president's campaign team who looked like, and doubtless was, an FSB stooge, periodically harangued us: “I repeat once more: nobody will ask any questions! Have you all heard that?” The journalists were transported to the meeting in twenty-three green buses with a militia escort, the way in Russia we transport children to a pioneer camp. After the meeting the journalists were herded into the buses again and taken back. No stepping out of line! Was this a private meeting between an individual and his friends to seek ways of ensuring a better future for their country?

  Olga Zastrozhnaya, one of the secretaries of the Central Electoral Commission, stated that this televising of the president's speech was “a direct violation of the rules of electioneering, because the broadcast was unquestionably political campaigning rather than informational.” Alexander Ivanchenko, the director of the Independent Electoral Institute and a previous secretary of the Electoral Commission, commented unambiguously, “Putin's election campaign falls short of civilized election standards. In technical terms there is a delegitimization of electoral procedures. The presidential election should be declared invalid, but the Central Electoral Commission is impotent.”

  There was no public reaction to this. Gleb Pavlovsky, a totally cynical individual, the director of the Effective Politics Foundation and one of the Kremlin's main spi
n doctors, even stated publicly, “The electorate doesn't care who gets how many extra minutes on air!”

  Television continues its brainwashing through upbeat broadcasts. Today Prime Minister Kasianov reported that agricultural production has risen 1.5 percent, and that under Putin all the conditions are now in place for the successful development of Russia's agribusiness. “We are poised to regain our prominent position in the world's grain markets,” Kasianov assured us. It is unlikely that his sycophancy will save him. He will be removed soon. Putin is uncomfortable with politicians left over from the Yeltsin era who remind him of a time when it was he who was a mere puppet, and of the history of how he came to be selected as Yeltsin's successor.

  In the course of the election campaign we have heard that we are world leaders in virtually everything, from arms sales and grain exports to space exploration. So far they are not claiming we are world leaders in car manufacture. High-ranking officials’ backsides have evidently not yet forgotten the experience of riding in our Zhigulis.

  February 13

  Does the Duma have any clout at all? Putin wanted it to elect Vladimir Lukin, a former Yabloko man and well-known liberal, as human rights ombudsman before the presidential election. United Russia pulled out all the stops, and although Rodina and the Communist Party said they would boycott the vote, the appointment went through. Lukin was the only candidate on the ballot; the others were simply excluded. He is delighted. “I very much look forward to working in this area,” he said. But what about those whose rights need to be defended?

  (Lukin was to prove a mediocre ombudsman, lacking in initiative and under the Kremlin's thumb, never straying beyond the bounds of what was permissible. Chechnya, for example, was never one of Lukin's priorities.)

  In Qatar, Zelimkhan Yandarbiev, the former vice president of Chechnya and colleague of Presidents [Dzhokhar] Dudaev and [Aslan] Maskha-dov,* has been killed by a bomb apparently fixed beneath his jeep. He left Chechnya at the beginning of the second Chechen war. This was almost certainly the work of the Russian intelligence agencies—the army's Central Intelligence Directorate or the Federal Security Bureau. Most likely, the former.

  Ivan Rybkin has announced that he will not be returning from London. A defecting presidential candidate is a first in our history. Nobody now has any doubt that the regime drugged him.

  A call to our newspaper's editorial offices, supposedly from “a well-wisher” in the intelligence services. “Pass it on to London, as we know you can, that if Rybkin should produce any compromising material against Putin in television debates, another terrorist act will follow. The president will have to distract the attention of the public somehow.”

  We passed the message on, but Rybkin has already washed his hands of the election. He is in fear for his life.

  Liberal voters seem to be of two minds. Khakamada called a meeting of her supporters in Moscow and I went along. Many people say outright, “If we don't put forward Khakamada we shall have no option but to vote against all of them, or not turn out at all.”

  Rogozin and Glaziev continue to play dangerously on the emotions of those who feel an impaired sense of nationhood.

  February 14

  A new tragedy in Moscow. The roof of the Aqua Park in Yasenevo has collapsed. It happened in the evening when the celebrations of St. Valentine's Day were at their height. Seventy percent of the dome, an area the size of a soccer field, fell in over the swimming pool. Officially, there were 426 people in the Aqua Park, but unofficially it was nearer 1,000. The building is shrouded in steam. People in their swimsuits leaped out into — 4°F of frost. In the worst-affected area there was also a restaurant, a bowling alley, bathhouses, saunas, exercise rooms, and a family area with a warm pool for children. Twenty-six bodies were found immediately, but there are many body parts. The authorities say it was not a terrorist act.

  Officialdom has started making life difficult for the new Party of Soldiers’ Mothers. The Ministry of Justice, which is responsible for registering parties, claims it has not yet received any documents from the party; they have not only been handed in to the ministry, but the Soldiers’ Mothers also have an official ministry receipt for them. The bureaucrats are trying to set all kinds of traps in the hope of tricking the new party into infringing the muddled and onerous laws on forming parties. Then they could simply be got rid of. For now the women are doing all right, checking every step.

  Yevgeny Sidorenko, the spokesman of the Ministry of Justice, declared, “I am not at all sure we shall register such a party. A political party cannot limit its membership to a particular group of the population. What if somebody who is not a soldier's mother wants to join? A soldier's father, for instance?”

  He must be a fortune-teller. The fathers do want to join. In our political Sahara, the Party of Soldiers’ Mothers is so attractive that many men have joined despite the party's title, and nobody, of course, has any intention of debarring them. Serving officers, moreover, have been phoning the Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers asking that there should be a place for them too when the party's structure is being decided. These are honorable officers who refuse to reconcile themselves to the idea of an army that is little more than a mechanism for taking the lives of our young men. The Party of Soldiers’ Mothers is beginning to look like a real means of rescuing the army and establishing public accountability for our armed forces.

  February 15

  The Sultanovs, the family of the little girl Khursheda who was murdered by skinheads in St. Petersburg, have abandoned Russia and gone to live in Tadjikistan. They took a small coffin containing the child's remains with them.

  The FSB is to be in charge of investigating the explosion in the Metro. It promptly demanded new powers, comparing the situation to that in the United States after September 11.

  Our war of the North against the South continues. Nobody imagines this is the last terrorist outrage, or doubts that the Chechens were behind it. A majority support giving those who live here hell. Seventy percent of Russians favor kicking out all Caucasians. But where to? The Caucasus is still part of Russia.

  Today is the fifteenth anniversary of our withdrawal from Afghanistan. That is seen as marking the end of the Afghan War, but we had already sown the seeds for terrorism to develop. Just like the Americans with their bin Laden: he is what he is today because the Afghan War was what it was.

  February 16

  Blood donor centers have been set up for the victims of the Aqua Park disaster. We are beginning to know what to do in these situations.

  The shareholders of Yukos have stated that they are prepared to ransom Khodorkovsky from the state. Leonid Nevzlin [Khodorkovsky's right-hand man at Yukos], who fled to Israel, has announced that they are willing to part with their stakes in return for freedom for him and Platon Lebedev [CEO of Menatep Bank, which was the main shareholder of Yukos, now serving eight years of penal servitude for alleged tax evasion].

  Nevzlin himself owns 8 percent of the shares of Menatep Group. He says the offer is backed also by Mikhail Brudno (7 percent) and Vladimir Dubov (7 percent).

  Khodorkovsky has expressed indignation from jail and refuses to be ransomed. He has decided to drain this cup to the dregs.

  February 17

  The NTV television company is refusing to provide airtime for the election campaign and debates of the “other” presidential candidates. It claims they have low ratings in the opinion polls and nobody would watch the programs. Perhaps a country gets the candidates it deserves, but they should at least be allowed to speak. There is no doubt that the company's decision was made under pressure from the Kremlin.

  In Moscow the committee supporting Khakamada has met in the fashionable and expensive Berlin Club on Petrovka. Khakamada said, “I am going into this election as if to the scaffold, and with only one aim: to show the state authorities that there are normal people in Russia who know exactly what they are up to.” That is good. She is trying to show that fear has not yet conquered Russia, which would b
e an unconditional victory for Putin.

  United Russia also held a meeting of “the democratic intelligentsia” in support of Putin, who, it was claimed, is having mud slung at him by his opponents. Putin's defenders included the veteran singer Larisa Dolina, theater and film director Mark Zakharov, the actor Nikolai Kara-chentsev, and circus manager Natalia Durova. They were sent a letter asking them to “defend the honor and dignity of the president,” and duly answered the call. It was mentioned in passing that the overall membership of United Russia has reached 740,000, and that more than two million “supporters” have been registered, although no explanation of what this means has been forthcoming. United Russia emphasized that its purpose as a political party is to support the president. Not policies, not ideals, not a program of reform: an individual.

  The Central Electoral Commission joyfully reports that more than 200 international observers have been officially accredited for the election on March 14. In all, some 400 are expected.

  The Duma contributes its mite to the pathetic attempts to fight terrorism. The powers of the secret police and spies will be widened, and amendments to the criminal code have been adopted to increase the penalties for suicide bombers. They will now be liable to life imprisonment! This seems unlikely to deter people who have decided to settle their accounts with life in this way. The Fourth Duma is the collective brain of today's bone-headed Russian bureaucracy.