I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. I was already being subjected to the attention every prominent opposition figure received from the Kremlin’s thugs and their proxies. These groups ranged from annoying pranksters to dangerous criminals, all on the payroll of those in charge of making sure any grassroots opposition movement met with immediate and heavy resistance. Youth groups we nicknamed the “Putin-Jugend” after their Nazi predecessors assigned members to heckle and throw things at me wherever I went to speak, and of course these groups were never bothered by the police. In April, I was bashed over the head with a wooden chessboard by a young man at an event in Moscow. And of course I was followed and recorded by more serious members of the security services at all times. That is the confidence of a totalitarian system.
But I wasn’t going to give up so easily. It was also important for me to travel because of how heavily the opposition world was weighted toward Moscow, and to a lesser extent St. Petersburg. Putin’s support was far greater outside of Moscow’s ringed roads, out in the regions where the economy was more likely to depend on the government and where the only sources of news were the Kremlin-controlled television channels. I visited Vladivostok in the east, sixty-two hundred kilometers from Moscow. I went to Rostov and then south into the Caucasus. I spoke with fishermen, railway workers, and students. And I went to Beslan.
I first visited the cemetery, or the New Cemetery as the people there had named it. There was still construction going on there, ten months after the attack. I put flowers on every grave, walking through the cemetery in a state of shock from my proximity to the horror that the people there had suffered and that the survivors lived with every day. Imagine row after row of graves, each with the same date of death: September 3, 2004, September 3, 2004, September 3, 2004, over and over 330 times. Row after row with birth dates in the 1990s and some in the 2000s. It was the most painful day of my life.
Yet I was still supposed to give a lecture in town, so I collected myself as best I could and headed to the local house of culture. Unsurprisingly, it was locked tight and every light was off. This was part of the usual package of harassment and isolation employed against opposition figures. Everywhere I went, meeting halls would suffer strange electrical or plumbing problems. Our plane wouldn’t be allowed to land and buses would arrive at incorrect locations. Locals would let me know they’d been threatened with harm or the loss of their jobs if they came to hear me speak. And so I spent much of my speaking time outdoors, in the street, or in lobbies and restaurants. Even hotels would be instructed not to give rooms to my colleagues and me.
This happened even in Beslan, a place that deserves peace and sanctity if any place in the world does. For that reason I had not wanted to come, but at the same time I felt that I had to. I had come not to make politics, but to see with my own eyes what had happened and to demonstrate to the families that they had not been forgotten. At this point, nearly everyone in the town blamed the government for caring more about killing the hostage-takers than about saving the lives of the hostages.
The Russian journalist Masha Gessen accompanied me on this leg of my journey and I have relied on her reporting of my visit to refresh my memory, which is clouded with the overpowering emotions of the day. Here I will quote two paragraphs directly, the first to show I’m not exaggerating about the juvenile harassment and the second to save myself more pain from reliving that day.
Just then there was a dull pop, very much like a gunshot, and the women screamed, “Garry! Garry!” The crowd broke apart, and Kasparov’s bodyguards tried awkwardly to shield him while keeping people from trampling one another as they rushed off the porch. A young man standing in front of the building suddenly turned out to be holding a bottle of ketchup, which he shook up violently and then aimed at Kasparov and squeezed. Kasparov was presently covered: his head, his chest, and the right shoulder of his blue sport coat were stained sticky red. The porch was empty now, save for a clear plastic bag with several broken eggs in it that had hit the roof of the porch before landing: that was what had made the popping sound. An old woman, now standing on the porch with us, tried to clean Kasparov’s face with a handkerchief. “Forgive me, forgive me,” he whispered over and over again, apologizing for triggering this incident in a town that was already racked with grief.
The crowd gradually grew as people came out of the houses and apartment blocks along the way to join the walk. They entered the school through the giant holes in the walls of what used to be the gymnasium…. Kasparov gasped when they entered the gym. “Oh my God, oh my God,” he whispered. The women walked to different corners of the ravaged space and began wailing; soon the hall was filled with a muffled, high-pitched sound. Kasparov looked stricken: his eyes red, mouth slightly open, head shaking. It was clear that it would not be possible to talk in here: the room was oversaturated with grief. He asked to be given a tour of the school, and as he walked around with the crowd, now grown to about a hundred people, he talked: “I’m walking through this school, thinking: How do people in Moscow keep walking around, saying something, continuing to lie? Among them, there is someone who gave orders to open fire. If that person gets away with it, we will all be to blame!”
Only three officials were ever charged over what happened at Beslan. All three were local North Ossetian police officers who were charged with negligence for failing to protect the school. Perhaps this was too much of a blatant scapegoating attempt even for Putin’s court system to abide, and all three were granted amnesty. When the judge read out the amnesty order in May 2007, a group of twenty-five Mothers of Beslan tore the courtroom to pieces. These officers could hardly be responsible for what had happened, but they were the only targets for the impotent rage of the families.
Here is the point at which we can divide our horror and our rage between those responsible—the terrorist murderers who conceived and carried out the attack—and those who failed in their duty to protect and preserve life, and then refused to produce accountability for those failures. Confusion, mistakes, outrages, and cover-ups occur in democracies, too, of course. Humans make mistakes and humans do horrible things all over the world; sadly, we seem unable to prevent these kinds of tragedies from happening in the first place (although one can certainly argue that treacherous dictatorships engender more of them). That is why the true test of our institutions is how they deal with these mistakes and horrors in order to maintain trust and to improve security.
The government’s responses to the terrorist attacks of Nord-Ost and Beslan and their aftermaths showed very clearly that the Putin regime had no interest in the trust or security of the Russian people. Putin didn’t need the people or their trust. He had oil, gas, total control of the media and the government, and a rapidly expanding security force. Unlike in democracy, where the loss of people’s faith in your administration will quickly cost you your job, being a dictator means never having to say you’re sorry, or even addressing the matter at all.
The other motive for my tour was to make contact with other activists around the country. There were still various opposition parties and NGOs struggling against the tide of increasing marginalization. As Putin tightened his grip on civil society, no group was too small or too innocuous to be persecuted. Ever on the alert against any “orange” activity, laws were passed to limit foreign funding of NGOs and increase penalties against protestors. A raft of “anti-extremism” bills went into effect, with language so broad and vague that any criticism of the government could be deemed an extremist act punishable by years in prison.