Such was the state of play on inauguration day, May 7, 2004. Putin has, by chance, gotten hold of enormous power and has used it to catastrophic effect. I dislike him because he does not like people. He despises us. He sees us as a means to his ends, a means for the achievement and retention of personal power, no more than that. Accordingly, he believes he can do anything he likes with us, play with us as he sees fit, destroy us if he wishes. We are nobody, while he whom chance has enabled to clamber to the top is today czar and God.
In Russia we have had leaders with this outlook before. It led to tragedy, to bloodshed on a vast scale, to civil wars. Because I want no more of that, I dislike this typical Soviet Chekist as he struts down the red carpet in the Kremlin on his way to the throne of Russia.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This book is about Vladimir Putin—but not, as he is normally viewed in the West, as seen through rose-colored glasses.
Why is it difficult to sustain a rosy point of view when you are faced with reality in Russia? Because Putin, a product of the country’s murkiest intelligence service, has failed to transcend his origins and stop acting like a KGB officer. He is still busy sorting out his freedom-loving fellow citizens; he persists in crushing liberty, just as he did earlier in his career.
This book is also about the fact that not everyone in Russia is prepared to put up with Putin’s kind of government. We no longer want to be under anyone’s thumb, even if that is what best suits the West. We demand our right to freedom.
But this book is not an examination of Putin’s policies. I am not a political analyst. I am just one person among many, a face in the crowd, like so many in Moscow, Chechnya, Saint Petersburg, and other places. These are my immediate reactions, jotted down in the margins of life as it is lived in Russia today. It is too soon to stand back, as you must if you want dispassionate analysis. I live in the present, noting what I see and what I hear.
Also by Anna Politkovskaya
A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya
A Small Corner of Helclass="underline" Dispatches from Chechnya
POSTSCRIPT
July 10, 2004, is just another day in the calendar of Russia. It happens to be the cutoff date for making changes to this book.
Late yesterday evening, Paul Khlebnikov, editor in chief of the Russian edition of Forbes magazine, was murdered in Moscow. He was mowed down as he left the magazine’s office. Khlebnikov was famous for writing about our oligarchs, the structure of Russian gangster capitalism, and the huge sums of easy money certain of our citizens have managed to get their hands on. Also last evening, Victor Cherepkov was blown up by a grenade in Vladivostok. He was a member of our parliament, the Duma, and a prominent champion of the weakest and poorest of this land. Cherepkov was running for mayor of his native city, the most important municipality in the Far East of Russia. He had successfully gotten through to the second round and looked to have a real chance of being elected. As he left his campaign headquarters he was blown up by an antipersonnel mine activated by a trip wire.
Yes, stability has come to Russia. It is a monstrous stability under which nobody seeks justice in courts that flaunt their subservience and partisanship. Nobody in his or her right mind seeks protection from the institutions entrusted with maintaining law and order, because they are totally corrupt. Lynch law is the order of the day, both in people’s minds and in their actions. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. The president himself has set an example by wrecking our major oil company, Yukos, after having jailed its chief executive, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Putin considered Khodorkovsky to have slighted him personally, so he retaliated. Not only did he retaliate against Khodorkovsky himself, he went on to seek the destruction of the goose that laid golden eggs for the coffers of the Russian state. Khodorkovsky and his partners have offered to surrender their shares in Yukos to the government, begging it not to annihilate the company. The government has said, “No. We want our pound of flesh.” On July 9, Putin strong-armed his loyal supporter Muhammed Tsikanov into the post of vice president of Yukos-Moscow, the parent company. Nobody has any doubts that the former deputy minister for economic development has been parachuted in for one reason only: to coordinate the delivery of Yukos into the hands of those whom Putin favors. The market is in turmoil, investors are running for cover, and all the remotely successful business executives I know spent May and June looking for ways to move their capital to the West.
They were wise to do so. On July 8, 9, and 10, lines a mile long formed at ATMs. The authorities had only to hint that a crackdown might close some of the banks; the result was the withdrawal from Alpha Bank, one of the most stable, of funds to the tune of two hundred million dollars in seventy-two hours. Other banks also saw a run on deposits.
It took just a hint. Because everyone expects the state to play dirty, the withdrawal of those two hundred million dollars in three days tells us all we need to know about Russia’s current stability.
If we go by the official surveys of public opinion, conducted by polling firms that have no wish to lose their contracts with the president’s office, Putin’s popularity rating couldn’t be better. He has the support of an overwhelming majority of the Russian public. Everybody trusts him. Everybody approves of what he is doing.
On September 1, 2004, a horrible act of terrorism, one without precedent, was perpetrated in Russia, and from now on the name of the little North Ossetian town of Beslan will be associated with a waking nightmare beyond the imaginings of Hollywood.
On the morning of September 1, a multinational gang of thugs seized control of No. 1 school in Beslan, demanding an immediate end to the second Chechen war. The hostage takers struck during the annual lineyka, a celebration of the beginning of the school year that is observed throughout Russia. By tradition this is an occasion to which whole families come: grandmothers and grandfathers, aunts and uncles, and especially the relatives of the youngest children, who are going to school for the first time.
This is why almost 1,500 people were taken hostage: schoolchildren, their mothers and fathers, their brothers and sisters, their teachers and their teachers’ children.
Everything that happened during the period of September 1–3, and in Russia subsequently, has been the predictable consequence of the Putin regime’s systematic imposition of the power of a single individual, to the detriment of common sense and personal initiative.
On September 1 the intelligence services, and after them the authorities, announced that there actually were not that many people in the schooclass="underline" just 354 in all. The infuriated terrorists told the hostages, “When we have finished with you, there really will be only 354.” The relatives who had gathered around the school said the authorities were lying: more than a thousand people were trapped inside.