It is easy to cynically state that a few hundred innocents killed at the hands of the government is better than seven hundred dead at the hands of the terrorists. The mathematics are unassailable, even in hindsight. There is no way to know what would have happened in the alternate universe where negotiations continued. The only clear conclusions to come out of the horrible tragedy were that the war in Chechnya wasn’t over, no matter what Putin said, and that the Putin regime had no greater regard for human life than the terrorists did—a point it seemed the government wanted to make.
If the goal of the rapid and lethal intervention was partly to send a deterrent message to the Chechens that there would be no negotiations, it was a failure. Two years later, the Beslan school siege would result in an even more violent and catastrophic military intervention against Chechen hostage-takers, resulting in the deaths of nearly 400 people, including 186 children. (One result that can definitely be attributed to the Nord-Ost siege was the end of NTV’s quasi-independence after Putin was displeased by its coverage of the crisis.)
Putin’s Russia does not consider the deaths of its own citizens to be a serious crime worth punishing guilty officials for. And yet, having quietly decorated and promoted many of the organizers of the storming of the Dubrovka, the Putin regime went even further by issuing an indefinite indulgence to carry out any of his immoral orders. Lacking organized pushback from society, the soft authoritarian regime spent the next decade gradually acquiring the sinister traits of a fascist dictatorship.
Sandwiched between the Nord-Ost and Beslan sieges was another landmark event in establishing the reach and grasp of state power in Putin’s Russia. On October 25, 2003, the richest man in Russia, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was arrested and charged with fraud. In a scheme that would prove to be a model for future behavior, Khodorkovsky was convicted and his company, the oil giant Yukos, was promptly chopped up. Its assets were handed out to companies controlled by Putin’s closest buddies at bargain prices. By the time he was released in December 2013—after a second conviction that was even more preposterous than the first—Yukos was no more.
As I said earlier, it was difficult to find many Russians willing to express sympathy for the oligarchs who had made their vast fortunes in the early days of privatization. If the saying “Behind every great fortune is a great crime” is valid in the relatively transparent market economies of the West, it was doubly the case in the Wild, Wild East of 1990s Russia and the other post-Soviet republics. They were considered unscrupulous entrepreneurs at best and predatory criminals at worst, people who had used political connections to amass untold fortunes while average Russians struggled. And, well, this was largely true, with the caveat that it’s not constructive to blame the winners for breaking the rules in a game that had barely any rules at all.
Many of the persecuted oligarchs were also Jewish, and anti-Semitism, usually subtle and coded in the media and unsubtle and blatant from the nationalists, played a part in the political and public campaigns against them. That a few of Putin’s most loyal oligarchs were also Jewish blunted this line of criticism of his purges, but there is no question their Jewishness was used against those who came under state attack.
This revival of another wretched Soviet tradition hardly surprised me. Despite my many sporting successes for the glory of the motherland, my ethnicity occasionally appeared in questions about my loyalty during my rivalry with Karpov, who was of “respectable stock” from the Russian heartland while I was an “explosive combination.” And ever since I became active in the anti-Putin movement there has been a dramatic increase in the number of times I have been called “Weinstein,” my father’s name, which was exchanged for my mother’s Armenian family name not long after my father died when I was seven.
I’m not sure if it’s ironic or just disgusting that the anti-Semitic chorus has again raised its voice beyond the gutters of the Russian Internet since Putin began his war on Ukraine in 2014. According the Kremlin propaganda, the new democratic government in Kyiv is full of fascists and Nazis, as is required of anyone declared an enemy by Russia, and Russia had to intervene to protect not just ethnic Russians, but the poor Jews! In response, the Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities of Ukraine responded with an open letter saying that President Putin’s assertions about the rise of anti-Semitism in their country “did not match reality” and “might have confused Ukraine with Russia where Jewish organizations registered a rise of anti-Semitism last year.” Ukraine also has a lower rate of anti-Semitic incidents than nearly every other country in Europe where statistics are recorded, including France and Germany. At the same time, stories about Jewish oligarchs “running Ukraine” have also been part of the Kremlin information war, apparently in an attempt to provoke Russia’s fellow Slavs in Ukraine to rise against them, or perhaps to let Putin do the job.
These perverse accusations led to a good joke that I heard when I visited Ukraine in December 2014. A Russian watches the TV news and calls his Jewish friend in Ukraine in a panic: “Moishe, is it true your country has been taken over by fascists and ultranationalists?” “Yes,” his friend replies, “our synagogue is full of them!”
Returning to 2003 and Khodorkovsky’s arrest, it was presented as a blow for justice, reform, and as retribution for the common people. In fact, it was exactly the opposite on all three counts. At the time there weren’t many questions as to why it was happening in 2003 if the crimes he was accused of had supposedly taken place in the 1990s. A look at Khodorkovsky’s activities both inside and outside of Yukos at the time reveal the true motives behind his captivity.
Gusinsky and Berezovsky had been chased off two years before Khodorkovsky’s arrest. They were both clear and present dangers to Putin due to their media holdings and political influence. In contrast, Khodorkovsky and his oil company had thrived in the first years of the Putin government. Yukos was ready to exploit the skyrocketing price of oil to modernize the aging Soviet equipment it had inherited and to explore international partnerships on its way to becoming the first big Russian company to become a true multinational. That was a threat in Putin’s mind. He intended to ensure that the oil and gas giants, the “national champions,” were brought under firm Kremlin control.
Khodorkovsky also committed the sin of getting personally involved in politics and civil society, but wasn’t interested in swearing loyalty to Putin or trying to compete with him directly in the rigged electoral game. Khodorkovsky founded the Open Russia foundation and used it to sponsor dozens of programs and charities across the country, all while refusing to seek approval for these activities from the Kremlin. He even publicly declared he would support opposition candidates, while other oligarchs brought briefcases of cash to support Putin’s political causes.
Russian State University for the Humanities (RSUH) is very big in Moscow and they signed a contract with Yukos to receive $100 million in educational grants. After Khodorkovsky was arrested, there was suddenly new leadership in RSUH, and the new rector refused to take the money from Yukos. Khodorkovsky wasn’t using his wealth to buy a soccer club in England, as Putin’s buddy Roman Abramovich had done with Chelsea in June that year. Even if he was doing it partly to bolster his reputation, Khodorkovsky was investing in Russia and those activities made him a legitimate threat to Putin; legitimate in all ways. He wasn’t a man Putin could control.