The two world leaders went off on a trip to provincial Lipetsk, where they opened a production line for washing machines and watched a military air show. Putin continued to give dressing-downs to high-level bureaucrats on television. That is usually how we see him, either receiving reports from officials in his Kremlin office or tearing one of these bureaucrats apart in monologues. The filming is methodically thought through in PR terms. There is no ad-libbing; nothing is left to chance.
Instead of the risen Christ, it was Putin who was revealed to the people at Easter. A service was held at the Church of Christ the Redeemer, Moscow’s cathedral re-erected in concrete on the site of an open-air Soviet-era swimming pool. Almost a month had passed since his second election. At the beginning of the Great Matins service there stood, shoulder to shoulder with Putin as if at a military parade, Prime Minister Fradkov and Dmitry Medvedev, the Kremlin’s new eminence grise, head of the president’s office, a man of diminutive stature with a large head. The three men clumsily and clownishly crossed themselves, Medvedev making his crosses by touching his hands to his forehead and then to his genitals. It was risible. Medvedev followed Putin in shaking the patriarch’s hand as if he were one of their comrades, rather than kissing it as prescribed by church ritual. The patriarch overlooked the error. The spin doctors in the Kremlin are effective but, of course, pretty illiterate in these matters and had not told the politicians what to do. Alongside Putin there stood the mayor of Moscow, Yury Luzhkov, who had been behind the rebuilding of the cathedral and who alone knew how to invoke the protection of the Cross in a competent manner. The patriarch addressed Putin as “Your Most High Excellency,” which made even those not directly involved wince. Given the numerous ex-KGB officers occupying top government positions, the Easter Vigil has now taken over from the May Day parade as the major obligatory national ritual.
The beginning of the Great Matins service was even more comical than the handshakes with the patriarch. Both state television channels did a live broadcast of the procession around the cathedral that precedes the service. The patriarch participated in this, despite being ill. The television commentator, who was a believer and theologically knowledgeable, explained to viewers that in the Orthodox tradition, the doors of the church should be shut before midnight because they symbolize the entrance to the cave where Christ’s body was placed. After midnight the Orthodox faithful taking part in the procession await the opening of the church doors. The patriarch stands on the steps at their head and is the first to enter the empty temple where the Resurrection of Christ has already occurred.
When the patriarch had recited the first prayer after midnight at the doors of the temple, they were thrown open to reveal Putin, our modest president, shoulder to shoulder with Fradkov, Medvedev, and Luzhkov.
You didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. An evening of comic entertainment on Holy Night. What is there to like about this individual? He profanes everything he touches.
At about this time, on April 8, nine-month-old twin girls were declared shaheeds—martyrs for the faith—in Chechnya. They came from the tiny Chechen farmstead of Rigakh and were killed before they had learned to walk. It was the usual story. After the March 14 election, relentless military operations were resumed in Chechnya. The army, in the form of the Regional Operational Staff Headquarters for Coordinating the Counterterrorist Operation, announced that it was attempting to catch Basaev: “A large-scale military operation is under way to destroy the participants of armed formations.” They failed to catch Basaev, but on April 8 at around two in the afternoon, as part of the military operation, the Rigakh farmstead was subjected to a missile bombardment. It killed everyone there: a mother and her five children. The scene that confronted Imar-Ali Damaev, the father of the family, would have turned the most hardheaded militant into a pacifist for life, or into a suicide bomber. His twenty-nine-year-old wife, Maidat, lay dead, holding close four-year-old Djanati, three-year-old Jara-dat, two-year-old Umar-Haji, and the tiny nine-month-old Zara. Their mother’s embrace saved none of them. To one side lay the little body of Zura, Zara’s twin sister. Maidat had had no room and evidently no time to think of a way of covering her fifth child with her own body, and Zura herself had had no time to crawl the two meters. Imar-Ali gathered up the antipersonnel fragments and established the number of the killer missile: 350 F 8-90. It was not difficult; the number was easy to read. Family members and friends started burying the bodies, and the mullah, a Muslim scholar from the neighboring village, declared all those who had been slain to be martyrs. They were interred the same evening, their bodies unwashed, without burial clothes, in what they were wearing when death claimed them.
WHY DO I SO dislike Putin? Because the years are passing. The second Chechen war, instigated in 1999, shows no sign of ending. In 1999 the babies who were to be declared shaheeds were yet unborn, but all the murders of children since that time, in bombardments and purges, remain unsolved, uninvestigated by the institutions of law and order. The infanticides have never had to stand where they belong, in the dock; Putin, that great friend of all children, has never demanded that they should. The army continues to rampage in Chechnya as it was allowed to at the beginning of the war, as if its operations were being conducted on a training ground empty of people.
This massacre of the innocents did not raise a storm in Russia. Not one television station broadcast images of the five little Chechens who had been slaughtered. The minister of defense did not resign. He is a personal friend of Putin and is even seen as a possible successor in 2008. Nor was the head of the air force fired. The commander in chief himself made no speech of condolence. Around us, indeed, it was business as usual in the rest of the world. Hostages were killed in Iraq. Nations and peoples demanded that their governments and international organizations withdraw troops, to save the lives of people carrying out their duties. But in Russia all was quiet.
Why do I so dislike Putin? This is precisely why. I dislike him for a matter-of-factness worse than felony, for his cynicism, for his racism, for his lies, for the gas he used in the Nord-Ost siege, for the massacre of the innocents that went on throughout his first term as president.
This is how I see it. Others have different views. The killing of children has not deterred people from trying to have Putin’s term in office extended to ten years. This project is being conducted through the creation of pro-Putin youth movements on instructions from the Kremlin. The deputy head of Putin’s office is a certain Vladislav Surkov, the acknowledged doyen of PR in Russia. He spins webs consisting of pure deceit, lies in place of reality, words instead of deeds. There is a great fashion at the present for bogus political movements created by directive from the Kremlin. We don’t want the West suspecting that we have a one-party system, that we lack pluralism and are relapsing into authoritarianism. Suddenly there appear groups called Marching Together, Singing Together, For Stability, or some other latter-day version of the Soviet Union’s Pioneer movement. A distinctive feature of these pro-Putin quasi-political movements is the amazing speed with which, without any of the usual bureaucratic prevarication, they are legally registered by the Ministry of Justice, which is usually chary of attempts to create anything remotely political. As its first public act, the new movement usually announces that it will attempt to ensure the extension of the term of office of our beloved president. Putin was given just such a present for his inauguration on May 7. At the end of April, the members of For Stability set in motion procedures for prolonging his term. The group’s underlying concept is that Putin is the guarantor of stability. At the same time, the members of this pocket-size movement demanded an inquiry into the results of privatization, a move that revealed them to be against Khodorkovsky, hence friends of Putin. The Moscow City Electoral Commission hastened to accept the application of the young members of For Stability for a national referendum on the president’s term.