A Russian Diary (19 page)

“It was quite needless, of course, but they take no notice of what we say. The federals do as they see fit. You know yourself, they are scared of
their own shadows. It is easier for them to kill than to try to think and see reality.”

“And what are you going to do now? When you know for sure that it was federal troops who were responsible?”

“Nothing. I shall keep quiet like everybody else. Since Putin has won, he has the power, and that means we have to keep our heads down. I will put the case of the murder of Madina to one side. Her parents will cry for a time and then calm down. They are simple people. They're not going to start writing to the procurator general's office. Even if they do, I'll be thanked for not having investigated too closely.”

Archakov's attitude is typical of our times.

The Khazbievs leave and in my room I now have the Mutsolgovs. If there is anything all this can be compared with, it is Chechnya: only there does a journalist instantly attract a line the length of those we saw in Soviet-era food shops. These are the relatives of victims of extrajudicial executions or, as it is now officially described by the procurator's office, of “targeted force necessary in the struggle against terrorism.” They are the relatives of all those people who have been “disappeared,” dragged off and murdered by “unidentified masked soldiers wearing camouflage fatigues.” The families can never find those responsible, nor any trace of those who have vanished. They are not to be found in any state institution, whether under interrogation, in custody, or in prison.

Adam Mutsolgov is the father of a twenty-nine-year-old teacher, Bashir, from the town of Karabulak. His son was shoved into a white Niva outside his house in broad daylight. Adam's two other sons also embarked upon an independent investigation.

(They were later to discover that those responsible for the abduction were agents of the Ingush Directorate of the FSB, under the command of Gen. Sergey Koryakov, a friend of President Zyazikov. General Kor-yakov was personally involved. The brothers obtained evidence that Bashir had spent the first night after his abduction in the DFSB building in Nazran—or Magas, as it was renamed—directly behind the presidential palace. In the morning he was taken in a DFSB vehicle to the main Russian military base of Hankala in Chechnya, but after that they could
find out no more. Their informant was himself a member of the DFSB. Those who had seen Bashir Mutsolgov in Hankala also told Adam that his son had been in a bad way, showing signs of terrible torture.)

Adam Mutsolgov hands me the list of forty names of those who have been abducted in recent months. It is an unofficial list, compiled by their families. The procurator's office has refused to accept it. Their only option is to unite and work together. The list, which in late February was rather shorter, was given just before Putin's election to Rashid Ozdoev, the senior assistant of the procurator of Ingushetia. Rashid's official duties were to monitor the legality of the actions of the Ingush DFSB. At that very time he was himself following up what had happened to those who had been abducted, and he too had concluded that extrajudicial executions were taking place with the knowledge of the republic's security services. Rashid submitted a report to the procurator general of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Ustinov, providing evidence of illegal activity, primarily by General Koryakov and the DFSB.

On March 11, at about 6:00 p.m., Rashid Ozdoev was seen for the last time getting into his car in the parking lot by the presidential palace in Nazran. Twenty-four hours later his Zhiguli was seen, covered by a tarpaulin, in the courtyard of the Ingush DFSB. Rashid was later observed, as his relatives discovered for themselves, beaten and tortured, in Hankala. They know only that he is no longer there.

“Every day spent not knowing, I bury my son.” Boris Ozdoev, Rashid's father, speaks quietly, hanging his head. He is a judge in honorable retirement and very well known in Ingushetia. He is far from young.

“Did your son tell you what was in his report to the procurator general?”

“Yes. He wrote about instances of extrajudicial force being used, and who was guilty of it. I said to my son, ‘Do not do this. It is a fearsome organization! Why do you want to take such a risk?’ He replied, ‘If you wish, I will leave this job. But if I am the procurator whose job it is to monitor the DFSB, and if the organization I am monitoring is involved in murder and abduction, then I am the only person in the republic who has the legal right to demand a return to legality. If I do not use that right now, the Almighty will never forgive me.’ We discussed it for a long time,
and he wondered, ‘Well, what can they do? Plant drugs on me, weapons? They can't make that stick: I have immunity as a procurator. Everybody knows I don't take bribes.’ He didn't consider the possibility that he might be abducted himself. After his disappearance I went to President Zyazikov and I, an old man, a judge, sat in his waiting room for one and a half hours. He kept me waiting, and then simply passed a message through his secretary that he had nothing to say to me. I have no doubt that means he knows who abducted Rashid.”

In the end, the heads of families whose sons had been abducted called a meeting and demanded that Zyazikov tell them where their sons were, and who was guilty of the abductions. At just that moment, however, Zyazikov was on his way to a meeting with Putin in Sochi to report on how Ingushetia was flourishing and to tell him that 98 percent of the electorate had voted “for you, Vladimir Vladimirovich.”

The direct consequence of the parachuting into the Ingush presidency of an FSB general who had worked for the Soviet KGB has been the organizing of state-sanctioned lawlessness on a massive scale. Zyazikov is no more trustworthy a guarantor of law than Putin, something that, incidentally, disappointed the hopes of many people in Ingushetia, who were tired of disorder. Instead Zyazikov has presided over a move away from democracy, not just to autocracy, but to state terrorism and medieval barbarity.

I went to my colleagues, Ingush journalists, to ask them how the system of media censorship works in these outlying regions, far away from Putin's administration in Moscow. Why, for instance, is there not a word in the republican media about extrajudicial executions, when concealing the problem can only make it worse?

It proved far from easy to discuss. In the first place, nobody would talk on the record. In the second, we could speak only in a car, away from prying eyes, as in the days of the Soviet Union. The person I talked to was in a state of deep depression, which seems to be well nigh universal. This was a deputy editor in chief of one of the two newspapers published in Ingushetia.

“Why do we need all these precautions?” I asked.

“If they find out I have opened my mouth, I won't even be able to find
a job as a tractor driver,” he answered, a gray-haired, clever man, a professional journalist.

“What would happen if you were to write about the abductions, the corruption, Putin's ‘98 percent?’ About the massive ballot box stuffing in last December's parliamentary elections?”

“If I wrote about that, I would be fired when it reached the censors. Articles of that kind just aren't going to be published, and I would be unable to find work in the future. My relatives would lose their jobs too, even though they have nothing to do with journalism.”

My colleague told me about the censorship mechanism that supports the myth of the “stabilization of Ingushetia.” Every column of the newspapers is read personally at proof stage by Issa Merzhoev, the president's press secretary. That is the law. He removes anything he considers harmful, anything that might undermine the “process of stabilization.” Negative information of any sort is censored if it relates even indirectly to those presently in power. You cannot propose articles about corruption if relatives of Zyazikov are involved. Of the war in Chechnya you may write only about the killing of fighters and the “voluntary resettlement of refugees.” The death squads are completely taboo, as is all extrajudicial activity.

Exactly the same goes for radio and television. Merzhoev personally checks the programs from a political angle, and he checks all the topics to be covered in advance.

But why? People have no air to breathe, they are in complete despair. Who can possibly want the Chechen scenario to be repeated here? Nobody in Ingushetia, not even Zyazikov. He is not like Ruslan Aushev, his very competent predecessor. If there is a crisis he will be totally out of his depth. Another Chechnya may, however, be something Moscow needs, and Zyazikov is entirely dependent on Moscow. His rise to the presidency was fixed by Moscow, and the Kremlin set two conditions, which people in Ingushetia know all about: that he would not object if the “antiterror-ist operation” were extended to Ingushetia, and would deliver the loyalty of his people; and second, that he would not demand the return from North Ossetia to Ingushetia of the Prigorodny Region.

And Zyazikov delivers, he and his henchmen. If the media were allowed to reflect reality, it would soon be very clear that the people want proper demarcation of the frontier with Chechnya and the return of the Prigorodny Region, which was taken from them when Stalin deported the entire Ingush population to Kazakhstan in 1944.

“That is why we are under pressure,” the journalist says. “They need it to appear that everybody in Ingushetia is happy with the Kremlin's policy and with what Zyazikov is doing.”

“Could you disobey Merzhoev?”

“So far none of the editors in chief have dared to try.”

“Who can resist?”

“Nobody. You can resist only if you leave Ingushetia, or better still if you emigrate from Russia.”

“How would you describe what is happening in Ingushetia today?”

“The Soviet system with a lot of bloodshed.”

Of course, Soviet stability too was a great achievement—the coffins containing soldiers killed in Afghanistan were not allowed to be identified as such; dissidents were imprisoned in labor camps and psychiatric hospitals; the populace voted 99.9 percent in favor of everything; the party bosses feared only the Party Control Commission; the well-drilled artists of the cinema made politically correct films about everybody having complete faith in the future. The West gave Brezhnev financial support because it didn't want everything to fall apart. That was the reality, disguised as stability. Now, in April 2004, we are back at square one. Reality is tastefully displayed to look like stability, both in Ingushetia and throughout Russia. The West again throws us a crust. We know all about eternal recurrence.

I often wonder why our people are so frightened by even the hint of a threat of repression. If they protest at all, then it is only by anonymously blowing up a presidential Mercedes, not in a civilized, open manner, by opposition in a parliament, or by demanding that the results of a rigged election should be annulled.

It can only be a matter of traditions. The Russian tradition is one of an inability to plan and see through the sheer hard work of systematic
opposition. If we are going to do anything, it has to be something we can do on the spot, here and now, after which life will be sorted. As that isn't the way things work, life doesn't get sorted.

I wonder too why Zyazikov, like Putin (because Zyazikov is a mere clone), can't do anything in a decent, human, democratic way. Why, in order to stay in power, do they need to lie, to twist and turn, support corrupt officials, avoid meeting their people, fear them, and, as a result, have no love for them?

I think the underlying problem must be that they have not been adequately prepared for leadership. They are appointed to the presidency in the Soviet way, quite by chance. The Party gives its orders and the eager Young Communist replies, “Yes, Comrade Commissar!” For a time they probably enjoy being president very much, but, after the inauguration and all the celebrations, when the firework displays are over, they find themselves faced with the routine labor of being a president: running the economy, maintaining the water pipes and the roads, coping with terrorists, wars, and thieving officials. That is when they realize they are incapable of doing anything except frowning severely, pretending to be Talleyrand, secretively keeping quiet, and blaming their failures on enemies who are lurking around every corner.

Zyazikov in Ingushetia copies his big boss in Moscow in all things, but particularly in his basic approach. What matters is not solving the problems, but controlling what gets reported on television; not reality but virtuality; censorship as a way of not having to tackle difficult matters. The downside is that ubiquitous censorship and constant duplicity mean you have no visible opposition with which to debate the issues on a daily basis. Where are the dissenting voices, all those who might criticize and come up with alternative ideas? You can't listen to them because they are not there. Neither in Moscow nor in Ingushetia.

For a long time the only open oppositionists in Zyazikov's republic were Musa Ozdoev and a number of people close to him. Musa used to be on Zyazikov's team and was even his adviser at one time.

Oppositionist Musa Ozdoev tried to challenge the election results to the Duma. In court he produced records from electoral districts where votes had been written into the record, a bizarre electoral roll in which
people with different names had the same passport, or where one person voted several times using the same name but different passports. Here are a few examples that explain how the opposition came to be “routed” in the December election and how Putin's party, United Russia, came by its imposing victory.

Electoral Ward 68 is in the village of Barsuki on the outskirts of Nazran, the home village of Murat Zyazikov. This is where his relatives live, and it is here that, on the highest hill, the president's “lettuce castle” is being built. It is a hulking, clumsy great building of feudal aspect, but the green color works surprisingly well, and he is expected to move there shortly. Naturally, in accordance with the worst Caucasian traditions, those supervising the voting in the polling stations of Barsuki were relatives of Zyazikov, his vassals, those building his castle, its suppliers and staff.