Death of a Dissident (51 page)

Moscow, December 30, 2003: Russian police and FSB agents seize a truck and confiscate five thousand copies of Blowing Up Russia en route from the western city of Pskov to Moscow
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January 11, 2004: A Moscow judge sentences Adam Dekkushev and Yusuf Krymshamkhalov to life imprisonment for participation in the 1999 Moscow bombings after a two-month-long closed trial, held without a jury
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On a sunny September 15, 2005, I arrived in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, for a meeting with Mikhail Trepashkin, who had just been released from prison. With me was Andrei Nekrasov, a filmmaker who had made a documentary about Tanya and Aliona Morozova. We had
a mission: to convince Trepashkin to flee to the West. I wanted to repeat Sasha’s coup. Andrei wanted to film it.

Trepashkin was released as the result of an FSB oversight. Back in 2004 the case against him of illegal gun possession fell apart, and he was acquitted. However, he received a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence for the disclosure of official secrets, a charge stemming from the old KGB file found in his desk in 2002. After serving two-thirds of his sentence in the godforsaken town of Nizhny Tagil in the Urals, he applied for parole. He was a model prisoner, except that he had been a pain in the neck for the prison administration because, as a lawyer, he wrote complaints on behalf of every inmate. The administration supported his parole.

Apparently, no one in Nizhny Tagil knew who Trepashkin was. He was hardly a national celebrity, after all, and he was a first offender, a hapless former FSB officer serving time on an insignificant charge. So they let him go. He arrived in Moscow unannounced and surprised his wife, Tatyana, when he appeared at their doorstep.

By then Goose and Igor Malashenko, backed by an investment from Boris, had launched their new network, Russian TV International. Based in New York, it could be seen on cable in the far-flung Russian diaspora, from California to Kiev to Israel—everywhere except Russia. “We are the only Russian news not subject to Kremlin censorship,” boasted an RTVI ad. I saw an interview with Trepashkin on an RTVI dispatch from Moscow. He insisted that he planned to resume his probe into the apartment bombings, and also wanted to look into the theater siege. He added that he planned to start a new human rights group defending the rights of prisoners.

This man is mad, I thought. Sure enough, the next day, the prosecutor general’s office appealed his parole.

“Mikhail Ivanovich, let’s get together in the same place we met last time,” I said on the phone. “And bring your family.” Remarkably, his foreign travel passport had never been confiscated.

As he and Tatyana boarded the Kiev-bound plane at Sheremetievo Airport, Nekrasov and I monitored their progress through secure mobile phones. We kept our fingers crossed that they would not be stopped at the last moment.

Tatyana Trepashkina, a pretty blonde of about thirty, was very happy to hear my offer for them to move to the West, to a decent life after their two nightmarish years. But Trepashkin did not want to leave. He considered the Kiev trip nothing but a well-deserved vacation.

“They let you out by mistake. If you return, you are going back to prison, and they will kill you there,” we chorused.

I had everything worked out for them. A car was standing by to collect their children, who were visiting with Tatyana’s mother in a village in Russia, not far from the Ukrainian border. We would get them tickets to the Seychelles or Barbados, neither of which required visas for Russian citizens. They would jump off at a connection in any airport in Western Europe and request asylum. Boris would underwrite them for a few years. Essentially, it was the same deal as with Sasha.

“If I run, it would undermine my credibility,” said Trepashkin. “You may not believe it, but I met a lot of good people in prison. Everyone thinks that I’m right. Particularly the FSB officers. There are many honest officers. If I flee I would be a traitor.”

We called Sasha in London.

“Misha, don’t be an idiot. Do as Alex says. We will get you a job. People like you are in demand. I have already spoken to some friends in Spain.”

Trepashkin was immovable.

I got Boris on the phone. “He wants to be a hero,” I reported.

“He is a fucking fool,” said Boris. “Let me talk to him. I will make him an offer he can’t refuse.”

Boris told him to seek asylum in Ukraine if he did not want go to the West. We could give him a job with the Foundation and help him to resettle. Ukraine was a free country now, after the Orange Revolution. The Ukrainians wouldn’t give him up.

But Trepashkin refused. Even Elena Bonner, who had helped me with Berezovsky in a similar situation six years earlier, could not convince him. Trepashkin was just not the kind of man who would run. He would stay and fight to the bitter end.

I decided to change tactics: “Why don’t we send you out to the Seychelles for two weeks while your parole is being decided. There is nothing illegal in going on vacation. If they leave you alone, you
go home. If they announce that you are heading back to prison, then

you’ll decide.”

“I want to go to the Seychelles,” said Tatyana.

“No,” said Trepashkin. “We are going home.”

Tatyana exploded. She had married an FSB officer, she said, not a prisoner. All this time she had assumed that it was Berezovsky’s people who were manipulating him, but now she saw that it was he himself who was bent on self-destruction. He was not thinking about the children. If he went back to jail, she promised, she would never visit him, ever. She was nearly hysterical. We had to calm her down.

It was no use. The next morning we put them both on a plane to Moscow.

The next day, a squad of FSB agents converged on their two-bedroom apartment, put Trepashkin in a car, and drove him the thirty-six hours back to Nizhny Tagil. They put him in a cell pending his parole appeal, which he lost some days later.

“He is crazy,” I said to Nekrasov as we flew from Kiev to Zurich.

“He is a martyr,” said Nekrasov. “All martyrs are nuts. The problem is, he has to get himself killed first. If he does, he will be a real martyr. I am going to make a film about him,
The Hero of Our Time
. But if he gets out, I’m afraid no one will want to see it.”

As of this writing, there are still seven months left of Trepashkin’s term.

One way or another, the war in Chechnya became the defining context for the lives of Sasha and Marina, Boris and Putin, Akhmed Zakayev, myself, and everyone in our collective circles. Chechnya was the graveyard of Russian democracy and the ultimate cause of Russia’s drift away from the West. Boris’s confrontation with the Party of War and his conflicts with the FSB that dragged Sasha into the whirlwind of Kremlin power struggles started over Chechnya. For Putin, Chechnya became his endless judo match and the glue that cemented his mutual dependence with George Bush, a destructive relationship.

Chechnya inspired those dark Kremlin forces that we presumed to be the villains in our conspiracy theories—from the Moscow bombings to the theater siege to Sasha’s own killing. Solidarity with the victims of Chechnya drove Sasha’s relationship with Akhmed Zakayev, who in the last year of his life became his closest friend.

Zakayev moved to England in the summer of 2002. His arrival, and his association with the Berezovsky camp, turned London into the center of the Russian antiwar campaign. This alliance also became a major irritant for Putin and the reason the Kremlin eventually declared London a staging ground for “Chechen terrorist activity.” Neutralizing the London brotherhood became Russia’s top diplomatic priority. First, the Russian government asked nicely for the Brits to give up Boris and Zakayev; when they were refused, the Kremlin
decried “British double standards.” After the legal options were exhausted, the hit squads began to arrive.

Grozny, Chechnya, August 19, 2002: A rebel missile brings down a huge Mi-26 transport helicopter on its way to Russian military headquarters in Khankala, killing 119. It is the single largest loss of life among the troops fighting in Chechnya in the three-year-old war
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In August 2002, as the death toll in Chechnya mounted, I helped organize a meeting between Zakayev and former NSC secretary Ivan Rybkin, one of the few Russian politicians who stood up to Putin. We wanted to force Putin’s hand on the stalemated war.

The conflict was impossible for either side to win. Russian forces controlled most of the country—but only during the day. By night the countryside was in the hands of the rebels, who had an underground cell in every town and village. The guerrillas used road mines and hit-and-run attacks to grind down the Russian forces. Throughout the North Caucasus, the radical followers of Shamil Basayev gained strength with each passing week, an ominous trend that threatened to turn the region into a breeding ground for Islamic extremism. In the meantime, from his mountainous hideout President Aslan Maskhadov urged negotiations and let it be known privately that he no longer insisted on full independence. Within the Russian army and across the broad political spectrum in Moscow, discontent with the war was growing.

The West and the liberal wing in Russia had stubbornly refused to deem Maskhadov a terrorist. His two envoys, Zakayev in Europe and a man named Ilyas Akhmadov in the United States, moved freely through Western capitals, meeting with members of Congress and various European legislators. Western governments, including the United States, quietly pressured Putin to agree to negotiations, concerned that the Chechen crisis was fueling anti-Western passions across the Muslim world.

But Putin’s position steadily hardened. It had been his war from
Day One, and he could not bear the political cost of losing it (not to mention the exposure of his generals’ war crimes that would inevitably have resulted). A settlement with Maskhadov would mean a humiliating failure for him; he insisted on unconditional surrender. Putin took the war very emotionally, and managed it personally. Journalists who interviewed him knew that Chechnya was the one thing that could make him visibly angry. On occasion, his emotions burst out publicly. When a French journalist asked him at a press conference, “Don’t you think that in trying to eradicate terrorism you’re going to eradicate the civilian population in Chechnya?,” Putin turned pale and lost his composure. “If you want to become an Islamic radical and have a circumcision,” he replied, “I invite you to Moscow, because we are a multitalented country and have specialists there. I recommend that you have the operation done in such a way that nothing else will grow there.”