A Russian Diary Page 17

  June 21-22

  During the night, the five-year-long “antiterrorist operation” reached its apotheosis when fighters took control of Ingushetia.

  Some time after 11:00 p.m. I started receiving phone calls from the republic, where I have many friends. “Something terrible is going on here! It's a war!” women were screaming into the telephone. “Help us! Do something! We are lying on the floor with the children!” I could hear the rattle of rifle fire and a lot of people shouting “Allahu akbar! [Allah is great!]”

  The virtual war over the telephone went on until dawn, the whole night filled with a sense of helplessness. At night in Moscow there is nothing you can do to help anyone. The television stations have closed down, the news service staff have gone home. The law enforcement agencies have switched off their mobile phones and are sleeping. You can murder if you like, you can steal, but the generals will give orders only in the morning.

  That is what happened in Ingushetia. When the fighters began leaving at dawn the soldiers, with whom Ingushetia and the adjacent regions are overrun, finally came out from their “positions of permanent deployment” and started organizing a pursuit. Helicopters thundered overhead, air support appeared.

  It was too late. The fighters had left. Bodies lay in the streets, both civilian and uniformed. The great majority of the dead were militiamen from the Interior Ministry of Ingushetia, from the Nazran office of internal affairs, and the Karabulak militia department. Procurators and FSB agents had also been killed. Middle-ranking officers of the security agencies of Ingushetia had been cut down, vehicles and buildings burned out. It became clear that more than 200 fighters had managed to take complete control of Nazran, and that there had been simultaneous raids in the town of Karabulak and the hill village of Sleptsovskaya. They had set up roadblocks wherever they wanted, and killed anyone arriving at them whose ID indicated that they worked for the law enforcement agencies, along with others who just happened to fall into their hands. Witnesses claimed that those manning the roadblocks were Chechens, Ingushes, and people “of Slavonic appearance,” all of whom said they were with Shamil Basaev*

  Can Basaev, then, muster a 200-strong group? When all the security agencies, including those in Chechnya, have been reporting to their superiors for the past three years that there are no more than fifty fighters left, and perhaps as few as twenty or thirty?

  This was a brilliantly organized guerrilla operation of which the intelligence services gave no warning, an operation resisted neither by the half-witted Kadyrov and his regiment (which may scare the Kremlin, but evidently does not scare Basaev); nor by the thousands of Russian soldiers in Hankala; nor even the further thousands in reserve in Mozdok; nor by the 58th Army, based in Ossetia, where some of the fighters had come from. There are also more than 14,000 militiamen in Chechnya, and 6,000 in Ingushetia.

  So do the intelligence services actually exist? Does Kadyrov's regiment? The 14,000 militiamen plus another 6,000 in Ingushetia? Are Hankala and Mozdok really there?

  The raid on Ingushetia proves that, as a genuinely effective security force, they do not. Our system of defense is as virtual as Putin, created purely to make a show of fighting, but not actually to fight. This is precisely why all those thousands of people disappear without a trace after encountering “unidentified masked soldiers wearing camouflage.” Someone needs to send his superiors a new “antiterrorist” report. He needs a result. These “forces” are capable only of furtive abduction and looting. That's all the Russian Army and security forces are good for now.

  Those reckless people who left their homes in the night and went to the fighters’ roadblocks to ask them to leave discovered that the “invaders” included just as many of their own people, Ingushes, as Chechens.

  When, in the winter and spring of this past year, the abductions began on a grand scale, and young people in Ingushetia began taking to the hills rather than endure it any longer, the authorities brought down thunder and lightning on the heads of those who said openly that this was enormously dangerous and would lead to an escalation of the war. They continued to insist on their own stability. On June 22 that myth cost almost a hundred lives. The militiamen who defended themselves and, waiting in vain for help to arrive, died in battle, carried out their duty to the end. But who takes responsibility for the civilian deaths?

  The fighters, of course, bear full criminal responsibility for all these deaths, but equally culpable are the so-called state authorities. They never tire of telling us that they “take responsibility for everything.” The authorities have lied, done nothing, worried only about staying in power, and thereby condemned innocent people to death.

  Where was Zyazikov during this night? Zyazikov ran away, disguised as a woman. He dismissed his bodyguard in order not to be identified from his security detail, and returned only when the danger was past, when people were searching among the corpses for their loved ones. It was unheard-of behavior for a man, and not only in the Caucasus. While all this grand nonsense remains in place, with Zyazikov as a condign part of the system, and if Putin does not change his blinkered rampaging in Chechnya, which is entirely without a future, for the tactic of peace, tragedies like that of June 22 are inevitable. Our collective lying over many years about the Chechen war, our failure even to learn from Nord-Ost, has brought about these monstrous events in Ingushetia. We simply must seek a political way out of this dead end.

  June 23

  Twenty-four hours after the tragedy, while funerals were taking place all over Ingushetia, Alu Alkhanov, minister of the interior of Chechnya, announced to the television cameras that he would be standing as a candidate for the post of president of Chechnya. Alkhanov is one of those personally responsible for failing to catch Basaev, but is nevertheless being presented every hour as Putin's preferred candidate. Putting himself forward, Alkhanov said how much he was looking forward to “peaceful elections on August 29,” and that the main thing now was to consolidate Chechnya's agriculture. He seemed quite oblivious of how objectionable it was to come out with all this one day after the catastrophe in Ingushetia.

  July 1

  A discussion was held at the Svyato-Danilovsky Monastery in Moscow on the topic of “Freedom and Personal Dignity: the Orthodox and Liberal Views.” Rostislav Shafarevich was there, at one time a colleague and friend of Andrey Sakharov, but today a terrible reactionary and defender of Putin. Ella Pamfilova was present, the director of the Presidential Commission for the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights. There were also present Deacon Andrey Kuraev and Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin. The round table busily set about elaborating Vladislav Surkov's concept of a Russian model for defending human rights: in the first place, it would be funded by Russian business; and in the second, it would be based on Russian Orthodox ethics.

  What about those who are not Orthodox? Muslims? Jews? Will they be excluded from defending human rights? The human rights movement is by its very nature supranational and supraconfessional. In any case, if we are to believe Dostoevsky the Russian is a “universal man.”

  That, however, is neither here nor there. Putin has instructed the Russian Orthodox Church to flesh out what he was talking about in his address to the Federal Assembly, to replace “Western” defense of human rights by “Orthodox” defense of human rights. In order to prove yet again its loyalty to the authorities, and in return for being made the main state religion under Putin, the Russian Orthodox Church has agreed. Metropolitan Kirill gave a deeply felt speech on the need to find new leaders for the human rights movement “who love our country.” He seems to have no inkling that “finding new leaders for the human rights movement” is simply not possible. They either are there, generated by life itself, or they are not.

  Ella Pamfilova also spoke. At one time she was an enthusiastic democrat who campaigned against the privileges of party bigwigs. Now she enthusiastically supported Putin and his new attitude toward human rights workers. She said, “I do not agree that we have a crisis of ideolog
y in the human rights movement. There can be no crisis of something that by definition cannot exist! There is a crisis in particular human rights associations whose leaders, who in many ways are still in the last century, are trying to fight a totalitarian state that disappeared long ago. They are accustomed to appealing to the leaders of Western states to try to influence our state authorities. I repeat, we ought not to associate the whole human rights movement in Russia with five or ten well-known people, most of them from the old days, who long ago confused campaigning for human rights with politics, who still regularly confuse one thing with the other, radically defend positions that have no support among the majority of the population or the informed public. I do not think they represent a great danger for us. I believe that we are now witnessing the birth of a human rights movement of a new quality in Russia … and that there are many young leaders of human rights organizations who are working in the interests of our people…”

  There certainly are, but they are not going to gladden the heart of Pamfilova. The radicalization of young people is an obvious fact. The children of the defeated Yabloko and Union of Right Forces supporters are going off to join the National Bolsheviks, the party of Limonov.*

  The final act in the destruction of Yukos has begun. Overnight on July 1-2 the company's accounts were frozen. The extraction of oil has ceased, causing the oil price to jump sharply on the world's markets. Yukos offered a package of shares in the Sibneft oil company to settle their new debts. The state turned the deal down, insisting on the liquidation of Yukos. It is a calamity and amounts to what President Putin likes to refer to as “kicking the shit out of them.” Nobody cares.

  July 6

  A meeting in the Chechen hill village of Sernovodskaya to demand the return of the latest group of men abducted by the federals has been dispersed with gunfire. Women from the neighboring village of Assi-novskaya and from the district town of Akhchoy-Martan blocked the state highway with the same demand: stop these arbitrary abductions of their sons, husbands, and brothers. (Nothing changed. Only human rights campaigners in Russia itself supported these protests.)

  July 7

  In the Chechen town of Shali there has been a gathering of the mothers of those who have been abducted. The women state that they are prepared to go on hunger strike indefinitely, their patience exhausted by the failure of the law enforcement agencies to search for the victims. They ask that European human rights campaigners and international organizations hear their cry of despair for a simplification of the procedure for according refugee status to Chechens. “We have been driven out of Ingushetia, we are being murdered and our sons kidnapped in Chechnya, and in Russia we are second-class citizens.” Such is the resolution of the gathering.

  That same night federal forces furtively continued taking men from their homes in Grozny, Nazran, and Karabulak. There is a flood of letters from Chechnya to Strasbourg.

  July 9

  The latest atrocious death of a Russian soldier killed by the Russian Army.

  Soldiers die in the army for all sorts of reasons; the army has made it easy for them to be killed. You may be keen to serve, you may have enlisted before you had to, like Yevgeny Fomovsky, but that will not save you. There will be scum who take a dislike to you, or who don't like your size, or the size of your feet, and they will kill you.

  “His schoolfriends were taking their final exams while my son was being buried,” Yevgeny's mother, Svetlana, tells me. She is from the town of Yarovoye in the Altai Region. “Zhenya took all his exams early in order to be in time for the spring conscription into the army.”

  “Why?”

  “In order to get it over with more quickly, in order not to be harassed by the local military commissariat, and then to go on to college.”

  Things didn't turn out that way. Yevgeny Fomovsky's career in the army lasted from May 31 to July 9, less than one and a half months. He arrived at his FSB border guards unit on the outskirts of Priargunsk in Chita Province on June 8. On July 4 he swore allegiance. On July 6 this big, healthy Siberian was sent into the hills, to a summer training camp 8 miles from Priargunsk. At dawn on July 9 Yevgeny was found hanged, using two belts tied together, by the wall of a half-ruined building 100 yards from the training camp tents. At nine o'clock that evening the postman arrived at Altaiskaya Street in Yarovoye with a telegram that read, “Your son, Fomovsky, Yevgeny Anatolievich, committed suicide on July 9, 2004. Advise place of burial immediately. Date of dispatch of coffin to be notified separately. Commanding Officer of Military Unit…”

  So what had happened? Yevgeny was strong and well equipped to be a soldier. He was an accomplished sportsman, and by the time he was eighteen he had acquired several army skills. The army, however, does not need educated conscripts, it wants run-of-the-mill recruits. The root of the tragedy is that Pvt. Yevgeny Fomovsky took size-13 boots and was 6 feet 5 inches tall. He was issued with size-10 1/2 army boots and forced to wear them during a daily three-mile cross-country run in 104°F heat.

  Torturing new conscripts is a way of life in the Russian Army. By the day before his “suicide,” Yevgeny was no longer able to walk in anything other than slippers.

  “When we went to the mortuary, his longest toe was rubbed down to the bone,” his aunt, Yekaterina Mikhailovna, tells me.

  Russia is a big country. When Yevgeny's mother and aunt set out from Yarovoye on the five-day journey to Priargunsk to visit him, they had no idea what was awaiting them. “We were too late,” his mother weeps. “We arrived in Priargunsk on July 10, and on July 9 Zhenya died.” Priargunsk is a town on the remote border of our land with China and Mongolia. The mortuary is a building attached to the district hospital.

  “When we were at the mortuary I saw Zhenya,” his aunt Yekaterina tells me. There was a mark on his neck, apparently from a noose. There were cuts on his left wrist. We were told that Zhenya had first tried to open his veins. His whole body had been beaten, his head was covered in bruises. It was soft to the touch as if there were no bones there, they had all been broken. On the back of his head there was a clear indentation from some heavy object. His sexual organs were swollen and crushed: they were one enormous black bruise. His legs were swollen, just one wound after another, braised as if he had been dragged. His back had all the skin flayed from it, also as if he had been dragged. There was a burn on his foot. There were bruises on his shoulders as if somebody had been pressing down hard on them. I think he was tortured, and then hanged in order to cover up the murder.”

  Yevgeny had not wanted to submit to the torment of his undersized boots and had been demanding the proper size. They decided to teach him a lesson in accordance with long-established army practice: with the blessing of the officers, this is carried out by the “granddads”— sergeants, soldiers in their second year of service, older servicemen. The officers expect them to “maintain order” in the barracks.

  The fact that Yevgeny was murdered was later confirmed by first-year soldiers who said his tormentors hadn't meant to kill him, just to teach him a lesson so that he didn't try to get above himself. They overdid it and Yevgeny died while he was being tortured. The murderers then decided to pretend he had committed suicide.

  The tragedy of Private Fomovsky, eighteen, killed because his feet were too big, did not cause any particular public outcry at such savagery in the army. Nobody insisted that the minister of defense, Sergey Ivanov, and the director of the FSB, Nikolai Patrushev, should undertake to ensure the future provision for our soldiers of an orderly environment, with food, clothing, and footwear fit for human beings; or that they should accept personal responsibility for the lives of the young men we conscript. Everything went on just as before, until the next unlawful killing of a soldier.

  Late in the evening of July 9, Paul Klebnikov, the editor in chief of the Russian edition of Forbes magazine, was fatally wounded. Klebnikov was a descendant of the Decembrist Pushchin, a friend of Alexander Pushkin; he was an American who had long been researching the development of
oligarchy in the new Russia. The murder of Klebnikov was a puzzle, and the suggestion by the law enforcement agencies that the perpetrators were Chechens taking revenge for a badly written book about the adventurist Hoj-Ahmed Noukhaev is manifest nonsense. They were in a flap because they couldn't solve a crime that caused widespread international outrage. Noukhaev is a strange, contradictory figure. At one time a field commander, he left the resistance and started representing himself as a philosopher, which he was not. His authority was never great among the Chechens, and it is difficult to imagine anyone carrying out a murder on his behalf.

  Mukhamed Tsikanov has been appointed vice president of Yukos-Moscow, the holding company of Yukos. A former deputy minister of economic development, Tsikanov is in reality an emissary of the state inserted to ensure a “correct” sell-off Needless to say, Tsikanov is wholly in the pocket of the state authorities. Before this he was engaged in the “restoration of Chechnya,” an enterprise admitted to have been a failure, even though all the money in the budget was spent. The man in charge of all that enjoys his life without untoward consequences, and has even been promoted.

  July 10

  The last edition of Savik Shuster's Free Speech has been broadcast on NTV. The only remaining political talk show anywhere on Russian national television has been axed. The Personal Affairs program has been closed down too, also on NTV. It was a weekly news analysis run by Alexander Gerasimov. Gerasimov was the deputy director general for news of NTV, and he too is leaving. The crushing of all freethinking and unpredictability on Russian television is a fait accompli.