This is a book about death in Russia.
The world is familiar with Russia’s long history of murderous rulers and ruthless assassins. But even now, a decade into the twenty-first century, brutality and violent death is so ordinary that it is usually ignored by all but the victims themselves, their families, and their friends.
After sixteen years of living in or visiting the former Soviet Union, I have come to believe that Russia’s acquiescence to this bloody state of affairs sets it apart from other nations that call themselves civilized. I realize this is a harsh judgment, and can only say that it was not hastily reached.
When I first arrived in the country after three years of reporting in Pakistan and Afghanistan, I mainly felt awe. Russia’s enormous size, remarkable history, and rich language wholly engaged me. I was assigned to cover territories on the fringe of the old Russian empire—Georgia, Armenia, Central Asia, the northern Caucasus mountain regions of Chechnya and Ingushetia. I maintained a Moscow apartment as a base of operations.
There were discordant notes from the outset. Resident foreigners and a disgruntled minority of Russians said the country was meddling beyond its borders—provoking wars in the Caucasus, blocking oil deals and energy pipelines in Central Asia, and generally working to preserve Moscow’s influence in the neighboring republics that comprised the former Soviet Union. At first, these complaints seemed unfounded; yes, Russia was seeking to reinvent and perhaps enrich itself, but it was not attempting to reestablish an empire. I would soon be disabused of this somewhat benign view.
In December 1994, a number of foreign journalists, including myself, gathered in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya. We were Americans, Britons, French, Russians, Azeris, and Georgians, including our translators and drivers. I was accompanied by my Georgian driver, Yura Bekauri, and assistant, Nana Kiknadze.
We headquartered in an inn that became known as the French Hotel and waited for the Russian military to attack the city. Russia’s president, Boris Yeltsin, and his defense minister, Pavel Grachev, had threatened just such an assault—a show of force to quell the region’s pretenses of independence.
Russia and the region of Chechnya had been antagonists for hundreds of years. They fought a long guerrilla war in the nineteenth century before Chechnya was subjugated. In the next century, the Chechens chafed under Soviet rule, and in 1944 Stalin, who thought they were siding with the Nazis, deported them en masse to Kazakhstan. Nikita Khrushchev allowed them to return, and when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, the Chechens saw an opportunity at last for independence. They behaved as though they were governing an autonomous land. That led to Yeltsin’s threat three years later to compel the Chechens to return to Russia’s fold.
Yeltsin had set a deadline of December 12 for all foreigners to be out of Grozny. Journalists were separately warned that Russia could no longer assure our safety, but there was nothing about the notification that I construed as threatening. Western correspondents had heard similar cautions in other war zones, and we were unworried. But there was a palpable rumble among the Georgians in our group. Two or three Georgian drivers, Yura among them, began packing their cars. They intended to leave, and quickly. “You don’t know what the Russians can do,” Yura replied when I protested.
Why was Yura, an ordinarily unflappable man, so agitated? His behavior seemed unreasonable, but it forced me to reassess the situation. For one thing, his panic was clearly genuine. For another, he intended to take the car with him, which would leave us without personal transport in a war zone.
We left with him—Nana, my colleague Carlotta Gall, then of The Moscow Times, and I. As we drove away, I wondered how to explain to my editor that I had left the scene of a story. We traveled east, and a half-hour later Yura drove into a gas station and employed his usual magic. He struck up a friendship with another motorist, who invited all of us to eat and stay the night at his home in the city of Gudermes.
So began a several-months-long discovery of what was behind Yura’s terror.
I returned to Grozny in January, in time to witness the main Russian assault for The Washington Post and its sister publication Newsweek. In my absence, the dispatches of my colleagues Anatol Lieven and Bill Gasperini, who had stayed behind, had kept me abreast of events there. Now Gasperini told me how he had been pursued by a Russian helicopter, first while on foot and then in a car, being shot at all the way. He was certain that the pilot had known he was a foreigner. It was my first realization that Western correspondents weren’t necessarily regarded as neutral noncombatants by the Russian military.
The Russian term bespredel translates roughly as “anything goes.” That describes how the Russians pursued their campaign in Chechnya. Grozny was a city under siege. More than half of its four hundred thousand inhabitants had fled. The Russian military subjected the remaining population to around-the-clock artillery bombardments, block by block, street by street, and building by building. It regarded no one as an ally, no one as a civilian.
Outdoor markets were a favorite target. After such attacks, people usually emerged from cover to retrieve the dead and wounded, only to be fired upon by Russian choppers returning for a second run. They typically dropped cluster bombs that fired shrapnel in an upward trajectory, seemingly designed to decapitate their victims. That was how a young Boston photographer named Cynthia Elbaum was killed in late December—decapitated when she left the safety of a bombed-out building to photograph the slaughter in a bazaar outside.
The assault reduced the city to rubble, leaving behind only the carcasses of buildings. Grozny resembled scenes in photographs from World War II depicting the carnage of Europe.
At the end of January, Nana and I returned without Yura, and we began to visit outlying villages. The war had shifted there as the Russians widened their assault. Now there was a new wrinkle in the stories we heard. Oleg Orlov, a distinguished investigator with the Russian human rights group Memorial, provided cassette recordings and written depositions from people claiming to be victims of torture and witnesses to murder by Russian officers and soldiers. The statements were said to come from both Chechens and ethnic Russian citizens of Chechnya.
We set out to find some of these victims and, in the cattle-breeding town of Goity, met Isan Matayev, a forty-year-old truck driver. His family went back three generations there, but he was born in Kazakhstan, his family among those exiled to that land by Stalin in 1944.
Matayev described eighteen days of imprisonment by the Russian army. He and about thirty other Chechens and ethnic Russian civilians had taken cover inside a Grozny bomb shelter, then heard troops outside. “The Russians gave us a two-minute ultimatum either to open the shelter door or they would smoke us out,” Matayev said. “We opened the door, they checked us for weapons—none of us had any—and then they locked us back inside.” The next day, the entire group was loaded into an enclosed truck, hands cuffed behind their backs. Guards whom he described as towering men wearing masks ordered everyone to lie facedown on the truck floor in rows. Then more prisoners were ordered to lie on top of others until there were five layers in all, “like lumber,” Matayev said.
The truck hauled its human cargo seven hours north to Russian military headquarters in the city of Mozdok. En route, guards beat some prisoners with rifle butts and fired occasional gunshots. Matayev said one Russian man shouted that the troops “had no right” to shoot. The man was not heard from again. “I think he was shot, because he wasn’t among us at the end” of the journey, Matayev said.
At Mozdok, the captives were ordered out of the truck two at a time and made to step over the bodies of seven or eight men who had perished along the way, having suffocated or been shot. They were marched to a makeshift prison that, in the Chechen wars, became known as a “filtration camp.” It was ostensibly a way station for the Russians to separate Chechen fighters from mere civilians. The camp was that, but it also became a place where the Russians decided who would live and who would die. And that decision often was reduced to which captives’ relatives could pay the soldiers enough to win their freedom. Some who had no one to pay the requisite bribe disappeared without a trace.
Matayev was imprisoned in a compound consisting of two sets of railway cars fitted with blackened windows and grates, and surrounded by barbed wire. About a dozen soldiers guarded the yard, along with incessantly barking German shepherds. The guards regularly clubbed the men; when Matayev went to the bathroom, two soldiers beat him along the way.
During interrogation, a masked man randomly struck his feet, his back, and handcuffs that had been positioned over his knuckles—“wherever was convenient.” He was threatened with death: “Today is your death; we’re definitely going to do away with you tonight; enjoy your last few hours.” Matayev was released after relatives came up with enough money to free him and five others.
We left Matayev before dusk to make the long drive west to Nazran, in neighboring Ingushetia, where most correspondents were staying because Grozny had become too dangerous. Nobody wanted to be on the roads after nightfall, when nervous Russian solders seemed to shoot anything that moved.
The next couple of days, we visited villages where residents had signed pledges of neutrality in hopes that the Russians would not fire on them. At Achkhoi-Martan, a city dotted with large red-brick houses, local men armed with rockets, grenades, and assault rifles were lounging outside an office building. A local woman named Mariam Madiyeva, worried that they could attract hostile fire, shouted at them: “Go outside the village; don’t do this here. I am asking you on behalf of the mothers and children to leave.”
The neutrality pledges seemed to have dubious value. Mayor Abu Oshayev told us he was blindfolded and put in a flooded basement with other Chechen prisoners even after he had safely transported a wounded Russian officer to a Russian detachment. It was the very unit with which the mayor had negotiated the pledges.
“They were pushing us with the guns. They pushed us to our knees. Someone said, ‘Shoot the bandits. All of them are bandits,’” Oshayev recalled. “Then they hit a person kneeling next to me. He fell down and shouted, ‘Help me. Don’t kill me!’”
Oshayev’s ordeal finally ended when a Russian officer heard his account of assisting the wounded officer and ordered him released. “I told him, ‘If you treat us like this, those helping you, how are you treating the civilians who you don’t know?’” Oshayev said.
For the next few months, such stories were commonplace. It was tempting to dismiss them as the wages of war—there are excesses in all conflicts, everywhere. Yet this was something else—the Russians were not just trying to put down a rebellion. They were killing, attacking, and brutalizing anyone found on Chechen soil, including not only fighters for the resistance but also civilians and the elderly.
What crystallized events for me, however, was the arrival of the mothers. From across Russia, the mothers of young men conscripted by the Russian military to fight in Chechnya came to fetch their sons. I had seen similar scenes in Afghanistan during the late 1980s—Russian mothers, fathers, and wives arriving in search of husbands and sons captured by the mujahedin in the Soviet–Afghan war. But this was on Russian soil, not in a foreign land. This was their land. And the officers commanding their sons and husbands were on their side. Only, it didn’t always seem that they were. The angry mothers were responding to the scandal of green, ill-trained Russian soldiers being used as cannon fodder or otherwise abused and neglected by their own commanders. It wasn’t just the citizens of Chechnya who had been dehumanized by Russian indifference.
As with Chechen men who had gone missing, there was no telling where many of the Russian soldiers were. Many had been captured by the enemy. Some were prisoners at the Mozdok filtration camp—Matayev had observed a row of Russian deserters standing in a railcar, faces against a wall, being taunted by their Russian countrymen. “Do you want to be imprisoned with this group of Chechens, or that group of Chechens?” the guards shouted at the unhappy Russian conscripts.
There was one place to look for sure: The bodies of dozens of dead troops were kept in a freezer compartment in a morgue outside the war zone. But there was no systematic effort to identify the remains, and when we returned a year later, there were unclaimed corpses still stored there.
Carlotta Gall would go on to document the fighting, the brutality, and the blood thirst in her classic Chechnya: A Small Victorious War, which she wrote with our mutual friend Thomas de Waal. In the Second Chechen War, launched by Vladimir Putin as prime minister in 1999, the tough-minded Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya wrote similar accounts in articles and books. She herself would be seized in Chechnya by Russian troops and threatened with rape and execution before finally being released.
At first, Muscovites seemed to react with genuine anguish to the ugliness in Chechnya. This was attributable to the Russian media, which provided saturation coverage, including much dispassionate reportage. But even the shocking stories of Russian soldiers mistreated by their own military didn’t seem to move many people; the main thing was to pay the necessary bribes so that your son was not conscripted or sent to fight there. Only the poorest, dullest, or most rural Russian youths seemed to end up in Chechnya.
Time softens memories. The images that had caused me to view Russians as callous toward the lives of most others gradually slipped from my mind. But then came a series of reminders of the anguishing events I had seen in Chechnya.
In 2000, a Russian nuclear submarine called the Kursk sank in the icy waters of the Barents Sea. All 118 aboard perished while rescue efforts proceeded at a snail’s pace and Moscow spent most of its energy trying to blame the West for the slow response.
In 2002, Chechen militants stormed a Moscow theater, taking several hundred spectators hostage. Russian special forces pumped an opiate gas into the building, rushed it, and shot the terrorists dead. Only, they forgot to make preparations for rescuing the hostages, and 129 of them succumbed—untreated—in their seats, on the sidewalk outside, in buses on the way to hospitals, and elsewhere.
In 2004, Chechen terrorists took some 1,200 children, parents, and teachers hostage in an elementary school in Beslan, a town in the southern Russian region of North Ossetia. Bedlam erupted on the third day of the standoff; shooting and explosions killed some 330 children and adults as hostages and terrorists fled the building.
In the fall of 2006, two outspoken critics of Vladimir Putin, by then Russia’s president, were murdered. Anna Politkovskaya was shot execution style and Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB officer, died of poisoning by a nuclear toxin.
I had been under no illusions about Putin. His bare-knuckle approach to governing Russia had been apparent for some time. But now it was hard to avoid the conclusion that something more ominous was happening. What I was seeing in Russia went beyond the question of leadership style. Putin had set about restoring the legacy of brute Russia.
It was not that his fingerprints were on every untoward event. They didn’t have to be. Rather, it was the complicity of his inaction. A high-profile murder can go unsolved anywhere. A hostage situation can go awry even when police are highly skilled. But after the third, fourth, or fifth such outrage, it becomes clear that something fundamental is amiss. At the very least, in Putin’s Russia the state cannot be counted on to protect the lives of its citizens. At worst, hired killers and those who employ them have reason to believe that they can carry out executions without fear of the law.
There has always been a certain amount of disorder in Russia. That is why many Russians are willing—even eager—to support a ruler with Putin’s instincts. But I find it troubling that he has been unusually selective in exercising his power on behalf of the law. He seems disinterested in stopping or bringing to justice those who settle accounts with violence or worse. For example, the world has yet to hear him declare, “I will not tolerate, and indeed I will prosecute ruthlessly, anyone who orders or carries out a murder. Neither will I tolerate the death of hostages.” If he had exerted such authority and issued such dictums, Russia might not have experienced the botched aftermath of the theater seizure or the retaliatory killings of Anna Politkovskaya and others.
Without question, he is willing and able to crush those who offend him. Consider this hallmark of the Putin era: his unyielding pursuit and prosecution of a select group of Russian oligarchs. The most notable target was oil kingpin Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia’s richest man, who was arrested in 2003 by masked federal agents aboard his private plane on the tarmac of Siberia’s Novosibirsk Airport. He was sentenced to eight years in prison, and his oil company, Yukos, was systematically dismantled and taken over by two state-controlled companies, Gazprom and Rosneft. (In 2008, when under ordinary circumstances Khodorkovsky might have been released on parole, Putin’s prosecutors pursued a slew of fresh charges and his imprisonment for two dozen more years.) Khodorkovsky’s crime? He had ventured into politics, financing Putin’s opponents and presuming to form an influential—perhaps dominant—bloc within parliament. That stepped over the line; politics is the state’s purview, specifically the Kremlin’s. The importance Putin placed on the case was evident. Dozens of prosecutors, auditors, and tax inspectors collectively spent thousands of hours making Russia safe from Khodorkovsky. There is no leniency for perceived political transgressors; Putin is hypersensitive in this regard.
Kukly, a weekly Russian TV show that employed puppets to represent the country’s leaders, is another example. The Putin doll was a wickedly funny dwarf. Putin objected to the skits performed by his likeness, and the producers were warned that the president was off limits, I was told by Grigory Lubomirov, one of the show’s creators. That didn’t disturb the Kukly team, which was accustomed to such reactions. In Yeltsin’s time, for instance, Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin at first strenuously objected to his portrayal. But he relented under the pressure of friends and critics who advised him to acquire a sense of humor, and ended up appearing in a photograph grinning next to his puppet character. Putin was not so gracious. Two years after he became president, the show was canceled.
Khodorkovsky and Kukly were hounded out of the public sphere.
I don’t mean to suggest that other countries occupy a higher moral plane than Russia. The post-9/11 world has upset many people’s presumptions—including my own—that the West in general and the United States in particular can lay claim to generally noble status. We’ve discovered that an American president can treat foreign allies with swaggering bluster while conducting a war of opportunity and employing torture as a policy—with the support of a majority of Americans. In fact, a comparison of contemporary events in Russia, the West, and elsewhere in the world suggests that distinctions between countries and cultures have become barely discernible.
Except that they haven’t. Notwithstanding America’s slippage during the Bush years, the United States, Europe, and large swaths of Asia are not places where journalists are freely assassinated, defecting spies poisoned, or theatergoers gassed to death by their own police.
I deliberately use Japan, Canada, Germany, Britain, France, Italy, and the United States as a comparison group. These are the industrialized countries that were known as the G-7 until Yeltsin successfully argued that Russia was entitled to be a member of the club, and the G-7 became the G-8. In 2007, Putin threw an extravaganza in St. Petersburg as host of the organization’s annual gathering.
But if you are a citizen of Russia, you are more likely than a person in any other G-8 nation to die a premature death, and to do so in a bizarre or cruel way. When I say premature death, I’m not thinking disease, stillbirth, or an automobile accident—although Russians die at a far higher rate in all these categories than citizens of the other seven countries. I mean the kind of death experienced by Anna Politkovskaya or Alexander Litvinenko or the theater hostages—all deaths that were countenanced or at least tolerated by the Russian state.
This book is a chronicle of violence in modern-day Russia, a place that seems unwilling or unable to escape its horrific past. My goal was to tell the story of some of the most prominent victims, people who are remembered largely for what they endured, and how they died. I sought—through the eyes of their friends, family, and colleagues, in addition to the victims’ own writings and private and public utterances—to write a more complete portrait of their lives. Many survivors recounted their own ordeals. The shared testimony paints a disturbing picture of assassination and other brutality, and leaves the unmistakable impression that the Russian state under Putin is at least partly responsible.