Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [109]
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