Strongman (23 page)

As 2005 progressed, and the West watched powerless as Putin curtailed democracy, created Nashi, cracked down on NGOs and turned off gas supplies to Ukraine, the rhetoric on both sides peaked. In
early May 2006 Vice-President Dick Cheney travelled to another former Soviet Baltic republic, Lithuania, with the express purpose of delivering another broadside at Russia – one that was
intended to be seen not as a wayward attack by a sometimes off-message vice-president, but as the considered view of the administration. Damon Wilson, at the National Security Council in the White
House, explained: ‘We knew that this would be an important opportunity to continue to echo the president’s messages about the freedom agenda. There was a tendency often in Moscow to
discount what Vice-President Cheney said, to say, this is Vice-President Cheney, we all know he’s radical, he’s the neocon in the administration, but at the end of the day, we’re
doing business with President Bush. And so we worked very closely with the vice-president’s office and his speech writers to make sure that this wasn’t Vice-President Cheney out on a
limb. We prepared a speech that was actually well vetted, very much circulated in the Interagency, delivering key messages on the democracy front, pretty tough-hitting words on what was happening
in Russia.’
³

Cheney delivered a paean to freedom and the spread of democracy, and let loose at the Putin regime:

He called on Russia to return to democratic reform, and become a ‘trusted friend’ by sharing the Western values: ‘We will make the case, clearly and confidently, that Russia
has nothing to fear and everything to gain from having strong, stable democracies on its borders, and that by aligning with the West, Russia joins all of us on a course to prosperity and
greatness.’ In a flagrant display of double standards, Cheney then flew to Kazakhstan where he praised the Putinesque dictatorship of President Nursultan Nazarbayev, expressing his
‘admiration for what has transpired here in Kazakhstan over the past 15 years, both in terms of economic development as well as political development.’

It was not the sort of thing that Vladimir Putin could let pass without comment. Six days later, in an address to parliament, he made a cryptic remark that left the Americans scratching their
heads, although its target was clear. During a long passage devoted to the importance of the military, he snarled: ‘We can see what’s going on in the world. We can see it! As they say,
“Comrade Wolf knows who to eat.” He keeps on eating, and listens to nobody. And apparently doesn’t intend to listen.’

The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, traditionally suave and restrained, lost his cool at talks in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York. The meeting was about Iran, which the US
suspected was trying to build a nuclear weapons capability by developing civilian technology provided by the Russians. The previous year Russia agreed to join a troika of EU nations (the UK, France
and Germany) plus the United States and China in elaborating a joint approach. At one point Moscow had helpfully suggested that it could enrich fuel for Iran’s as yet uncompleted Bushehr
power station and have it shipped back to Russia. But in April 2006 the Russians announced the sale of an advanced air-defence system to Iran, infuriating the Americans.

Now, at the Waldorf, the six foreign ministers of the Iran group were exploring the possibility of sanctions against Iran. But after Cheney’s Vilnius speech the gloves were off.
Condoleezza Rice and her political director Nicholas Burns faced an increasingly agitated Lavrov across the dinner table. Burns recalls: ‘Ordinarily in diplomacy people are polite to each
other. And they don’t personalise things. But at some point, midway through the dinner, Lavrov became very red in the face and very angry, and kind of pounded on the table and attacked me
over public statements I had made, objecting to Russia’s arms sales to Iran.’ Lavrov invoked Cheney’s speech and demanded that the Americans keep their criticisms to themselves.
Burns was about to respond in kind, and Rice had to grip his arm to calm him.
⁴

Such was the fraught atmosphere when the simmering conflict between Georgia and Russia erupted into violence. In September 2006 South Ossetian forces fired on a military helicopter carrying
Georgia’s defence minister, Irakli Okruashvili, causing him to make an emergency landing. Okruashvili had earlier promised to celebrate the following New Year in the South Ossetian capital
Tskhinvali – in other words, to accomplish the reincorporation of the region into Georgia by the end of 2006. Skirmishes broke out between Russian-armed South Ossetian soldiers and
American-trained Georgians. Then, at the end of the month, Georgia arrested four Russian officers and accused them of espionage. International mediators were brought in, and after a few days the
Russians were released – but not before they were paraded in front of television cameras, handcuffed and escorted by female Georgian police.

‘The message of Georgia to our great neighbour Russia,’ Saakashvili proclaimed, ‘is: enough is enough.’

The Russians took it as a deliberate humiliation and retaliated with the harshest of sanctions: they recalled their ambassador, and cut all rail, sea, road, air and postal links. Georgians
living in Moscow began to feel the heat: hundreds who could not produce legitimate papers were rounded up and put on planes bound for Tbilisi; schools were asked to provide lists of children with
Georgian-sounding names so that the authorities could investigate whether they were illegal immigrants.

Murder of Anna Politkovskaya

Western governments were only getting into their stride with criticism of Russia’s démarche against Georgia when something much more shocking happened. On 7
October 2006, Putin’s 54th birthday, the journalist Anna Politkovskaya – known around the world for her bold reporting from Chechnya and criticism of the Kremlin – was shot dead
in the lift of her apartment block in Moscow. The murder stunned people around the world – but not, apparently, Vladimir Putin. At first he gave no reaction at all. Then, four days later
during a trip to Germany, he finally responded to a reporter’s question by dismissing her as essentially unimportant.

It was, he said, ‘a disgustingly cruel crime’ and her killers should not go unpunished. But he added: ‘Her impact on Russian political life was only very slight. She was well
known in the media community, in human rights circles and in the West, but her influence on political life within Russia was very minimal. The murder of someone like her, the brutal murder of a
woman and mother, was in itself an act directed against our country and against the Russian authorities. This murder deals a far greater blow to the authorities in Russia, and in Chechnya, to which
she devoted much of her recent professional work, than did any of her publications.’ It was one of Putin’s more grotesque utterances: Politkovskaya’s death, he was saying, was
actually aimed against
him
, and would have a greater effect than her insignificant writings had. He lamented the murder of ‘a woman and mother’, not of the journalist.

I once asked his spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, whether Putin had read much of Politkovskaya’s work. ‘No,’ he replied, shaking his head as if to underline that she wasn’t
worth reading. But it is hard to believe that Putin did not know of her work. She worked for the most prominent opposition newspaper,
Novaya gazeta
, co-owned by ex-President Mikhail
Gorbachev. Her articles contained stinging criticism of human rights abuses in Russia and particularly of Putin’s war in Chechnya. She had negotiated with the hostage-takers in the Dubrovka
theatre crisis, and might have done the same during the Beslan school siege had she not been poisoned on the plane as she flew down from Moscow (another unexplained crime). Leaders of other
countries condemned her murder and demanded a thorough investigation. The State Department described her as ‘personally courageous and committed to seeking justice even in the face of
previous death threats’.

Yet the Kremlin was unmoved.

Suspicions automatically fell on the leadership of Chechnya, and specifically its prime minister, Ramzan Kadyrov, whom Politkovskaya had fiercely criticised for human rights abuses. Some
speculated that people loyal to him might have killed her for revenge, others that his enemies killed her to cast suspicion on him.

Kadyrov became prime minister of Chechnya, and later president, following the assassination of his father, Akhmat Kadyrov, whom Putin had installed as a pro-Russian president by means of a
rigged election in 2003. Both had previously been on the rebel side – the elder Kadyrov was the mufti, or religious leader, of Chechnya under its separatist leader, Dzhokhar Dudayev, and had
even called for a jihad against Russia. I once had tea with him in a house in rebel-held Chechnya in 1995. I recall that he asked rather disarmingly whether the British people were generally
converting to Islam. The Kadyrovs later reversed their anti-Russian stance, however, and supported the war launched by Putin against the insurgents in 1999. Ramzan’s militia, known as
kadyrovtsi
or Kadyrovites, acquired an unsavoury reputation – accused of torture, abductions and murders. Moscow installed first Akhmat, then Ramzan, as ‘quisling’ leaders
– Chechens loyal to Moscow – under a new strategy to pacify the republic.

In the wake of the Chechen terrorist attack on the school in Beslan, the Kremlin deputy chief of staff, Vladislav Surkov, gave this explanation of Russia’s strategy towards Chechnya:
‘The solution is complex and hard. And we have begun to put it into practice. It entails the active socialisation of the northern Caucasus, the gradual creation of democratic institutions and
the foundations of civil society, of an effective system of law and order, and of industrial capacity and social infrastructure, the overcoming of mass unemployment, corruption and the collapse of
culture and education.’ In reality, Kremlin policy amounted to the surrender of the republic to the loyal Ramzan Kadyrov, allowing him to enrich himself and run the place as he pleased so
long as it was kept inside the Russian Federation. Kadyrov professes ‘love’ for Putin and calls him his ‘idol’. He renamed the main street in Grozny, the capital, Putin
Avenue.

The strategy has been partially successful. Despite the continuation of terrorist atrocities, mainly outside of Chechnya, by the remaining Islamic rebels, Kadyrov has restored a semblance of
order within the republic. Grozny, totally destroyed in the two wars, has been largely rebuilt, using petrodollars thrown at it from Moscow. It boasts Europe’s largest mosque. It has normal
shops and cafés again – something I thought I would never see when I reported from the bombed-out city in the late 1990s. But the strategy is a double-edged sword for Putin. The
muscular, bearded Kadyrov is a wayward and ruthless individual. I visited his palace outside the village of Tsentoroy in 2008 and got a taste of his fabulous wealth – the grounds include an
artificial lake and a zoo with panthers and leopards – and his primitive way of thinking. Asked what he thought about the death of the rebel leader Shamil Basayev, the mastermind behind most
of the recent terrorist attacks in Russia, Kadyrov replied: ‘I was delighted when I heard he was killed ... and then sad, because I wanted to kill him with my own hands.’ He has
introduced elements of Sharia law in his fiefdom, and congratulated men who sprayed paintballs at women who appeared in public with their heads uncovered.

American diplomats attending a riotous wedding reception in Dagestan in August 2006 witnessed Kadyrov, the guest of honour, dancing with a gold-plated pistol stuck down the back of his jeans and
showering dancing children with hundred-dollar bills.
⁵

True to Chechen tradition, Kadyrov is quick to promise retribution and blood vengeance on his enemies. On his watch many opponents have disappeared. His former bodyguard, Umar Israilov, who went
public about torture and killings by the Kadyrovites that he had witnessed, was shot dead in Vienna in January 2009. Six months later Natalya Estemirova, who worked for the Memorial human rights
centre in Grozny, was abducted and murdered. Kadyrov described her as a woman ‘without honour, dignity or conscience’. As for Anna Politkovskaya, in 2004 she published an account of a
terrifying meeting with Ramzan Kadyrov, during which he boasted that his hobbies were fighting and women. The interview included the following comical exchange:

‘What kind of education do you have?’

‘Higher. Law. I’m graduating soon, sitting my exams.’

‘What kind of exams?’

‘What do you mean, what kind? Exams, that’s all.’

‘What’s the name of the college you are graduating from?’

‘A branch of the Moscow Business Institute, in Gudermes. The law faculty.’

‘What are you specialising in?

‘I’m a lawyer.’

‘But is your diploma in criminal law, civil law ...?’

‘I can’t remember. I wrote something, but I’ve forgotten. There’s a lot of events going on.’

Kadyrov was later made an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences.

Politkovskaya was taken back to see him again the next morning, and found him with a Kadyrovite in a black T-shirt who snarled at her: ‘You should have been shot back in Moscow, in the
street, the way they do it in Moscow.’ And Kadyrov chimed in: ‘You’re an enemy. You should be shot.’

Politkovskaya described him as a ‘baby dragon, raised by the Kremlin. Now they need to feed him. Otherwise he will set everything on fire.’ She was about to publish another article
about human rights abuses and torture in Chechnya when she was killed.