Death of a Dissident (42 page)

Chechnya and Moscow, May 2001: In one week, Chechen guerrillas carry out more than 140 hit-and-run attacks and Russian sappers defuse 160 explosive devices. Russian defense minister Sergei Ivanov tells reporters that 2,682 Russian soldiers have been killed in Chechnya since the beginning of hostilities in September 1999. His statement is immediately challenged by a prominent nongovernmental organization, the Union of Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers, who say that the real losses are nearing ten thousand
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Boris’s new role as a sponsor of Russian democracy was announced to the world by Elena Bonner on November 30, 2000, at a press
conference in Moscow. Bonner, the seventy-seven-year-old widow of the Nobel Laureate who defied the Soviet system, said that she had accepted a $3 million grant from the New York–based Berezovsky Foundation (which would later become known as the International Foundation for Civil Liberties, or IFCL) as an endowment for the Sakharov Museum and Civic Center in Moscow.

For Boris and me, awarding the first grant to Sakharov was a gesture ripe with symbolism. Elena Bonner had been the first among Russia’s human rights activists to say that Putin represented “modernized Stalinism” at the time when Boris was still Putin’s “brother.” Three decades earlier Sakharov had become an emblematic figure, symbolizing moral resistance to tyranny. The grant to the Sakharov Center was meant to underscore the continuity of Soviet oppression under Putin and the permanence of dissidents’ resistance. From the outset it defined the colors of the new foundation.

By May 2001, the IFCL had awarded 160 more grants to NGOs across Russia, which collectively represented, Boris hoped, “crystallization centers” for protest movements: antiwar groups like Soldiers’ Mothers, supporters of prisoners’ rights, the greens, defenders of ethnic minorities, and local human rights watchdogs. We also announced the Berezovsky legal aid program: we would provide free legal counsel to troubled juveniles and conscripts in litigation with the army, amounting to thousands of cases nationally.

Western pundits took the IFCL with a grain of salt, as a campaign by a cunning oligarch to improve his reputation. But not so the Kremlin. Within days after our wire transfers from New York hit the accounts of NGOs across Russia, Putin’s advisers sounded the alarm. The IFCL grants obviously targeted issue-oriented groups, which included some 30 million ethnic minorities who felt like second-class citizens in the increasingly xenophobic atmosphere; the estimated 20 million citizens who had been beaten by the police at least once; 12 million ex-prisoners; and millions of families of would-be army conscripts. Taken together, these groups represented a potential protest electorate. The Kremlin rightly guessed our
intent: to develop a grassroots network that could evolve into an antiestablishment political party. Within weeks they launched a counterdrive.

On June 12, Putin met with “representatives of civil society,” a handpicked group of some thirty cultural functionaries, which, in the best Soviet tradition, included a cosmonaut, an actor, and a hockey player. The president spoke of his concern that many Russian NGOs were funded by foreign grants. The state must take responsibility for the support of civil society, he said, as was the custom in the USSR. A congress of NGOs would take place in the Kremlin in the fall, where the president would talk to these people’s representatives directly, over the heads of the bureaucracy.

But it was too late. The seeds of discontent were sewn. Many NGOs promised to boycott the Kremlin initiative. Soon we received a call from a group of democratic politicians who wanted to meet to talk about setting up a new political party.

Sergei Yushenkov was a veteran of Russia’s democratic politics. A former army officer, during the 1991 coup attempt he had organized the “living chain” of civilians around the Parliament to protect Yeltsin from the expected assault by KGB squadrons. An MP since 1989, Yushenkov was a leading proponent of a movement to abolish the draft and a leading critic of the war in Chechnya.

Yushenkov came to Château de la Garoupe in mid-May, along with another dissident Duma member, Vladimir Golovlyov. The meeting had all the hallmarks of a nineteenth-century episode from Russian history: comrades from Moscow travel to Western Europe to see a major émigré figure. Upon return, Yushenkov announced the formation of a new party, Liberal Russia, with Boris and himself as its leaders. Their objective was to run in the 2003 Duma elections on an anti-Putin platform.

The strategy of Liberal Russia was to focus on the protest electorate represented by the grassroots network of civic groups that the IFCL supported. Among other things that Yushenkov and Boris had in common was their suspicion about the 1999 apartment bombings.
They agreed that the matter should be thoroughly pursued and perhaps used as a campaign issue in 2003.

Sleptsovskaya, on the Chechen border, July 4, 2001: Hundreds of civilians flee for refugee camps in Ingushetia amid reports of summary executions in Chechen villages. According to one refugee, in the village of Assinovskaya, “They detained all men aged from 15 to 50, over 500 people, and put us down on our knees in a silage pit at the village’s edge…. They kept us there for the entire day. They ordered us not to move, and beat some people with rifle butts, hunted them with dogs and tortured with electric shockers. In the end, they selected 50 of us and led them away, and let the rest go.”

The arrival of Yushenkov and the prospect of an opposition party, combined with enthusiastic feedback from our grassroots grant recipients, somewhat lessened my initial pessimism that our battle, though noble, was not winnable. After all, even the Communists, who had had total control of the media and government, had collapsed in 1991. Maybe Boris was right after all: maybe Putin’s regime was intrinsically unstable and would collapse at the first challenge.

Shortly after the visit of Yushenkov to the château, I had a chance to share my enthusiasm with Igor Malashenko, who happened to be in New York. We shared a lunch at his hotel overlooking Central Park. Igor was skeptical.

“These kinds of regimes do not fall by themselves,” he said. “Communism collapsed not because of brave dissidents, but because the government could not keep up with the arms race. There was consolidated opposition from the West, including a massive anti-Soviet information industry funded by Western governments. Solzhenitsyn wrote a book, and it was immediately trumpeted by the Western support system. Today, try to publish a book about Chechnya! We are completely on our own. Our best strategy is to wait it out until the West wakes up and sees the danger. Then we will have a chance. As for Yushenkov, the moment he becomes a challenge they will whack him, you’ll see.”

Sadly, if we were to wait for Western help, it appeared we would have to wait for a very long time. On June 16, George Bush met with Putin in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He “looked him in the eye … and was able to get a sense of his soul.” The U.S. president liked what he saw and announced to the world that Putin was “very straightforward and trustworthy.”

“Unfortunately, that tells us more about Bush than about Putin,” remarked Boris.

Genoa, Italy, July 21: Russian human rights activists appeal to the leaders of the G7 summit of industrial democracies to pressure the Kremlin on Chechnya. The war is “our national disgrace, but also a disgrace for the international community as a whole,” says former Soviet dissident and human rights campaigner Sergei Kovalyov on behalf of the Committee for Ending the War
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