A Russian Diary Read online

  August 2

  A group of National Bolsheviks entered the building of the Ministry of Health and Social Development on Neglinnaya Street in the very center of Moscow. They went upstairs, barricaded themselves in the office of the minister, Mikhail Zurabov, threw his chair out into the street, and started shouting their slogans against the reform of welfare benefits from the window. They demanded that Zurabov and Putin resign.

  *

  The National Bolsheviks were soon arrested and it was claimed in court that the chair cost $30,000. How come a minister of social welfare has a chair that expensive? At first they were given an unprecedentedly harsh sentence of five years each in a strict regime labor camp, for political hooliganism. Nonpolitical hooliganism normally attracts suspended sentences. Subsequently the Supreme Court reduced the term to three and a half years, to be spent in the company of murderers and persistent offenders.

  It is clear enough what the state is up to, but here is the position of the political prisoners. One of them, Maxim Gromov, said in court: “It is significant that we heard mention of the name of the terrorist Ivan Kalyaev in the prosecutor's speech. One hundred years ago, a series of bloody political trials also preceded the appearance of Ivan Kalyaev. The things going on in the state at that time were guaranteed to bring into existence the combat organization of Boris Savinkov. We are being tried for a political protest under Article 213, but according to this article all the sycophants in the state Duma should be on trial. Over the course of long years its members have conspired to show their manifest disrespect for society. In the present instance, they have shown disrespect toward millions of disabled people, pensioners, and ex-servicemen and -women.

  This is simply a disgrace for present-day Russia, and for present-day civil society which has had nothing to say about it.”

  He is right. The passing of the law abolishing material benefits and privileges provoked no indignation. We heard no demands that Zurabov should resign. The National Bolsheviks are the first to stand up for these groups.

  Gromov continued, “In a police state, trying to fight injustice without ending up in prison is as futile as trying to fire at mosquitoes from a cannon. I am proud to be behind bars at this cruel time, and even more proud that today I am not alone. I have with me my comrades in the struggle… Farewell, friends! I hope that sooner or later we shall break through the ice that holds our country in its grip. For the freedom of our Motherland we must go to prison.”

  Is there anything I disagree with in this? No, I endorse every word. Today the National Bolsheviks are a group of idealistically minded young people who see an older generation of oppositionists failing to make an impact. Naturally, they are rapidly becoming radicalized.

  The most upsetting thing I discovered from talking to them and their parents, who in the main are former supporters of Yabloko and the liberal right, is that the parents say exactly what parents in Chechnya say of themselves and their children. There the young people are also rapidly being radicalized, and this often happens with the best and most idealistic of them.

  Here is a recent conversation in Chechnya with the mother of one of those who have just gone off into the mountains, as they call it when young people go to join Basaev and Maskhadov in protest of the “New Chechen” bandits who have seized power and of the federal troops’ atrocities. The mother was an educated woman, a teacher.

  “I think the same way as my son,” she told me very emotionally. “It is better to do something than to be waiting in the night for them to come and drag your children off to who knows where. The federals are occupying troops, and Kadyrov's gangs are brutal collaborators. We don't speak about this openly, but everybody knows and understands it, from great to small. The adults just keep everything to themselves, but the young refuse to put up with it. One day my son disappeared. I was in a panic. I thought he had been abducted and wrote a statement to the militia. Then it turned out that he and his comrades had gone off into the mountains. They had gone to fight for us, their parents. I agree with him completely.”

  Lyudmila Kalashnikova is the mother of Ivan Korolyov, a National Bolshevik. She is a Muscovite, a researcher at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences. She told me precisely the same thing: “What is my Ivan fighting for? For us, for his parents.”

  It has to be said that Lyudmila is no National Bolshevik, or Communist, either. She is an ordinary, metropolitan, educated woman. In the 1990s she supported Yabloko.

  “Tell me, is Limonov an idol for Ivan?”

  “I wouldn't say that. Ivan is a clever lad, but the position of not reconciling yourself to evil very much appeals to him.”

  I had asked the Chechen mother: “Does he idolize Basaev?”

  “No, I've never heard anything of that sort from him, but it was to Basaev that he went. Where else? Boys as idealistic as him are compelled by long years of living in the circumstances we have here, in the midst of all the lying, bloodshed, abductions, and murders, to acknowledge Basaev as their commander.”

  Limonov and Basaev have become the leaders of young people who cannot reconcile themselves to the existence offered by Putin, a life lived in conditions of total injustice and catastrophic disregard for human life. It is Limonov and Basaev who keep the hope alive in our children that someday they will be able to feel they are decent human beings. It is appalling, but that is how things stand.

  People are outraged when I start talking like this. They say it is nonsense, tell me to shut up, say I will attract the evil eye. When I wrote in this vein for my newspaper, the editor in chief struck out the paragraph because, although he might agree with what I was saying, you can't put it in print.

  This is very much our style, closing our eyes to reality until it hits us like a typhoon. Like the majority, I find it appalling that our children have been reduced to this, but I know the way things stand today. So what is it our state authorities want? Are they suicidal? Are they calmly waiting for the appearance of new terrorist Kalyaevs, Zasuliches, and Savinkovs like those the tsars conjured up?

  Or are they simply mindless, living for the moment? Today while they are in power, they have their snouts in the trough and are getting away with it, so let tomorrow take care of itself? Is the main thing to hold on to your place at the trough for as long as possible? Does being in power in Russia really mean no more than having a place at the trough? I think they are mindless.

  FROM THE REELECTION OF PUTIN TO

  THE UKRAINIAN REVOLUTION

  August 9

  In Moscow, the great and the good of the Russian human rights movement, the flower of the nation, congregated at the Andrey Sakharov Center. Some years ago they formed a ginger group called Joint Action in order to get together and, at times of national crisis, try to work out a common standpoint.

  Today what they are discussing is not the National Bolsheviks’ protest and why it came about; the meeting is to consider why the heat is being put on them, the human rights movement, an exercise in navel gazing only too typical of our civil society.

  Around the table are many of those whom Putin excoriated in his address to the Federal Assembly on May 26, calling them a fifth column eating out of the hand of the West, accusing them of being concerned primarily with obtaining funds from the West rather than with helping people. They debated for a long time, but came to no conclusions. One alarming note was that some of the participants imagine that Putin is being misled, that he hasn't been given the true picture. The tsar is a good tsar, but his boyars are bad men. An old, old Russian story.

  It is a pity. The activists are no longer active. There is little passion left in them. They have learned too much from bitter experience and have little desire to move forward. Most of them, of course, not all of them.

  Apart from discussing their own predicament, they resolved that the human rights movement should boycott the coming presidential elections in Chechnya, meaning that they would not act as observers.

  (Despite the resolut
ion, on which there was a vote, some of those present at the meeting did attend the election in Chechnya, saw what went on, and subsequently issued statements.)

  Incidentally, August 9 is the fifth anniversary of Yeltsin's proclamation of Putin as acting prime minister—that is, as his successor. A war was brewing in Dagestan. Basaev was wreaking havoc in mountain villages, and the Russian troops allowed him into Dagestan and back out again. Thousands of refugees fled to the mountains, but none of those in Yeltsin's entourage would agree to start full-scale military operations—a second Chechen war. The first had cost them too dearly.

  Well, actually, there was one man who would agree: Putin, the then director of the FSB, on whose watch Basaev had been allowed to get out of hand and Hattab [a militant Saudi of Palestinian origin] had been free to teach all the young people in Chechnya who came to hear him. Putin sat in Moscow, saw it all—he couldn't but know—and said nothing. He allowed the fruits of evil to ripen.

  In August 1999 he decided it was time to destroy the results of his own activities before they were discovered. I believe that it is the sole reason he agreed to begin the second Chechen war. That is how the rapidly deteriorating Yeltsin came to make Putin first the acting prime minister, then prime minister, then president of Russia. Not once since August 1999 has Putin held back from tormenting his fellow citizens and shedding the blood not only of those who live in Chechnya.

  It is noon and the sun is shining in Verkhny Tagil, a small, very quiet town in Sverdlovsk Province in the Urals. Beyond it is the impenetrable forest of the taiga. You are deep in the heart of Russia here.

  An awkward, half-blind old man in shabby clothes is shifting from foot to foot at the entrance to a tall apartment building. This is Vladimir Kuzmich Khomenko, whose son Igor, an officer in the parachute regiment who died in Chechnya, was made a Hero of Russia. The door to Vladimir's ground-floor apartment is open. “Go on in, please go on in,” he says, as if we are old friends. Either Vladimir is very pleased to see us or he is very lonely. In the cramped corridor Lyudmila Alexeyevna, his wife and the mother of the Hero, kisses everybody warmly and shows us through. One whole corner of the room is full of portraits, flowers, icons, and candles. It is a memorial to their son.

  Capt. Igor Khomenko was one of the first to be sent to the North Caucasus under the decree issued by the newly appointed acting prime minister, V. V. Putin. His parachute regiment opened the hostilities of the second Chechen war, which at that time was still confined to the border between Chechnya and Dagestan. When they arrived they were immediately sent into battle, and on August 19 Igor Khomenko did something remarkable. In order to plot the fighters’ firing positions, he took a reconnaissance group to the Ass's Ear, a mountain that was to change hands several times during the fighting.

  Khomenko discovered the fighters’ positions on the hill, radioed the information back to his regiment, and he and his sergeant remained, covering the group's departure and taking on what they knew to be an unequal battle. That is where they died, having saved the lives of many men. His body was found by his comrades three days after his death, but they were unable to approach it because of the intense fighting. The Captain's Motherland recognized his achievement by awarding him the title of Hero of Russia. At the moment of their son's death, his parents had just become citizens of Ukraine. They lived in a modest wattle-and-daub house in Dnepropetrovsk Province.

  Their history is that of a typical Soviet family. To this day it is often difficult to determine an individual's post-Soviet citizenship. Igor grew up in Yakutia in the Russian Far North, his parents having been sent to build an ore enrichment factory there after graduating. Completing their prescribed period of service in Yakutia entitled them to an early pension at an enhanced rate, and they decided to return to the warmth, as did nearly everybody in their situation. They chose Ukraine with its wonderful Little Russia climate. When he left school, Igor moved from Soviet Ukraine to Alma-Ata in Soviet Kazakhstan, where there was a prestigious military academy. Graduating in 1988, with the USSR still intact, he was deployed to various hot spots. He was a parachutist, and trouble was forever flaring up. Soon the USSR fragmented, and Igor's parents became citizens of Ukraine while he became a citizen of Russia, because at the moment of the breakup he was attached to a military unit whose headquarters were on Russian territory. The captain died with Stavropol Region (Russia) registered as his place of residence. His grave is there, close to the military unit.

  After their son's funeral, Lyudmila Alexeyevna and Vladimir Kuz-mich decided to move to live near their son's grave, in Russia. They sold off their hut for the best price they could get, which was very little, but when they arrived in Stavropol the authorities refused even to register them as applicants for permanent residence. They persisted, wrote petitions, and for months made a daily round of the offices of the district administration. Finally, the proceeds from the sale of their hut ran out and they were ruined. The Hero's parents went to Verkhny Tagil in the Urals, where Lyudmila Alexeyevna had grown up and still had some, admittedly very distant, relatives. They were warmly welcomed, but their relatives were also very poor, like everyone else in Sverdlovsk Province, and there was nowhere for them to live.

  “We are homeless. We are allowed to live here only through people's kindness.” Lyudmila Alexeyevna shows us the apartment. “We have nothing, nowhere to live, no property. Only that iron is mine, and the sewing machine. And the television. The young people are so kind, they help us a lot. Without them we would have died. It's because of Igor that they look after us, even though none of them knew him.”

  The “young people” standing in a line by the wall look at the floor and say nothing. They are Verkhny Tagil “Chechens,” soldiers and officers who have fought in Chechnya, and they have formed a local association of ex-servicemen.

  “Our aim is very simple,” Yevgeny Bozmakov, the chairman of the association, tells me. “It is to help each other to survive. That is our only mission, and it is why we are helping the parents of Hero Khomenko.”

  “It was they who managed to get me and Father Russian citizenship,” Lyudmila Alexeyevna continues. “They visited all the offices for us, otherwise we wouldn't even have a pension.” Such are the rules of Russian life. Somebody who is not a citizen of Russia, even if they worked in the USSR for their whole life, is not entitled to a pension.

  Lyudmila Alexeyevna begins to cry, quietly and very sadly. Vladimir Kuzmich, moving behind her, strokes her shoulder and she says, now speaking to him, “No, no, that's right, I know. I'll stop crying. I'll just tell her. What's to become of us?”

  She shows us a stack of papers, the correspondence between the parents of a Hero of Russia with various official organizations and the Ministry of Defense. The officials’ letters are full of haughty disdain.

  As relatives of a Hero of the Russian Federation who died in the North Caucasian Region of the Russian Federation, you are entitled to enhancement of your living conditions drawing on funds of the National Military Fund. At the same time I have to inform you that, consequent upon a dearth of voluntary contributions, the program “Homes for Servicemen” is in abeyance. Act. Dir. of the Directorate of Military Welfare of the Central Board of Education of the AF of the RF, V. Zvezdilin.

  We send people into the fire of battle, then bury them with great pomp and ceremony, award them posthumous medals—and forget them. It is a Russian tradition to shirk responsibility for our debts. It has never occurred to Putin, at least no one has ever heard him admit it, that he is responsible for those who have paid with their lives for his decision to begin the second Chechen war.

  I have come to Verkhny Tagil with Lyudmila Leonidovna Polymova, the mother of another soldier killed in Chechnya, another mother whom the state forgot after it had taken the life of her son. Lyudmila Leonidovna breaks down when she sees the scene in the Khomenkos’ house. “My own boy died protecting an officer with his body. They gave him the Order of Valor posthumously.” She urges that they should unite thei
r efforts. In Yekaterinburg, where she lives, Lyudmila has already created an association called Mothers Against Violence.

  The following day Vyacheslav Zykov, the chairman of the ex-servicemen's association of Yekaterinburg, another “Chechen” soldier, takes Lyudmila to Bolshaya Rechka, a little township on the outskirts of Yekaterinburg in which the military cemetery is located. Here are buried the remains of her son, Pvt. Yevgeny Polymov, which she had to find herself in a mountain of soldiers’ bodies in Rostov-on-Don. The generals are not going to look for you, nor is anybody else. Parents have to travel to Rostov-on-Don themselves, and look for the remains of their sons in the mortuary of the North Caucasus Military District.

  A funeral party advances slowly toward us from the cemetery. They have just buried an officer killed in Chechnya. Through the windows of the bus we see women in black.

  “The latest,” Lyudmila Leonidovna comments, and goes off alone to her son's grave. She doesn't ask us to join her. She bears her suffering alone, and tries to help others in the same situation.

  Many young men were taken from Sverdlovsk Province to fight in Chechnya, and more than 20,000 “Chechen” ex-servicemen live there now. The region is dotted with memorial plaques and monuments to those who died there. Beside the Officers’ Club in the central square of Yekaterinburg they have already added a Chechen section to the Black Tulip memorial, a kind of annex to the monument to the men of the Urals who died in Afghanistan in the last war of the Soviet era. This new section already has 412 names etched in gold. There are blank obelisks to either side for those who, we can be sure, are going to die.

  How many more such coffins will we tolerate? How many new cripples with arms and legs missing? Every soldier killed or maimed in the second Chechen war brings the state greater responsibility, when it isn't yet servicing its existing debts. Like a bankrupt, it begins to default, trying to conceal its bankruptcy with measures like this wretched reform of benefits in kind. It removes even those small privileges from the disabled, the “Chechens,” the mothers of soldiers who have been killed, privileges that were some gesture of compensation for its escapade in the North Caucasus.