Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [115]
As paradoxical as these results seemed, we nonetheless counted them as a success beyond our expectations. We had not placed a single ad. The coverage in the government-controlled newscasts was openly hostile. The allegations themselves ascribed an unimaginable monstrosity to the government that, according to the same opinion polls, enjoyed overwhelming popularity. The majority of respondents had neither seen the film nor read the book. Yet everybody had heard of the charges, and almost half accepted Boris’s and Sasha’s claims as credible.
The Russian national psyche is deeply conflicted at its heart. There is a medieval streak of masochism in Russians’ attitude to their vlast, which they perceive as divine and fearsome, something that is reflected in the reverence accorded such historical tyrants as Ivan the Terrible (“terrible” is an ambiguous translation of the Russian; a better choice would be the affectionate “awesome”).
In a brilliant analysis of this phenomenon in an article about the film in Time magazine, Moscow correspondent Yuri Zarakhovich compared the apartment bombings to the famous episode in Russian history when Boris Godunov, the head of the Kremlin’s secret police, was voted by the Boyars to succeed the heirless Czar Fyodor, the son of Ivan the Awesome. Godunov’s electoral triumph was marred by the allegation that he had cleared his way to the throne by murdering the infant nephew of Fyodor, a grandson of Ivan who might have claimed the throne. The allegation haunted Godunov throughout his reign, in spite of extensive propaganda efforts that he introduced: he “forced Russians to chant a daily prayer to him, while secret police kept hunting for signs of any sedition, and enticed people to squeal.” Eventually, the country’s economic situation deteriorated, and the fable of the murdered infant became the driving force of a popular uprising.
“Unlike allegations of complicity in one innocent child’s murder back in the 17th century, claims of involvement in 247 innocent deaths will hardly bring the regime down now, not after all the millions of such deaths in modern Russian history,” wrote Zarakhovich. “Still, the worse things become, the more people will talk. One day, the talk might grow into a roar once again.”
The film was the last straw for the Kremlin. On the day of the world premiere in London, the FSB responded by announcing that Berezovsky was “financing terrorist activity” in Chechnya and accused him of taking part in the kidnapping and murder of an Interior Ministry general in 1999. FSB Director Nikolai Patrushev went on TV to state ominously that the FSB would “duly document” Boris’s terrorist activities, pass them on “to our partners abroad, and wait for a proper reaction from them.” The prosecutor general’s office added that “for the safety of investigators, witnesses and the preservation of evidence, we cannot yet make public the documents in our possession about Berezovsky’s involvement in the events in Chechnya.” But the announcement left no doubt that the Kremlin was gearing up to strike back.
CHAPTER 12 THE SLEUTHS
In the aftermath of Sasha’s book and Boris’s film, the educated classes of Russia plunged into a bout of soul-searching. Was it possible that their vlast was not just a mildly authoritarian regime, which, many argued, was something that Russia needed in order to emerge from oligarchic chaos, but an embodiment of evil itself, rooted in the original sin of killing some three hundred innocent souls in their sleep?
The angst was well reflected in a thoughtful article by Dmitry Fur-man, a sociologist at the Russian Academy of Sciences, explaining why so many Russians readily accepted the horrific allegation. The theory that the FSB was behind the bombings, he argued, had inner logic: blowing up the apartment houses and blaming it on the Chechens would provoke a war, a response whose assertiveness would boost Putin’s popularity on the eve of the elections. The plot appeared rational and successful, except for the disappointing mishap in Ryazan.