All, it would seem, was proceeding according to the rules. I met Colonel Andrey Vershinin, the military prosecutor in Shatoy District, who was conducting this much-publicized case at that time, and in the spring of 2002 he was still full of optimism. He said there was more than enough proof of guilt, and that the case would most certainly come to court. It would be almost impossible to demolish it, as happens nearly every time with similar cases. Hundreds of criminal cases waiting to be brought to court are blocked at all levels for one simple reason: army personnel accused of crimes are moved out of Chechnya by their commanding officers as quickly as possible. Investigations stall, obstacles are put in the way of the prosecutor’s office, its staff members are intimidated, and so the investigation is silenced.
Prosecutor Vershinin had managed to achieve what was almost impossible: he had personnel of the GRU under arrest, while the investigation proceeded, in the guardhouse of the 291th Regiment, because the military prosecutor’s office had its premises within the regiment’s compound. So the suspects were under the colonel’s direct, around-the-clock supervision.
Prosecutor Vershinin is not to blame for what happened next. The accused were removed from Shatoy and transferred to a prison outside Chechnya and beyond his reach. Two of the accused, Lieutenant Alexander Kalagandsky and Corporal Vladimir Voevodin, spent nine months in prison in Pyatigorsk and were then released because the central military prosecutor’s office in Russia failed to apply to the court to extend their period of detention. The court was therefore automatically obliged to release them “on receipt of their signed undertaking not to travel outside the Shchelkovsky District of Moscow Province.”
Why were these two killers to be found in Moscow Province? Before being sent to Chechnya, both had been serving at the end of the world in Buryatia. That they had been transferred to Moscow Province meant only one thing: the Central Intelligence Directorate in general headquarters had decided to support them, evidently considering that, like Budanov, they had loyally served a motherland that had failed to appreciate their efforts. The military has tried again to pursue the charges against them but has made no headway on getting a conviction.
Only Captain Eduard Ulman, Special Operations, remained for a while in detention. It was he who, on January 12, 2002, gave the order to carry out the massacre, although he claimed he was following orders from a superior and was later released. The suspected instigator, Major Alexey Perelevsky, remains at large.
What do you call this sort of situation? If a Chechen fighter had shot six Russians and burned their bodies, he surely would not have been freed in return for an undertaking not to change his place of residence.
Russia now faces the question, comparable to the one the United States confronted during and after the Vietnam War: how to view its soldiers and officers in Chechnya who routinely murder, loot, torture, and rape. Are they war criminals? Or are they unyielding combatants in the struggle against international terror, using every means at their disposal, with the noble end of saving humankind? Are the ideological stakes in this struggle so high that everything else should be disregarded?
A Westerner would, I hope, have a simple answers to these questions: It is for the courts to decide. As of now, Russia has no answer. Now, five years into the second Chechen war, more than a million soldiers and officers have experienced that lawlessness. Poisoned by war, they threaten civilian life; they cannot be left out of the social equation.
The Budanov case and the Dai massacre are both tragic and dramatic; they exposed Russia’s problems and challenged the country to consider the impact of the second Chechen war on Russian lives. These events highlighted illogical thinking about the war and about Putin, and put Russia’s notions of right and wrong in the northern Caucasus on trial. Most important, they showed the profound changes that have occurred in the judicial system under Putin and under the influence of the war.
The spirit of democratic reform lived on in the work of Judge Bukreev and Prosecutor Vershinin, but Russia has seen clearly that it does not have an independent judiciary or a prosecutor’s office. Instead it has verdicts decided by political fiat and based on the imperatives of political expediency.
TANYA, MISHA, LENA, AND RINAT: WHERE ARE THEY NOW?
So, where are we now?—we who lived in the Soviet Union, where most of us had a stable job and a salary we could rely on, who had unbounded, unshakable confidence in what tomorrow would bring. We who knew there were doctors who could treat our ailments and teachers who would help us learn. And who also knew that we would not pay a kopeck for all these benefits. What kind of existence are we eking out now? What new roles have we been allocated?
The changes since the end of the Soviet era have been threefold. First, we underwent a personal revolution (in parallel, of course, with the social revolution) at the time of the demise of the Soviet Union and during the regime of Boris Yeltsin. Everything vanished in an instant: Soviet ideology, cheap sausage, money, and the certainty that there was a Big Daddy in the Kremlin; even if he was a despot, at least he was responsible for us.
The second change came with the 1998 debt default. Many of us had managed to earn a bit in the years after 1991, when the market economy was introduced, and there were signs that a middle class was being formed. A Russian middle class, admittedly, not like what you might find in the West, but a middle class nonetheless, one that would support democracy and the free market. Overnight, it all disappeared. By then, many people were so tired of the daily struggle for survival that they could not rise to the new challenge; they simply sank without a trace.
The third change came under Putin, as we embarked upon a new stage of Russian capitalism with obvious neo-Soviet features. The economy in the era of our third president is a curious hybrid of the free market, ideological dogma, and various other features. It is a model that puts Soviet ideology at the service of big-time private capital. There are an awful lot of poor, indeed destitute, people. In addition, an old phenomenon is flourishing again: the nomenklatura, a ruling elite, the great bureaucratic class that existed under the Soviet system. The economic system may have changed, but members of the elite have adapted to it. The nomenklatura would like to live the high life, like the New Russian business elite, only their official salaries are tiny. They have no desire to return to the old Soviet system, but neither does the new system entirely suit them. The problem is that it requires law and order, something Russian society is demanding ever more insistently; accordingly, the nomenklatura spends most of its time trying to get around the law in order to promote its status.
As a result, Putin’s new-old nomenklatura has taken corruption to heights undreamed of under the Communists or Yeltsin. It is now devouring small and middle-size businesses, and with them the middle class. It is giving big and super-big business, the monopolies and quasi-state enterprises, the opportunity to develop. (In other words, they are the nomenklatura’s preferred source of bribes.) Indeed, they represent the kinds of businesses that produce the highest, most stable returns not only for their owners and managers but also for their patrons in the state administration. In Russia, big business without patrons, or “curators,” in the state administration does not exist. This misconduct has nothing to do with market forces. Putin is trying to gain the support of the so-called byvshie, the ci-devants, who occupied leadership positions under the Soviet regime. Their hankering after old times is so strong that the ideology underpinning Putin-style capitalism is increasingly reminiscent of the thinking in the Soviet Union during the height of the period of stagnation in the late Brezhnev years—the late 1970s and early 1980s.