Activists, Reporters Leaving Chechnya

From Byzantium To Grozny -- Russia's U-Turn Toward Zakayev

By Aslan Doukaev

It is not for nothing that Russia considers itself to be the successor and spiritual heir to the Byzantine Empire. Just like the long-vanished realm on the shores of the Bosporus, Russia straddles Europe and Asia, and its culture, political tradition, and way of life reflect both influences.

Ordered in mysterious ways, both Byzantium and then Russia engaged in politics that were viewed by others as opaque, duplicitous, and hypocritical. In their heyday, they exerted real influence on the world stage, but their disastrous decline was precipitated not so much by external pressures or infighting among the ruling class as by their excessive fondness for dogma, and their inability to evolve and embrace change.

For all their reputation for somnolence, corruption, intrigue, and occasional descent into paranoia, however, Russian rulers, courtiers and bureaucrats, just like their Byzantine predecessors, have been anything but uncreative, inflexible and lacking in ideas. Even today, a Russian politician can perform U-turns and somersaults that would turn any acrobat green with envy.

Witness, for example, the Kremlin's recent overtures to the exiled Chechen leader Akhmed Zakayev. Over the past two months, officials from the pro-Moscow administration in Chechnya have been conducting negotiations with Zakayev purportedly aimed at the "consolidation of the Chechen people." One of those officials, Chechen parliament speaker Dukvakha Abdurakhmanov, confirmed last week in London that their mission was endorsed by both President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

Just two years ago, however, Putin, then Russian president, issued a public demand that Zakayev, who had received asylum in the United Kingdom, be extradited to Russia to face criminal charges.

"There is no need to sift through any archives for this," Putin told a news conference at the end of a G8 summit. "We have the evidence -- video footage of his criminal activity."

Last September, Putin accused Britain of providing a safe haven for Russia's enemies, in clear reference to a group of Russian emigres, including Zakayev. His country's relations with the U.K. would never recover, Putin declared, as long as London remained a base for anti-Kremlin dissent.

"Why are you allowing the territory of Great Britain to fight Russia? Why do you allow Great Britain to be used as a launch pad?" he asked a bemused group of foreign journalists and academics at a meeting in the Black Sea resort of Sochi. It would be like Russia letting IRA terrorists use Russia as a safe haven to plan attacks, he claimed.

So why the volte-face? Why have the Russian authorities abandoned the old and worn-out "we-never-talk-to-terrorists" mantra so quickly?

There are two possible reasons.

First, Russia never truly believed Zakayev had ever been involved in any terrorist activities. When the Russian Federation sought Zakayev's extradition from Britain in late 2002, the materials presented by the office of the Russian Prosecutor-General to the court in London did not contain any charges of terrorism, though in the media Russian officials routinely branded him as a terrorist.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, the Russian leadership seems to be increasingly frustrated with the situation in Chechnya and with its current head, Ramzan Kadyrov. Since November 2008, at least four known critics of his regime have been murdered execution-style in Russia and abroad. Kadyrov strenuously denies any involvement, but those killings, no doubt, have caused the Kremlin diplomatic and political embarrassment.

Deteriorating Security

To add insult to injury, the security situation in Chechnya, after a period of relative calm, has begun to deteriorate again, with a recent upsurge in bombings and attacks. If anything, Kadyrov's leadership style, his dictatorial ways, brutality, and contempt for justice only fuel resentment and impel more young men and women to join the ranks of the insurgents.

The Zakayev team will probably attempt to capitalize on Kadyrov's failures and present an alternative program for Chechnya's stabilization at "a world Chechen congress" that the two negotiating parties have agreed to convene within the next few months. Zakayev may also call for a more vigorous investigation of the recent killings, an amnesty for thousands of Chechens currently serving lengthy prison sentences on charges of "participating in illegal armed formations," and the re-burial of several prominent Chechen leaders, such as Djokhar Dudayev and Aslan Maskhadov.

Finally, the prime minister of the Chechen separatist government-in-exile is likely to appeal to the Russian authorities not to persecute the families and relatives of the alleged rebel fighters, as such reprisals only furnish another steady source of recruits for the insurgency.

Zakayev's agenda appears to differ radically from that of the pro-Moscow Chechen negotiators, who seek primarily to rally Chechen factions behind the Kadyrov leadership. However, the Kremlin's tacit approval of the negotiating process and of the forthcoming Chechen congress may signal a realization that a change of course is essential if Chechnya is ever to be truly stabilized.

Exactly how far the Russian leadership is prepared to go is still unclear. The inner workings of Russia's Byzantine politics are as difficult to decrypt as ever.

It Will Take Political (Not Military) Will to End the Insurgency in the North Caucasus

The death toll is still rising from this morning’s bomb attack in Nazran. At the time of writing it had reached 20. The details are still hazy, but it appears that a suicide bomber drove a Gazelle truck into the courtyard of the police headquarters in Nazran, the capital of Ingushetia, as officers  lined up for a change of shift. The blast was powerful – Kaloi Akhilgov, an Ingush government spokesman, told Reuters that “practically all the cars and buildings in the yard of the police headquarters were completely destroyed.” More than sixty people were injured, including children.

The attack in Nazran caps a bloody several days in Russia’s North Caucasus. On Friday, gunmen murdered four policemen and seven women in the town of Buinaksk in Dagestan. On Wednesday, the Ingush construction minister was shot dead in his office. And today’s attack was at least the third suicide bombing since the attack on Ingush President Yunnus-bek Yevkurov’s motorcade on June 22 (the other, involving a bomber on foot, killed five senior police officers in the Chechen capital Grozny on July 26). And this is only a small sample.

For a few years the insurgency in the North Caucasus seemed to be on its last legs. The relative increase in violence in Ingushetia was seen as a symptom of Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov’s success in crushing the rebels in Chechnya. Kadyrov himself would make regular statements about how few rebels still held out in the forests and mountains. If the rebels could be pushed from Chechnya to Ingushetia, presumably they could be crushed.

But somehow that has not happened, and it is not clear why. The former-rebel president’s outlandishly brutal approach to counter-insurgency, and the Kremlin’s willingness to overlook it, could be to blame. Or the dire economic situation. Or, as some, including the president of Chechnya, believe, it’s the work of mind-controlling drugs (following the attack on Yevkurov, Kadyrov told the Interfax news agency that a captured fighter had provided information about “tablets” that make a man “like a robot.” The peddlers of these zombie pills were, he hinted, the Western special services).

According to the United Nations Development Program unemployment in some of the North Caucasian republics may reach as high as 70 or 80 percent. And, as Anatoly Tsiganok, the head of the Center for Military prognosis pointed out, when fighting terrorism the most important thing is the economy. “No matter which strategy you follow, you have to find people work,” he said. “The difficulty of finding work in the North Caucasus is the first problem.”

Whatever the combination of causes, it is clear that Kadyrov’s claims that there are only 20 to 40 fighters clinging on in the mountains were at best willfully optimistic, and at worst misleading. According to Tsiganok, the police and the Federal Security Service reckon there are between 500 and 600 terrorists in the North Caucasus. That estimate is partly based on the amount of money the security services think is supporting the insurgency. “If there was more sponsorship, it would allow more fighters,” said Tsiganov.

The official Russian line as that many of these “sponsored” fighters come from abroad, mostly from the same countries Western governments blame for supplying Islamic extremists - Pakistan, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. It is certainly true that the surge in violence this summer, especially the suicide attacks, have given news from the North Caucasus a similar flavor to the one the world has become accustomed to hearing from Iraq and Afghanistan.

But like most insurgencies, working out where foreign involvement stops and local disaffection begins is almost impossible. It is not foreigners who are affected by the lack of employment options in the North Caucasus. And most analysts accept that there are other local factors fueling the insurgency. “There are children who are currently 17 or 18 years old, who have grown up only in the conditions of war, and they do not know anything else apart from military action,” said Tsiganok. “And then there are a lot of fighters who have lost many of their relatives through the actions of the federal forces.”

Both Human Rights groups and some military strategists say that the “Kadyrov model” of counter-terrorism, which has seen security forces conduct house burnings, abductions and extra-judicial executions, is counter productive. But even boosters of Yevkurov’s rival strategy of reigning in the security services in order to win back the public’s trust acknowledge that it does not bring “such short-term results.” The question is whether the federal government will have the patience to stick with the longer-term strategy.

There are already signs of frustration in Moscow. Late Monday, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev fired the Ingush Interior Minister Ruslan Meyriev over the Nazran attack.

Conventional military thinking is that the violence of the past several weeks is partly seasonal. Fighting in the Caucasus usually ends in autumn, when colder weather and the falling of foliage forces fighters to return to the towns and villages to take up more peaceful employment (if they can find it). Winter, in theory, should be a calmer season. But this will be small comfort to those who lost loved ones in Nazran on Monday morning. And there is still a month and a half until October. 

But only once has Putin penned a purely personal opinion in the Russian press.

That journalistic debut was in Russky Pioner, the celebrity magazine launched this year by veteran Kremlin and now White House correspondent Andrei Kolesnikov.

In May, Kolesnikov asked for a short meeting with the prime minister, and in return got a column, "Why it's hard to fire someone", for his new magazine.

Putin's article drew so much publicity, Kolesnikov says, that it turned his Italian vacation "into a living hell. I was interviewed in every alley of Venice".

That Kolesnikov persuaded Putin to write the article - and that he got his meeting at all - speaks volumes about the Kommersant reporter, who became the Kremlin pool's most famous member during the Putin era.

It's hard to imagine the exclusive Kremlin and now White House press pool without Kolesnikov, who has been an integral (if not the most noticeable) part of it since 2001.

In a country that Kolesnikov himself acknowledges has serious problems with freedom of speech and self-censorship, writing about the Kremlin takes on an irony - sometimes hyper-realistically Kafkaesque, sometimes plain surreal - that has become a trademark of this veteran reporter. He writes about how the president walks and talks, about the shoes he wears and the unexpected gifts of Superbowl rings, and about the strange black dress with the long zipper that Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko donned when she met with Putin to settle the latest gas war in January.

How else, after all, can one write about Putin, nearly a decade after he came to power?

Detachment, Kolesnikov said in a recent interview in a Moscow café, is the key. He downplays the amount of access that he has to Putin as a journalist, but the Pioner article would indicate that his access is about the best there is.

"Since I have been working in the pool for a long time, probably if I ask for a short meeting, I will get it. But I won't use this option unless I'm in dire need. Like if this is a question of life and death for someone very close. You have to keep your distance in this situation as much as possible. Because I write regular articles for Kommersant, and I write whatever I feel is necessary. I am limited neither by the editor, nor by the White House press service.

Nor by myself. It's a rare situation, and I'd like to keep it that way."

The "short meeting" in May probably indicates that Kolesnikov and Putin have a strong feeling of mutual respect for each other's work.

The 43-year-old Kolesnikov boasts a reporter's biography typical of his generation: he worked at a regional newspaper in the Yaroslavl region, then went to journalism school at Moscow State University. Then there was a stint at Moskovskiye Novosti, the Russian-language sister paper of The Moscow News, in the 1990s.

Finally came Kommersant, which shares the reputation with Vedomosti of being one of the few respected business dailies in the country.

The turning point in Kolesnikov's career came in early 2000, just after Putin was appointed acting president. That year, he was picked along with Natalia Gevorkyan, a fellow correspondent, and Natalia Timakova, who worked for the prime minister's press service, to interview Putin for his authorized biography, "In the First Person".

Altogether, the journalists spent about 24 hours with Putin, and produced a book that was instrumental in introducing Putin to a wider public during his presidential campaign that spring.

Today, Gevorkyan lives in Paris, where she writes columns that are virulently critical of Putin. Timakova is President Dmitry Medvedev's press secretary. And Kolesnikov is still, well, the same Kolesnikov.

"Natalia Gevorkyan chose this lifestyle herself. Part of it was technical - she left for Paris as a special correspondent for Kommersant. As for [her] view of Putin, she has the one that she has.

"My view of Putin has a purely working character, the kind that a Kommersant reporter should have.

I don't have any strong feelings for him. I notice, with a lot of satisfaction, that as time goes by I have neither grown to like him nor to hate him. This kind of even attitude is the guarantee of real journalism."

Occasionally, Kolesnikov's trademark irony has landed him in tricky situations.

At the recent launch party for Russky Pioner, Mikhail Fridman, the billionaire chief of Alfa Group and one of the contributors to the magazine, was asked by Kolesnikov what he thought of Putin's 10 years in power.

"I am afraid that after such a question I will have to stop talking to you," Fridman replied in an apparent joke.

But every joke has a grain of truth in it.

"Actually, this is a pretty serious situation," Kolesnikov said when asked about the exchange the day after the party. "In the last several years, people have grown accustomed to talking about the president and the prime minister with caution. Television has conditioned them to talk like this. And television is in very bad shape when it comes to freedom of speech. I had a chance to mention this to Putin - I said, listen, can't you free television from government pressure? Don't act as if this pressure doesn't exist. And he didn't act as if it didn't exist. He said to me, ‘Yes, you're probably right, but right now society is in a position where it needs this kind of television. When society changes, he said, so will television.'"

The influence of television is enormous, Kolesnikov says, so much so that his columns pale in comparison. "The people, the newspapers, and journalists take their cues from television. Because where there is no censorship there is self-censorship. And it even pops up at Russky Pioner readings. We joke about it, but in reality it exists."

Indeed, there is a suspicion that the detached façade sometimes falters. Kolesnikov described an incident about three years ago when he and the Kremlin pool photographer, Dmitry Azarov, decided to publish a photo-album titled "Four Seasons of Vladimir Putin". All the photographs were purchased from the Kommersant archive, but Kolesnikov decided to show the album to Putin first.

"It was so harsh on [Putin] at times that I thought it wouldn't be fair to publish it without saying anything to him first. So I decided to show it to him, although it was a difficult decision to make. I thought that he would hate us afterwards. And when we met, in his personal office in Sochi, he was standing there, paging through a Monet album. We should have just turned around and left, because how can we compete with Monet? He won the first round, from the psychological standpoint, if he was thinking about it (and I think he was). Anyway, he looked at our album for over an hour. He was very displeased with certain photographs. ‘What, is that me drunk?' he asked about one."

But in the end, Putin seemed to like the album, Kolesnikov says. In fact, he told Dmitry Azarov that he was a "cut above" a Western photographer recommended to Putin by Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder.

"And I thought to myself then, so this is what these people are really worried about - how they look," says Kolesnikov. "However calm and condescending they seem to be about their image, this is what they talk about among themselves."

Spending seven years in the Kremlin press pool, Kolesnikov went over to the White House pool when Putin became prime minister.

"I don't have the feeling that I'm not so much at the centre of events now as I was in the presidential press pool," he says of his reporting from the White House. "This is where it's at. And it will only get more interesting."