A Russian Diary Page 27

  January 23

  The authorities are waking up to the fact that they need to do something about these protests. The state television channels have started putting out propaganda to explain why the new monetarization law is good, and old-age pensioners say how pleased they are with everything.

  Alexander Zhukov, the first deputy prime minister, is the chief apologist. Here is an example: “There are protests where the payments received from the regional budgets are less than the real cost of the abolished benefits. When this law was passed, however, it was agreed that regions that have sufficient resources can make higher payments if they so choose.”

  This is the main aim of the central government authorities: to shift the blame onto the regional authorities, even though eighty out of eighty-nine regions are totally dependent on the subsidies they receive from the federal budget. Zhukov relies on the fact that most people are simply unfamiliar with how the financing works.

  Mikhail Zurabov, the minister of health and social development, is forever urging people not to worry. “Additional sums are being allocated from the federal budget. In 2004 expenditure on benefits was one hundred billion rubles [$3.5 billion], but in 2005 we are allocating three hundred billion rubles [$10.5 billion]. We're just working out the details. The decision will be made either today or on Monday.”

  Zurabov claims that Law 122 was introduced in order to regularize the delivery of benefits. He says that although people had benefits in kind, no finance was allocated for them. “We need to make people free and independent of the state, and for that we need to improve their financial situation.”

  This is poppycock: the new system is so onerous and overadministered that to talk about freedom is casuistry. Old people have to stand in lines for hours in order to get the cash for a month's bus travel! The next month they will have to start all over again. No doubt the old social welfare system was cumbersome and had many faults, but the new system is worse and, moreover, is causing great financial hardship to millions of people.

  Another constant claim on television is that all the protest meetings are being organized by the mafia who control drugstores and the transport system. The opposition is said to be exploiting the situation in order to score political points. The democratic opposition, on the contrary, is making no attempt to score points, although it could and should.

  January 25

  The steering committee of the National Citizens’ Congress holds a meeting at the Journalists’ Club in Moscow.

  Everything at this festival of democracy degenerates into a fruitless discussion about who is the most important person.

  Boris Nadezhdin tries to mount a takeover bid for the Union of Right Forces. The Yabloko supporters try to behave like the owners of the enterprise. There is a lot of shouting, but no sign of action. Lyudmila Alex-eyeva in the chair gets cross. Garry Kasparov says how fed up he is with everything, and rightly points out irregularities in the procedure for adopting resolutions.

  Kasparov leaves before the end of the meeting. He stands outside in the corridor for a long time, complaining that the democrats are again missing the boat. The boat is already transporting the people of Russia to a different landing stage and the orchestra waiting to greet it there is not the Citizens’ Congress.

  Only St. Petersburg has managed to corral all the opposition parties and movements into a consultative assembly called the Petersburg Citizens’ Resistance. Even more amazing is that it is in action every day.

  Demonstrations in St. Petersburg are the most energetic and outspoken in the country; Putin is least loved in his native city. Petersburg Citizens’ Resistance is demanding restoration of the election of governors, dissolution of the Duma, abolition of Law 122, resignation of the president and government, the raising of pensions, and the abolition of censorship on state television.

  January 27

  Demonstrators in St. Petersburg formed a living corridor at the entrance to the city's Legislative Assembly on St. Isaac's Square. As the deputies arrived they had to pass along this corridor to shouts of “Shame on United Russia,” “Shame on this dull, gray Duma,” “Putin out!” One of the protesters burned her United Russia membership card at the door of the Legislative Assembly.

  January 28

  We are discussing what is going on at the Citizens’ Congress with Lyud-mila Alexeyeva. She admits that she does not have high hopes of it.

  “Then why waste time?”

  “Who knows—it might work!” she replies.

  January 30

  From the Internet: “Right, and now Comrade Deputies, all those who voted in favor of the election of Vladimir Vladimirovich as tsar may put their hands down and move away from the wall.”

  A year ago no jokes like this were circulating. It was the era of the Great Political Depression. People were afraid of the high-and-mighty Putin, who had broken the opposition.

  Whenever there is an acute crisis, Putin waits in the wings, and only when the dust has settled does he come out with some thoroughly gray utterance. Is he now seen as a joke? Or are people resigned to him, anticipating a return to the Period of Stagnation, and to laughing, as they did at Brezhnev, in the privacy of their kitchens. Revolution from above seems to be what we favor, when something prevents those at the top from being able to carry on in the old way.

  February 1

  An opinion poll by the Yury Levada Analytical Center, commissioned by the People's Verdict Foundation, finds that 70 percent of respondents do not trust the law enforcement agencies and view them with apprehension. Seventy-two percent believe they might suffer as a consequence of their lack of accountability. Only 2 percent stated that there is no problem of arbitrariness in the law enforcement agencies.

  February 2

  The Duma has granted permission to the army to conduct operations inside the country. What efforts were made in the Yeltsin period to ensure that the armed forces could not be turned against Russian citizens! Now we are back to the situation as it was in the USSR. An amendment to Article 10 of the federal law “On Defense” reads: “The Armed Forces of the Russian Federation may be employed to counteract terrorist activity using military resources” (Addendum to the law “On Defense”). This is included in the so-called Beslan antiterrorist package of laws. The only group to express concern that the army could be put to improper use, if this amendment was passed, was the Communists. They were brushed aside.

  The government has quelled the wave of anti-monetarization protest by throwing money at the regions.

  The Islamic underground, however, is growing in strength. Nonoffi-cial Islam is becoming increasingly attractive to young people because of the shortsighted religious policies of the Kremlin. After Beslan, the Kremlin decided to revive Soviet methods of containing Islam. The FSB took over responsibility for dealing with it, just as its former incarnation, the KGB, had in the days of the Soviet Union. The intelligence services will foster “tame” Muslims, and put the rest in jail. The result will be the same as it was under the Communists: the formation of underground religious groups.

  This morning, forty-eight-year old Yermak Tegaev, director of the Islamic Cultural Center of Vladikavkaz (the capital of North Ossetia, some twelve miles from Beslan), found himself in jail under Article 222 of the Criminal Code, for “harboring explosive materials and related components.”

  “At about six o'clock in the morning, soldiers broke into our apartment,” his wife, Albina, tells me. “My husband was reading the Koran before doing namaz and I was in the bathroom. When I heard noises, I partly opened the door and found a rifle pointed at me. There were people in masks and helmets all over the apartment, about twenty of them. They dragged me out of the bathroom almost naked and didn't let me dress for a long time. For us that is not permitted. My husband was lying on the floor with three people sitting on top of him. I started shouting for the neighbors—I thought robbers had broken in—but they didn't allow them to come in and started searching. My husband told them they couldn't conduct
a search without a lawyer, but they had brought their own ‘witnesses’ and started with the toilet. Three or four times they looked there in exactly the same place, and I suspected something bad. We have been searched several times recently and have feared this.

  “I tried to keep an eye on them the whole time to prevent them planting anything, but then they grabbed the keys to our car and ran out to where it was parked. They told my husband to get dressed and ordered him out. We refused to approach because we knew they had already planted what they needed to. They opened the trunk and said there were explosives there. They telephoned somewhere and a person appeared with a video camera who started filming us. Then they took my husband away.”

  His family and friends and Suleiman Marniev, the imam of the central mosque in Vladikavkaz, are convinced that the explosives were planted. The authorities want to jail the chairman of the Islamic Cultural Center, preferably for a long time, in order to neutralize an unofficial leader of the Muslim community whose existence does not suit them. His only crime is his popularity among his fellow believers, especially the young, and the fact that he won't collaborate with the republican directorate of the FSB.

  What kind of collaboration are we talking about? And what is the Islamic Cultural Center of Vladikavkaz, that its leader should face such major unpleasantness?

  Formally the center is only one of the public associations of North Ossetia. It is a religious club whose status is identical, for example, to that of the Religious Board of Muslims of North Ossetia. On paper, the center and the board are exactly the same. Not, however, in practice. The board enjoys the financial support of the state authorities, and openly admits that it collaborates with the FSB. The center keeps its distance. That is the root of its problems.

  “After Beslan, the authorities, or more precisely the directorate of the FSB who hold power in the republic nowadays, wanted complete subordination of Muslims,” I am told by Artur Besolov, the center's deputy chairman. “The FSB is keen to control the life of Muslims through the Religious Board, through the chairman, who is an official mufti of the republic, Ruslan Valgasov. We are quite certain that Valgasov was appointed a mufti by the security agencies, which is categorically forbidden in Islam. The only place that sort of thing went on was in the Soviet Union. The majority of Muslims in North Ossetia (who make up 30 percent of the republic's population) oppose such appointing of religious leaders. Tegaev was offered appointment as a mufti but refused, precisely because he feared pressure from the regime. Nonetheless, it is Tegaev who has the greater authority. Valgasov, on the other hand, has only old men around him. The authorities simply decided to resolve the situation by jailing Tegaev.”

  Everybody can see that there has to be an accommodation with the Muslim world, but nobody in Russia is opening negotiations. They are pressing ahead with the old Soviet methods: if you can't abolish the Koran, then at least everything should be under control; no revivalist ja-maat communities, and if muftis and emirs are unavoidable in a country with twenty million Muslims, then they had better be on our side.

  Today all this jiggery-pokery is embedded in the state's approach to the fight against terrorism, an approach that is above the law. What has happened to Tegaev is simply one of its manifestations. They jail him, send in their report, and think the problem has been solved. In reality, it has merely been made worse. Persecuting Islam throughout Russia has led to a predictable Islamic backlash, which we have been seeing throughout 2004 and 2005 across the North Caucasus.

  In January, the security forces stormed an apartment in an ordinary five-story building in Nalchik, Kabardino-Balkaria. They believed a terrorist group was inside, or at least that's what they claimed afterward. However, those in the apartment were simply Muslims who were “not on our side.” Among them were Muslim Ataev and his wife, Sakinat Katsieva, a young married couple involved in the Islamic underground. They and their friends, another young Islamic family not under state control, were shot.

  Muslim and Sakinat had a six-month-old daughter, Leyla. The bodies of the adults were returned to their families after the assault, but Leyla had vanished. There was no body, no baby, no information; all attempts by her grandparents to find their granddaughter were in vain.

  They had, of course, also shot the baby. People in the neighboring buildings saw the soldiers carry out a small body swathed in a blanket, but, since the murder of an infant would have been too shocking for the public, they did not return her remains. How does the murder of Leyla differ from the deaths of the children killed during the assault on the school in Beslan?

  The more intense the pressure, the more committed the adherents of nonofficial Islam become. Islamic communities reluctant to exist within a system of “religious boards” are becoming ever more isolated, closing themselves off from the outside world and thereby becoming less comprehensible. Needless to say, Orthodox or Catholic Christians or anybody else would behave in the same way under the same circumstances. The situation is no different in Chechnya, where “FSB Muslims” fight Muslims who do not enjoy official sanction, exploiting the long-established religious boards, or “departments of religious affairs,” as they were called in the USSR. These were to be found even in the Communist Party's Central Committee, and in provincial and district party committees.

  Today many Soviet-era officials are still in the same jobs. Rudnik Du-daev, a general of the KGB and now of the FSB, was for many years Kady-rov's director of the Security Council of Chechnya and, before that, was also for many years one of the heads of the religious boards of Muslims in Soviet times.

  Dudaev “ran” Akhmed-hadji Kadyrov from the moment he entered a madrassa in the 1970s. Working for the KGB, he monitored Kadyrov, Djohar Dudaev, and Maskhadov, and now keeps an eye on Kadyrov Junior. And what good has it done? Are there fewer jamaats now in Chechnya? Or emirs aged between fifteen and seventeen who are completely out of control? What good has come of these religious boards? Has the authority of the official mufti of Chechnya been enhanced? Or the authority of emirs who are “not on our side” diminished?

  Mufti Valgasov will benefit to precisely the same extent as Shamaev, the former mufti of Chechnya, and as Mirzaev, who has replaced him. The state authorities may like their malleability, but the charisma and respect enjoyed by religious leaders do not derive from their closeness to the FSB. The fight against Islam, using Soviet methods, leads to the opposite of what is intended. In Chechnya and Dagestan, in Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, and in Karachaevo-Cherkessia, Islam is going underground.

  February 3

  The presidential administration swings into action. In Tula the clowns have organized a meeting in support of Law 122. This is the new approach of the presidential administration: meetings populated with “their” people. Old folk are paid a fee to attend—how much depends on the circumstances, but money changes hands. The corrupting of our people continues, and our people are wholly willing to be corrupted.

  The meetings are organized by local authorities after a coordinating phone call from the Kremlin. Putin's “line management” is alive and well. At these “antiprotest meetings,” governors who have grown fat from bribe taking waddle onto the platform accompanied by their bureaucratic entourage. They promise, as they have been told to, that social welfare payments are on the point of being increased and that everything will again be exactly as it was before the law was passed. Day after day these meetings are the lead item on the television news.

  In Tula too we see the governor on stage with a pack of his apparatchiks. The meeting has been organized by United Russia. The governor announces that everyone receiving a pension of less than 1,650 rubles [$59] will be issued with free season tickets for the city's public transport system (of which there is virtually nothing left). On the other hand, from February 1 a ticket on Tula's private transport system has gone up from 6 to 7 rubles.

  Bewilderingly, the people rejoice and give thanks for the season tickets.

  February 10

  So far, peopl
e on the periphery of the empire are not giving in. In Abakan, Siberia, in 33°F of frost, some thirty people picket the building of the Khakassian administration with placards reading “No to the antisocial policy.” In the town of Kyzyl, the capital of Tyva, in 49°F of frost, fifty-six people attend a demonstration against Putin's policy. In Khabarovsk, in the Far Eastern storm wind, a handful of people stand in the central square with a banner reading “United Russia disgraces Russia!”

  February 12

  In Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk the local human rights association has performed a piece of street theater called “The Funeral of Democracy.” On a life-sized dummy representing youthful democracy the campaigners hung fifteen or so heavy accusatory placards about the recent unconstitutional actions of the state authorities, Law 122, and the abolition of election of governors. Eventually, under the weight of these woes, democracy collapsed and was placed in a coffin covered with stickers proclaiming its demise. Bearing wreaths, to funereal music, the demonstrators nailed down the lid of the coffin and bore it away on a catafalque. The performance took place by the building of the provincial administration, watched with interest by bureaucrats from the windows.

  In Tula, a meeting organized by the Communists attracted around a thousand protesters. In Abakan too they held a meeting and almost three hundred people were present this time: it wasn't quite so cold. It was a result of sorts, but a Nationwide Day of Joint Action, as intended by Social Solidarity (SOS), it was not. There is no nationwide protest.

  February 15

  The democrats (Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces) have again tried to reach agreement. So far their battlefield is still offices in Moscow rather than the streets of Russia. Everybody is fed up with the democratic functionaries, even their supporters.