“And is this your home? Do you feel at home here?”
Edik is an honest boy. He knows that when you cannot tell the truth, it is better to say nothing, and that is what he does.
Indeed, who could call this pen for combat officers, with the drunken bawling of contract soldiers on the other side of the thin walls, with its inventory of regulation furniture, “home”? Edik knows, however, that they are trying to drive his father even from here, so let this be home.
Relations between the regiment’s commanders and the major began to sour when Rinat asked to be allocated a flat in that fine new building we had been walking around while hiding from the deputy commanding officer. The major supposed he was within his rights, since for many years he had been at the top of the waiting list for accommodations.
“When I asked Petrov, he was indignant: ‘You haven’t done enough for the regiment,’” Rinat relates. “Can you believe it, that is exactly how he put it? I was very surprised and told him, ‘I have been fighting the whole time. I rescued pilots from a mountain when nobody else could find them. The state needs me.’”
The major had, indeed, been put forward for the country’s highest award, Hero of Russia, for his actions when a military aircraft crashed in the mountains of Chechnya near the village of Itum-Kale in June 2001. Several search-and-rescue teams went into the mountains to find the crew but without success. The commanders remembered Rinat with his unique experience of combat, his feel for the mountains, and his ability to find men by reading twigs, sticks, and leaves.
He found the dead airmen in just twenty-four hours. One body had been booby-trapped by the Chechen fighters, and Rinat made it safe. So the families have graves to tend.
The active-service officers have a saying that commanders who lose their heads in combat and in the mountains are best in civilian occupations. Rinat told Petrov, “I know what kind of a hero you were in Chechnya, always skulking in staff headquarters.” The deputy commanding officer responded, “Now you’re really in the shit, Major. For that little remark, I’ll make you a down-and-out. I’ll discharge you without accommodations. You’ll be out on the street with that son of yours.”
Petrov set about implementing his threat with a vengeance. First he humiliated the major by ordering him to decorate the parade ground and also to manage the regimental club, organizing film shows for the soldiers.
Petrov next ordered Rinat to design posters for the parade ground (he is an excellent artist), which was the job of Petrov’s wife. She simply ceased to turn up for work, and all the officers knew that Rinat was making the posters while she took her ease in that fine new block of flats.
Then Edik was taken ill and had to go to the hospital. The doctors told Rinat he should stay at his son’s bedside. Rinat was constantly asking for time off, and Petrov, ignoring the medical certificate provided by the doctors and backdating the record, took to recording him absent without leave. Petrov convened an officers’ court, manipulated the minutes, and used them to remove the major from the waiting list for an apartment. He was agitating to have Rinat summarily dismissed from the army without any privileges. In short, Rinat is in deep trouble.
“What have I done?” Rinat bows his head, aware that he is being outmaneuvered.
The wars our country takes part in continue afterward, wherever those who were involved in them find themselves—primarily within the units to which they return after completing their missions. The staff officers there are pitted in a fight to the death against the field officers. The latter find themselves discharged for disobedience, their past records ignored, with a barrage of insults hurled at them. Rinat is not the only one. The officers in the army now divide into two unequal categories. The first are those who have actually taken part in combat operations, who have risked their lives, who have crawled their way through the mountains, burrowed into the snow and earth for days at a time. Many have been wounded on numerous occasions. You feel desperately sorry for them. It is difficult for them to find a place in the civilian life that seems so normal to us. They can’t find a common language with the second group, the staff officers, who have also been in Chechnya, so they rebel and get drunk and feel miserable. The staff officers, as a rule, outmaneuver them at every opportunity: they bear false witness against them, they run to their superiors, they tell tales, they plot. Before you know it, the awkward squad is being lined up for discharge. What have they done? They have been themselves, of course. By the mere fact of their presence in the units, the field officers daily remind the staff officers who is who in this world.
And the staff officers? They rise through the ranks faster than a speeding bullet. They take care of themselves very nicely, get all the flats and dachas.
In the end, Rinat gave up. He gave up the army that he loved so much and went off to who knows where with Edik, a homeless, penniless field officer. I fear for him, because I can guess where he has gone. I fear for all of us.
HOW TO MISAPPROPRIATE PROPERTY WITH THE CONNIVANCE OF THE GOVERNMENT
Moscow, February 2003. A bolt from the blue: President Putin appoints a new deputy minister of internal affairs and head of GUBOP, the Central Agency for Combating Organized Crime. He is Nikolai Ovchinnikov, a modest, low-profile deputy of the state duma who never speaks at its sessions, has no known involvement in its legislative work, and appears to be politically inert. He isn’t even one of Putin’s former cronies from Saint Petersburg, which in terms of current appointments policy is unusual. After the announcement, Ovchinnikov gives an interview saying he will do his best to be worthy of the president’s trust and that he sees his mission as being to reduce corruption “to a minimum” and to ensure that the “healthy sector of society” is no longer at the mercy of the criminal minority. These are splendid sentiments, so why does the new deputy minister’s pronouncement give rise to such merriment in the Urals?
Let us look at his new job. Where does it rank in Russia’s bureaucracy?
The director of GUBOP occupies no ordinary position in Russia. This is a key portfolio in the power structure. In the first place, organized crime—the Mafia—is rooted in monstrous corruption, and permeates everyday life. We say in Russia that where money talks, it can’t be silenced.
In the second place, the office carries so much clout because of its history. One of our country’s top bureaucrats and power brokers, a man who has stayed afloat under Yeltsin and now under Putin, is Vladimir Rushailo.[8] Formerly minister of internal affairs, recently he headed Russia’s National Security Council. He began his career as director of GUBOP. When he was appointed minister of internal affairs, he maintained an interest in his old field and did his utmost to beef the agency up. He inflated its staffing levels relative to other agencies and gave its officers sweeping powers, allowing them to carry out operations involving the use of force without prior approval, unlike other sections of the police. He also actively advanced his political appointees out of the agency and into the highest offices of state, with the result that nowadays “Rushailo men” are a factor to be reckoned with in the law-enforcement ministries. Their numbers are comparable only with the Petersburgers, as those who worked with Putin in Saint Petersburg and who followed him to various bureaucracies in Moscow are known, and the “Cheka men,” products of Putin’s old stomping ground, the KGB.
8
Rushailo was removed from this post in May 2004, and moved into a new position with little power.