Death of a Dissident (15 page)

“Just watch,” he said. “The idiots have lost. They did not understand the power of the media.”

The president watched the program, placed one phone call, and went back to bed. Arkady and his companion were set free at 4 a.m.

Later that morning, Chubais received a summons from the president’s office.

“I will demand that he fires Korzhakov and Soskovets,” he said to Boris as he was leaving for the Kremlin.

“Barsukov should go too,” said Boris. “If one of them stays, sooner or later it will start all over again. I will make sure that TV crews wait outside.” By then Boris knew that the best way to guarantee that the volatile president would not change his mind was to immediately put his decision on the air.

At 9 a.m., in a nationally televised address, Yeltsin fired Korzhakov, Barsukov, and Soskovets.

When Sasha Litvinenko came to work the next morning, the Agency brass “looked shell-shocked.”

But a Barsukov assistant called him into his office and said, “Tell Boris that if Korzhakov or Barsukov are arrested, he is dead.”

He dutifully delivered the message.

July 8, 1996: Four days after Yeltsin’s decisive victory in the runoff election, hostilities resume in Chechnya. Each side blames the other for violating the truce
.

August 6, 1996: Thousands of rebels led by Chechen commander Aslan Maskhadov pour into Grozny, encircling several thousand federal forces. After two weeks of intense fighting, the Russian army abandons the capital. Over the objection of his generals, who want to raze Grozny with a massive bombardment, President Yeltsin authorizes National Security Adviser Alexander Lebed to seek a settlement. On August 31, Lebed and Maskhadov sign the Khasavyurt Accord, granting the rebels de facto control of the republic, promising prompt withdrawal of troops and free elections. The issue of formal independence for Chechnya is deferred until 2001
.

Grozny, September 1996

Akhmed Zakayev, the security adviser to the interim Chechen president, settled into his new offices in one of the few buildings still intact in Grozny. He had been through hell over the past two years.

Before the Soviet Union collapsed, Zakayev had been a leading actor in the Grozny Drama Theater, performing Shakespeare and Russian classics, dreaming of a Chechen cultural renaissance that would follow the end of Communism. After the USSR fell and Chechnya declared its independence, he became the head of the Chechen National Actors Guild, a “would-be Chechen Ronald Reagan,”
he joked. But then came the war. He traded his stage costumes for the fatigues of a hardened guerrilla, a green band with Islamic inscriptions across his forehead and a Kalashnikov by his side. In August he had led the assault on Grozny from the south, against a Russian force that outnumbered his men several-fold. Now he was happy to return to civilian life and assume his new post in the government of interim President Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev.

That very month, as the rebel government struggled to assume control of the restive guerrilla movement, Sasha Litvinenko went on a raid in Moscow. In a strange twist of fate, that raid would threaten to undermine the fragile Chechen peace accord.

The fragility of the peace had a lot to do with the absence of one man: the late Dzhokhar Dudayev, the only leader, in Zakayev’s view, who could unite the warring factions and personalities of the Chechen resistance.

Zakayev first met him in early 1990, when Dudayev was an air force general stationed in Tartu, Estonia. He was the only ethnic Chechen to reach such a high rank in the Soviet military. Initially Zakayev was suspicious of the smooth forty-six-year-old officer with an immaculately groomed, pointed moustache and ridiculous Soviet army cap. To become a general, one had to be 100 percent loyal to the Communist Party. A nonethnic Russian also had to be totally assimilated and married to an ethnic Russian. Dudayev was all of these things. He could barely speak Chechen. But when Zakayev heard him address a conference about the rebirth of the Chechen nation, he was overwhelmed. Here was a man, he saw, who could lead their people to freedom. As an actor, Zakayev appreciated Dudayev’s charisma. Perhaps it was the influence of Estonia, one of the most rebellious Soviet republics. Estonians revered Dudayev for ignoring orders from Moscow to shut down Estonian TV during massive anti-Soviet disturbances.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Dudayev returned to Chechnya, became active in politics, and was quickly elected president. He proclaimed independence in November 1991. Zakayev watched
from a distance until one day in November 1994, when Dudayev called to offer him a cabinet position as minister of culture.

One month later, the first Chechen War began.

As with many wars, it started as a result of a miscalculation on both sides. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the Chechens were under the impression that they would be free, like other Soviet republics. These expectations were reinforced by the Kremlin’s decision to apportion state property. The Red Army, as it left Chechnya, transferred all its possessions to the Dudayev government—tanks, guns, aircraft, weapons, and ammunition. It was a decision the army would later regret.

But Chechnya was not a full republic of the USSR, like Estonia and Georgia. It was just one of eighty-six provinces of the Russian Federation, and an autonomous ethnic region. In Moscow’s view, it was not entitled to full sovereignty. The Chechens protested and declared independence unilaterally, as did Tatarstan, another predominantly Muslim region, landlocked in the center of Russia. In February 1994, President Yeltsin went to Tatarstan and signed a treaty on the mutual delegation of powers with its strong-man president, Mintimer Shaimiyev. For all intents and purposes, Shaimiyev was granted control of local affairs in his nation of 3.7 million, leaving to Moscow the regulation of defense, currency, federal law, and collection of federal taxes, among other things.

The Chechens expected similar treatment, and probably would have been willing to give up their formal independence if they could otherwise manage their own affairs. But Moscow offered no negotiations. As a mountainous nation of only 1.1 million, Chechnya seemed insignificant in comparison to Tatarstan. Talks were delayed and postponed. By mid-1994, the mood in Moscow was rapidly changing, and Yeltsin could not afford to grant another region even token sovereignty. Instead, he decided to undermine Dudayev and install an administration loyal to Moscow.

In the summer of 1994 he authorized a covert operation supporting anti-Dudayev forces, comprised mostly of Moscow-based
Chechen expatriates. Dudayev crushed the insurgency and captured a number of Russian soldiers posing as dissident Chechens. He paraded them on TV and publicly denounced Yeltsin as a liar. Yeltsin was enraged. In December 1994 he unleashed the full force of the Russian army, on the strength of assurances by Defense Minister Pavel Grachev, who bragged that “a paratroop regiment would take Grozny in two hours.” Sasha Litvinenko and a group of his FSB friends saw a broadcast of Russian columns advancing on Grozny and were awash in patriotic fervor. They applauded and toasted to a quick victory.

“What are you happy about, silly?” Marina asked him at the time. “People will get killed. And it is a war in our own country, isn’t it?”

But back then he would not even call it a war. He repeated the defense minister’s boasts about a two-hour job for a paratroop platoon. And he dismissed the Chechens, those primitive shepherds, who could not possibly fight the Russian army.

Some weeks into the war, when NTV showed horrific pictures of the destruction of Grozny, Sasha’s comments became less flippant but no more sympathetic to the Chechens. The bandits were putting up resistance, fighting for every house, he said. Bombardment was the cheapest way to smoke them out; it cost fewer Russian lives than hand-to-hand combat. The Chechens were the enemy. He was an officer. War is ugly, but it was necessary to preserve the integrity of Russia.

His moment of truth came in January 1996, during the siege of Pervomaiskoye. He called Marina unexpectedly from work to say that he was leaving for Dagestan and asked her to turn on the TV. For two weeks Marina was glued to the screen, hoping to see his face among the Russian troops that surrounded the unfortunate village where a band of insurgents held some 120 hostages. It was clear to Marina that something very wrong was happening, and the fact that Sasha did not call home—very unusual for him—added to her anxiety.

As the hostage drama unfolded, she saw the absolute helplessness of federal commanders, who could not explain how fewer than three hundred pinned-down rebels held out against thousands of federal troops, who could not take the village after artillery and aircraft
had pulverized it for four days. Nor could they explain why the bombardment was allowed in the first place, while most of the hostages were still alive. Nor how the insurgent commander, Salman Raduyev, and his “Lone Wolf” band of fighters were able to break out of the village through three lines of encirclement.

Two days after everything was over, the doorbell rang. It was Sasha.

“At first, I did not recognize him,” Marina recalled. “He was a different man, exhausted, with an empty stare. He could barely walk, he had frostbite on his feet.”

It took him some days to recover, and then he did something that he had never done before. He told her what had happened.

Marina was horrified by Sasha’s story. His group, a bunch of big city opers from the FSB, was thrown into the middle of a military operation without any equipment, protective gear, or even an adequate supply of food and water. They were ordered to storm the village on foot across an open field, but had to retreat when they were exposed to friendly rocket fire. They slept in an unheated bus in the freezing cold. They had some canned food, but no spoons or forks or even knives to open the cans. They were abandoned for two days in the bus without any orders or communications from anyone. Finally Sasha managed to navigate through the frozen fog to a heated command tent, where he found a group of generals, dead drunk.