Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [91]
Many years later, in New York, Igor Malashenko, the exiled ex-president of NTV, told me about the agonizing decision he and his boss Goose had to make. On March 23, a messenger came from the Kremlin—none other than Valya, Valentin Yumashev. He brought a warning in no uncertain terms from “you know who”: if they dared to broadcast “The Sugar of Ryazan,” they should consider themselves finished. Putin’s election on March 26 was guaranteed. Should they defy him, he would go after them in force.
“This was a sign of the changing of the guard. Yeltsin would never have resorted to such blunt pressure,” said Malashenko.
They decided to go ahead with the broadcast.
Moscow, spring 2000: Details of events leading to the war in Chechnya emerge in the presidential election campaign. Sergei Stepashin, the former prime minister, discloses that the Kremlin began planning the Chechen campaign in March 1999, six months before the invasion. Speculation that the FSB or GRU could have been involved in the Moscow bombings appears in the liberal press. Putin, in a campaign interview in Kommersant, dismisses the allegation as “raving madness,” saying, “It is immoral even to consider such a possibility.”
On March 26, Vladimir Putin won election to the presidency of Russia by a landslide.
CHAPTER 10 THE FUGITIVES
Geneva, Switzerland, March 17, 2000: Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International urge the UN to investigate massive alleged war crimes in Chechnya. Reports from the war zone depict widespread atrocities by the Russian forces, including more than 120 summary executions and hundreds of cases of arbitrary detention, beatings, and torture. Hundreds of civilians are held for ransom by the military. Refugees report the systematic rape of Chechen women by soldiers. Villages are cut off from food and water, leading to widespread malnutrition and epidemic disease. The area is closed to journalists and international observers.
Later on in London, two schools of thought emerged to explain why Putin, in the words of Berezovsky, “abandoned his mission to preserve and expand Yeltsin’s [democratic] policies.”
Boris believed, in retrospect, that Putin never understood his mission in political terms in the first place. Putin was “loyal and sincere,” but he never had any political philosophy and was an “underdeveloped personality.” His identity had always been defined by whichever group he belonged to: his judo team, the FSB, the St. Petersburg liberals, or “the family.” His mentality stemmed from the street gangs of his childhood: the “us-ness,” rather than the essence, was what counted, “us” against “them,” even if “they” are the rest of the world.
When he suddenly found himself at the pinnacle of power—and “the family” dissipated—he had to reinvent himself and find a new gang. He began to see himself as part and parcel of the state. The state became his gang, and he its guardian and protector: l’état c’est moi. He was supported in this shift by his two crafty confidantes, Voloshin and Roma. His life took on a new purpose: to prevail over the state’s enemies through strength, ruthlessness, and control, just as he had once practiced judo. Those who plotted against him became enemies of the state. How could anybody be against him without aiming at the state, when all he was doing was for the state’s sake? They had to be destroyed.
The other view was expressed by Sasha: Putin had never been his own man; he was a Kontora sleeper who was reclaimed as soon as he was returned to the FSB in 1998, or maybe he had never left it in the first place. He had been neither loyal nor sincere, fooling everyone, including Boris. As Boris, the hapless oligarch, maneuvered him to power, Boris empowered his natural enemy, a pawn of the KGB mandarins. Like a secret medieval order, these people had a two-pronged strategy to gain control: overtly, through Primus, or covertly, through Putin.
In support of his theory, Sasha provided lots of argument, starting with