Winter is Coming (25 page)

I first visited the cemetery, or the New Cemetery as the people there had named it. There was still construction going on there, ten months after the attack. I put flowers on every grave, walking through the cemetery in a state of shock from my proximity to the horror that the people there had suffered and that the survivors lived with every day. Imagine row after row of graves, each with the same date of death: September 3, 2004, September 3, 2004, September 3, 2004, over and over 330 times. Row after row with birth dates in the 1990s and some in the 2000s. It was the most painful day of my life.

Yet I was still supposed to give a lecture in town, so I collected myself as best I could and headed to the local house of culture. Unsurprisingly, it was locked tight and every light was off. This was part of the usual package of harassment and isolation employed against opposition figures. Everywhere I went, meeting halls would suffer strange electrical or plumbing problems. Our plane wouldn’t be allowed to land and buses would arrive at incorrect locations. Locals would let me know they’d been threatened with harm or the loss of their jobs if they came to hear me speak. And so I spent much of my speaking time outdoors, in the street, or in lobbies and restaurants. Even hotels would be instructed not to give rooms to my colleagues and me.

This happened even in Beslan, a place that deserves peace and sanctity if any place in the world does. For that reason I had not wanted to come, but at the same time I felt that I had to. I had come not to make politics, but to see with my own eyes what had happened and to demonstrate to the families that they had not been forgotten. At this point, nearly everyone in the town blamed the government for caring more about killing the hostage-takers than about saving the lives of the hostages.

The Russian journalist Masha Gessen accompanied me on this leg of my journey and I have relied on her reporting of my visit to refresh my memory, which is clouded with the overpowering emotions of the day. Here I will quote two paragraphs directly, the first to show I’m not exaggerating about the juvenile harassment and the second to save myself more pain from reliving that day.

Just then there was a dull pop, very much like a gunshot, and the women screamed, “Garry! Garry!” The crowd broke apart, and Kasparov’s bodyguards tried awkwardly to shield him while keeping people from trampling one another as they rushed off the porch. A young man standing in front of the building suddenly turned out to be holding a bottle of ketchup, which he shook up violently and then aimed at Kasparov and squeezed. Kasparov was presently covered: his head, his chest, and the right shoulder of his blue sport coat were stained sticky red. The porch was empty now, save for a clear plastic bag with several broken eggs in it that had hit the roof of the porch before landing: that was what had made the popping sound. An old woman, now standing on the porch with us, tried to clean Kasparov’s face with a handkerchief. “Forgive me, forgive me,” he whispered over and over again, apologizing for triggering this incident in a town that was already racked with grief.

The crowd gradually grew as people came out of the houses and apartment blocks along the way to join the walk. They entered the school through the giant holes in the walls of what used to be the gymnasium. . . . Kasparov gasped when they entered the gym. “Oh my God, oh my God,” he whispered. The women walked to different corners of the ravaged space and began wailing; soon the hall was filled with a muffled, high-pitched sound. Kasparov looked stricken: his eyes red, mouth slightly open, head shaking. It was clear that it would not be possible to talk in here: the room was oversaturated with grief. He asked to be given a tour of the school, and as he walked around with the crowd, now grown to about a hundred people, he talked: “I’m walking through this school, thinking: How do people in Moscow keep walking around, saying something, continuing to lie? Among them, there is someone who gave orders to open fire. If that person gets away with it, we will all be to blame!”

Only three officials were ever charged over what happened at Beslan. All three were local North Ossetian police officers who were charged with negligence for failing to protect the school. Perhaps this was too much of a blatant scapegoating attempt even for Putin’s court system to abide, and all three were granted amnesty. When the judge read out the amnesty order in May 2007, a group of twenty-five Mothers of Beslan tore the courtroom to pieces. These officers could hardly be responsible for what had happened, but they were the only targets for the impotent rage of the families.

Here is the point at which we can divide our horror and our rage between those responsible—the terrorist murderers who conceived and carried out the attack—and those who failed in their duty to protect and preserve life, and then refused to produce accountability for those failures. Confusion, mistakes, outrages, and cover-ups occur in democracies, too, of course. Humans make mistakes and humans do horrible things all over the world; sadly, we seem unable to prevent these kinds of tragedies from happening in the first place (although one can certainly argue that treacherous dictatorships engender more of them). That is why the true test of our institutions is how they deal with these mistakes and horrors in order to maintain trust and to improve security.

The government’s responses to the terrorist attacks of Nord-Ost and Beslan and their aftermaths showed very clearly that the Putin regime had no interest in the trust or security of the Russian people. Putin didn’t need the people or their trust. He had oil, gas, total control of the media and the government, and a rapidly expanding security force. Unlike in democracy, where the loss of people’s faith in your administration will quickly cost you your job, being a dictator means never having to say you’re sorry, or even addressing the matter at all.

The other motive for my tour was to make contact with other activists around the country. There were still various opposition parties and NGOs struggling against the tide of increasing marginalization. As Putin tightened his grip on civil society, no group was too small or too innocuous to be persecuted. Ever on the alert against any “orange” activity, laws were passed to limit foreign funding of NGOs and increase penalties against protestors. A raft of “anti-extremism” bills went into effect, with language so broad and vague that any criticism of the government could be deemed an extremist act punishable by years in prison.

The Russian opposition in 2005-2008 was a jumble of liberal politicians, young activists of every political stripe, and old-guard human rights defenders. Several of the politicians were exiles from the Putin regime, including his former prime minister, Mikhail Kasyanov, and economic advisor Andrei Illarionov. There was Boris Nemtsov, Yeltsin’s former first deputy prime minister, and Vladimir Ryzhkov, one of the last surviving independent members of the Duma. Georgy Satarov was a former Yeltsin aide who had helped devise the new Russian constitution. It was a fairly high-powered group, except for the fact that they had absolutely no power at all.

In a more distant orbit there were the “respectable” politicians of the Yeltsin era attempting to cling to relevance in government as the political world crumbled beneath their feet. These individuals, such as former presidential candidates Irina Khakamada and Grigory Yavlinsky, founder of Yabloko, attempted to protest from within while staying on passable terms with Putin. Eventually they realized Putin had no use for them, even as loyal opposition. Some gave up and joined in Putin’s democracy charade for a paycheck while others left politics altogether. A few joined us, the “radical” or “external” opposition.

The human rights cadre included the venerable Ludmila Alekseeva, a founding member of the Moscow Helsinki Group and one of the few Soviet dissidents still active. Lev Ponomaryov was one of the founders of Memorial, one of the first Russian human rights organizations. The “young guns” included Sergei Udaltsov, chairman of the Vanguard of Red Youth, and Ilya Yashin, a charismatic youth activist on the liberal side. A few years later, former Yabloko activist Alexei Navalny would become the most prominent of us all thanks to his sharply penned and well-researched anti-corruption investigations finding a huge audience online.

Then there were the “disloyal nationalists,” the radicals, mostly young, in groups like writer Eduard Limonov’s National Bolshevik Party, which wasn’t as scary as the name sounds by the 2000s but was still more than enough to scare off the respectable liberal opposition. But they were willing to march against Putin for free speech and fair elections, and that was all that mattered to me.

Along with the politicians, organizers, and activists, there was substantial intellectual firepower in the wings among the countless Russian writers, journalists, and intellectuals disillusioned by Russia’s return to the dark ages. There were big-hearted lawyers who put in long hours of work defending protesters and activists from spurious charges for little or no pay. Political directors and staffers of a dozen or more opposition groups, including my own United Civil Front, organized protests, training seminars, and communications for little reward and often at great personal risk.

And suddenly there I was, dropped into the middle of it all. I felt at home with the liberals like Nemtsov and Illarionov, who shared my ideology of free markets and close alignment with Europe, but I also realized that opposing Putin had little to do with ideology by that point. It mattered little what policies you supported when there was no chance at all you would ever have the chance to enact those policies. The debates among opposition candidates were a like a group of starving people with no money arguing about what to order at a fancy restaurant.

I was already doing what I could on the international front, speaking at foreign parliaments and writing editorials to encourage Western leaders to increase pressure on Putin over his anti-democratic ways. In Russia, I hoped to use my lack of political affiliation as an advantage by bridging the gaps between the disparate opposition movements so we could unite to solve the only problem that really mattered: ending Putin and Putinism as soon as possible.

Before my retirement from chess I had helped form the Free Choice 2008 Committee and the All-Russian Civic Congress in 2004. I had been observing the dissatisfaction of the activists on every side. They were tired of dancing to Putin’s tune while watching their party leaders cut deals for paltry handouts. The Civic Congress was conceived as a unifying platform, but it fell short when forces from both sides of the political spectrum were unable to leave behind the Yeltsin-era civil war mentality and work alongside their traditional ideological adversaries.

In 2005, I formed my own small social action group, the United Civil Front, so that I would have a base of operations and an address. Then I went to work looking for strategic targets on the calendar where the opposition could make the most of our limited resources. It was important to have clear targets so we would have a feeling of purpose and hope. When I first entered the Russian political arena full time I had the feeling of sitting down to a chess game in progress, with my side facing checkmate in every variation. I realized that our first task as an opposition force was simply to survive, to get out our message that we existed, that we opposed the Putin regime, and that we were fighting. With every television station and major newspaper under state control it was a very difficult task, as you might imagine.

The opposition was in disarray, but the one thing we all had in common was the knowledge that democracy was our only salvation. By 2006, liberals, human rights activists, even the

Communists—they all agreed that given a choice in a fair election the Russian people would reject Putin’s attempt to turn our country back into a totalitarian state. It didn’t matter that afterward we would be sitting on opposite sides of the floor. First, we needed to rescue our democracy.

This mixing of opposition groups also had several positive side effects. The leftists and those still mourning the Soviet Union came to recognize the importance of liberal democracy and political freedom now that they’d been cut out of the picture. The liberals, which in Russia refers to those like me who favor free markets and an open, Western-leaning society, learned to accept the need for the social and economic stability programs touted by the left. Unity not only stiffened the opposition to the Putin government, but has also clarified and advanced the specific goals of our member groups. This isn’t to say it was all one big happy family, but at least we were together.

To have a real impact, I felt it was necessary to unite on the core issue: you were either working with the Kremlin or dedicated to dismantling the regime. It was clear by then that there was no way to change anything from the inside. In a way, the key step was taking a page out of the Kremlin’s book: a nonideological movement. Forces from across the political spectrum came together. In the summer of 2006 we had enough momentum to go on the offensive, hosting The Other Russia Conference in Moscow in advance of the July G8 meeting in St. Petersburg.