Russians

by Gregory Feifer

  Although the failure to properly overhaul the Soviet legal system has had disastrous consequences under Putin, some successes have been achieved. The introduction of a jury system in 2003 for the first time since the Revolution provided the best hope for fighting widespread corruption in the court system. Statistics show why. While judges presiding over non-jury trials find defendants guilty more than 98 percent of the time, juries have acquitted some 15 percent of defendants.

  So when the directors of one of the country’s largest cigarette importers were accused of fraud soon after the reform passed, they opted for a jury trial. The lead juror, a soft-spoken deputy director of a small publishing house named Liudmilla Barabanova, told me the prosecutors presented reams of documents during the trial but not a shred of evidence to support their charges. Worse than that, each juror was offered a bribe of as much as five hundred dollars to find the defendants guilty. “We were all very tense,” she said. “But we didn’t dare complain to the judge because we knew it would be used as a pretext to dismiss us. We had to remain silent to see the trial to its end.”

  Barabanova and the other jury members came to believe the accusations were false, cooked up by a rival to put the defendant company out of business, and that the prosecutors were playing along. But the jurors had no chance to acquit the defendants: they were sent home three days before they were due to reach a decision. “We were dismissed because we weren’t going to reach a guilty verdict,” Barabanova said.

  The case went to a retrial. The new head juror, Yevgeny Danilov, told me it emerged that the plaintiff company was registered in the United States under a false name, something prosecutors assured the jurors was standard practice. “We understood something was wrong, that documents were being fabricated,” Danilov said. “We also realized we had to protect our own integrity, so no one could compromise us.” The jurors found themselves sneaking in and out of the courthouse to avoid being trapped into meetings with prosecutors who could later be accused of influencing them. This time the jury persevered in unanimously acquitting the defendants. Unlike American practice, however, Russian law allows acquittals to be appealed, and the prosecutors took their case straight to the Supreme Court, which overturned the not-guilty verdict and ordered another trial.

  A young lawyer named Ekaterina Stavitskaya represented the defense during the third trial. Speaking in her small, plain office, she told me such trials were a way to get ahead in business. “Lawsuits have replaced the contract killings of the 1990s as a more humane way to get rid of competitors,” she said. In that case, it didn’t work: the third jury acquitted the defendants a second time. Later, however, the prosecutors again appealed to the Supreme Court.

  After the first trial, its jury members tried to make sense of their experiences by meeting with the defense lawyers. They later realized they were spied on because photographs of them appeared in newspaper articles that accused them of obstructing justice. One paper called the jury members “secret terrorists.” The prosecutors appeared on television to denounce some of them as homeless, unemployed and mentally deficient. “I felt like my soul was being spat on,” juror Danilov told me.

  Critics of the jury system complain that unlike Britain and the United States, Russia is a young, undeveloped democracy whose population can’t be expected to make important legal decisions. That was the opinion of the stolid justice minister, Yuri Chaika, who later became prosecutor general. “From the point of view of our society’s understanding of the legal system, of the level of our legal culture, it’s probably too early to have introduced juries to Russia,” he said.

  Supporters of the jury system counter that jurors aren’t meant to be experts but peers who consider specific issues. A leading legal expert named Sergei Nanosov told me that judges routinely ignore egregious procedural violations to rule in prosecutors’ favor. They are kept in line by such a large array of institutional arrangements, including bonus pay doled out by regional officials, that “it’s fair to say our legal system is utterly dependent on the state.”

  A rare Moscow city judge who refused to follow orders became a cause célèbre. Olga Kudeshkina was presiding over a trial against a customs official who had launched criminal proceedings against the owner of the infamous FSB-connected Tri Kita furniture shop, central to the 2007 Kremlin clan battle that prompted the arrest of the drug control agency’s Alexander Bulbov. The prosecutor general himself quashed an investigation into the smuggling of four hundred tons of furniture before going on to charge the customs official who initiated the probe with abuse of office. Kudeshkina was fired when she refused to convict him.

  When I spoke to her later, the smiling, elaborately coiffed former judge explained that officials called chairmen of the courts, who assign judges to preside over trials, are expected to select loyal people for sensitive cases. A deputy chairwoman had selected her for the furniture trial “by mistake” because the chairman was on holiday.

  The authorities essentially control the courts, Kudeshkina said, but “it’s much more difficult to do that with juries, so of course the authorities want to get rid of them by saying our citizens aren’t ready.” Judges’ dependence on politicians is so great, she concluded, that apart from cases involving political matters, Soviet practice had generally been fairer and less corrupt. Although Soviet judges were very occasionally fired for unjustified convictions, “that never happens today.”

  Pro-Kremlin legislators have continued calling for the jury system to be limited to cases not involving national security or hate crimes, something legal experts believe is part of a strategy to chip away at the few surviving remnants of judicial independence.

  In many other institutions, the informal patronage system behind the Kremlin’s ruling structure has seriously undermined the government’s oversight, including in the regions outside Moscow. Besides the Caucasus, perhaps nowhere has that been more visible than the crime-ridden port of Vladivostok on the Pacific coast, where massive smuggling industries enrich officials who help criminal groups spirit illegally caught fish, timber, cars and many other goods in and out of Russia. No profitable business is exempt, a local law professor assured me. For most of Putin’s tenure, the region’s governor was a square-jawed former used car dealer named Sergei Darkin, who made his fortune selling the secondhand Japanese cars that sustain the local economy. Victor Cherepkov, a former Vladivostok mayor who waged an epic battle against corruption, told me Darkin also became part of a criminal group involved in prostitution, poaching and racketeering. He rose to power after the boss’s death, which was made to look like a scuba-diving accident. However, Darkin—who later cemented his position by marrying the millionairess wife of a rival named Igor “the Carp” Karpov after his death from a sniper’s bullet—assured me there were no improper connections between business and politics in his region.

  Shoring up the Kremlin’s role as the ascendant Mafia-type group by appointing such men has also deepened Russia’s greatest security threat: instability in the North Caucasus, including Chechnya, which is led by Ramzan Kadyrov, another top tough who used to be a rebel fighter. What’s happening there may be an extreme illustration of Moscow’s relationship with the provinces, but is instructive because it mirrors the state of affairs across the country.

  Russia launched the first military campaigns to conquer the mountainous region on the southern edge of its expanding empire in the mid-1700s. Organized largely by kinship clans, ethnic groups and language, the fragmented collection of Islamic societies that populated the North Caucasus offered fierce resistance to tsarist troops. By the nineteenth century, Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov and other poets were romanticizing the dangerous region as a beautiful object of Russian manifest destiny.

  Sporadic resistance continued well into the Soviet era, especially in Chechnya, where traditional kinship clans called teips helped keep society together under repression by Stalin, who in 1944 exiled all Chechens to Kazakhstan and elsewhere for allegedly collaborating with the Nazis. By t
he 1950s, however, popular Soviet comedy films depicted the Caucasus as an exotic tourist destination where communism was modernizing an amusingly backward people. Such patronizing attitudes seem almost quaint today.

  Many Russians now associate the Caucasus primarily with horrific television news images of the aftermath of bombings—corpses strewn about Moscow’s airports, metro system and streets. The predominant view of the region as little more than a seat of terrorism and poverty is fueling deep suspicion and hatred. In 2012, protesters in the capital began rallying under a banner that read STOP FEEDING THE CAUCASUS, demanding that the government end the funding of a region they saw as irredeemably corrupt.

  When I visited Chechnya’s capital, Grozny, in 2009 during one of many trips to the region, the city I first saw as a bomb-flattened wasteland four years earlier had been rebuilt with lightning speed. Expensive cars sped down Putin Prospect, a name some acquaintances could not bring themselves to say. Cafés bearing French and Italian names, a sushi restaurant and a branch of a Moscow luxury shopping mall lined the main thoroughfare. Giant posters of the thirty-three-year-old Kadyrov loomed everywhere, and everyone I spoke to on the street recited stock phrases about his greatness. Privately, residents complained bitterly of Kadyrov’s rule by fear, enforced by abductions, torture and killings. “We have to live like this, like it or not,” a friend named Heda Saratova explained. “We’re forced to say things we don’t believe.” A brave human rights activist, Heda is one of the few people who have continued documenting abuses after the grisly murder of her colleague Natalia Estemirova in 2009.

  I’d traveled to Grozny with several fellow journalists on that occasion to interview Kadyrov. Summoned from our threadbare hotel to his heavily fortified compound in the dead of night, we passed a horse-racing track and a man-made pond outside its main entrance. Inside, lions prowled in cages, part of Kadyrov’s extensive zoo housing rare animals and birds, and there was a rumor that the complex also contained a prison where he tortured and killed with his own hands. Passing a sleek black Mercedes near the front door—a relatively modest example from Kadyrov’s fleet of luxury cars—we stepped into a massive, marble-floored palace lined with ornate columns and luxurious silk wallpaper.

  Playing billiards with one of his men, the Chechen president was dressed in slippers and an Armani tracksuit. Although the squat bear of a man with a short beard and the jovial manner of a frat boy had been president for more than two years, he greeted us with a display of bashfulness, as if he were embarrassed by the opulence of his fantasy playground. By the time we sat down, it was 2:00 a.m.

  Although Kadyrov shares apparently close personal ties to Putin, he began the first Chechen war as an anti-Moscow rebel and chief bodyguard for his father, Muslim imam Akhmad Kadyrov, a separatist leader who switched sides during Chechnya’s second war. The Kremlin later installed the senior Kadyrov as the Chechen leader before his assassination in a bomb blast. Today, the son praises Putin for “wise policies” that kept Chechnya a part of the Russian Federation. “If we would have been given independence, it would have been the end of our people. We would all have died,” he said in brusque, heavily accented Russian.

  When I asked about Estemirova, whose death a leader of Memorial, the human rights organization that employed her, had blamed on him, Kadyrov accused her of having no honor or shame. Insisting his only concern was for the welfare of ordinary Chechens, he boasted, “I’d lay down my life for my people.” True or not, his fealty to Moscow obscures an irony not lost on most Russians: Kadyrov—who advocates strict Islamic codes, including polygamy—effectively governs his region independently of Moscow. His critics wryly note that the young leader has achieved the kind of de facto self-rule that had eluded Chechnya’s former separatist leaders by doing what he wants inside the region in exchange for maintaining outward loyalty to the Kremlin.

  Kadyrov’s brutally enforced pacification of Chechnya has had the effect of spreading violence to neighboring regions. I traveled to the Caucasus again in 2011 to investigate the growing perception that a certain, perhaps managed, level of instability there suited one or more groups among the authorities in Moscow. That time my destination was the currently most volatile region, Dagestan, where I drove to the village of Gimry, a scattering of tin-roofed houses nestled between jagged peaks and accessible only by a narrow dirt road.

  Fall arrives late in the green valleys, where the pervading smell of burning leaves is especially strong. You would think the subtropical region, with its abundant possibilities for growing fruit and other crops, along with the locals’ reputation for fine craftsmanship, should be booming economically. In fact it’s depressed, mired in corruption and seething under the Kremlin’s heavy boot. But although most of its population barely ekes out a living, Gimry’s deep isolation didn’t preclude the enrichment of some residents, including the owner of a large new house where I was invited to lunch. My hosts included the son of the village chief, who drove a fancy Volkswagen Touareg. When we sat in the courtyard over several courses, finishing with sweet grapes from vines hanging overhead, I couldn’t know they were half joking among themselves in the local Avar language about the benefits of kidnapping me for ransom. Later the local journalist who escorted me there earnestly told me not to take it personally. “That’s their business, you see.”

  In a province so remote that children speak only Avar and residents use the word Russia to describe the country’s other regions, not their own, one could be forgiven for forgetting we were in Putin’s Russia. But despite its location on the southern fringes of the country’s vast landmass, the spread of violence from Chechnya has been a central symbol of rule under a president who has used the threat of terrorism as a main justification for his attack on his country’s democratic institutions. Far from the stability he’s claimed, however, his policies have encouraged traditional society to tear at the seams.

  Gimry’s elders described how soldiers had recently sealed off the village during a so-called counterterrorism operation that lasted almost two years. An elderly man with a long white beard named Nabi Magomedov broke down as he described how it began with militants luring his son, a prominent member of the Dagestani parliament, out of his house with a request to talk. They proceeded to shoot him sixty-two times. Chechen rebel leader Doku Umarov later took credit for ordering his death, accusing the younger Magomedov of betraying Islam by participating in politics. But if the ensuing police operation was meant to combat extremism by smoking out separatists among the villagers, it did the opposite. In addition to their daily searches of houses, soldiers had carte blanche to cut down apricot trees for fuel—“Otherwise they’d have frozen,” one farmer admitted—and to steal livestock and kill residents.

  Villagers said they were protesting by refusing to observe Russian law and adopting Sharia instead—or at least their understanding of it, which included blood feuds and other centuries-old forms of remediation. Many became Salafists, conservative Muslims who denounced the Sufi Islam traditionally practiced in the Caucasus because it is supposedly under state control. On a small plateau above the village, workers were constructing a large madrasah said to be partly financed by “outside” money, perhaps from Saudi Arabia. Some hoped the new institution would replace the village’s state school.

  Such opposition to rule from Moscow is an old story in Gimry, the birthplace of the Imam Shamil, one of the legendary leaders of resistance to the tsarist empire in the nineteenth century. But the religious radicalization is exacerbating new divisions in a region whose many ethnic groups previously coexisted more or less peacefully. When a budding relationship between a young resident of Gimry and a woman in the neighboring Sufi village of Insukul resulted in a shootout that killed seven people, the conflict was soon perceived as religious in nature. Both villages were girding for revenge when I visited.

  In the months that followed, the violence rang alarm bells when gun and bomb attacks killed a number of moderate Sufi leaders, not only in Dagestan but also in
other regions previously not known for such violence. The top Muslim official in the Tatarstan region, more than a thousand miles from the North Caucasus, was wounded in a car bomb attack and his deputy was shot dead on the same day. In August 2012, the country’s most senior Islamic cleric warned of a looming civil war in Dagestan, which lies several hundred miles from Sochi and the 2014 Winter Olympics. Putin’s response was to tell security forces to “outsmart and outmuscle” Islamist militants to ensure security during the games.

  However, locals in Gimry also told me the mounting tensions were pointing toward a larger confrontation, which some ominously welcomed as a means of establishing formal independence. It would be led by young men who regularly leave their homes and go “into the forest” to join militant groups performing weekly bombings and shootings.

  Outside a ramshackle brick mosque—where young men, some sporting dark beards and military fatigues, gathered for midday prayers—one worshipper named Abu Magomedov, who had served in Chechnya as an FSB officer, told me that killings such as the assassination of Dagestan’s interior minister in 2009 were justified as justice and retribution. “I was ordered to kill innocent Muslim boys ‘to control their numbers,’ ” he said of his time in Chechnya. “How am I supposed to take that?”

  The anger is helping estrange increasingly radicalized young people from older generations that were made less devout by centuries of loose adherence to Islamic customs even before the suppression of religion under Soviet rule. The effects are sometimes felt beyond Russia’s borders, as Americans learned during the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, when two young Chechen-Avar brothers who had lived in Massachusetts for a decade set off bombs that killed three and wounded more than two hundred fifty people. Evidently grappling with the pressures of belonging to two cultures, the elder, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, began holding increasingly radical Islamist views to the dismay of his father, who separated from his wife and returned to live in Dagestan. Assimilating in the United States must have been especially hard for a family from a highly patriarchal culture of warriors. Although the brothers were almost certainly radicalized in the United States, where they learned about Islam from the Internet and had little if any known connection to militants in Russia, their search for identity was not unlike those of many young men in the Caucasus who express their alienation through violent acts.