A Russian Diary Page 16

  April 28

  At 11:20 a.m., on Staraya Basmannaya Street in Moscow, a hitman shot Georgii Tal at point-blank range. Tal was a fledgling of the Yeltsin nest, the director from 1997 to 2001 of the Federal Service for Financial Recovery and Bankruptcy. Tal died in the hospital this evening without recovering consciousness. His murder is part of a process of destroying those involved in the redistribution of Russia's prime industrial assets through an organized system of bankrupting enterprises. During Tal's years as director there was a reallocation of ownership, primarily of the oil and aluminum industries, by this means. Under Putin many criminal bankruptcies have begun to be investigated. It is a factor in the Yukos case. The aim of the investigations is to carry out a new redistribution in favor of Putin's supporters. In fact, the system of bankruptcy under Yeltsin was perfectly legal, and it was exploited by all those who are today the wealthiest people in the country, the oligarchs who made their fortunes under Yeltsin. Putin has a rabid hatred of most of these. Few people doubt that Tal was murdered to prevent him from speaking about the principles on which the bankruptcy service operated. He simply knew too much about those who are now highly influential. The murder of insolvency practitioners by hitmen was itself part of the business of bankruptcy in Russia.

  Tal was a key professional in the management of the property of bankrupt enterprises. After 2002 he headed a nonprofit partnership called the Interregional Self-regulated Organization of Professional Insolvency Administrators. The organization existed under the aegis of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, and mainly advised members of the board of the RUIE on who should be bankrupted and when, so that the enterprise could be put in administration. These are our oligarchs: Oleg Deripaska, Vladimir Potanin, Alexey Mordashev, Mikhail Fridman, and others. It is unlikely, however, that Tal's murder was in the interests of these people.

  The murder caused no surprise at his own organization, at the RUIE, among big business or the government bureaucracy. The general population was even less surprised. As if that was perfectly fine.

  Late April

  We lived through April with the feeling of being constantly deceived, a sensation that suited many, who wanted just that.

  We lived also in anticipation of another piece of offensiveness, arranged for May 7: Putin's second inauguration. You could not exactly say that the air was filled with anticipation. The majority of the population really don't care what sort of inauguration there is, or whether it takes place at all.

  On the eve of major official events it is traditional in Russia to pause and reflect on the future. An inauguration might be expected to prompt the main political players to tell us what their plans are for the period between now and 2007.

  There is none of this. Total silence from the opposition tells us that it has caved in. The failure to generate any new movements tells us that the “old” opposition will be in no state to fight for seats in the Duma in 2007, or to put forward credible presidential candidates in 2008. Nobody believes in revolution, either.

  The Kremlin's social-survey unit, TsIOM, asked the Russian public, “If there were mass demonstrations in your region by the population in defense of their rights, would you take part?” Only 25 percent answered yes; 66 percent said no. We shall not be having a revolution anytime soon.

  May 7

  Putin's inauguration in the Kremlin. A demonstration of our First Citizen's autocratic power and magnificence, of his separateness and remoteness.

  Even from his own wife. During the live television broadcast the commentators actually said, “Among those invited to the solemn ceremony of President Putin's taking of office is the wife of Vladimir Vladimirovich, Lyudmila Putina.” It is laughable of course, and people did laugh, but not very cheerfully. She stood throughout the inauguration among the VIPs, behind a barrier past which Putin trotted down the red carpet.

  He arrived alone, marched past his wife to the podium, then back to the Tsar's Porch to review the parade. All the time alone. No friends, no family. The man is barking mad. It is a sure sign that he trusts nobody, and that is a fundamental characteristic of Putin's rule. The concomitant is the certainty that only he, Putin, knows what is best for the country.

  We do not really know what the inauguration of a leader is like in other countries. Is it a time of popular celebration? Or is it, as in Russia, merely an embarrassment?

  May 9

  Akhmed-hadji Kadyrov,* Putin's main placeman in Chechnya, has been assassinated. He had attended Putin's inauguration and yesterday flew back to Chechnya, not disguising his displeasure at the place allocated to him by Putin's entourage. He was in the second hall, not in the first ranks of the most honored guests, and saw it as a worrying cooling of the First Citizen toward him.

  He had good cause to be nervous. Putin was his only hope of power and survival. Kadyrov had presided over the process of “Chechenization” of the conflict in his republic, the initiation of a civil war between Chechens, with the Kremlin supporting the “good” ones who side with Kadyrov and Putin against the ones who are “not on our side” and have to be exterminated.

  Kadyrov was killed while viewing the Victory Day parade at the Di-namo Stadium in Grozny. The explosive device was concreted into the supports beneath the grandstand.

  *

  There were persistent rumors that Kadyrov was blown up by “our people.” His security in the last months of his life meant that nobody but “our people” could get anywhere near him. Whenever he appeared in public, everything was cordoned off far in advance and checked repeatedly for explosives. Those responsible for Kadyrov's assassination were never found, no matter how frequently we were shown on television how hard everyone was trying.

  Who are “our people” in this context? Agents of the federal special operations units working in Chechnya. State hitmen. Soldiers of the Central Intelligence Directorate of the army, the GRU; the center for special missions of the Federal Security Bureau; and secret subsections of the FSB for carrying out particularly sensitive missions, which usually means assassinations.

  On May 9 it seemed that Kadyrov's death, no matter at whose hands he died, spelled the end of Chechenization and, with it, of Putin's moronic policy in the North Caucasus. Kadyrov, people supposed, had been removed in order to bring this policy to an end. The surmise was shortlived. On the evening of May 9 the murdered president's psychopathic and extremely stupid younger son, Ramzan Kadyrov, was illogically elevated to prominence in Chechnya. Ramzan had been in charge of his father's personal security, into which he had brought all the criminal dross of Chechnya, attracting them with promises of immunity from prosecution.

  Putin received Ramzan in the Kremlin that evening. He turned up in a bright blue tracksuit and gave Putin every assurance that he would continue the policy of Chechenization begun by his father. The meeting was shown on all television channels and seen throughout Chechnya, and made it clear that Kadyrov's gangs were being granted immunity to carry on as before. For some reason Putin's administration had suspected that, after his father's death, Ramzan would make a run for it into the mountains to join the fighters. Instead he was granted permission to continue to terrorize the population of the republic.

  This led to even more divisiveness and violence in Chechnya in order to underpin the position of the vacuous Ramzan Kadyrov. The armed resistance was strengthened by an influx of new volunteers after the death of Kadyrov senior, but people were soon humbly bowing down before the new idiot, and in no time at all he deluded himself that he actually was of real significance.

  May 26

  Putin has delivered his annual address to the Federal Assembly. This is how the Russian people are informed of the president's plans for the coming year. He was in top form and in aggressive mood. He talked with total contempt about civil society, claiming it was all corrupt and that the defenders of human rights were a fifth column feeding from the hand of the West. The following is a verbatim quotation: “For some of these organizations [of civil
society] their first priority is to obtain finance from influential foreign foundations… When there is a problem with fundamental and basic violations of human rights, infringement of the real interests of the people, the voices of these organizations are sometimes not heard at all. This is hardly surprising. They simply cannot bite the hand that feeds them.”

  *

  Thereafter, of course, Putin's absurd attack on human rights campaigners was vigorously taken up by the officials of his administration, primarily by his chief ideologist and spin doctor, Vladislav Surkov. Human rights campaigners attending protest meetings against the war in Chechnya subsequently carried placards reading, “I am the West's fifth column.”

  After Putin's May 26 speech, the state authorities started setting up a new variety of “human rights associations” under their own patronage.

  This came to nothing, but the idea was that this parallel civil society, “on our side,” should be financed by Russian business, the oligarchs. They stubbornly refused, no doubt mindful of the fate of Khodorkovsky, who was now in prison for having financed nongovernmental organizations.

  Why did Putin suddenly mount this onslaught on the human rights associations? By the summer of 2004, after the collapse of the democratic and liberal parties, it seemed clear that if opposition was going to crystallize anywhere, it would be around the human rights community, as in the Soviet period. That is why Putin vilified these organizations in his message, why he was so eager to discredit them.

  In May the democrats remained quiescent. Ramzan Kadyrov's rise to prominence in Chechnya was the key event of the month, overshadowing the inauguration, but they made no protest. Indeed they made no comment at all.

  June 1

  Leonid Parfyonov, a brilliant television journalist, has been fired by the NTV television station. In his very popular news analysis program, The Other Day, he screened an interview with the wife of Zelimkhan Yandar-biev, the Chechen leader murdered in Qatar. It was fairly unexceptional, the widow said nothing particularly startling, but she was inconsolable. The topic, however, was impermissible.

  Parfyonov is not an aggressive broadcaster and, if anything, sought compromises between what the authorities wanted and what he wanted to show in his program. His firing is political censorship of NTV.

  Kakha Bendukidze, an erudite Georgian who is also a Russian industrial oligarch, has been appointed minister of industry in the new Georgia. Saakashvili quickly made him a citizen of the republic.

  Bendukidze was persuaded to take the job by the Georgian prime minister, Zurab Zhvaniya. He has announced that he intends to introduce “ultraliberal reforms” in his old homeland. He studiously avoided all comment on the nature of any reforms that might be needed here, but his departure speaks for itself. There is evidently no place for him as a liberal in Putin's Russia. Even before the Rose Revolution in Tbilisi, Bendukidze had spoken both in public and in private of his disappointment with Russia's economic development and his desire to get out of business. He was already in the process of selling off his Russian business interests.

  In Moscow the Central Electoral Commission is beginning a propaganda campaign to get the electorate to accept the abolition of the right to vote in the Duma elections for individual candidates in constituency seats, rather than for parties through a system of proportional representation. This is a right we stubbornly fought for, and it is vitally important in our post-Communist society. The Kremlin's aim is to allow people to vote only for party lists. They also intend to increase the share of the vote required before a party is allowed to be represented in Parliament. In other words, only major parties will be allowed to participate in elections.

  Such a system would return us to the Soviet past. It would make it impossible to form new parliamentary parties, and new nonparliamentary parties would be marginalized. The effect would be to enable the Kremlin to deal only with two or three “old” parties, which have already shown themselves capable of accepting major compromise. The Communist Party, the Liberal Democratic Party, and, with some reservations, the Ro-dina Party would operate under the preeminence of that bloated party of bureaucrats, United Russia.

  The underlying aim is to enable the Kremlin to take away the unpredictability of elections. The planned result will be the actual result. The democratic parties will instantly be marginalized, because support for Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces is below the 7 percent threshold on which the presidential administration is insisting. This proposal was immediately referred to as if it were a done deal by Alexander Vesh-nyakov, the far from independent director of the commission.

  Veshnyakov explained that elections based on proportional representation could become law in June 2005 by introducing amendments to the law “On Basic Guarantees of Electoral Rights and of the Right to Participate in a Referendum of Citizens of the Russian Federation.”

  *

  That is exactly what happened. It was explained that the new system was “more responsible.” There were no protest demonstrations, and only human rights campaigners tried to warn the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and European leaders that Russia no longer had a democratic electoral system. The Europeans noted that there had been no popular protest, so they accepted it too.

  June 2

  In Chechnya, Zelimkhan Kadyrov, the elder son of Akhmed-hadji Kady-rov, has been buried. It was well known that he was a drug addict, and he died of a heart attack three weeks after the assassination of his father. Relatives of the Kadyrovs said Zelimkhan was completely opposed to the brutal policies of his father and younger brother and took refuge in heroin.

  June 19

  In St. Petersburg, Nikolai Girenko has been shot dead in his apartment. This is a political murder of a well-known human rights champion and antifascist scholar. The murder was carried out by Russian fascists, who made no secret of the fact. It was a show of strength on their part. First they passed a “death sentence” on Girenko, posted it on the Internet, the state authorities ignored it, and then Girenko was killed in accordance with their “sentence.”

  Who was Girenko? He was a St. Petersburg academic ethnographer, a prominent research fellow of the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He was called as an expert witness in the very infrequent court cases brought against fascist organizations. He would analyze the texts of radical nationalist publications and the manifestos of neo-Nazi groups and demonstrate that they were extremist. His forensic analyses were precise and scholarly, and were often the basis on which neo-Nazis were convicted. These trials are rare. In 2003, of seventy-two crimes identified as being racially motivated, only eleven made it to court. The other cases collapsed when investigators were either unable or, more commonly, unwilling to prove racial motivation.

  The neo-Nazis hated Girenko because, when he was an expert witness, they often received prison sentences, rather than the more usual pardon or suspended sentence. He testified at the beginning of this month at the trial in Novgorod of members of a local branch of the Russian National Unity Party.

  Few scholars will today agree to give evidence in open court at such trials. They are afraid of retaliation from the fascists, who enjoy the support of the state authorities and of a significant proportion of the population. They cannot rely on witness protection schemes, because the law-enforcement agencies are themselves shot through with chauvinism and xenophobia. They always have been, but the Putin period and the second Chechen war have seen an upsurge of hysterical fear of those from the Caucasus.

  “When I heard about Girenko's murder, I was sure there would be a wave of social protest,” the writer Alla Gerber, president of the Holocaust Foundation, commented. Until December she had been a long-standing Duma deputy of the Union of Right Forces. Once again, however, there was no protest, only a wave of social satisfaction as the websites of the nationalistic organizations posted the joyful news of Girenko's murder. “Nationalists were jubilant to hear the news of the death of this academ
ic!” The Russian National Unity Party announced that it had “heard of the untimely demise of this antifascist with a sense of relief.” The Slavic Union (its initials in Russian are “SS”) displayed a poster that, it stated, had been prepared in advance of the shooting. It depicts a young man in the uniform of a nationalist storm trooper with a pistol. The caption reads: “In memoriam Girenko.” Nobody stopped them. The procurator's office had nothing to say, let alone take the action that the law required. None of the sites was closed. Their owners will face no criminal charges.

  At the same time, a list of “foes of the Russian people” was posted on the website of another ultranationalist organization, the Greater Russia Party. It lists forty-seven names, including that of Svetlana Gan-nushkina, director of Citizens’ Aid, the major association assisting refugees and those forced to resettle. Alla Gerber is also there, a well-known champion in the fight against anti-Semitism in Russia. So too is Andrey Kozyrev, ex-minister of foreign affairs, for his pro-Western leanings; as are the television presenters Nikolai Svanidze, because he is a Georgian and, incidentally, a relative of Stalin, and Yelena Khanga, because her mother was married to an African. So too is the author of these lines.

  The Slavic Union claims: “It is well known that numerous so-called human rights associations, generally made up of venal non-Russian human rights campaigners and surviving on funds from foreign well-wishers, foundations closely related to the CIA, MI6, and Mossad, are compiling dossiers against Russian activists.” Lower down, the leader of the SS, Dmitry Demushkin, openly threatens those on the list: “The Night of the Long Knives is near!”

  There is no doubt that all this vileness has been triggered by the murder of Girenko—which the state authorities were reluctant to disclose, and even attempted to hush up—but also by the example from above of how one should deal with “venal human rights campaigners.” In his address to the Federal Assembly, Putin used almost the same words as the SS.