A Russian Diary Read online

It is difficult to believe that Karpushikha is in the same country as Moscow, or even as Yekaterinburg. Not a single care worker has visited Tolya in the year and a half that he has been bedridden. The wheelchair issued to him at the disabled ex-servicemen's hospital in Yekaterinburg stands unused in the corner. There is nobody to help him down from his second-floor room to get a breath of fresh air.

  It is good to write uplifting stories about people who have fought their way to a decent future in spite of the hopelessness and brutality of life in Russia; but the truth is that there are thousands more like Tolya, weak people at the bottom of the pile, who can survive in the remote, provincial scene of their last days only if they are given social support. Withholding the full cost of necessary medical treatment for the likes of Tolya is equivalent to sentencing him to death. The state machine becomes an agent of natural selection.

  It is the middle of the working day. A stunted, drunken man with a black eye and with his pants pulled down grabs a hefty, disheveled woman in a skirt short enough to reveal her swollen thighs. A crowd of bystanders is guffawing under Tolya's window, but nobody looks up. Here you are either a fellow drunk or you are of no interest to anybody. Here, in the remote jungles of Russia.

  Revda is a small town on the Yekaterinburg-Moscow highway. It is difficult to like the place. It is a territory of extreme politics where the idol is Zhirinovsky, our cunning holy fool who makes big money out of all the losers longing for the good old days of Soviet Russia. Dust, drunkenness, and drugs. Prostitutes loiter by the roadside, aged twelve to fifty-six, and costing between 50 and 300 rubles [$2-$11], according to a pugnacious man with a skull pendant. This is Andrey Baranov, deputy chairman of the Revda section of the Sverdlovsk Provincial Union of Ex-Servicemen of Local Conflicts. Baranov is no Tolya.

  “I look out for myself,” Baranov boasts. “I chucked my work registration record out. What use is it? Nobody gives us work. A lot of us have head injuries, we are unpredictable. People are scared of us.”

  “Probably not without reason. Are you aggressive?”

  Baranov is not standing for that. “No, we just see injustice before other people do. Half of us are in prison for that. Seventy percent have become alcoholics. It takes a heroic wife to put up with our boys, but some do. I don't trust the state for an instant. I trust Zhirinovsky.”

  “How do you earn a living?”

  “We have got ourselves organized and escort freight. Straightforwardly, without any work registration records.”

  “You are into protection, then?”

  “Why do you immediately think that? It's just that the government is totally useless. Why work for it? Anyway, protection rackets are old hat. We help people to do business.”

  Baranov and the “Chechens” in Revda are an outlaw private taxation department. Among their clients, to put it politely, is the local taxi firm. We are talking in its decrepit little office at Revda railway station. The whistling of the locomotives underscores the edginess of our conversation, the confusion in the damaged minds of the “Chechens” sitting around, Baranov's rage at the rest of the world, and the fact that he believes he is fighting for justice on his own terms.

  “Do you make use of welfare benefits?”

  “Never. We look after ourselves. On the train to Yekaterinburg I organize my own free travel. I get on the train, show my military card, which makes it clear that I took part in combat operations, and the ticket inspector moves on. They steer clear of me.”

  “Would it be worthwhile getting an education?”

  “What for? No thanks.”

  I ask them to find me at least one sober “Chechen” to talk to. Time passes. In the evening in Revda there are none. Valerii Mokrousov, a friend of Baranov who fought in the Afghan war and is the chairman of the ex-servicemen's association, walks in and out. He is constantly distracted by telephone calls. As our conversation at the railway station is ending, he mentions, “I just tried to get through to Oleg Donetskov, but his wife told me to bugger off. He is lying there dead drunk. He fought in both the Chechen wars and has a concussion.”

  “Concussion? He shouldn't be drinking!”

  “Well, what do you expect?” Baranov returns to the fray hurling his words straight at me. “You have a choice: either hit the vodka, or go back to Chechnya. I went back there under contract.”

  “What for?”

  “For a vacation. To get away from your civilian way of life. I know where I stand there. Here it's nothing but problems. All our lads are looking for the truth and not finding it. When you come back from there you see things clearly. Everything here is rotten. Brother abandons brother. It's complete shit. There everybody is honest: we are here, the enemy is there—fight and shoot!”

  Vyacheslav Zykov, chairman of the Sverdlovsk Province ex-servicemen's association, served as an ambulance driver in the present war. He confirms what Baranov is saying.

  “Seventy percent of our guys try to go back to fight again. Out of desperation. But only about 30 percent get selected as contract soldiers.”

  “Have you heard that benefits are being abolished?”

  “Who cares. That won't save them.” This prognostication comes from another individual wearing a skull pendant. “We are for Zhirinovsky. We'll get a patriotic movement going; take kids off the street and put them in patriotic soldiers’ clubs. If we show them the ropes, things may work out in the end.”

  “Work out how?”

  “With a strict monarchy.”

  “But how can you teach anybody if you aren't well yourselves?”

  “I lost 360 lads in the assault on Grozny. Only you're not allowed to write about that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because something like that ‘couldn't happen.’ Everybody lies about Chechnya. I took part in the ‘cleansings’ after the assault on Komsomol-skoye, know what I mean? But we're the ones who have to deal with that. That's why we are fighting for justice.”

  “Why did you go back to Chechnya? If you know that it only makes things worse, for you and for everyone else?”

  The question goes unanswered, thank God. If anyone in Russia manages to stir up this community of “Chechens” to political action, it will be the end.

  January 1, 2005

  In the Chechen town of Urus-Martan, three boys have gone off to fight for the resistance. They left notes for their relatives explaining that they could no longer put up with the lawlessness and could see no other way to get back at the failure to punish evildoers.

  January 9

  Another four young men from Urus-Martan, aged between twenty-five and thirty, have left to join the resistance. January has seen a record number of recruits. This is in response to the large-scale, brutal cleansings of the last six months.

  January 12

  On January 12 Ramzan Kadyrov, the lunatic deputy prime minister of Chechnya, set off with a column of between 100 and 150 jeeps to sort out the Dagestanis. When they arrived at the border between Chechnya and Dagestan, the Dagestan militia on duty fled in terror. In Hasavyurt in Dagestan, Kadyrov's troops detained and then released the regional chief of police. This was a typical piece of bravado in retaliation for the brief detention of Kadyrov's sister in Dagestan on January 10.

  January 14

  Aslan Maskhadov, president of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, has announced a one-month, unilateral cease-fire. He has ordered all his armed groups to take a break until February 22.

  What does it signify? Winter weariness? An attempt to foster goodwill on the basis that both sides are fed up with the carnage and should just stop it? Or is he testing his authority? One must suppose there's a bit of all three. In announcing the cease-fire, Maskhadov is first and foremost testing himself and very courageously so because he is doing it publicly. It is no secret that many people shrug when they hear mention of Maskhadov and ask whom he actually controls.

  The reasons for this lack of confidence are obvious enough; Maskhadov stays very deep underground. For many years he has
refused to see journalists, fearing the fate of Ahmad-Shakh Masud of Afghanistan, the Pandsher Lion blown up by journalists who had been specially sent for the purpose. For the time being Maskhadov's public self-examination is not going well. The use of land mines against the federals is not decreasing, and whoever is planting them is paying no attention to his cease-fire.

  This is also a test for a Kremlin not noted for courageous responses.

  The first to raise his voice against the cease-fire was, naturally, the Kremlin-appointed “president of Chechnya,” Alu Alkhanov. He announced that he would not negotiate with Maskhadov but was prepared to negotiate with fighters about a unilateral surrender of weapons. The Kremlin simply disdained to react to the cease-fire at all. If you are not for peace, you are in favor of war.

  To underline its stupidity, the Kremlin decided to announce that when it got its hands on Maskhadov and Basaev, it would arrest both of them. The charges against Maskhadov include the fact that “there is evidence that Basaev instructed the Beslan terrorists to include among their demands the opening of negotiations with Maskhadov” (Nikolai Shepel, deputy procurator general).

  January 15

  The mothers of soldiers killed in Chechnya have sent back to Putin their monthly “compensation” of 150 rubles [$5] in protest at the withdrawal of benefits in kind.

  Before January 1, mothers whose sons had been sacrificed in the North Caucasus escapade were entitled to free medical treatment, free travel on public transport, a half-price ticket each year for train, plane, or steamer; they also paid half-price for their telephone and television service and had the right to a one-off loan on preferential terms and to a free plot of land.

  That was entirely just. In most cases the state uses the sons of poorer families to fight its war in Chechnya. Often the mother is a single parent. Well-off people with any influence at all ransom their sons from the misfortune of army service, and certainly from service in Chechnya.

  Anti-monetarization demonstrations are snowballing. Every day people turn out in the thousands. Political causes do not produce anything like the response to a policy that hits people's pockets, and Putin has little to fear. He will throw them some money, the Russian people will fail to sweep him from power, and their aggression will be directed against whichever stranger happens to be in the vicinity.

  January 17

  Russia's first Internet referendum is under way at www.skaji.net [“Skazhi net!” means “Say no!” in Russian]. It is a classic grassroots initiative. Some students from the Higher Institute of Economics got together and decided to invite citizens to vote on the Net on two issues:

  Law 122 (abolishing benefits in kind);

  No confidence in the government.

  I was phoned by Alexander Korsunov, the leader of the team, who asked for support.

  “But who are you?” I asked. “What party are you from?”

  “I am nobody. We are just doing it.”

  The students who had thought up the project belong to no single political party, although their initiative has subsequently received formal support from Yabloko, Rodina, and the Communist Party.

  The students wrote:

  We regard Law 122 as an insult to our old people in the year when we celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of victory in the Second World War. The government has discredited the sound idea of monetarization of benefits. The sole legal means of protecting our rights today is a referendum in which we can express our protest. Students have always been the most socially active part of the population, reacting effectively to events in Russia. We call on you to join us.

  Millions of our people voted online against the law and the government's policy but where do these and other millions disappear to when they cannot hide behind anonymity? Fear makes them invisible.

  Protest demonstrations are particularly strong in St. Petersburg, Tver, Tyumen, Samara, Perm, and in Khimki in Moscow Province. People are coming out onto the streets, blocking the roads, picketing buildings and threatening the authorities with more to come. The reason is that Law 122 is beginning to hurt.

  In St. Petersburg the police tried to arrest members of Yabloko and the National Bolshevik Party. After the meeting an old-age pensioner was arrested, taken away, and brutally beaten up at a militia station. In the morning the militia arrested Vladimir Soloveichik, a member of the Joint Action Committee that has been coordinating the protest demonstrations. They also subsequently arrested eight members of the National Bolshevik Party who had taken part in the demonstration at Gatchina.

  January 19

  If the protests against Law 122 continue at their present level, it is clear there is going to be an increasing overlap between the interests of the protesters and those of the militia sent in to pacify them.

  Most of those working for the security agencies are also losing benefits. Their wages are traditionally low—militiamen get no more than 3,000 rubles [less than $105] per month. These protests are taking place in large cities and most of the militiamen will live in the suburbs. Until this month they enjoyed free public transport. There have been reports of mass resignations in the Moscow militia. One militiaman shot himself while on duty in the center of Moscow, guarding the offices of the Directorate for the Struggle Against Organized Crime; he had told his colleagues that he could no longer feed his family. The Ministry of Defense has officially notified the Soviet of the Federation that a survey conducted this month showed that 80 percent of officers feel dissatisfaction over the law on benefits, and only 5 percent of officers consider their material situation to be satisfactory.

  I suspect the state authorities are starting to take notice because they know that, apart from the security forces, nobody supports them. They have begun offering subsidies and handouts in order to head off unrest. They saw that militiamen were refusing to beat demonstrators, and it reminded them of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine when the security forces refused to fire on their own people and changed sides. That was the decisive moment.

  In Moscow, a coalition of voluntary organizations has been set up: Social Solidarity (SOS). It promptly called for demonstrations throughout Russia on February 10 and 12, “Nationwide Days of Joint Action” against the authorities’ antisocial policy. SOS is a pro-Communist organization, the democrats having missed the boat once again. It is demanding the repeal of Law 122, the doubling of pensions, reform of the tax system in favor of the regions and low-income groups of the population, the firing of all United Russia deputies, and resignation of the government.

  Nobody wanted to make a fuss about this last summer and autumn. It was only when the benefits were actually withdrawn and pensioners were unable to get on to public transport by showing their pension books that the protests took off.

  January 22

  This Saturday too saw mass demonstrations. Further January opinion polls say that 58 percent of those who formerly enjoyed benefits in kind support the protesters. The survey was conducted by the state-owned Channel One television station.

  In Krasnoyarsk, more than 3,000 people protested against a rise in electricity prices. From January 1 a customer can use only 50 kilowatt-hours a month; anything over that will be charged at double the rate. In most of the apartment buildings in Krasnoyarsk the central heating is extremely inefficient and, as Siberia is a cold place in winter, people have no option but to leave their electric fires on. There is no way they can use only 50 kilowatt-hours in the winter months—surveys suggest that the average citizen uses two to three times that amount.

  In Ufa, almost 5,000 people attended a rally in the city center demanding that President Murtaza Rakhimov should either repeal mone-tarization in Bashkiria by February 26, or resign. After the meeting, pensioners wearing orange clothing blocked one of the main streets. Bearing the orange flags of the Ukrainian revolution, they began collecting signatures for a referendum on the direct election of mayors in the cities of Bashkiria.

  In Moscow, ten activists of the Avant-Garde of Red Youth have been arrested for
“attempting to march to the building of the presidential administration,” although they were arrested near the Byelorussky Station, which is over a mile away. There had been an anti-monetarization rally at the station organized by the Communists and attended by 3,000-4,000 people. Many young people and the National Bolshevik Party also took part. Their slogans were “Free travel for employees of the militia and servicemen,” “Stop robbing the pensioners,” “Hands off the law on ex-servicemen,” “Down with the Putin regime!,” “Down with the El Puta clique!”

  The formal reason for detaining the Avant-Gardists is that permission had been granted for the Communists’ meeting, but not for a procession afterward. All ten of those arrested were beaten up.

  Street protest is becoming increasingly left-wing and nationalistic. Democrats attend protest meetings but behave as if they are doing everyone a favor. They are not popular.

  According to the January social survey by the Kremlin's TsIOM polling service, the slogan “Russia for the Russians” is wholly supported by 16 percent of the population, who consider that “this should have been done long ago;” 37 percent consider that “it would not be a bad thing to implement it, but within reasonable limits.” 16 + 37 = 53 percent fascism, because this policy cannot be implemented “within reasonable limits.”

  The only ray of hope is that 25 percent oppose the idea. They believe that “Russia for the Russians” is a fascist idea.

  The same survey shows a very Russian reason for wanting ethnic minorities driven out. It is because, in the opinion of 39 percent of respondents, they live better than Russians. Only three regions of the Federation—Moscow, Tyumen Province, and Tatarstan—have a standard of living comparable to Europe's.