Winter is Coming (24 page)

My son Vadim is now eighteen and has no knowledge of what it is like to live in a free Russia. What he has seen of democracy and civil liberties he has learned the way I did as a teenager in the USSR, from traveling abroad and reading foreign news. At least he and his generation have the Internet, which is still relatively free in Russia. Two thousand five was also the year of my third marriage, and my wife Dasha continues to play a vital role in making this new phase of my life a happy and successful one. Our daughter Aida and our son Nickolas were born in and are growing up in a free country. But contrary to how I’d envisioned it, that country is the United States, not Russia.

A few months prior to my retirement, the Beslan school hostage crisis shattered the global conscience. I place it here, outside of the chronology, because of the impact it had on my decision to leave chess and because of my personal experience visiting the site in 2005.

On September 1, 2004, Chechen separatists took over eleven hundred hostages at a school in North Ossetia, a Russian region of the Caucasus bordering Georgia. It was what we call “First Bell” or Knowledge Day in Russia, the start of the school year when parents and other family members accompany their children to school. Thirty very heavily armed terrorists took over the school and herded the hostages into the gymnasium. The building was mined with IEDs (real ones, unlike at Nord-Ost) and a number of hostages were killed immediately.

The situation outside the school was predictably chaotic as disparate groups of regional and national security forces and political forces formed separate camps. Parents and other locals refused to leave the area, many because they wanted to prevent any military assault on the school. Memories of Nord-Ost were still very fresh. The attackers’ demands were similar to 2002: withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya and recognition of

Chechnya’s independence. Other reports said they also wanted United Nations recognition of Chechnya.

They also demanded the presence of several regional politicians to serve as intermediaries, including North Ossetia’s president, Aleksander Dzasokhov, and the president of neighboring Ingushetia, Murat Zyazikov. Neither came to Beslan. Dzasokhov later said that he had been forcibly prevented from coming and told
Time
magazine that “a very high-ranking general from the Interior Ministry told him, ‘I have received orders to arrest you if you try to go.’”

Anna Politkovskaya, the journalist who was one of the few Russians trusted by the Chechens, was also invited. She immediately set off for Beslan but never arrived. Her tea was poisoned during the flight, putting her into a coma, and after coming close to death at a small medical center in Rostov, she returned to Moscow to recover. She stated that she was sure Russian security forces “neutralized me because they knew I was going to Beslan to set up talks.”

The despised leader of the Chechen independence movement, Aslan Maskhadov, who had a $10 million price on his head from Moscow, condemned the attack through his spokesperson and sounded ready to personally intervene. Dzasokhov later said he had been ready to negotiate, to offer safe passage for the terrorists and to release some imprisoned guerrillas, in order to guarantee the safety of the remaining hostages.

But as negotiations proceeded, the unthinkable happened. On September 3, the third day of the siege, two explosions shook the gymnasium just as medical workers were approaching the building to remove twenty bodies outside. One of the explosions started a fire on the roof. It is telling that, once again, there are a half-dozen theories about the origin of the initial explosions and even more about the ensuing battle, half of the theories coming from the same officials, whose stories changed by the day. Some reports said that some of the terrorists’ explosives had gone off by accident. Others that a Russian sniper had shot a terrorist, who detonated a bomb.

Equally confusing is the story of who was in charge outside, and who gave the orders to fire and when; and it has all only become more confused as time has passed after the tragedy As firing of all kinds erupted inside and outside the gym full of hostages, many of them too dehydrated and weak to run, armed civilians participated alongside of local police forces and heavy military weaponry. It was deadly chaos. Only after neighbors found enormous shell casings on nearby roofs was it revealed that the military had fired flamethrowers into an auditorium full of children.

Practically as soon as the battle ended, bulldozers and dump trucks came in and removed debris (including some physical remains) and everything else that could have served as evidence with which to reconstruct the horrific events of the day. Testimony from locals outside and hostages inside repeatedly contradicted government statements about what had happened. The authorities were caught lying so many times about easily dis-proven claims, such as which weapons were used and when, that it is impossible to accept any of the official statements in good faith.

Unlike after Nord-Ost, there would be several official investigations of Beslan. One was completed in 2005 by a member of the North Ossetian parliament who was actually on the scene the day the school was stormed. The federal parliament produced two extensive reports in 2006. The Duma was controlled by United Russia, Putin’s party, and the report controlled by their representative became the official one. Another was done by Yuri Savelyev, a member of the Russian nationalist party Rodina (“Homeland”) and, coincidentally, a recognized expert in rockets and explosives. Savelyev’s report fits much better with the testimony of witnesses outside and the hostages inside regarding the weapons used and the order of events. He and another colleague filed their own report and refused to sign off on the official one. In 2007, they broke their silence to denounce it as a cover-up.

A 2006 article by David Satter looked at the evidence:

The version of the Beslan parents was supported by the findings of a commission of the North Ossetian parliament. In a report released on November 29, 2005, the commission concluded that the first explosion was produced by either a flamethrower or grenade launcher fired from outside the building.

The most powerful confirmation, however, came in a report released by Yuri Savelyev, a member of the federal parliamentary investigative commission and a highly regarded expert on the physics of combustion. . . . Savelyev concluded that the first explosion was the result of a shot from a flame thrower fired from the fifth story of a building near the school at 1:03 p.m. The second explosion came 22 seconds later and was caused by a high explosive fragmentation grenade with a dynamite equivalent of 6.1 kilograms shot from another five story building on the same street. The explosions, according to Savelyev, caused a catastrophic fire and the collapse of the roof of the school gymnasium, which led to the deaths of the majority of the hostages. The order to put out the fire did not come for two hours. As a result, hostages who could have been saved were burned alive.

Even the casualty records are disputed and were regularly revised for weeks. Interviews with family members and survivors helped fill in the gaps in the official records. The final numbers are 334 dead hostages, of which 186 were children. Over 700 were injured, with many requiring amputation from shrapnel wounds. Many of the killed had burned alive. The number of hostage-takers alive and dead is also disputed. The official numbers say that there were 32 attackers of whom one survived. Other reports say that there had been many more attackers, up to 75, many of which escaped. At least 10 members of the security forces were killed, including all three commanders of the assault group.

Credit for the Beslan attack was claimed by Chechen commander Shamil Basayev, who claimed he had originally hoped to target a school in St. Petersburg or Moscow. He also promised more such attacks, although this did not happen and Basayev died in an explosion in 2006. Once again, no one was sure exactly how he died, but in this case precious few people cared as long as he was dead.

The government was the only available target for the grieving Beslan families. You cannot demand answers from terrorists or from the dead. The one captured hostage-taker, Nur-Pashi Ku-layev, was quickly convicted and disappeared into the Russian prison system. The Mothers of Beslan advocacy group supported appeals for him in the hopes of gaining information about the attack during a public trial. While they got very little government accountability for their tears, there were indeed dramatic governmental reforms after Beslan. Unfortunately, there was little in them related to greater security for the Russian people.

Just two weeks after Beslan, Putin brought together all eighty-nine of the nation’s governors along with his cabinet and spoke with them for several hours. After some opening remarks about Beslan, Putin said that the response had to be greater effectiveness and unity in the government and the country. Those words are red flags to any student of dictatorship, and this was no exception. Aside from a few natural responses about strengthening laws against terrorism and expanding law enforcement powers, the reforms were mostly aimed at further diminishing democratic institutions in Russia. Putin would now directly appoint governors: no more elections. Duma elections changed from a direct vote to a party vote, guaranteeing that established figures could keep their seats forever. Other reforms attacked the foundations of the democratic system, making it more difficult to register parties. Of course these things had nothing to do with Beslan or fighting terrorism or anything other than Putin seeing an opportunity to centralize more power into the Kremlin.

As a famous individual I had advantages in my new career as a political activist, but there were also drawbacks. I was vulnerable to accusations of being a neophyte, a dilettante who wouldn’t be interested in the hard work of building alliances and listening to people. I was determined to refute this perception as much as possible, and so I set off on a tour of Russia to hear what people thought of the state of the country and to spread the message that a different future was possible.

Also keep in mind that the opposition had no access to the mass media, so we had to be seen in person to be heard at all. A famous sportsman quitting to enter politics would have been big news just about anywhere else. But since my views about Putin were already well known, my retirement was covered from a purely sporting perspective. In contrast, several famous Russian hockey stars, including Fetisov and Tretiak, publicly endorsed Putin and received a great deal of attention. There was no chance for me to get on TV and discuss my future plans. Not only wasn’t I invited in the first place, but live television had been practically banned already in order to avoid any awkward political content.

I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. I was already being subjected to the attention every prominent opposition figure received from the Kremlin’s thugs and their proxies. These groups ranged from annoying pranksters to dangerous criminals, all on the payroll of those in charge of making sure any grassroots opposition movement met with immediate and heavy resistance. Youth groups we nicknamed the “Putin-Jugend” after their Nazi predecessors assigned members to heckle and throw things at me wherever I went to speak, and of course these groups were never bothered by the police. In April, I was bashed over the head with a wooden chessboard by a young man at an event in Moscow. And of course I was followed and recorded by more serious members of the security services at all times. That is the confidence of a totalitarian system.

But I wasn’t going to give up so easily. It was also important for me to travel because of how heavily the opposition world was weighted toward Moscow, and to a lesser extent St. Petersburg. Putin’s support was far greater outside of Moscow’s ringed roads, out in the regions where the economy was more likely to depend on the government and where the only sources of news were the Kremlin-controlled television channels. I visited Vladivostok in the east, sixty-two hundred kilometers from Moscow. I went to Rostov and then south into the Caucasus. I spoke with fishermen, railway workers, and students. And I went to Beslan.