Strongman

by Roxburgh, Angus

  Beslan and the ‘constitutional coup’

  The tragedy began on 1 September, the day Russian children traditionally return to school after the summer holidays. In Beslan, a small town of 36,000 people, just north of the Caucasus mountains and less than an hour’s drive west of Chechnya, children turned up at school No. 1 in cheerful mood and fresh uniforms. Just after 9 o’clock, as they held a ceremony with their parents in the schoolyard, a group of armed fighters screeched up to the school in an army truck, firing their guns into the air, and herded more than 1,100 people – children, parents and teachers – into the school building. It was a repeat of the Moscow theatre tragedy – except that the terrorists had learned lessons that made it even harder for the authorities to deal with the crisis. The hostage-takers had planned the attack meticulously and knew every inch of the school. A dozen hostages were shot within the first hours, and over the next three days the country watched horrific events unfold, as the gunmen laid trip-wires and explosives around the school and refused to allow food, water or medicine to be brought into the building. Once again, President Putin faced the most awful dilemma – how to free hostages and save lives without giving in to the terrorists’ demands, which as usual included outright independence for Chechnya. Negotiations with a doctor who had helped during the theatre siege and with a local government leader got nowhere. Packed into the school gymnasium, in sweltering heat, the children were traumatised and parched. On the third day, special forces stormed the school following two unexplained explosions. The rebels fought back. Twenty-eight terrorists were killed, but so were 334 hostages, mostly children.

  It was the bleakest day yet in Russia’s failing battle against terrorism on its own soil. The ability of gunmen and suicide bombers to wreak havoc almost at will demonstrated the impotence of the authorities and the nonsense of Putin’s claim to have ‘won’ the fight. The Beslan tragedy was the sixth major terrorist incident in 2004 alone.

  In February 41 people were killed in a bomb attack on the Moscow underground.

  In May the pro-Moscow president of Chechnya, Akhmat Kadyrov, was assassinated at a Victory Day parade in the capital, Grozny.

  In June a group of terrorists from Chechnya attacked the capital of the neighbouring republic of Ingushetia. They killed 95 people and captured a large cache of weapons which were later used at Beslan.

  In August 90 people died when two aircraft were simultaneously blown up in mid-air by suicide bombers.

  And at the end of the same month, just the day before Beslan, a woman blew herself up in a Moscow metro station, killing herself and ten passers-by.

  Vladimir Putin finally addressed the nation on television on the evening of Saturday, 4 September, a day after the violent end to the school siege and a few hours after travelling to the scene to meet some of the survivors. He looked deeply shaken, and spoke slowly and emotionally about the ‘terrible tragedy on our soil’. Like a priest addressing a funeral service, he asked people ‘to remember those who perished at the hands of terrorists in recent days’, and dropped his head in sorrow. But then he quickly moved on from the immediate crisis to draw far-reaching and startling conclusions that in many ways defined the rest of his presidency.

  ‘Russia has lived through many tragic events and terrible ordeals over the course of its history,’ he said. ‘Today, we live in a time that follows the collapse of a vast and great state, a state that, unfortunately, proved unable to survive in a rapidly changing world. But despite all the difficulties, we were able to preserve the core of what was once the vast Soviet Union, and we named this new country the Russian Federation.’

  The style was odd – a history lesson delivered at the nation’s moment of grief, evoking the greatness of the USSR. In his next words Putin betrayed his nostalgia for the iron fist of the communist police state, which had been replaced by laxity:

  We are living through a time when internal conflicts and interethnic divisions that were once firmly suppressed by the ruling ideology have now flared up. We stopped paying the required attention to defence and security issues and we allowed corruption to undermine our judicial and law enforcement system. Furthermore, our country, formerly protected by the most powerful defence system along the length of its external frontiers overnight found itself defenceless both from the east and the west. It will take many years and billions of roubles to create new, modern and genuinely protected borders. But even so, we could have been more effective if we had acted professionally and at the right moment.

  In an intimation of the crackdown that would soon follow, Putin went on: ‘We showed ourselves to be weak. And the weak get beaten.’

  Putin was putting a whole new spin on the terrorist attack. There was no mention of his own forces’ brutality in Chechnya – the main factor that lay behind all the home-grown terrorism. In fact, he did not mention the word ‘Chechnya’ at all. Instead he was blaming the West! He couched his accusation in strange, ambiguous terms:

  Some would like to tear from us a ‘juicy piece of pie’. Others help them. They help, reasoning that Russia still remains one of the world’s major nuclear powers, and as such still represents a threat to them. And so they reason that this threat should be removed. Terrorism, of course, is just an instrument to achieve these aims.

  The attack on Beslan, Putin seemed to be saying, was part of a Western conspiracy to dismember the Russian Federation. Foreign governments were using terrorists as an ‘instrument’ to achieve that end. He addressed his people now in apocalyptic terms, like a leader on the brink of war:

  As I have said many times already, we have found ourselves confronting crises, revolts and terrorist acts on more than one occasion. But what has happened now, this crime committed by terrorists, is unprecedented in its inhumanness and cruelty. This is not a challenge to the president, parliament or government. It is a challenge to all of Russia, to our entire people. Our country is under attack.

  Putin swore that as president he would not be blackmailed or succumb to panic. ‘What we are facing is direct intervention of international terror directed against Russia. This is a total, cruel and full-scale war.’ He warned Russians they could no longer live in such a ‘carefree’ manner, and demanded tough action from the security services. He promised ‘a series of measures aimed at strengthening our country’s unity’.

  Those measures were announced over the coming days, and they shocked those who believed Russia was already far too authoritarian. Putin’s former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov (who had been sacked half a year earlier) called it an ‘anti-constitutional coup’.

  First, in the name of fighting international terrorism, Putin abolished the direct election of regional governors. From now on, he himself would nominate them, and their appointment would be rubber-stamped by regional assemblies. (The implication, never properly explained, seemed to be that Beslan would not have happened if regional governors were not ‘out of control’.) Second, it was made almost impossible for independent politicians or radical opposition parties to get into the State Duma. Until now, half of the 450-seat parliament had been elected from party lists, while the other half were individual politicians directly elected by voters in 225 constituencies. From now on, all would be chosen from party lists; the single-member constituencies were abolished. The threshold required for a party to enter parliament at all was raised from 5 to 7 per cent. The rules for setting up new political parties were also tightened.

  Putin was ratcheting up his own control, and strangling the opposition. The ‘vertical of power’ created in 2000 was now made rigid. Putin’s ‘ideologist’, Vladislav Surkov, was wheeled out to dignify the crackdown with a pseudo-academic term. He called it ‘sovereign democracy’, or sometimes ‘managed democracy’. In fact, it was the end of democracy. In an interview with the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, he gave an Alice in Wonderland version of the latest reform package. Everything was the opposite of how it seemed: the new election system would not weaken the opposition but ‘bring it back f
rom political oblivion’; the reforms would strengthen not Putin but the state; the appointed governors would have greater, not fewer rights. A further initiative announced by Putin – the creation of a new ‘Public Chamber’, an assembly of 126 appointed worthies who would discuss civic initiatives and draft laws – had caused some bewilderment, since it was assumed that this was what the elected State Duma was supposed to do. Surkov explained that the trouble with parliaments is that deputies are always thinking about re-election; in the West this is known as ‘being held to account by the electorate’, in Russia according to Surkov, it leads to populism. The experts in the Public Chamber would be less dependent on the political climate and thus be more objective.12 (A measure of Surkov’s grasp on reality was given a few years later, when he said on television that ‘Putin is a person who was sent to Russia by fate and by the Lord at a difficult time for Russia. He was preordained by fate to preserve our peoples.’13 Clearly such a God-given leader could interpret democracy any way he liked.)

  And what were people to make of the president’s talk of foreign powers trying to seize a ‘juicy piece of pie’? According to the experienced analyst Dmitry Trenin, Putin’s foreign policy was entering a new stage. Until 2003, he wrote, ‘Russia had been mostly moving toward rapprochement with the West under the slogan of its “European choice” and with a quest to become allied with the US.’ Henceforth, ‘Moscow pursued a policy of nonalignment, with an accentuated independence from the West, but combined with reluctance to confront it.’14

  It was the beginning of a new isolationist stance. In Putin’s second term there would be no more sucking up. He believed Russia had dropped its guard and needed to defend itself against twin evils – terrorism (now defined as part of a foreign conspiracy) and Western-style democracy, which was infiltrating the former Soviet space, first through Georgia, and soon ... through Ukraine.

  7

  ENEMIES EVERYWHERE

  The Orange Revolution

  The scenes in Kiev in late 2004 caused apoplexy in the Kremlin: a sea of orange clothes and banners, a million protesters braving sub-zero temperatures, day and night, to bring the Ukrainian capital to a standstill. Bad enough that this was a repeat of the Tbilisi events a year earlier – protests against a rigged election, mass support for a pro-American, nationalist candidate who offered an alternative to corrupt, authoritarian, pro-Russian rule. But this was happening in Ukraine, the most important for Russia of all the former Soviet republics. With 47 million inhabitants, Ukraine was ten times the size of Georgia. One in six of the population was an ethnic Russian, and there were millions of mixed Russian-Ukrainian families. Putin (like many Russians) saw it as a mere extension of Russia itself. He reportedly told President George W. Bush in 2008: ‘You don’t understand, George, that Ukraine is not even a state. What is Ukraine? Part of its territory is Eastern Europe, but the greater part is a gift from us.’ One part – the Crimean peninsula – really was a gift, transferred by decree from Russia to Ukraine by the former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Crimea was strategically vital to Russia, as the Black Sea Fleet was based there – and indeed the whole country stood like a great boulder across many of the strategic links between Russia and Europe – the oil and gas pipelines, the electricity grid, the military highways – the last buffer between Russia and the ever-expanding NATO. And yet the man who would be president there, Viktor Yushchenko, with his American wife, was talking of joining NATO!

  Putin would not make the mistake of sending his foreign minister to Ukraine to ‘sort things out’ and risk letting it slip away like Georgia. In Ukraine, Putin would do whatever it took to stop the rot. He put his new chief of staff, the future president, Dmitry Medvedev, in charge of working out a strategy.

  The danger had been clear to Putin since the Ukrainian election campaign started back in July. The Western-oriented opposition was led by a charismatic duo: Yushchenko, who had already served as the country’s central bank chairman and prime minister, and Yulia Tymoshenko, a fiery politician renowned for the trademark blond plait wound like a pie-crust around her head and for her controversial career in the gas business which had made her one of Ukraine’s richest people. The two formed an electoral coalition, Force of the People, and struck a deal under which, if Yushchenko was elected president, he would nominate Tymoshenko to be his prime minister. Both wanted to assert Ukraine’s independence from Russia and, in particular, its right to join the European Union and NATO if it wished.

  The establishment candidate was the prime minister, Viktor Yanukovych, a man with an unprepossessing past – he had two criminal convictions as a youth for robbery and assault – that made even Vladimir Putin wary of him, though he was clearly preferable to Yushchenko. Several well-placed Russians have indicated to me that Putin did not think Yanukovych was the best candidate, but acquiesced because he had the full support of the incumbent president, Leonid Kuchma, who threw all the government’s resources behind his campaign. State television gave Yanukovych wide and positive coverage, while disparaging Yushchenko as an extreme nationalist, damningly married to an American of Ukrainian extraction who may even have been a CIA agent, plotting her husband’s seizure of power.

  In an interview, Kuchma confirmed that he and Putin had discussed who the preferred candidate should be. ‘It was not a secret. Didn’t the West discuss who should be president of Ukraine? The whole Western community did that, but on the other side just Russia, just Putin. Putin knew Mr Yushchenko’s statements and opinions. And he did not have a great desire that he come to power.’1 Once Kuchma had chosen Yanukovych as his ‘successor’, Putin threw the Kremlin’s support behind him. Ukraine now became a battleground for influence, with the United States and Russia both openly supporting opposing candidates.

  Just as in Georgia the previous year, Western NGOs were heavily involved in the campaign, advising Yushchenko and the home-grown groups that supported him. The biggest youth group was called Pora (‘It’s Time’), which borrowed the electioneering and civil disobedience techniques of the Serbian group Otpor and the Georgian Kmara. The Russians for their part sent so-called ‘political technologists’, including the well-known Gleb Pavlovsky (a one-time Soviet dissident and now an adviser to Putin) and the political consultant Sergei Markov, to work as spin doctors with the Yanukovych team and act as a channel between them and the Kremlin.

  The American ambassador to Kiev, John E. Herbst, recalled in an interview that Western embassies ‘developed tools’ to make sure the elections would be free and fair. ‘I remember the Canadian ambassador took the lead on this to develop a working group of interested embassies keeping an eye on things relating to the election. I also then organised a regular meeting, first on a monthly basis but then it happened maybe every couple of weeks, with all interested international and Ukrainian NGOs, to find out what they were doing to encourage free and fair elections, and to brainstorm on how we might better coordinate to get the outcome we want. And the outcome was a free and fair election, not any particular winner.’ As in Georgia, the USAID contributed millions of dollars to promote civil society, free media and democracy awareness. Herbst says all parties, including even the Communist Party, were free to avail themselves of these funds and programmes.2

  At one point during the campaign Herbst reached out to the Russian spin doctors to try to gauge what they were up to. ‘I invited Pavlovsky and Marat Gelman, who was his partner in this enterprise, to lunch. We had a pleasant lunch ... but a very restrained conversation. They really did not want to talk too much about what they were doing.’ Herbst says he made no bones about what the Americans were doing in Ukraine: ‘In a sense I had an advantage because everything we were doing was pretty much right out in the open. We wanted to encourage a free and fair election, and we said what we were doing publicly. I had no problem telling them that NGOs in Ukraine, and for that matter internationally, were trying to encourage this result too. They were more reticent to describe to me what they were up to, and I can understand why.’r />
  What Herbst described as merely supporting free and fair elections, Pavlovsky saw differently: ‘I could see consultants and a large number of NGO activists who were completely pro-American or pro-Atlantic.’ Pavlovsky was also reticent when asked what he had been trying to achieve. He acted as a ‘channel of communication’, he said, but found it hard to influence Kuchma, who insisted on running his candidate’s campaign on his own. ‘We never understood why Kuchma selected him. There were other governors much more acceptable to the electorate. As I understood it, Kuchma was expecting a conflict, and Yanukovych seemed like a tough man who could handle it. It was his mistake. Yanukovych’s rudeness, his coarseness, irritated voters. And of course Putin noticed that, and was unhappy about it.’ By the end of the campaign, Pavlovsky says he was reduced to writing sad reports back to Moscow about how the campaign headquarters had ‘lost command’.3

  In an interview, Sergei Markov was more forthcoming about the advice Russian consultants gave to the Kuchma/Yanukovych team – and made some startling claims about the role the Russians believed Western NGOs were playing. Markov openly acknowledged – indeed stressed – that he and his colleagues were commissioned to do this work (to influence the election of a sovereign state) by the Russian presidential administration. Part of their work, according to Markov, consisted in providing Kuchma and Yanukovych with daily expert analyses of the developing situation, to enable them to respond better. Secondly, he said, ‘We saw that experts who were appearing in the mass media were by and large firmly under the influence of Western foundations. And basically these Western foundations forbade them to say anything good about Russia. If they did they were thrown out of the projects they were working on, lost their grants and ended up penniless. So we came and started organising seminars, conferences, joint media projects with them, to try to get around this “ban”.’4