Winter is Coming (36 page)

I watched the entire catastrophe erupt on the live feed from the Echo of Moscow studio. I had been planning to do my spot and return to Bolotnaya to hear the speakers and meet some colleagues, but the entire square had turned into chaos by six thirty. The entire city had been turned into a fortress to prepare for Putin’s inaugural the next day and the police were obviously intending to send a message, as Luntz astutely pointed out. The tsar was back and anyone who wanted to march against him had better be prepared to have his skull cracked.

The new crackdown did not end in the streets. The regime targeted the entire Coordination Council of the opposition movement, raiding their homes and even their offices and families’ homes. Leaders were called in for interrogation over and over. Even more new anti-protest laws were passed to allow for much higher fines and up to thirty days in prison for a minor civil offense. It was not a headless movement; it required coordination and communications work to bring fifty thousand or more people to the streets. That was still plenty to put the lie to Putin’s approval ratings, but it was not enough to topple the regime. There were a few more fairly large rallies up until the May 6,

On July 18, 2013, Navalny was sentenced to five years in prison on concocted embezzlement charges typical of the kind used to persecute opposition figures. This happened after he had registered the day before as a candidate for the Moscow mayoral race. A bizarre cat-and-mouse sequence then ensued. Navalny was shockingly released, probably for the dual purpose of avoiding making him a martyr and to add some needed quasi-legitimacy to the mayoral election. He was allowed to appear on the ballot and campaign, although of course the Kremlin candidate, incumbent mayor Sergey Sobyanin, had the innumerable advantages of state power and media. Another likely reason why Navalny was released and allowed to run was as a way for the Kremlin to keep the ambitious Sobyanin in his place. Without Navalny on the ballot Sobyanin’s result would have surpassed Putin’s national 63.6 percent and dwarfed Putin’s 47 percent in Moscow. It shows how subtle and dangerous modern dictatorships are that they can employ democratic structures and tools in this way.

Navalny duly finished a distant second and continued his life as a marked man with his convictions and new charges constantly hanging over his head. His last conviction, in December

It is difficult to say what could have gone differently for the public protest movement in that period. If a real revolution was to occur it needed to be early, before the regime formulated a response. Perhaps the huge demonstration on December 24, 2011, on Sakharov Avenue was the best chance if there was one. I was there with nearly every other member of the opposition and there must have been at least thirty other speakers. Navalny came tantalizingly close by saying what many of us had thought for so long:

I can see that there are enough people here to seize the Kremlin and the White House [federal government building] right now. We are a peaceful force and will not do it now. But if these crooks and thieves try to go on cheating us, if they continue telling lies and stealing from us, we will take what belongs to us with our own hands!

What might have happened had we marched on the Kremlin and the Duma that night? If we had established a camp in Red Square one hundred thousand strong and prepared battlements? Would the people have followed us? Would the thousands of police have opened fire? Would we now be free, or dead?

Press conferences are supposed to make headlines, but on June 5, 2013, in Geneva I made a little more news than I had intended. I was there to receive the Morris B. Abram Human Rights Award from the organization UN Watch. It was a great honor to receive an award bearing the name of an American civil rights champion who worked with Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy before becoming a global rights figure in co-founding UN Watch in Geneva.

At the press conference a reporter asked a question I have received hundreds of times since I retired from chess: whether or not I feared for my safety and freedom in Putin’s Russia. But this time I did not give my usual reply about nothing in life being certain. I answered that if I returned to Russia I had serious doubts I would be able to leave again, since it had become obvious in February that I would be part of the ongoing crackdown against political protestors centered on the Bolotnaya Square case.

“So for the time being,” I concluded (if I may quote myself to make the record clear), “I refrain from returning to Russia.”

This was not intended to be a grand declaration of leaving my home country, permanently or otherwise. In the context of the question, even the Russia experts among the journalists in attendance failed to pick up anything special about my cautious response. It was only when the
Moscow Times
reported it that the headlines and speculation began to fly.

I was simply expressing the dark reality of the situation in Russia at the time. Nearly half of the members of the opposition’s Coordinating Council were under criminal investigation on invented charges ranging from illegal protest to incitement of extremism to embezzlement. This difficult decision was already old news to my family and me; I had not been to my Moscow home since February. Even my fiftieth birthday in April was celebrated in Oslo instead of Moscow, as much as it pained me to make my mother and other close family travel abroad.

My work on the opposition council was generally foreign relations, which entailed lobbying governments and organizations abroad to condemn the human rights record of the Putin regime and to bring sanctions against Putin’s government and his cronies. Putin’s rage at the passage of the US Magnitsky Act legislation at the end of 2012 convinced me that this was the correct path, and a path that needed to be promoted in Europe as well.

The Moscow prosecutor’s office opening an investigation that would limit my ability to travel would have crippled these efforts. It would have kept me from my professional speaking engagements, all of which were abroad since my dissident status had denied me any possibility of earning an income in Russia. A travel ban would also have limited my work with the nonprofit Kasparov Chess Foundation, which had centers in New York City, Brussels, Johannesburg, Singapore, and Mexico City to promote chess in education.

I doubt they would have just locked me up and thrown away the key, although that’s what we thought about Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Pussy Riot. It was more the fashion for the prosecutor’s office to inflict an endless barrage of charges, trials, and court appearances: death by a thousand paper cuts. It bankrupts the victims financially, physically, and spiritually and keeps them out of the limelight without martyrdom. It causes fear and paranoia in the target as well as in his family and friends. This is the technique they’ve used against Navalny for years.

When I retired from chess in March 2005 to join the opposition movement, my concept of uniting every anti-Putin element in the country to march together regardless of ideology was harshly criticized. Seeing the 2011-2012 marches with hundreds of flags representing every group from liberals to nationalists all marching together for “Russia Without Putin” was the fulfillment of a dream. But it was a brief dream followed by a rude awakening for the opposition and, sadly, the continued slumber of most of the Russian people.

For his uncontested return to the presidency Putin locked down the capital, turning the center of Moscow into Pyongyang. He has since shown no hesitation in persecuting activists, leaders, lawyers, scientists, or even musicians who dare challenge his power publicly. The phase of attempting to create popular outrage by going through the motions of sham elections was over. Despite the government propaganda, most Russians knew the system was a cruel joke, but this knowledge was not in itself sufficient to get millions of people to risk their safety and freedom against a well-armed police state.

I had also expanded my human rights work in an effort to create an international coalition of dissidents and activists. In 2012 I succeeded one of my heroes, Vaclav Havel, as the chairman of the Human Rights Foundation (HRF) in New York. Thor Halvorssen, its tireless founder and director, has put together a remarkable series of global events and campaigns with an emphasis on uniting freedom fighters around the world. HRF’s annual Oslo Freedom Forum is the epitome of these efforts to bring human rights activists and dissidents together to share information and strategies.

I understood that I could not lead in Russia from outside of Russia and I’ve had to accept that. I’m still involved in the opposition and in some ways I’m busier than ever working for our cause. To those who have accused me of abandoning Russia, or of giving up, I say that Russia remains my country regardless of where I live or the papers I carry. I will not subject myself to the whims of the thugs and crooks who rule it for the time being. Russia is not Putin. I refuse to be an easy target or to be caged and limited to being little more than a figure of sympathy. It has been painful not to see my eldest son, Vadim, and my mother in Moscow very often, but Klara Kasparova gave me both her name and her fighting spirit, and so I will persist.

Two months later, President Obama, too, had personal issues with the Putin regime, canceling a summit meeting with Putin that had been set for August. There were many good reasons for Obama to make this choice, but most of the attention went to Russia’s granting asylum to the American fugitive National Security Agency (NSA) leaker Edward Snowden a few days earlier. The coverage reflected the short attention span and limited interest in Russia in the Western press, but it may also be accurate. After all, the list of ways Putin had worked against American and European interests was quite long already, with Syria, Iran, and missile defense on top. But previously Obama had been content to sit down across from Putin and spout the usual blather about cooperation and friendship. If it took a personal jab over the negligible figure of Snowden to at last rouse Obama to stand up to Putin, I suppose that doing the right thing for the wrong reason is better than never doing it at all.

It is human nature to want to put a face on our stories, whether or not it really fits. Like a footballer making or missing a penalty in the final seconds of a game, one individual often gets credit or blame when he is mostly just a diversion from more important stories. One person’s central role in a single incident ends up looking more important than the serious issues, which have been building for a long time, that the incident represents. That was the case of Edward Snowden, a traitor and spy to some and a whistleblower and hero to others. I have no special knowledge about his actions or his leaks, but I would surely feel differently about him had he not taken refuge in Russia, where his asylum request tacitly endorsed the dictatorial regime of his gracious host, Vladimir Putin.

My reaction is not only due to Snowden’s first statement from Russia, while he was still in legal limbo at Sheremetyevo airport, in which he included Putin’s Russia—a police state and patron of despotism worldwide—on his list of nations that “stand against human rights violations carried out by the powerful rather than the powerless.” Excuse me? Putin’s many political prisoners would disagree quite strongly, as would the many opposition members who have had their emails hacked and their phone calls recorded by the KGB in attempts to discredit them. And Snowden could have been more respectful of the many injured and dead among journalists and his fellow whistleblowers in Russia.

One note on Snowden’s NSA revelations, however, speaking as someone who grew up under the all-seeing eye of the KGB and who is fighting its modern rebirth under Vladimir Putin: it is exasperating to hear blithe comparisons between the NSA, and other Western spy or law enforcement organizations, and the vicious internal security regimes of the USSR and East Germany. The NSA is to the Stasi what a bad hotel is to a maximum security prison. It is not what a government does with data that defines it; it is what it does to human beings.