Winter is Coming (21 page)

It was while preparing these speeches that I became a big fan of Henry “Scoop” Jackson, the Washington State senator who was the primary force for a moral American foreign policy in the 1970s. I could happily fill several pages with Jackson’s powerful statements on why America had to live up to its ideals of freedom and democracy by actively promoting and defending them abroad. My favorite is the conclusion of his impassioned September 27, 1972, speech on the Senate floor to advocate for the amendment that would bear his name: “We can, and we must, keep the faith of our own highest traditions. We must not now, as we once did, acquiesce to tyranny while there are those, at greater risk than ourselves, who dare to resist.” Jackson also quoted Solzhenitsyn’s 1972 Nobel Prize-acceptance lecture, “There are no INTERNAL AFFAIRS left on our crowded Earth!”

When I was invited by Hillsdale College to speak about Russia at an event in Jackson’s home state of Washington in 2013 I jumped at the chance. Hillsdale is a very politically conservative institution, the “conservative Harvard,” so I enjoyed playing the contrarian by invoking Jackson as well as his fellow Democrat Harry Truman in my lecture. Both were strong advocates of using American power and moral authority to defend people around the world from dictatorship. Unfortunately, with a few notable exceptions this stance has been completely abandoned by the current generation of Democrats. After my lecture, I was approached by an elderly local woman who had clear memories of supporting Scoop Jackson (and maybe Truman!), calling him “the only Democrat I’ve ever voted for!”

The Bush 43 administration openly promoted a “freedom agenda” (aka the Bush Doctrine), an agenda of which Scoop Jackson would have been proud. It recommended actively promoting liberty abroad—an agenda I supported in nearly every aspect, by the way. But they still fell into the trap of inconsistency and trade-offs when it came to Russia. Rice’s “the Cold War really is over” when getting off the phone with Putin on 9/11 says it all. The Cold War had been over for a decade!

This comment reinforces what Rice once said on the
Charlie Rose
show, in 2009 I believe, about “Russians being better off than in the USSR,” again making it sound like the 1990s had never happened. Arguing degrees of repression in a theoretical or historical debate is one thing, but doing it when people are being jailed and killed is immoral. Even if the water has receded, a few feet is still enough to drown in, especially if your hands are tied.

Yes, the Cold War was over, but Putin was already fighting the next war and it wasn’t in Chechnya or against terror. Putin’s war was against Russian democracy and anyone who might stand in the way of his mission to destroy it. Those 9/11 phone calls to Bush were preemptive strikes, a targeted maneuver by Putin to undermine potential American influence against his crackdowns at home.

Unfortunately, the tactic worked quite well and it wasn’t until Putin invaded Georgia in 2008 that Bush and his administration admitted as much and stiffened their policies. By then Bush was on his way out, and Russian democracy was on its deathbed and beyond the help that foreign pressure could have provided when Putin was still vulnerable at the start of the decade.

Looking at what happened inside Russia after 9/11 is also a good way to examine one of the most critical patterns of Putin’s rule: the less pressure he felt from the outside, the more dictatorial he became inside Russia. Despite his tough-guy persona and rhetoric, Putin, especially in the first few years in office, was sensitive to external pressure over civil liberties and other abuses. It was only later, when the oil money was rushing in and all his potential domestic rivals had been destroyed, that Putin would go out of his way to flaunt his immunity to outside pressure.

During the dark days of the USSR the world understood that people like Andrei Sakharov, Sergei Kovalev, and Natan Sharansky were heroes for their nonviolent resistance. The modern Putin style of oppression is different and it has many advocates in the West, who refuse to distinguish between Putin’s regime and the Russian people it oppresses. For example, after I appeared on a panel discussion on BBC television in 2006, on a show recorded in Moscow but of course not aired in Russia, a British viewer wrote in amazed at how freely we said things that, he said, would have led to our execution not long ago. This attitude, that Russians are “better off now” and should count our blessings, has been very harmful to our democratic cause. It validates repression with absurd relativism.

The Cold War and the threat of nuclear destruction focused everyone’s attention very well on every move Russia made. As soon as that threat faded, Western leaders preferred to keep their heads in the sand and to pretend everything was fine, especially when they had more urgent and visible problems to deal with after 9/11. It took a generation of an existential threat and the real and imagined menace of Communism to produce an active moral foreign policy constituency in the West. It only took a few years for governments to outsource human rights to NGOs like Amnesty International. Human rights were no longer government business.

Meanwhile, with nothing more to worry about from the outside, for Putin the coast was clear. He continued to “consolidate” the media by shutting down independent television stations and making it clear to the press that certain topics were off limits. The harassment of the political opposition became increasingly routine. Even for established politicians and successful businesspeople it was no longer possible to oppose Putin’s principles or policies without taking on considerable risk of losing your career, your freedom, or your life.

Any doubts about the Putin regime’s willingness to spill blood were erased in the 2002 hostage crisis at the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow. A small army of Chechen militants took nearly 850 people prisoner for four days in what would become known as the “Nord-Ost” siege, for the name of the Russian musical play that was being performed on the night the attack began, October 23.

There is no need to recount every grisly detail of the siege, especially since nearly every detail is disputed. I especially wish to avoid any appearance of sympathy with the hostage-takers despite my focus on the response of the government. Terrorists are scorpions; we know their character and condemn them for it in good conscience. The true nature of the Putin regime, however, was still somewhat in doubt and is the subject under discussion.

The hostage-takers demanded the immediate withdrawal of all Russian troops from Chechnya and said that they wanted to “bring a taste of what is happening in Chechnya every day to the people of Moscow.” They were heavily armed with machine guns, grenades, and improvised explosive devices. The first night they released a large group of hostages, between 150 and 200, mostly children, women, Muslims, and foreigners. The next day, the terrorists accepted negotiations with quite a few public figures, including opposition politician Boris Nemtsov and journalist Anna Politkovskaya, the long-time war correspondent in Chechnya.

Despite every conversation resulting in the hostage-takers confirming that they were there to die, they released another large group of hostages, mostly foreigners. On the twenty-fifth they accepted food, juice, and medicine from the Red Cross for the hostages. The leader of the terrorists, Movsar Barayev, gave interviews to the press, reiterating their willingness to die and that “we are here with the specific purpose to end the war.” With such a large and well-prepared group of experienced militants and so many hostages, it looked like it was going to be a long standoff.

I was still playing chess professionally then, and at the end of October I was leading the Russian team to the gold medal for the last time at the Chess Olympiad in the Slovakian city of Bled. The news of the hostage crisis at the Dubrovka Theater shocked all of the participants, but most of all, of course, those of us who were born in the Soviet Union, and for whom the word “Chechnya” was more than just an unfamiliar geographical term.

I remember well the heated discussions of this tragic situation in the halls, when, looking one another in the eye, people would express the same hope: “The government won’t decide to use force. They won’t let hundreds of people die.”

On the morning of the twenty-sixth, Russian special forces stormed the theater. Simultaneously, a toxic gas was pumped into the theater. According to survivors and a frantic call from one of the hostages, they and the terrorists were aware of the gas and some of the assailants had gas masks. The terrorists fired at the Russian forces instead of executing the hostages, another fact that only became clear later and that was contrary to initial official reports that most of the dead had been shot.

All 40 hostage-takers were killed in the raid along with over 130 hostages: all but one of the hostages were either killed by the gas directly or indirectly by choking to death while unconscious and failing to receive medical care in time. Local hospitals were flooded with poisoned hostages they didn’t know how to treat because officials refused to identify the type of gas that had been used. Immediately afterward, officials said the attack was provoked by the terrorists beginning to execute hostages. This statement was revealed to be false only a few days later when other officials said the attack had been scheduled and planned since the first day.

Despite controversial reports that at least one of the hostage-takers was a known FSB operative, there is no way to know if the special forces knew that most of the explosives in the theater were fake, meaning the gas wasn’t really necessary before storming the theater. The Russian parliament declined to launch an investigation of the government’s conduct during the siege, which is why there are so many unknowns to this day. The government’s policy after the attack, of stonewalling or spreading misinformation about every facet of the operation, makes it difficult not to think the worst.

It is easy to cynically state that a few hundred innocents killed at the hands of the government is better than seven hundred dead at the hands of the terrorists. The mathematics are unassailable, even in hindsight. There is no way to know what would have happened in the alternate universe where negotiations continued. The only clear conclusions to come out of the horrible tragedy were that the war in Chechnya wasn’t over, no matter what Putin said, and that the Putin regime had no greater regard for human life than the terrorists did—a point it seemed the government wanted to make.

If the goal of the rapid and lethal intervention was partly to send a deterrent message to the Chechens that there would be no negotiations, it was a failure. Two years later, the Beslan school siege would result in an even more violent and catastrophic military intervention against Chechen hostage-takers, resulting in the deaths of nearly 400 people, including 186 children. (One result that can definitely be attributed to the Nord-Ost siege was the end of NTV’s quasi-independence after Putin was displeased by its coverage of the crisis.)

Putin’s Russia does not consider the deaths of its own citizens to be a serious crime worth punishing guilty officials for. And yet, having quietly decorated and promoted many of the organizers of the storming of the Dubrovka, the Putin regime went even further by issuing an indefinite indulgence to carry out any of his immoral orders. Lacking organized pushback from society, the soft authoritarian regime spent the next decade gradually acquiring the sinister traits of a fascist dictatorship.

Sandwiched between the Nord-Ost and Beslan sieges was another landmark event in establishing the reach and grasp of state power in Putin’s Russia. On October 25, 2003, the richest man in Russia, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was arrested and charged with fraud. In a scheme that would prove to be a model for future behavior, Khodorkovsky was convicted and his company, the oil giant Yukos, was promptly chopped up. Its assets were handed out to companies controlled by Putin’s closest buddies at bargain prices. By the time he was released in December 2013—after a second conviction that was even more preposterous than the first—Yukos was no more.

As I said earlier, it was difficult to find many Russians willing to express sympathy for the oligarchs who had made their vast fortunes in the early days of privatization. If the saying “Behind every great fortune is a great crime” is valid in the relatively transparent market economies of the West, it was doubly the case in the Wild, Wild East of 1990s Russia and the other post-Soviet republics. They were considered unscrupulous entrepreneurs at best and predatory criminals at worst, people who had used political connections to amass untold fortunes while average Russians struggled. And, well, this was largely true, with the caveat that it’s not constructive to blame the winners for breaking the rules in a game that had barely any rules at all.