A Russian Diary Read online

  I complain indignantly about this “interpreting,” and Nikolai Ivano-vich, like a dog breaking free from its chain, attacks and insults me. Nobody stops him. Ramzan chuckles, pleased. His real hobby is setting people at each other's throats, and nobody at the table can rival him in this, with his enthusiasm for dog fights.

  The conversation becomes more animated. “You are putting the case for bandits;” “You are an enemy of the Chechen people;” “You should have to answer for this”—all this addressed to me. Ramzan is shouting, jumping up and down in his chair, and Nikolai Ivanovich is goading him on. We are seated around a large, oval table and the scene increasingly resembles a thieves’ convention. Ramzan behaves more and more oddly, as if he is the oldest person in the house, though he is in fact the youngest. He laughs at inappropriate moments. He scratches himself. He orders his bodyguards to scratch his back. He arches himself, wriggling, and keeps making irritating, inane remarks.

  I try to talk to Shaa, but Ramzan really doesn't like Shaa getting more questions than him. He cuts in and forbids Shaa to say any more. It's time to end. I ask one last question, and it is the only one Shaa answers himself.

  “When was the happiest time in your life?”

  “There has been no such time.”

  Ramzan interrupts even this: “Did you know that Khambiev voted for Putin?”

  Khambiev nods agreement, with the mocking smile of a liar: “Yes. He is hard. He wants order in Chechnya.”

  “What is missing,” I ask Khambiev, “before there can be complete order in Chechnya?”

  “Very little. Yandarbiev has been taken out. If Berezovsky and Maskhadov's men Zakaev* and Udugov are taken out, there will be order. They are pulling the strings. Basaev carries out their wishes. Basaev is not fighting on behalf of the Chechen people.”

  “What are you fighting, and living, for?”

  “For ourselves. For the people.”

  “In what capacity do you see yourself serving it?”

  “As Ramzan decides.”

  “Why should that be up to Ramzan?”

  “He is the first among Chechens. Ramzan is promising to make me president of the Freestyle Wrestling Federation.”

  “How old are you?”

  “The right side of forty-two.”

  “How do you feel about the fact that Ramzan's people abducted your relatives to force you to surrender?”

  “No problem. My relatives were at fault, and they were captured.”

  “What were they guilty of?”

  “They brought me cassette messages from Maskhadov, and bread.”

  Ramzan, satisfied, chuckles insolently. He leans backward smugly, then goes to watch himself on television. He is very pleased about this, and comments on the way Putin walks: “He's got real class!” He declares that Putin walks like a mountain dweller.

  Outside the windows it is night. The temperature is rising in here and it is time for me to get out. Ramzan gives orders for me to be taken back to Grozny. Musa, a former fighter from Zakan-Yurt, sits at the wheel and there are two bodyguards. I get into the vehicle and think that somewhere along the route, in the dark, with checkpoints everywhere, I am obviously going to be killed. But the ex-fighter from Zakan-Yurt is just waiting for Ramzan to leave. He wants to bare his soul, and when he starts telling me the story of his life, how he had been a fighter, why he joined Ramzan, I know he is not going to kill me. He wants the world to hear his story.

  I understood that, but sat there crying from fear and loathing. “Don't cry,” the fighter from Zakan-Yurt finally said to me. “You are strong.”

  *

  When argument has been exhausted, and at Tsentoroy they don't understand the meaning of the word, all that is left is tears. Tears of despair that someone like this can exist, that the vagaries of history should have raised up, of all people, Ramzan Kadyrov. He really does have power, and rules according to his own ideas and abilities. Nobody, not a single man present in Tsentoroy, dared to stop his getting out of hand. It was Ramzan Kadyrov who was telephoned from the Kremlin by “Vladislav Yurievich”—in other words, by a deputy head of Putin's administration,

  Vladislav Surkov. That was the only time Ramzan stopped misbehaving, scratching himself, shouting and hooting with laughter.

  It is an old story, repeated many times in our history: the Kremlin fosters a baby dragon, which it then has to keep feeding to stop him from setting everything on fire. There has been a total failure of the Russian intelligence services in Chechnya, something they try to represent as a victory and a “restoration of civilian life.” But what about the people of Chechnya? They have to live with the baby dragon. First the Kremlin tried to show the Chechens that resistance to Putin was useless. That more or less worked; most of them gave up. Then it was the turn of the rest of Russia.

  September 1

  Censorship and self-censorship in the mass media have reached new extremes and increased the probability that hundreds of adults and children in School No. 1 in Beslan, which has been seized by terrorists, will die.

  Self-censorship is now the business of trying to guess what you need to say and what you should not mention in order to stay at the top. The purpose of self-censorship is to keep your hands on a large, very large, salary. The choice is not between having a job or being unemployed, but between earning a fortune or a pittance. Any journalist has the option of moving over to Internet publications, which are more or less free to say what they want, while there are still a couple of newspapers that enjoy relative freedom too. Where there is freedom, however, there is low pay, irregularly paid. The big time is the mass media that play ball with the Kremlin.

  Television presenters who lie persistently, who keep off the airwaves anything that might upset the state authorities, do so for fear of losing a salary of several thousand dollars a month. They face a choice between continuing to dress in Gucci and Versace or putting on old, shabby clothes. There is no question of ideological commitment: their only commitment is to their own financial well-being. No journalists have any faith in Putin, nor have had for a long time.

  The result is that what the NTV station broadcasts is roughly 70 percent lies. On the two official stations, RTR and Ostankino, the proportion is a good 90 percent. The same is true of state radio.

  If during the Nord-Ost hostage taking television showed half the truth, during Beslan it broadcast nothing but official lies, chief of which was the assertion that there were only 354 hostages in the school. [The actual figure was closer to 1,200.] This so enraged the terrorists that they stopped letting the children go to the toilet or have anything to drink.

  At NTV they knew perfectly well that figure was untrue. The directors of the company suppressed a report from their own correspondent at the scene, who was reliably informed about the real number of hostages. As Leonid Parfyonov, fired from NTV on June 1, said later, there was only one word of truth heard on NTV during the Beslan crisis. That was after the assault had begun, when dead and injured children were being brought out, and lumps of human flesh were seen all over the place; the reporter speaking on camera at that moment uttered a resounding Russian swear word, which accurately characterized what was happening.

  Beslan was the nadir of this treacherous self-censorship, treacherous because it betrayed people who paid for the lies with their lives. Residents of Beslan attacked state television reporters because their lying, by now habitual in the Putin era, had started costing the lives of women and children they knew. Previously this had been experienced only by people living in Chechnya. Now it was time for others to understand.

  September 3

  There are 331 fatalities as a result of the hostage taking in Beslan.

  September 4

  The editor in chief of Izvestiya, Raf Shakirov, has been fired. He was a careerist: not a revolutionary, not a dissident, not a champion of human rights. He was fired for failing on just one occasion to intuit the new state ideology, something that is not supposed to need spelling out.


  Izvestiya published a brutally honest photographic report from Beslan about the assault on the school. The authorities complained that it was too shocking.

  Izvestiya is not a state-owned newspaper—it belongs to the oligarch Potanin—but thunderclouds were gathering over Potanin just like those that had gathered over Khodorkovsky. By firing Shakirov, Potanin must hope he is back in with Putin and the Kremlin.

  *

  After Beslan there were at least the stirrings of opposition to the authorities’ regime of wholesale mendacity and cowardice. Between December 2003 and September 1, 2004 all that had been noticeable was a reluctant, half-stifled dissidence, but after the massacre the emergence of at least some sort of public protest began. Until September 1 nobody chose to recognize that the intelligence services were only interested in sharing out the national loot. After the bloodbath at Beslan on September 3, many finally realized that they were unprotected. They could either continue to pretend that the president had a high approval rating, or they could have security for their children.

  September 10

  What is emerging in Russia is not a stabilizing middle class but a new class consisting of parents whose children have died in terrorist acts. They are already almost a party whose manifesto is to demand a genuine and thorough inquiry into the tragedy that occurred in School No. 1.

  The first to arrive in Beslan after the catastrophe were the parents of hostages who died at Nord-Ost. Muscovite Dmitry Milovidov was among them. In October 2002 he lost his fourteen-year-old daughter, Nina, at the Dubrovka theater. He took to Beslan a handful of earth from Nord-Ost in Moscow, and took back ashes from the school. He showed me this mixture in a small transparent box.

  “I scooped up some of what is still lying on the floor in the school. You can see there are cartridge cases and dumdum bullets, even though those are banned, a carefully sharpened pencil, the charred pages of a textbook. All of it is covered in dark-gray ash, and it is as well not to ask what that ash might be.”

  “Why did you Nord-Ost parents go there? It must have been very difficult for you.”

  “We collected money 37,000 rubles [$1,266], and decided to hand it over personally. We thought our own sad experience of how to survive after the death of your children might be helpful. We barely survived, relying solely on our own resources, abandoned by the state.

  “There is another reason: Just a little over a year ago I was talking to Tanya Khazieva—her husband was a musician in the Nord-Ost musical and died, leaving her to look after little Sonya and Tanya. She was the first of us to win a court case claiming material compensation. Tanya said to me then, in June 2003, ‘I need to know that, if tomorrow one of my daughters were to be taken hostage at school, her life would be so expensive that neither the FSB nor the state could afford to pay me off for letting her die.’ Do you know, we feel today that we didn't manage to prevent Beslan. I see it as an alternative ending to Nord-Ost: ‘There, just see what would have happened to you if you had been locked in that theater and we had not used the gas.’ It is as if they wanted to teach Russia a lesson. We went to Beslan to say to the people there, ‘Forgive us for not doing enough to avert your tragedy’ ”

  “What do you think the people in Beslan need most right now? Money?”

  “No. Understanding.”

  “Are there too few psychiatrists?”

  “There are enough of them in the hospitals, but it is often young trainee doctors who go around to people's homes. It is difficult to open your heart to them. The problem for people in Beslan is the same as ours was. Many don't want counseling. They want to grieve among themselves.”

  “But did you have the feeling that, as people who have been through something similar, you were closer to them than the psychiatrists?”

  “Of course. They wanted to talk to us, but not in order to weep with us. They asked what conclusions the Nord-Ost inquiry had come to. Had there been a proper answer to the question of how such a thing could have happened? It is already obvious that this tragedy is not just going to go away. There are graffiti on the fences: ‘Death to the Ingushes,’ and stronger than that. Nobody cleans them off. Everywhere I heard people quietly vowing to take revenge. There was a meeting of young people while we were there, and that was clearly the theme. They had the darkest things to say about their president, Dzasokhov, and what they said about Putin doesn't bear repeating.”

  “Is it true that the feeling toward journalists is also bad?” “Yes. We were the same. In the first months after Dubrovka, at the sight of journalists we would say, ‘Here come the vultures.’ It was only much later that we began to see them not as vultures but as dissectors, without whom we would never have heard the truth about the sinking of the submarine Kursk or the reality of Nord-Ost.”

  “Who are people in Beslan now expecting to provide a proper inquiry?”

  “They trust only their own families. They expect that an inquiry will come, but, as many say, ‘from Russia’—in other words, from the state. We have been through Nord-Ost, though. We know that isn't going to happen.”

  “What is the main impression you brought back from Beslan?” “We were in Moscow, a big city. Beslan is an entire town in mourning.”

  September 13

  After Beslan, the security agencies of the North Caucasus, having failed to prevent the terrorist outrage, are now making a great show of fighting terrorism. They are killing or arresting anyone they think might conceivably be involved in terrorism.

  How do they go about it? The success or failure of the manhunt is measured primarily by how many “terrorists” are caught. Human rights and respect for the law go straight out the window. A confession is proof of guilt, and if a suspect has been killed, you don't even need that. It is an exact repetition of what occurred when a “counterterrorist operation” was launched after the assassination of the Communist Party leader, Sergey Kirov, on December 1, 1934. Just as then, any attempt to suggest something is wrong and perhaps there should be more regard for the law is treated by supporters of “radical and effective methods” as a desire to protect criminals.

  Representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross are not allowed to visit the prison cells where “terrorists” are being held. There is no legal oversight by the procurator, and certainly no independent judiciary, where these fast-track “antiterrorist” cases are concerned. Nobody is going to investigate whether a special operations unit was justified in murdering someone. It is an area completely outside the law, incapable of punishing the guilty and acquitting the innocent. The main wave of post-Beslan “antiterrorism” has broken over Ingushetia, because there were many Ingushes in the group that seized the school. And, needless to say, over Chechnya.

  The predictable result was that, throughout the autumn, reacting against this “antiterrorism,” the real terrorist underground was greatly strengthened. The killing or fast-track sentencing of the innocent leaves the real criminals at large to prepare new crimes, needing only to improve their methods of conspiracy. Moreover, the underground is swollen by those who have suffered unjustly or who seek to avenge their relatives. For others, taking up arms is their personal protest against the lawlessness of the security forces.

  You can call this anything you like, but a counterterrorist operation it is not. It conjures up the most monstrous forms of terror. The true picture is that, after the fighters took over Ingushetia for one night in June 2004, the security forces went on a rampage, murdering and imprisoning a multitude of innocent people they happened to get their hands on, and the result was Beslan.

  Meanwhile, Chechen officialdom is celebrating. A few dozen kilometers away they are burying the victims of Beslan, but Alu Alkhanov, the newly “elected” president, has decided to celebrate the birth of a son to the prime minister with a day's horse racing.

  In Tsentoroy, behind intense security, Putin's current Chechen favorites are enjoying life. Their retinues indulge them in every way. Rarely does a day pass without some kind of e
ntertainment to demonstrate that peace has come to Chechnya. Even Beslan is not allowed to spoil the fun, and the deaths of all those children that are on the conscience of the unholy trinity of Kadyrov, Alkhanov, and Abramov. It was they after all, who were assuring Putin and everybody else, right up until September 1, that there were practically no bandits left in Chechnya and that they would be catching Basaev any minute now. Beslan showed us the real situation.

  One of the reasons for Russia's social malaise is this diabolical cynicism on the part of the authorities, who peddle a completely fake reality. Russia's citizens do not rise up against this cynicism. They withdraw into their own shells, becoming defenseless, wordless, and inhibited. Putin knows this and employs brazen cynicism as the antirevolutionary technique that works best in Russia.

  The funerals are not yet over, but already Putin is busy. He has informed the government and the country that in future regional leaders will no longer be elected, but appointed by him. The appointment will need to be ratified by regional parliaments, but if the local deputies twice fail to approve his choice of candidate, the Parliament itself will be liable to dissolution.

  There have been rumors for some time about Putin's desire to abolish the direct election of governors, some of whom have minds of their own. One of the methods for the opposition to remain effective was to reach an understanding in the regions, if this proved impossible with the presidential administration in Moscow.