Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [142]
Judge Workman stated the obvious: that this turn of events was “dramatic.” He demanded from the prosecutor the full, unredacted testimony of Dushuyev and an explanation for why the original testimony did not mention that it was obtained while in custody, as the law required.
Sitting next to me in the crammed, spellbound courtroom, Sasha beamed. It had been he, a.k.a. Edwin Redwald Carter, who had arranged for Dushuyev’s safe delivery into the hands of British lawyers.
The other charge against Zakayev, that he had shot off the fingers of Ivan Solovyov, also fell away. This time it wasn’t Sasha who helped undermine the witness, but Anna Politkovskaya, in a story in Novaya Gazeta, which emerged after Solovyov testified. She wrote that Ivan Solovyov was actually well-known in Zakayev’s hometown in Chechnya. People had seen him with fingers missing—apparently lost to frostbite—back in 1992, six years before the alleged shooting episode. The story also said that according to one of his drinking buddies, before departing for London, he had bragged about making a deal with the FSB to testify against Zakayev in exchange for “plenty of booze.”
Zakayev’s lawyer completely destroyed Solovyov on the witness stand. On November 13, 2003, Judge Workman ruled for Zakayev.
The Kremlin lost both bids to extract its London enemies through the legal system.
Moscow, January 2004: The campaign for Russia’s presidential elections, scheduled for March 14, is in full swing. In the aftermath of a scandal concerning a conscript’s death from abuse, President Putin pledges to work for the abolition of the draft. The Union of Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers claims that 3,500 conscripts die every year from hazing, malnutrition, and disease, among the 1.1 million-member Russian army.
To an outside observer, there was never much of a chance that Ivan Rybkin could defeat Putin’s bid for reelection. With the Kremlin’s control of the media and the Russian people’s traditional love of a powerful leader, Putin should not have had to bother thinking about Rybkin beating him at the polls. But insiders knew that Rybkin’s campaign was a major concern for the Kremlin. Putin knew that he owed his popularity to the absence of alternative voices, not the success of his policies. There was great popular discontent at the grass-roots level. Moreover, as a KGB veteran, he knew better than anyone that regimes that come into power by trickery are often dissolved by trickery. Central to any plot is a credible, often unexpected pretender. After all, Putin himself came to power by emerging from total obscurity within a few short months. The apartment bombings were his trump card. They could easily become his Achilles’ heel. A national campaign by someone like Rybkin, who would not hesitate to revive the bombing story, was something that he could not discount easily.
Backed by ample cash from Boris and the network of Liberal Russia branches around the country, Rybkin was planning to pick up where Yushenkov had left off. He wooed the protest electorate, particularly the antiwar and antidraft voters. Through his campaign he was aiming at establishing himself as the embodiment of anti-Putin sentiments, with an eye, perhaps, not at winning this election but setting himself up for the succession struggle of 2008. Rybkin’s strategy was to renew his peacemaking mission and attempt once again to paint Putin as a man who was wasting innocent Russian lives in a useless war with an enemy who desired peace, a war that had been started on a controversial pretext. What Rybkin did not realize was the extent to which his opponents were prepared to play dirty.
At the end of January he was approached by an intermediary who, he knew from his time as NSC chief, had contacts with the rebel Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov.