Death of a Dissident (33 page)

He went to the court president, made him cosign the release order, stamped it, and handed them the paper, saying, “Good luck.”

They rushed back to Lefortovo.

The officer took the release and went away. He returned in thirty minutes.

“The release order has not been officially delivered. It should have come here with the court messenger, or through registered delivery or some other official channel. We cannot process it.”

“It will take at least two days to arrange that,” said the lawyer somberly.

Marina called Boris, who told them to come see him.

Boris heard them out and placed a phone call to his friends in the Kremlin. Within fifteen minutes an FSO officer arrived in a car with lights flashing and siren wailing, retrieved the court order, and delivered it to Lefortovo in an impressive pouch with federal government seals—as official as can be. Marina arrived a half-hour later; she had not been able to keep up with the FSO car.

“Well,” said the prison officer, “now it seems all right. We can say that we are officially in receipt. But it is almost the end of the day, and we need at least two hours to process the release, so come tomorrow morning.”

The lawyer went to break the bad news to Sasha, who had been waiting in a holding cell since morning.

Sasha met him with a resigned grin. “I did not expect for a minute that they would let me go.”

He was right. The next morning the prosecutors protested his release and demanded a hearing. Judge Karnaukh was replaced. The lawyer spent half an hour with the president of the court and then told Marina, “The new judge is Evgeny Kravchenko. I know him, he is a good man. But we should not press him on the restraining measure. There are two decent judges in this court; we’ve already burned one of them. I do not want to burn the other for the sake of a few weeks of detention. If he rules for release, they will replace him, too. I’d rather have him try the case. So let Sasha stay where he is, it is just one more month.”

Sasha’s trial approached just as a new war with Chechnya threatened to erupt. For more than a year Boris had been silent on Chechnya. Between the Kremlin intrigues, the president’s illnesses, and his fights with Primus and Skuratov, he simply had had no time. But he had closely watched the developments and maintained contact with key Chechens.

Back in the spring, he had had several telephone conversations with former Chechen foreign minister Movladi Udugov, the one-time leader of the Islamist wing whom Maskhadov had kicked out of his
government. In early June Udugov came to Moscow to see Boris. From that conversation Boris realized that the Chechens still viewed him—mistakenly—as a prime mover of Chechnya policy. Udugov talked about his plan to replace Maskhadov with an Islamist regime, which he argued would only be to Russia’s benefit.

Udugov’s rationale was geopolitical. Maskhadov’s long-term goal, he said, was to steer Chechnya to full independence and integrate it with the West, eventually joining NATO and the European Union. He viewed pro-American Georgia and Turkey as his key potential partners in the region. In the end, Maskhadov would provide access to the North Caucasus for the Americans, who had been dreaming of a pipeline to the Caspian oil fields. This, naturally, would be bad for Russia.

It would be also bad for Islam, Udugov argued, because America is the Great Satan and the ultimate enemy of all Muslims. From that perspective, the true believers in Allah and the Russian state had a common interest: not to let the West into the Caucasus. An Islamist government in Grozny would automatically be anti-American, that is, by default, pro-Russian.

Udugov’s plan was for Basayev’s Wahhabi gang to stir up trouble in Dagestan, thus provoking Russia into a limited military action, leading to the fall of Maskhadov. A Basayev-Udugov government would be installed in Grozny. They would compromise on independence, in exchange for religious autonomy. He magnanimously offered to give back to Russia the territories north of the Terek River in Chechnya, populated mostly by ethnic Russians. Udugov was not interested in converting them to Islam.

Boris did not like the idea. There was no proof that Udugov could deliver on any of his promises. Moreover, an Islamic state in Russia’s backyard might have unpredictable consequences. On the other hand, from the Kremlin’s standpoint, it did not matter whether Chechnya was Muslim or secular as long as it was not pro-American. So Boris told Udugov that he was the wrong man to approach. He no longer had influence on Chechnya policy. He said that he would pass his proposals on to the powers that be. He went to see Stepashin, who was still the prime minister. Stepashin
thanked him for the information and said he would take it from there.

Boris repeated all of this to Putin in early September. Basayev’s gangs were fighting in Dagestan. The Russian army was mobilizing. Could it be that Putin actually wanted to play out Udugov’s gambit?

“Volodya,” Boris said, “what’s going on? Please be careful. Don’t jump into a war with a harebrained scheme. Wars have a tendency not to work out as planned.”

“Boris,” said Putin, “let’s agree on a division of labor: you deal with the elections and I deal with Chechnya. Trust me, I know what I am doing.”

“Okay, but let me tell you at least what I think you should do, and then do as you see fit.”

“Go ahead.”

“Maskhadov is losing control, unfortunately. It is all our doing; we did not keep a single promise we made to him. It may or may not be true that he would sell out to the Americans, but that’s water under the bridge now. Basayev and Udugov are powerful, but they are thugs. If they have their way, they will continue making trouble throughout the North Caucasus. We cannot afford to let them run loose, and we cannot ignore them. Our best policy is to pressure them back into a coalition government with Maskhadov. Then they would neutralize each other.”

“I will not negotiate with bandits,” said Putin.

“Then help Maskhadov.”

“You said yourself, he has lost control.”

“Than you have to talk to Basayev and Udugov.”

“We are going in circles.”

“Volodya, don’t start a war. This war cannot be won. You will be stuck there forever.”

Putin was silent for a moment.

“Boris, I’ve heard you out. We have not made a decision yet. I promise you, we will take into account what you said. And can you do me a favor?”

“Yes?”

“Stop your contacts with the Chechens. No more phone calls, no
messages, no small favors. You cannot imagine what my people are telling me about you. If I believed 1 percent of it, we would not be talking here. But it is becoming a problem for me.”

“Okay,” Boris said. “I promise.”

Moscow: On September 9, 1999, a predawn explosion levels an apartment block on Guryanova Street, killing ninety-four and wounding 249. Four days later another bomb destroys an apartment block on Kashirskoye Highway, killing 119. No one claims responsibility. Chechen extremists are suspected. Prime Minister Putin, using street slang in a nationally televised address, promises to “waste the terrorists in their shithouse.” In a last-ditch effort to prevent war, Maskhadov seeks contact with Yeltsin. Russian troops mass on the Chechen border
.

The apartment bombings shattered any hope of avoiding a new war. Boris was stunned, as were most observers. The attacks did not make any sense. Basayev and Udugov were bad, but not mad. They wanted power, and eventually they wanted to deal with the Kremlin. If they had ordered the bombings, they were committing suicide.

Putin, of course, stood to benefit from the blasts politically, but it was unthinkable that he would authorize such a thing. That left only two possibilities: rogue elements in the secret services or a foreign interest trying to lure Russia into a war.

On September 10 the whites of Boris’s eyes turned yellow, and he was hospitalized with a case of hepatitis. He also faced a new attack: the tabloid
Moscovsky Komsomolets
published a “transcript” of a telephone conversation between him and Udugov, partly true and partly a fabrication, which implied that they had been conspiring to stir up trouble in Dagestan. Putin had warned Boris about ugly rumors, but this one was poisonous. Goose’s media immediately picked it up and went so far as to insinuate that the bombings in Moscow were part of a Kremlin election conspiracy, and that Boris was the evil genius behind it all.

After the second explosion in Moscow, Boris decided to hold a press conference to set the record straight. On September 16, as his car pulled up at the Interfax news agency on Mayakovsky Square and camera crews scrambled to get a picture of him, his face and the whites of his eyes were still yellow from hepatitis, a perfect look for a conspiring villain.

In front of the cameras, he began by accusing Luzhkov and Gusinsky of fabricating the transcript and exploiting the bombing tragedy for political ends. He went on to accuse the FSB of “aggravating the situation in Dagestan” by playing games with the Wahhabi. They “could not have been unaware” that the Wahhabi had been building up in Dagestan for two and a half years.

He reminded the public of his own record as a peace negotiator and called for immediate talks with any Chechens who were ready to negotiate, including the terrorists. “I am not afraid of accusations to be poured on me after this statement. I am not after… improved political standing, but after saving lives,” he said. “The declaration of emergency would make no sense because it will resolve no problems…. If we can’t kill them all off, we must talk to them.”

It was pointless. Whoever bombed the apartment buildings had achieved one result: all across the political spectrum, there were calls for revenge. Even the super-dove Yavlinsky called for “a large-scale action … without haste.”

The day of the press conference, in the early morning hours, another apartment house exploded, this time in Volgodonsk, in southern Russia, killing seventeen people. Three days after that, on September 19, Putin spoke. The peace accords of 1996-1997 were “a mistake,” he declared. “These people must be destroyed. There simply is no other response.”

On September 23, 1999, police foil an apparent bombing attempt in an apartment block in Ryazan, 130 miles southeast of Moscow. Putin orders aerial bombardments of Grozny. Two days later, the government suddenly changes its story on the Ryazan incident, saying
that it was a training exercise by the FSB, and that the bomb wasn’t real
.