The Dark Side Of Putin's Russia

The Age

Saturday July 21, 2007

Robert Horvath

Death of a Dissident

By Alex Goldfarb and Marina Litvinenko

Simon & Schuster, $49.95

A Russian Diary

By Anna Politkovskaya

Harvill Secker, $35

Two new exposes suggest the future of democracy is grim in Russia under the dubious leadership of a former KGB colonel, says Robert Horvath.

IN THE AFTERMATH OFthe failed August 1991 coup in Moscow, Russia's democrats seemed invincible. Intoxicated by the sudden freedom, protesters gathered outside KGB headquarters and began to demolish the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the bloodthirsty founder of the Cheka, Lenin's secret police and the prototype of the KGB. The crowd was addressed by Russia's greatest human rights activist, Sergei Kovalyov, who recalled his years in the Gulag and declared that "it is a not a question of monuments, but that the KGB shall cease to exist".

As they celebrated the dawn of Russian democracy, few of the demonstrators in Lubyanka Square could have foreseen that, within a decade, an ex-KGB colonel would be elected president and proceed to establish what his ideologues call "sovereign democracy". That euphemism describes a regime that preserves trappings of a multi-party system, but is dominated by members of the KGB's successor, the FSB.

These "Chekists" have terrorised their most determined critics, stifled the media and the democratic movement, rigged elections, and waged a dirty war in Chechnya. Until recently, the response of Western leaders to this tragedy was barely audible. The tone was set by President Bush, who announced after his meeting with President Putin in Ljubljana in 2001 that he had got "a sense of his soul": the ex-KGB colonel was "very straightforward and trustworthy".

One of those who made it harder for the West to ignore the suffocation of Russian democracy was Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian journalist who was shot dead last October. Her final book, A Russian Diary, is a chronicle of the collapse of the democratic movement and a searing indictment of Putin's Kremlin.

It begins in the aftermath of the 2003 parliamentary elections, when the two major democratic parties were wiped out, and traces the remorseless imposition of authoritarian controls, the constant narrowing of political freedom, and the insidious resurgence of Soviet ideological and administrative habits.

Politkovskaya's transformation from a journalist to a human rights crusader began in the carnage of Chechnya, and A Russian Diary offers countless instances of the lawlessness that prompted the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC to put Chechnya on its genocide watch list. In 2005, Human Rights Watch argued that the practice of "disappearances" in Chechnya, which it estimated at as many as 5000 since 1999, had reached the level of a crime against humanity.

But Politkovskaya's strength lies in her sensitivity to the individual tragedies that lie behind the statistics. A typical vignette is the fate of Beslan Arapkhanov, a tractor driver murdered in his home in Ingushetia by masked intruders. No sooner had the killers fled the scene than an FSB inspector arrived to confront his wife with a warrant to search a house with a different street number, at which point it became evident that an incompetent death squad had got the address wrong. No apology was forthcoming.

Perhaps the most chilling episode in Politkovskaya's book is her interview with Ramzan Kadyrov, the former insurgent who is Putin's strongman in Chechnya. After an afternoon waiting in Kadyrov's gangster-kitsch compound, full of garish furniture with price-tags displayed conspicuously, she was admitted into the warlord's presence.

Kadyrov, then a 27-year-old first deputy prime minister, boasted that he was studying law, but was unable to specify which field of law ("someone wrote the topic down for me on a piece of paper, but I've forgotten it"). What he lacked in education, Kadyrov made up for with macho posturing, fantasising about confronting a rebel leader in personal combat, and then screaming at his interviewer that "you are an enemy of the Chechen people".

Politkovskaya feared for her life. As she was being driven away, she wept "tears of despair that someone like this can exist, that the vagaries of history should have raised up, of all people, Ramzan Kadyrov". That ascent has not been interrupted by the suspicion that members of his circle ordered Politkovskaya's murder. In March this year, Kadyrov became president of Chechnya.

Politkovskaya's tears of revulsion offer a rare glimpse of her own emotions. For much of A Russian Diary, she is silent about the onslaught of intimidation and vilification directed against her. With utmost sensitivity, she recounts the anguish of traumatised parents who lost children in the school siege at Beslan. But she omits her own poisoning on a flight to Beslan, an event that made headlines around the world. Nor does she allude to the incessant insinuations of treason and "Russophobia" in the pro-government, nationalist press.

In her preoccupation with victims and outcasts, Politkovskaya exemplifies what has become known as the "journalism of attachment". Her own attachments sharpened her courage and compromised the objectivity of her reportage, but her moral integrity is unimpeachable.

A more problematic, but no less disturbing light on Putin's Russia is shed by Alex Goldfarb's Death of a Dissident, an account of the life and death of his friend, the renegade KGB officer Aleksandr Litvinenko. Written in collaboration with Litvinenko's widow, the book purports to trace Litvinenko's journey from secret policeman to "dissident", a title that most Russian dissidents would not confer upon a man who moved in a murky underworld of spies and security contractors.

In Goldfarb's narrative, the central figure in Litvinenko's transformation is Boris Berezovskii, the exiled oligarch who has assumed demonic proportions in the Russian media. It was an order from an FSB superior to kill Berezovskii that prompted Litvinenko to call the press conference that marked his rupture with the FSB, and it was Berezovskii's patronage that facilitated his escape to West and subsidised his campaign against the Putin regime.

The central issue in that campaign, which Goldfarb recounts in detail, was Litvinenko's allegation that the FSB was behind the 1999 apartment bombings that propelled Putin from obscurity into the Kremlin. Many Western commentators likened this idea to the ravings of conspiracy theorists who believe that the CIA orchestrated September 11.

But the "Ryazan Test", when local police arrested FSB agents for placing explosives in an apartment building, was enough to convince some of Russia's most reputable human rights activists to establish an unofficial commission of inquiry.

With help from Berezovskii and Litvinenko, this commission added compelling circumstantial evidence to the case against the FSB. But its activities ground to a halt after its most active member, the charismatic democratic politician Sergei Yushenkov, was murdered in April 2003.

Reflecting on Litvinenko's agonising death from polonium poisoning, Goldfarb likens him to a religious martyr, a judgement that would amaze his numerous detractors.

What is certain is that the indictments levelled against Putin by Politkovskaya and Litvinenko have been massively reinforced by their deaths. The Russian President, who recently proclaimed himself the world's greatest democrat since Gandhi, has much to fear from an open inquiry into the apartment bombings and the trail of killings that followed. That fact does not bode well for an early end to the rule of the "Chekists" in Russia.

Dr Robert Horvath is a research fellow at Melbourne University's Contemporary Europe Research Centre. He is the author The Legacy of Soviet Dissent (Routledge).

© 2007 The Age

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