April 17
At one of his appearances in Moscow, Garry Kasparov has been struck on the head with a chessboard. Somebody approached him, supposedly wanting him to autograph the board. Recovering from the blow, Kasparov quipped, “I'm glad Russians prefer chess to baseball.”
April 23
Today Putin received Mikhail Fridman of Alfa Group in the Kremlin. The Moscow business elite have been viewing him as a likely candidate for the Khodorkovsky treatment. The reception in the Kremlin was a typical PR act by Putin, this time for the benefit of the TNK-BP oil company. In the language of the Kremlin, they were “giving moral support” to Fridman.
Fridman is accordingly in favor for the moment. He has been given the opportunity of sharing his wealth and will certainly avail himself of it. You are in a bad way if the authorities don't even give you the chance of buttering them up. Lord Browne, group chief executive of BP, was also received in the Kremlin. Viktor Vekselberg was there too, the man who lays Fabergé eggs in the Kremlin's basket. Throughout the meeting Fridman and Vekselberg radiated happiness.
Sergey Glaziev, a deputy of the Duma from the Rodina Party who was minister of foreign economic affairs in the early 1990s and is now in the opposition, commented, “They prefer Fridman to Khodorkovsky because he does not finance opposition projects.”
April 23–24
Vladimir Ryzhkov has joined the political council of the Russian Republican Party. He has financial backing from Lukoil and this is now his party. Ryzhkov warned that the democrats must unite no later than this summer, if they are to stand a chance in the Duma elections in 2007.
Garry Kasparov was an ally of Ryzhkov in the winter, but has not joined the RRP. They have in common the view that the present political system needs to be done away with, not compromised with. If Kasparov had stayed with Ryzhkov, he could have been the one with charisma, with Ryzhkov as the smarter political fighter. Ryzhkov is saying that the door is still open, and that the RRP is still hoping to welcome Kasparov.
April 25
Putin's annual address to the Federal Assembly was both sensational and comical. It was a veritable manifesto of liberalism, but by their fruits shall ye know them!
His theme was “A free country of free people,” but how can you be free without an independent judiciary? Or genuine, democratic electoral rights? With a politically directed procurator general's office, and a stifled civil society?
April 28
The government has decided that recipients of the title of Hero of Russia, of the USSR, or of Socialist Labor will be paid an extra 2,000 rubles [$72] a month in place of their privileges.
Thus began the main political scandal of the summer of 2005: a three-week hunger strike by the Heroes, which Putin's administration called blackmail.
May 1
In Russia, May 1 is traditionally a day of meetings and parades. This year the opposition were at sixes and sevens.
They assembled at Turgenev Square, marched along Myasnitskaya Street past the great gloomy buildings of the FSB, and held a meeting on Lubyanka Square at the Solovki Stone, which commemorates victims of the Communist era. Their placards read, “For freedom, justice, and democracy! Against the violation of civil, political, social, economic, and cultural rights in Russia!”
There were about a thousand people. Not too bad, not a disaster. The day before, in Minsk, fourteen of our fellow citizens had been released from custody. They had traveled to Belarus to take part in a procession organized by the local opposition. Ilya Yashin, leader of the youth wing of Yabloko, got back to Moscow this morning. From a rostrum beside the Solovki Stone, he gave us an insider's view of a Lukashenko* prison, and told us that in Minsk Ukrainian supporters got beaten up much more violently than Russian protesters.
As the democrats were finishing, the Union of Right Forces started their meeting right there in Lubyanka Square. The authorities must have been delighted to see that liberals and democrats don't even stop quarreling on public holidays.
The main protest was organized by the left wing, who assembled almost 9,000 people. Most of the young people were there. The Communist Party, the National Bolsheviks, Rodina, Labor in the Capital, the Union of Soviet Officers, and others had agreed to hold a joint meeting. For the first time in four years Eduard Limonov was able to lead the column of the National Bolsheviks, now that his suspended sentence has expired.
Yevgeny Baranovsky, Lev Dmitriev, and Alexander Chepalyga have begun a hunger strike at the headquarters of the National Bolshevik Party in Moscow. They are demanding the release of their fellow party members who are in prison.
Overall, throughout Russia, the left brought out one and a half million May Day demonstrators.
In Ingushetia, the May celebrations were marked by arrests. Musa Ozdoev, the leading campaigner for the removal of President Zyazikov, was arrested during the night. The previous day he was in a square where an anti-Zyazikov meeting was to be held and was arrested by the militia. At midnight Judge Ramazan Tutaev was brought to the militia headquarters in Nazran; he dispensed justice in the holding cell, thereby giving symbolic expression to the further melding of the judiciary and institutions of law enforcement into a single repressive state mechanism.
Tutaev sentenced Ozdoev to seventy-two hours’ imprisonment, officially for “petty vandalism.” It was falsely alleged that he had broken a stool. As a deputy of the republican Parliament, Musa cannot legally be arrested without the sanction of the People's Assembly, but, as that is difficult at night, they dispensed with the formality.
In prison, Musa promptly went on hunger strike in protest. He discovered his cellmates were in for a collective suicide attempt.
May 2
Ozdoev has been unexpectedly released, a day early. The decision was made by Judge Alikhan Yaryzhev of the Nazran district court. Ozdoev considered this insulting. “I told Judge Yaryzhev,” Musa told me, “that I wouldn't leave. I needed no concessions from them.” The militiamen, however, took the oppositionist out into the street and shut the door firmly behind him.
The real reason was evidently that he had entered a world the authorities want kept secret. In the cell he met people who had been tortured into “voluntarily” confessing that they were “organizers of and participants in a terrorist act against Murat Zyazikov.” Ozdoev learned that the torture employed by agents of the Interior Ministry against these prisoners was so extreme that the North Ossetian directorate of the FSB refused to accept some of them for further questioning because of the severity of their injuries. Ozdoev also met Bekkhan Gireyev, whom the Interior Ministry claims was “the mastermind behind the terrorist plot.” His kneecaps had been shattered and he had no fingernails left on his hands. They had been torn out during interrogation.
“I learned things that I would never previously have believed,” Musa told me, “if I had not seen them with my own eyes. Of course, after this sort of thing these people and their relatives will rush to join the resistance.” The deputy considers his own misadventure entirely trivial.
May 3
From Israel, Leonid Nevzlin has made an offer to the presidential administration to sell off Menatep Group's shares in Yukos in return for the freedom of Khodorkovsky and Lebedev.
Through his lawyers, Khodorkovsky from Matrosskaya Tishina prison rejected his friend and erstwhile business partner's offer. Khodorkovsky stated that he did not consider himself guilty and had no intention of allowing himself to be ransomed. He would fight for his freedom by legal means.
Nevzlin became the owner of a controlling share in Menatep after Khodorkovsky transferred 59.5 percent of the company to him in order to “concentrate on creating a civil society in Russia.” This focusing of his efforts was the beginning of all his troubles, as the Kremlin decided he was its most dangerous enemy. If he had dutifully paid the Kremlin its cut, no harm would have come to him.
The Yukos shareholders have announced that they see no point in continuing their attempts to save the company.
The authorities are insinuating ever more busily, on television and in speeches by their most prominent figures, that Stalin was really not as bad as he was subsequently made out to be. The unveiling of new monuments to Stalin in recognition of his great contribution to victory in the Second World War features prominently on the news. The Human Rights Association has urged opposition to these attempts to impose official veneration of The Leader. In a statement it commented:
After all that our people have learned about the superhuman brutality and vileness of Stalin, his moral and political rehabilitation could only mean that in our country any political immorality is permissible and any crime committed by the state can be justified if its enormity is sufficiently mind-numbing. We must never forget that the main victim of Stalinism was the Russian people.
The democrats have missed the boat again. Re-Stalinization is a reality.
May 4
In the Zamoskvorechie district court in Moscow, Judge Irina Vasina rejects an appeal by Svetlana Gubaryova. Svetlana was a Nord-Ost hostage and lost her thirteen-year-old daughter and her fiancé, Sandy Booker, a U.S. citizen, in the tragedy.
Svetlana was demanding that the procurator's refusal to respond to her questions as to where and when her family died be ruled unlawful; that the directives of the procurator's office refusing to review the provision of medical assistance during the Nord-Ost siege be ruled unlawful; and likewise that the decision of the head of the investigating team, Vladimir Kalchuk, not to press criminal charges against the agents of the special operations units that carried out the assault be ruled unlawful.
In a wavering voice, Svetlana read her complaints against the procurator. She noted that those who killed the hostages, including her family, received awards, and that every attempt is now being made to absolve them of blame for turning the Dubrovka auditorium into a gas chamber. The lack of accountability of the guilty has led to the even greater tragedy of Beslan.
After five minutes of this, the judge abruptly terminated the hearing. Svetlana had been hoping to create a precedent by getting the court to pronounce on the legal basis of the way the inquiry was being conducted.
May 9
The leaders of every imaginable country have come to Moscow to pay homage to Putin, not to Russia's victory in the Second World War. That is how it is being seen by the right, the left, and the apolitical.
Putin has hijacked this major patriotic celebration for his own purposes, in order to consolidate his position as one of the world's major leaders. The whole business world has been coerced into contributing to the victory fund. All officials have been charged a levy. Even the humblest government employees have had no option but to pay up to celebrate “Putin's victory.”
One old man, Pavel Petrovich Smolyaninov, has written to me from the village of Pushkarnoye where his wife is the postwoman. She is paid a mere 2,000 rubles [$71] a month, but even she was forced to contribute. In his words, she was unable to resist the extortion because she has only three months to go before she retires, and didn't want to jeopardize her pension.
May 11
They are going to set up a Social Chamber from “the best elements of civil society.” These will be selected by Putin so that they can criticize decisions of the state authorities, including Putin himself.
The steering committee of the Citizens’ Congress has described this as “an attempt to manipulate civil society in the vested interests of those in power.” On the other hand, they added, they continue to consider it sensible to exploit any opportunity of influencing the authorities, “and we believe that individual participation of members of the National Citizens’ Congress in the Social Chamber should be regarded as a further practical opportunity to exert such influence.”
Are they really going to allow themselves to be bought in this manner?
They sure are.
May 12
In Novosibirsk, FSB agents have arrested two National Bolsheviks, Nikolai Baluev and Vyacheslav Rusakov. Baluev's apartment was searched, and the agents removed leaflets, issues of the National Bolshevik newspaper Generalnaya Liniya, twenty videocassettes, and a jar of saltpeter that Nikolai's mother, Yevdokia, uses at their dacha as fertilizer. Both party members are being charged under Articles 222, Part 2, “Possession of weapons,” and 205, Part 2, “Terrorism.”
May 14
The “Antiterror Festival.” The Nord-Ost siege victims staged a four-hour tour de force called “No to Terror!” They continue the fight under their own steam, but with little support. The large concert hall of the Cosmos Hotel in Moscow is only half full.
In the stalls and the circle are mainly the families of those who died at Nord-Ost and survivors. Somewhat to one side is a delegation from Beslan. The event is opened by Tatiana Karpova, the mother of Alexander Karpov who died at Nord-Ost, and who is now the driving force behind the association, defending the interests of those involved. The main theme of the evening is: where is the state's concern for the victims of terror? Where are the independent inquiries into terrorist acts? Where is the independent judiciary and the honest procurator's office? Are you listening, Mr. President?
An open letter to Putin is distributed. It has been written by Oleg Zhi-rov, a Dutch citizen whose wife died trying to save their son in the siege:
My main reason for writing this letter is the growing number of victims of terrorist acts in Russia, and the total disregard for their problems and their right to moral and material compensation on the part of the bureaucracy and judicial institutions, including the Supreme and Constitutional courts. To judge by their verdicts, everything that has gone on in Russia over the past five years of the struggle against terrorism has been in accordance with the Constitution, and the demands and lawsuits of the victims have been without legal justification. It seems at times that there are only two parties to this war: the heroic special operations troops; and, on the other side, terrorists and separatists.
In the wings I read Oleg Zhirov's letter together with Svetlana Gubaryova, who lost her daughter, Sasha, and her American fiancé during the siege. Her eyes are full of tears as she tries to hold back her inconsolable grief. She does not believe that writing open letters to Putin will change anything about the way the Russian authorities currently “fight terrorism,” when it is Putin who is the main instigator of policies where those who come off worst are always the hostages.
The stage is taken by familiar faces, diehard supporters of the victims of terrorism: Irina Khakamada, who now heads the Our Choice Party; Garry Kasparov, who this spring retired from playing chess the better to work for political change; and Lyudmila Aivar, a lawyer who for more than two years now has been representing the interests of the Nord-Ost victims in the courts.
Many “new faces” had been invited, but have not appeared. Alexander Torshin, for example, who is leading the parliamentary commission set up to investigate Beslan. It was he that the people from Beslan had been hoping to hear. They believe that Torshin knows every last detail about the assault on the school, can't reveal it for the time being, but will tell the whole truth once he has plucked up enough courage. His absence from this festival evidently means he hasn't plucked up enough courage yet.
Putin is incapable of seeing the Russian people as an ally in the fight against terrorism. He doesn't like that kind of popular involvement, and the lackeys who carry out his orders merely ape the president's behavior.
The 2005 festival is already the second. It is becoming a tradition. We, hostages to an uncaring state, can only guess how many more terrorist acts there will be in 2006, and hope they may be few.
May 16
The churlish behavior of the OMON special operations militia outside the Meshchansky court where the trial of Khodorkovsky and Lebedev is drawing to an end is a clear indicator of the authorities’ attitude toward democracy. They broke up a group of those supporting the accused, but ignored the demonstrators opposed to Yukos, who had also materialized from somewhere. In total twenty-eight people were arrested, th
e militiamen just plucking people out of the crowd and shoving them into a bus when the demonstration was over, as if someone in charge had just woken up. The protesters were taken to militia stations and held there for seven hours. They included Kasparov.
May 21
Every year since 1990, the Andrey Sakharov Foundation and the Moscow State Philharmonia have celebrated Sakharov's birthday by holding a musical evening in the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatory. Over the last fourteen years the program has become traditional: a classical concert with brief speeches, by leading public figures and human rights defenders who were close to Sakharov, about the main problems currently facing us.
It was probably the speeches they were afraid of, because when it was time to arrange the fifteenth celebration this year, for the first time the Philharmonia suddenly told the foundation it wouldn't be possible. No reason, no explanations.
In order to continue the tradition unbroken, Sakharov's admirers, regrouping after their surprise at such an unexpected manifestation of managed democracy, held an open-air concert in the little square next to the Sakharov Museum and Social Center. The theme of the evening was “While Hearts Still Beat for Honest Life.”
There was a good attendance and the evening went well in a familiar, Moscow sort of way. Bards sang, poets recited, the Chechen singer Liza Umarova performed breathtakingly, a letter was read out from Vladimir Voinovich who was unable to attend. Sergey Kovalyov gave a speech, as did Grigorii Yavlinsky and Vladimir Lukin, Russia's ombudsman for human rights. The concert was hosted by Natella Boltyanskaya, an excellent songwriter, singer, and presenter on Echo of Moscow, almost the last free radio station broadcasting.
A Russian Diary Page 30