A Russian Diary Page 22

  Putin claims that the reason for abolishing the election of governors is the threat from terrorism. Such cynical exploitation of the cataclysm of Beslan to resolve his purely political and practical difficulties is unexpected, even from Putin. There has been hardly a murmur of protest.

  September 16

  The only reaction came from Committee 2008, who issued the following statement, “The Threat of a Coup d’État in Russia”:

  The president of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, has announced that he intends to carry out a coup d’état in Russia. His speech on September 13, 2004, at an extended session of the government contains a detailed proposal to dismantle fundamental institutions of democracy in Russia.

  “Russia is a democratic, federal, law-governed state …” according to the first article of the Constitution. The Kremlin is now intending to liquidate all three of those foundations of the Russian state.

  Putin's Russia will not be a democratic state, since its citizens are to be deprived of the right to free elections, which, according to the Constitution, are the “highest and direct expression of the power of the people.” Putin's Russia will not be a federal state, in that its regions are to be governed by officials appointed by and answerable only to the center. Putin's Russia will not be a law-governed state, because the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation made a ruling eight years ago that explicitly prohibits any such “reform,” and that will be flouted.

  We call upon the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, to pay particular note to Article 3, Point 4 of the Constitution, which reads, “Nobody shall appropriate power in the Russian Federation. Seizure of power or appropriation of the authority of the government will be prosecuted under federal law.”

  The state authorities ignored all that. Nobody protested.

  September 27

  The authorities are very concerned that human rights campaigners will again become dissidents, that it is from them, rather than from opposition politicians, that danger threatens. Accordingly, they are constructing a parallel human rights movement to operate under strict state control. Putin is signing a directive to create an “international human rights center.” The directive is characteristically titled “Additional Measures of State Support for the Human Rights Movement in the Russian Federation.”

  The driving force behind this directive is Ella Pamfilova, chairperson of the Presidential Commission on Human Rights. She is loudly insisting to anyone who will listen: “I completely reject the scurrilous allegations that one of the tasks of the International Human Rights Center is to introduce centralized control of the human rights movement. This directive is a great help to us. It will be easier for the leaders of human rights organizations to find each other (in the Kremlin?—AP). We shall be able to extend the reach of our expertise. This idea is the initiative of human rights campaigners themselves. I have had phone calls from the representatives of many human rights associations, people have called in from the regions. They are all in favor. They say it is a small victory for us. First and foremost, we need to guarantee the rights of defenders of human rights themselves to help people effectively.”

  Hardly anyone believes Pamfilova's invariable protestations of the benign nature and democratic credentials of Putin.

  Yelena Bonner had this to say in an interview with Yezhenedelnyi Zhurnal:

  There is the philosophy and outlook of defenders of human rights, and there is the philosophy and outlook of those who represent governmental power. They have different aims and different missions. The aim of the human rights movement is to defend society from the state authorities and to form a civil society. The aim of any state authority is to consolidate its own power. I am upset to see many well-known human rights campaigners falling for this. If they do, they effectively cease to be defenders of human rights. They want to cozy up to the state authorities. This testifies to a crisis in the human rights movement.

  What today is called the human rights movement in Russia, and the politicians whom we call the opposition and who for many years have been sitting between two stools, have missed the boat. We have missed the opportunity of acting by legal means. Today, exploiting the Beslan tragedy, attempts are being made to destroy the independence of the courts. What does that leave open to society? Only revolt and rebellion.

  I am not calling for revolution. I see no leaders capable of leading it, and no readiness for it in the country. Accordingly, Russia will follow the path outlined for it by Mr. Putin. What else can it do? Local elections have been removed, the right to referendums has been taken away, the accountability of the electoral institutions to the population was done away with long ago. I see this directive as another trick. The state is creating a parallel human rights movement.

  I see no way of returning to a democratic path at present. I am not saying that we had a democracy, but there was a tendency in that direction that might have developed, given the existence of free mass media. We needed a proper electoral system; the last thing we needed was for it to be destroyed. The elections have long ago been turned into a fraud, and elections are the institution fundamental to any democracy.

  All three branches of power in Russia, the executive, the judiciary, and the legislature, have been made over to suit the president. We have ceased to be a democratic or, I would say, even a republican state. Formally, presidential elections are to take place (in 2008). If, of course, the country as it is being constructed by Putin survives that long. All channels for a legal and peaceful alteration of the situation in a democratic direction have been removed. Accordingly, this sealed boiler will heat up until it explodes. This can occur in a number of different ways.

  Putin's “International Human Rights Center” never got off the drawing board. Funds were allocated from the budget, and somebody no doubt got their hands on them, but nothing else happened.

  Putin's authority rests solely on the fact that there is no alternative to him within his entourage, which he has made faceless and dull. His supporters call this “the loneliness of Putin.” There is nobody in his team who could replace him in an emergency. They are all pygmies with Napoleon complexes, or not even that.

  Is a new, liberal, pro-Western party in the offing? Vladimir Ryzhkov could be its leader. He has matured a great deal. Such a party might succeed in completing the liberal-democratic revolution. The problem of our political elite, however, both of those in power and of those in opposition, is that they would prefer just to let things carry on, or at least crawl on, as they are.

  September 28

  Putin has not kept us waiting for long. Without any political debate, he has submitted to the Duma amendments to the electoral law abolishing the direct election of governors. The electorate are being bombarded with assurances that they are not yet sufficiently mature to choose the right local leader. Does that not mean they are also not yet mature enough to elect Putin?

  September 29

  A number of Duma deputies have written to the chairman of the Constitutional Court, Valerii Zorkin, asking him to review the president's actions as a matter of urgency.

  (Zorkin chose not to. The deputies subsequently received a purely formal reply. The sense of hopelessness was as profound as in the final years of the USSR.)

  October 5

  In Grozny the laughable inauguration of Alu Alkhanov, the president foisted on the people of Chechnya by the Kremlin, has taken place. They erected a large tent inside the fortified government compound and Alkhanov took the oath there, speaking in bad Chechen. He looked out of sorts, with heavy blue rings under his eyes. The security measures were unprecedented, as if they were expecting Putin, who didn't show up but sent greetings. In the interest of security, three locations had been prepared, and until the last moment nobody knew exactly where it would be. What sort of peaceful life does that suggest? Alkhanov showed the whole of Chechnya how afraid he is of dying. Nobody will take him seriously now.

  October 6

  Joint Action, an association of the ma
in human rights organizations, has also issued a statement entitled “A Coup d’État in Russia,” calling for the convening of a Citizens’ Congress that would evolve into an independent national forum involving the human rights, ecological, and other public associations, free trade unions, democratic parties, scholars, lawyers, and journalists.

  It is a peculiarity of Russia that the defenders of human rights—of whom several, like Lyudmila Alexeyeva, Sergey Kovalyov, and Yury Samodurov are former Soviet dissidents—are far more resolute and progressive than the parties and politicians. They are urging the politicians: for heaven's sake, do something!

  A serflike psychology has once again taken hold of the country and rounds on anyone less servile. How malevolently Russian television rants when Yushchenko makes a mistake in Ukraine, and as for Saakashvili, he is the Kremlin's bête noire. Georgia is our main enemy among the countries of the former USSR.

  October 7

  In Vladimir, a first criminal case has been got up against the Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers. The chairperson of the Vladimir committee, Lyudmila Yarilina, is accused of “complicity in evasion of military service,” an offense carrying a three- to seven-year prison sentence.

  What is the basis of the accusation? Through her persistent defending of conscripts and soldiers, Lyudmila has made herself thoroughly unpopular with the local military commissariat and military procurator's office. She agrees that a great many soldiers are found unfit for army service in Vladimir Province. The area is notorious for alcoholism. It is a place where people drink more than they work, so the health of their children is poor. Half of them are invalids, but the military commissariat goes to extraordinary lengths in order to get its quota of conscripts, falsifying health certificates and cheating the young men in other ways.

  Between 400 and 500 people consult the committee each year: conscripts, soldiers, and their parents. Most of them want to be rescued from the brutal bullying of the “granddads,” older soldiers; from death and disease and a state machine that has no interest in investigating abuse.

  When Dmitry Yepifanov came to the committee he had already served several months in Chechnya and been wounded and burned in a tank. He was given leave and, back home in Vladimir, complained to his parents of constant stomach pains. He had suffered from these before going into the army, but the conscription commission decided they posed no problem and sent him off to fight in Chechnya.

  Dmitry came to ask how he could get into a hospital during his leave. That was all. The system in Russia is quite absurd: if a soldier on leave is ill, he will not be admitted for diagnosis at the nearest military hospital but must return to his unit, where an orderly or military doctor will decide whether to hospitalize him or whether he is malingering. If, however, a soldier can present a written diagnosis, he can be admitted to a hospital locally.

  Lyudmila began calling around to doctors she knew, and one, an en-doscopist at the Vladimir cancer clinic, agreed to see Dmitry and, if necessary, conduct a gastroscopy This duly revealed an ulcer, and he was admitted to the hospital. Subsequently, Dmitry was sent from Vladimir to a hospital in Moscow, and from there to an army commission. The military doctors in the capital discharged Private Yepifanov from the army on the grounds that he had a duodenal ulcer.

  The way this is presented in the materials of the criminal case is:

  L. A. Yarilina, being the chairperson of the Vladimir regional section of the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers, on the pretext of providing assistance to obtain exemption from military service, with the assistance of medical workers of various hospitals in the city of Vladimir, connived at creating in citizens subject to conscription for military service, and also serving military personnel, a fictitious (feigned) illness, namely a duodenal ulcer, for which she received remuneration.

  Of course, they never produced any evidence to support the allegation about receiving money which was completely untrue, but the case proceeded nevertheless and the imagination of the investigators of the military procurator's office proved boundless. Captain Golovkin, assistant military procurator of the Vladimir garrison, described the process by which the “feigned” duodenal ulcer had been produced with Yarilina's complicity:

  With the assistance of an endoscopist, Yarilina assisted in conducting a biopsy on the bulb of the duodenal intestine with subsequent thermocoagulation of the site for the purpose of creating a post-cautery scar there, which a subsequent conscientious endoscopic investigation assessed as post-ulcerous—that is, a fictitious ailment, namely an ulcerous condition of the duodenal intestine.

  It is Stalin's Doctors’ Plot all over again, with dissidents as their accomplices.

  “The materials of the case seem to be saying that you assisted the endoscopist.”

  “Of course I didn't. I only asked him over the telephone to examine the boy,” Lyudmila replies.

  So was Yepifanov malingering? Nobody is charging him with evasion of military service. Did the doctor deliberately harm him? Nobody is trying to prosecute him, either. The only person under criminal investigation is the human rights campaigner Lyudmila Yarilina. Fabricating criminal cases against those who cause trouble, or are just too active, is part of life under Putin, both in Moscow, where Khodorkovsky and Lebe-dev are in prison, and in the provinces like Vladimir.

  The “good” defenders of human rights are those who try to help people by collaborating with the authorities rather than through constant confrontation, people like Pamfilova. For the bad ones, the technique is to try to marginalize them and, if necessary, use “themocoagulation” to destroy them.

  The method of thermocoagulation starts with an enervating, objectionable investigation. This leads to a trial followed, for the most intractable, by prison.

  October 20

  Dmitry Kozak, Putin's representative in South Russia, has appointed Ramzan Kadyrov as his security adviser for the entire Southern Federal District. If, before this, Kadyrov Junior was able to trample underfoot the law and the Constitution only in Chechnya and Ingushetia, now he will be able to share his experience and advise the directors of the security services throughout the North Caucasus region on how to behave similarly, and will supervise the atrocities they commit on behalf of Mr. Kozak.

  This is going to cost many lives. Ramzan is virtually brain-dead, and is in his element only where there is war, terror, and chaos. Without them he literally does not know what to do.

  Ramzan's promotion continues the suicidal policies that lead inexorably to future terrorist acts, and the consolidation of power in the hands of people who appear to want to do everything they can to ensure that the bombing of the Metro should be followed by the hijacking of airplanes, and after that the seizure of a school.

  There is no special meaning to be found in this act by Putin. He has no idea what needs to be done next. It is Russia's familiar tragedy of having top political leaders who are incompetent, having landed their jobs through the operation of blind chance, and in turn promoting nonentities to positions of great power.

  October 23

  In Moscow a major demonstration has taken place to protest against the war in Chechnya and commemorate the victims of the terrorist acts. The meeting was held at 5:00 p.m., and from 10:00 a.m. there was a line of demonstrators on Pushkin Square. Those who suffered in the Nord-Ost siege were there for the first time, because today is the second anniversary of the hostage taking.

  The meeting was not “official.” After Beslan a wave of officially organized antiterrorist meetings rolled over the country on the initiative of the presidential administration. The Central Moscow authorities had agreed to a demonstration of up to 500 people, but around 3,000 turned up and the authorities warned that this was more than had been permitted. The second reason was that the slogans on banners were not only antiwar, but also antigovernment. But then, who is conducting the war?

  A lot of those attending arrived in expensive cars, members of the middle class who don't usually attend such meetings. A cold, heavy rain was
falling, but people came and stayed, which is significant. As Boris Nadezhdin, a member of Committee 2008 and cochairman of the Union of Right Forces, said: “This is a demonstration that people do not want to be held hostage to an ideologically generated fear that is being imposed on them after Beslan … Chechnya is a terrible wound that has caused both Nord-Ost and Beslan. In 1999 Russia was offered a physician who promised to cure the country, and he was elected president. He has not succeeded. Today, when we have no free mass media or Parliament in Russia, there remains only one way of putting pressure on the state authorities; and that is good people coming out to demonstrate.”

  The good people stood in the square in the pouring rain, bearing placards reading, “We are the West's fifth column!,” alluding to an interview by Vladislav Surkov in Komsomolskaya Pravda, in which he had the gall to say that the opposition was a section of society “irrevocably lost as partners;” that Russia was under siege; that the liberals and nationalists were a fifth column financed by the West; that there was no such thing as Putin's Russia, there was “only Russia,” and that anybody who didn't believe that was an enemy.

  This is no longer a neo-Soviet ideology: this is the Soviet regime pure and simple. No sooner has the Communist elite got rid of hindrances such as the decayed Party Central Committee, and gained limitless opportunities for self-enrichment, than it has started resurrecting the ideological frameworks of the past. Surkov is regarded nowadays as Putin's chief ideologist.

  It is the autumn of 2004, but a political winter has already set in that makes your blood run cold.