Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [132]
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.
CHAPTER 13 THE QUARRY
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