A Russian Diary Read online

  Center stage was taken by the same old dears, and they reduced everything to a talking shop, shaping a congress in their own image.

  The question is: can an extraparliamentary democratic opposition exist at all at present? If it should come into being, will it be able to keep its head above water in a corrupt society where only those who can lobby the authorities can raise funds from “sponsors”?

  Who could sponsor it anyway? Only oligarchs, and given that it is open season for hunting oligarchs there are no takers, apart from Berezovsky. A financial link with him would send voters fleeing in the opposite direction.

  There is another problem. Hatred does not work as a platform for parliamentary elections and political struggle in Russia. The democrats cannot build their campaigning on hatred.

  What can they build it on, if they have no positive ideas? Well, they damned well should have positive ideas! The average life expectancy in Russia is fifty-eight years and six months. Why not make the main plank in your election platform a demand to let people live at least to seventy!

  The liberals and democrats are approaching the New Year of 2005 as political sleepwalkers. In the year since they were trounced in the parliamentary elections they haven't even managed a realistic assessment of why they were defeated.

  The dissidents and the democrats both tried to fool the people for too long into believing that Yeltsin, of all people, was a real democrat. There came a time when that fairy tale became unsustainable and “democrat” became literally a dirty word: people changed the word “demokrat” to “dermokrat” (shitocrat). It became current not only among fanatical Communists and Stalinists but among the majority of the population. The “dermocrats” had given Russia hyperinflation, made them lose the savings they had carried forward from Soviet times, started the war in Chechnya, and presided over the Russian government's currency default.

  People didn't elect Yeltsin in 1996 because they believed in him, but simply as the lesser of two evils; not because they believed in his prescription for taking the country forward, but because they feared what might happen if the Communists got back in. Government resources were shamelessly exploited; national television stations broadcast only in favour of Yeltsin and were in effect his campaign cheerleaders. People turned away in disgust when they saw how the democratic parties kept silent about this travesty of democracy. A number of democrats even stated openly that it was reasonable to sacrifice the truth in order to save democracy.

  This enthusiasm for sacrificing the truth caught on, and became the main force propelling Putin to power after Yeltsin proclaimed him his successor. The Kremlin took control of all television news coverage, with independent stations allowed only to provide entertainment, even when hundreds were being killed in Chechnya.

  And that was the end of that. The election was based on trickery, fraudulence, and state coercion. The democrats kept mum, trying to cling to their vestiges of power in the Duma and locally. They forfeited whatever was left of their authority, and the Russian people are now profoundly indifferent to all things political. That is the terrible legacy of thirteen years of Russian democracy.

  [December 10-14

  An incident in Blagoveshchensk involving three masked militiamen and the owners of a local casino, against whom the mayor had a grudge, led to a grotesque overreaction when the deputy minister of the interior of Bashkiria* sent in a forty-strong militia special operations unit. Armed with truncheons and rifles, they descended on the main street and started dragging out and arresting any man they found in the cafés and gaming establishments. Those arrested were photographed, fingerprinted, beaten, and forced to sign blank statement forms.

  After being searched in public, girls were taken to a room on the first floor of the city's internal affairs directorate. The special operations troops lined up at the door, and witnesses state that half a bucketful of used condoms were subsequently brought out. Over the next four days a great many men were beaten up and women raped. Local taxi drivers report that the troops sent them for vodka, and that the screams of girls were to be heard coming from the local swimming pool. The attacks later spread to neighboring villages.

  There followed a massive official attempt to intimidate witnesses and cover up the reality of what had happened.]

  December 14

  A group of high school and college students belonging to the National Bolshevik Party entered the reception area of the presidential administration in Bolshoy Cherkassky Lane, barricaded themselves into a ground-floor office and began shouting slogans out the window: “Putin—you get out!,” “Putin, sink with the Kursk!” and the like. Forty-five minutes later, through the joint efforts of OMON and the Federal Security Service, they were all brutally restrained. Lira Guskova, twenty-two, ended up in a prison hospital with a severe concussion; Yevgeny Taranenko, twenty-three, had his nose broken by the soldiers; and Vladimir Lindu, twenty-three, who has dual Dutch and Russian citizenship, suffered leg injuries.

  RUSSIA AFTER UKRAINE, BY WAY OF KIRGHIZIA

  THE UKRAINIAN ORANGE REVOLUTION*OF DECEMBER 2004 PUT an end to the Great Russian Political Depression. Society was shaken out of its torpor: everybody so envied them their Maidan Square. “For heaven's sake, why aren't we like they are in Ukraine?” people asked. “They're just the same as us, only …”

  Everyone had their own arguments to prove that we and the Ukrainians are as alike as peas in a pod. A vast number of people living in Russia are either pure Ukrainian or half- or quarter-Ukrainian. In the Soviet Union there was no city closer to Moscow than Kiev, and everything in our way of life was so intertwined there was no way we could ever be pulled apart. Even after the breakup of the USSR, most Russians were certain Ukraine would remain an adjunct and a semicolony, and that Moscow would decide what was best for Kiev.

  Only, it all turned out differently. While the former imperial capital continued to delude itself that its ex-colony would stay in line, the ex-colonials underwent a remarkable transformation and developed into a nation.

  The political passions of the Orange Revolution did not, however, sweep like wildfire over Russia; they gave a boost to the spirit of protest. They got people off their sofas to at least think of demonstrating; but that was as far as it went in January 2005. Millions took part in demonstrations against the law to replace the extensive system of benefits in kind with token monetary compensation, which came into effect on January 1. There were hopes of a revival of democratic opposition.

  *

  January was nothing but protest meetings. The sick lost their right to free medicine. Soldiers lost their right to send letters home without paying postage, a monstrous deprivation because they have almost no money. If their parents could not afford to give them money there would be no letters home. Expectant mothers lost the right to paid leave, which is hardly the best way to go about raising our abysmal birthrate.

  [In the summer of 2004, when the reform was passed by the Duma, Anna was in Yekaterinburg in the Urals. She wrote at the time:]

  Here, in Sverdlovsk Province, live 20,000 ex-servicemen who have fought in the Chechen war. Almost all of them qualify for benefits in kind as former participants in the “antiterrorist operation.” They see the government's benefit reform as a crusade against themselves.

  The “Chechens” here in the Urals can barely make ends meet. Nobody wants to employ or teach them, and many become alcoholics, junkies, or thieves and end up in prison. In the village of Repino they have actually set up an Association of Ex-Servicemen of the Chechen Wars inside the prison. It has 200 members.

  They are not welcome in free institutions and hospitals, and usually have no money to pay privately for the services they need. They are driven like lepers out of hostels, become outcasts, and gravitate into their own groupings, “Chechen” communities, and associations. Most of them see the material privileges as a token of at least some kind of respect and gratitude from society, as compensation for lives broken at the very outset. Abolishing these privileges a
nd replacing them by a cash pittance is seen as a final kick in the teeth from the state to which their comrades sacrificed their lives and they sacrificed their health.

  The wounded and disabled will simply die. Many will lose jobs they were barely managing to cling to. The few who, in spite of everything, were studying will lose educational privileges extracted from the state only with immense effort.

  Ruslan Mironov is a young man with a Category 2 disability. He has a friendly, open smile untypical of a “Chechen” ex-serviceman. He behaves undemonstratively, wears no medals on his chest. He would be an ordinary lad, but for the obvious consequences of a severe head injury. Half his face is twisted and he has problems with his arms, which had to be pieced together after he was wounded.

  We are sitting in a small room in the Yekaterinburg premises of Arsenal 32, one of the largest Sverdlovsk associations for disabled ex-servicemen.

  “Ruslan, you are plainly self-sufficient. How do you do it? What do you stand to lose as a result of the reform?”

  “I am losing everything,” Ruslan answers, “and that hurts. I am disabled, but I didn't just collect my pension and burden others with my problems. I do a little business and make around a hundred thousand rubles [$3,550] a year. I fought to get the tax exemption ex-servicemen are entitled to but now I shall have to give away 48.5 percent of my income. That is a loss of 48,500 rubles, almost half. My business ceases to make commercial sense. I am going to be poor.”

  In addition to that, Ruslan had a financial incentive to take on disabled workers, to support his own “Chechen” comrades whom other employers were reluctant to take on. They have a reputation for working badly and causing problems.

  “If a disabled worker was paid, say, 8,300 rubles [$295] a month,” Ruslan explains, “he paid no tax. This privilege is also being withdrawn. He will have to give the state 4,000 rubles in tax; in other words, twice the 2,000 rubles he will receive in recompense through monetarization. This is not a sensible policy toward disabled people who do not want to be a burden on society. You would think they would do everything they could to support us, enable us to develop by individual initiative, so we aren't just lying around at home or sprawling drunk in gateways. But now they are forcing us onto the scrapheap.”

  Ruslan continues: “I had a right to half-price air and rail travel in the autumn and winter. That was a great boon, because my parents live in Anapa on the Black Sea and my mother-in-law is in Novosibirsk. I used that privilege a lot. Again, the right to free false teeth has been taken away. That matters. We nearly all came back from Chechnya without our teeth. There is an enormous line in the hospital. And now? The ‘social package’ for someone who is disabled is 2,000 rubles [$71]; for those who took part in combat it is 1,500 [$53]; families of those who died get a total of 650 [$23]. It will be impossible to get your teeth taken care of.”

  Sergey Domrachev, born in 1976, has a punctured lung. Part of his skull has been replaced by a titanium plate. Nevertheless, today Sergey is a typical representative of the Yekaterinburg middle class. He confidently drives the streets in his modest Zhiguli, wearing a smart suit and carefully chosen tie. He is well groomed, sleek, self-reliant. It's a pleasure to look at him and listen to him. He is married to an independently minded, literate, and beautiful woman. He likes his work, has completed a first degree, and is studying for a second.

  “Of all the people I know who took part in combat operations, only one in ten got back on their feet after the war. The rest of them drink, or do nothing. They live with their parents and sponge off them. We scare people. That is why most ‘Chechens’ work as security guards. They are mainly employed by ‘Afghan’ ex-servicemen in private security firms. The Afghans take us lot, but even they aren't keen.”

  “But many ‘Chechens’ who don't find a place in civilian life go back to Chechnya under contract. You don't feel an urge to do that?”

  “I can do without going back there.” He laughs.

  “But why do others do it?”

  “It's perfectly clear why. You can do whatever you please. You shoot whoever you want to. There are no laws. That's what they like.”

  “How did you manage not to sink to that level?”

  He laughs again. “I declared independence from the state. There came a moment after I had come back from the slaughter in Chechnya when I realized I could either choose to sink with all the others or start all over again. I never wear my Order of Valor medal. I have survived only because I pretended to forget everything and started living as if none of it had ever happened.”

  He would have reached the front of an accelerated line for state housing in 2005, but now they have abolished the privilege.

  “I have always known you should never rely on our state authorities. They always cheat you,” Sergey says. “Of course, it's a shame that I'm losing all these benefits, especially the priority for housing. It will be a pity if everything collapses.” Sergey shows me the tiny apartment he and his wife are renting. “I can't afford to buy an apartment yet. I work hard, but I recognize that I'm not up to holding down several jobs simultaneously. I don't expect to be able to do that in the future, either. At the moment at least I am working, but the plate in my head needs to be changed. I need money, I need to earn it and put it aside for the time after the operation.”

  We live in a most unusual state. It just loves driving people into a dead end, even those who are capable and really want to make their own way. The question is: what kind of citizens does such a state prefer? A mass of drunken idlers, or people who are looking to live an active life? Today the state is deliberately impoverishing those it should be helping to get on their feet. It forces into penury even those who have managed to raise themselves, while proclaiming that combating poverty is the president's new priority. The benefits reform may be the last straw for people whose lives have been broken by these same authorities. Many of the “Chechens” say they will find it difficult to swallow this. “Survival of the fittest”? It's not the ideal approach to social welfare. Are the weakest supposed just to die?

  Nadezhda Suzdalova locks her son Tolya in when she goes off to work at the village boiler-house. He is twenty-eight, an ex-serviceman with a Category 1 disability: paralyzed from the chest down; a talking head with arms, his elbows the only support for his body. They live in the remote village of Karpushikha in the dense taiga of the Urals. The regional center is Kirovgrad, 24 miles along a track through thick forest. It is from places like this that boys are sent to fight in the Caucasus. Their mothers do not throw themselves on the rails to save their sons.

  It is to such dire places that they return from the war. Karpushikha today is the “sink estate” for all the antisocial elements who, unable to adapt to the new times, have been expelled from Yekaterinburg for rent arrears run up over many years. By the entrance to the apartment building where the Suzdalovs live is a heaving mass of drunks, tramps, and junkies. They stagger about yelling, swearing, grabbing each other by the hips and kicking. They steal what little there is to steal: washing bowls, brushes, teapots, jugs. It is on account of the “neighbors” that Nadezhda has to lock Tolya in. He would be unable to stop their thieving.

  There is very little, but if they stole a bowl or unscrewed a tap, there would be no way it could be replaced. Tolya and his mother live on a disability benefit of 1,200 rubles [$43] a month. Nadezhda has not been paid her wages for more than six months.

  Tolya's story is typical: “He cries in the evenings.” As she tells me this, Nadezhda too begins to cry. She is worn out looking after her bedridden son. “But what can you say? I used to tell Tolya to fight back, to stop drinking, but now it's too late. That's all behind us.”

  Tolya left school as a naive, good-looking boy and was immediately sent to Chechnya. He returned a complete mental wreck, as they all do. Without any kind of rehabilitation, he was sent straight back to Kar-pushikha, where the only rehabilitation is alcoholism and drug addiction.

  Shortly afterward Tolya went bers
erk and wrecked a trading booth in Levikha, the neighboring village. In court the traders said the odd thing was that he didn't steal anything or hit anyone. So he landed in jail, like more than half the “Chechens” in Sverdlovsk Province. He was released under an amnesty, and started drinking again. Before long he became paralyzed. The doctors told his mother not to make a fuss. He wouldn't last five days. Their diagnosis was “severe neurological infection.”

  “In fact he has lived more than a year already,” his mother says, seating herself on a low bench by the bed. There is happiness in her eyes. “At first only I could feed him, but he has even started feeding himself.”

  Nevertheless, Tolya's illness is as severe as it is incurable. He has been diagnosed with HIV. Where he picked that up from, whether in Kar-pushikha or in the hospital, there is no telling. The only thing his country is honor bound to do is to allow him to live out his life in dignity. The room in which he lies is clean, but the smell of a sickroom is ineradicable. Urine flows into a bag attached to the bed frame. Tolya is covered in bedsores and infections, which his immune system cannot fight.

  “How could it? What do we eat? His catheters are brought by a girl who was in his class. She works at the cancer clinic and steals them for him. We can't afford to buy them ourselves,” Nadezhda says.

  A disabled veteran can count on getting only a pathetic selection of irrelevant medicines, and for the ones that are essential he has to pay. The cost of those Tolya needs exceeds the “social package” many times over.

  “And then there are the catheters. They are constantly getting clogged. He needs a mattress to prevent bedsores. I don't know what to do.”

  “No money will ever reach us because it never does,” Tolya says. “I don't believe a word the government says.” In his calm eyes there is a readiness for death.