Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [146]
“Basayev is a terrorist,” I said to Akhmed Zakayev. “I don’t see how you can stay in the same government with him.”
“You are becoming just like the Bush administration,” retorted Akhmed. “What do you want from us? For ten years the Russians have been killing us—40 percent of our population is dead—and no one said a word. Now everyone is outraged about Basayev. I did not invite him to join the government, and I wouldn’t have if it were up to me. I fought with him all my political life. And now you want me to quit and leave him in control? So, okay, I quit. There will be no one left to stand up to the radicals. And what about those who think the way I do? We are still people, with a young generation growing up, both at home and all over Europe. They will say, Zakayev quit? Basayev is our leader? This would only mean Basayev had won, with Russian and Western help. No, I will stay and keep fighting.”
In the weeks following Maskhadov’s death, a fiery debate erupted between the two principal ideologues of Chechen independence: Zakayev, who argued for a Western-style democratic state, and Movladi Udugov, who hoped for a strict Islamic republic. Just as in occupied Europe during World War II, listeners in Chechen towns and villages and in the mountain rebel encampments tuned in to the broadcasts of Radio Liberty to hear the émigré politicians talking about the time “after the victory.” Zakayev’s and Udugov’s visions clashed across the pages of their respective Web sites, Chechen-Press.info and KavkazCenter.com, each with thousands of attentive readers in the Russian and Western European Chechen diasporas.
Sasha Litvinenko took the sellout of the Chechens very close to his heart. He became a frequent contributor to the ChechenPress Web site. Zakayev eagerly provided him with as much space as he wanted. ChechenPress became Sasha’s tribune; in 2005-2006 he authored more than a hundred opinion columns there, with titles like “Kremlin Werewolves,” “The Heroism of Mikhail Trepashkin,” and “Politkovskaya Killers Cover Their Tracks.”
He took his mission to reach out to the Chechens very seriously, as an obligation. He once told me that he saw himself as “one of those Germans who were helping Jews.”
“When the war ends, I will be the only remaining Russian whom the Chechens will still call a friend,” he said, “and Akhmed, perhaps, the only Chechen who will be willing to talk to the Russians. So the two of us will negotiate the next peace treaty.”
At one point he told Marina, “Akhmed and I are like brothers. They should bury us next to each other. Not in London. In Chechnya.”
CHAPTER 14 THE “TINY NUCLEAR BOMB”
Moscow, June 8, 2006: The State Duma adopts legislation giving the FSB authority to send commandos to assassinate “terrorist groups” abroad. “The amendments provide for special operation units of the FSB to be used at the discretion of the President against terrorists and bases that are located outside the Russian Federation for the purpose of interdicting threats to the Russian Federation,” says Mikhail Grishankov, deputy chairman of the Duma Security Committee.
As Putin’s presidency settled into its second term, the security services roamed freely in the corridors of power. Over 70 percent of top government appointments were taken by former FSB officers. With virtually all television broadcasting under Kremlin control, regional leaders subdued, and no opposition in the Duma, the political process ground to a halt. In the aftermath of the destruction of Liberal Russia and the abortive presidential bid of Ivan Rybkin, our London group of dissidents realized that the FSB could never be chased from the Kremlin by constitutional means. But we did not despair: the events in neighboring Ukraine suggested another way.
The nonviolent overthrow of Ukraine’s Moscow-backed authoritarian regime in late 2004 and early 2005, thanks to the crowds camping on Independence Square in Kiev, was a major setback for Putin. It quashed his drive to reinvent the Soviet Union by installing puppet administrations