Killer in the kremlin, p.16
Killer in the Kremlin, page 16
A villager walked past and palmed something to me: the business card of Robert Roxburgh, press officer of the International Olympics Committee. I called the number on the card on my mobile and told Roxburgh that the FSB had taken our passports, and asked him what the IOC was going to do about it. He scolded us for going to Akhshtyr without Russian press passes. I explained that problem lay with the Russians, not us. The FSB subsequently kept our passports but allowed us to walk on foot through their checkpoint to film the villagers. They complained about the quarry, owned by Russian Railways, which was in turn owned by oligarch Vladimir Yakunin, an old St Petersburg mucker of Vladimir Putin.
When we got back to the FSB checkpoint, the grunt said that to get our passports back we had to sign a document admitting that we had illegally entered ‘the border zone’. No deal. I called Roxburgh again. He huffed and puffed. A solution emerged when one of the FSB agents suggested we sign ‘I refuse to sign’ on their document. That we did and then we were free.
Workers claimed that they had been cheated of their wages. Few were willing to say so on camera, but electrician Mardiros Demerchan was an exception. He told us that when he complained, the police arrested him on a trumped-up charge: ‘They started to beat me, one from one side and one from the other. I fell to the floor and I started losing consciousness, and they hauled me back up and sat me on the chair. One of them said, “Have you had enough or do we have to beat you some more?”’
Demerchan claimed he had been tortured and sexually assaulted with an iron bar. He was trying to bring charges against the police. They were suing him for libel.
I didn’t mention Moonglade to the FSB. That’s my translation from the Russian of Lunnaya Polyana, a secret base high up in the mountains, accessible only by helicopter, which sounds like a Bond villain’s lair. Built in a former national park, Moonglade is officially a meteorological research station, but it appears to be a hush-hush skiing lodge for the president. Green activist Yevgeny Vitishko hiked up to Moonglade. He told us: ‘Vladimir Putin liked it and decided to build himself a country house there.’ Vitishko campaigned against more lodges being built nearby: ‘This holiday home fever is something that must really be fought – which is what we’re doing, and why the court found us guilty.’ Vitishko was referring to his trial for hooliganism for allegedly painting a graffito on a fence, a charge he denied. After Vitishko appeared on our Panorama programme ‘Putin’s Games’ – he took the decision himself, fully knowing that it was apiece with his activism – he got sentenced to three years in prison.
The way I liked to work on Panorama was to push everything to the limit, so that when the bosses pushed back, adding cold milk as they always did, the viewing public would still get something with a bit of flavour. For the Moonglade section of ‘Putin’s Games’ I suggested that we should use the John Barry soundtrack from his song ‘Capsule in Space’, the bit in the Bond movie You Only Live Twice when the SMERSH satellites gobble up the Soviet and American satellites. It’s a brilliant and creepy riff. The BBC underlings were so terrified about the rest of the show they somehow forgot to water this down and it stayed in.
Just sayin’.
Our detention by the FSB, the anger of the cut-off villagers, the torture of the electrician, the arrest and sentencing of the brave Green activist all summed up ‘Putin’s Games’ for me: the authorities pretending to be all smiley, but every now and then the guard dropped, and you had a glimpse of a police state, robbing the powerless, serving the powerful.
Boris Nemtsov hated Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine, the seizing of Crimea and the masked invasions of Donetsk and Luhansk in the east. He fired this shot directly at the Kremlin in the spring of 2014 on his Facebook page:
‘Putin has declared a war of brother against brother in Ukraine. This bloody folly by a crazed KGB man will cost Russia and Ukraine dear: once again the deaths of young boys on both sides, bereft mothers and wives, children turned into orphans. An empty Crimea, which tourists will never visit. Billions, tens of billions of roubles, taken from old people and children and thrown into the furnace of the war, and then after that even more money to prop up the thieving regime in Crimea … The ghoul needs a war. He needs the blood of the people. Russia can look forward to international isolation, the impoverishment of its people, and repressions. God, why should we be cursed like this??? How much longer can we take it?!’
A little more than a year after I interviewed him giggling his head off, Boris Nemtsov was shot dead, gunned down on 27 February 2015 on the bridge over the Moskva river, a hundred yards from the Kremlin. I remember I called my Panorama executive producer, Andrew Head, and sobbed down the phone. Seven years on, no one who commissioned the killing has been charged. Nemtsov was an extraordinary man, the sweetest, funniest and most human Russian I’ve ever met. His brutal snuffing out caused me to sink into a profound depression. I knocked out a thriller, Cold, about modern Russia and I dedicated it to three Russians who I’d met and who had been shot: Politkovskaya, Estemirova, Nemtsov.
In the London Review of Books Keith Gessen reflected on Nemtsov’s Facebook post against the war in Ukraine and wrote this after he was assassinated: ‘He was killed for his opposition to the war. Since the start, critics have been warning that the war in Ukraine would eventually come home to Moscow. No matter who pulled the trigger on the bridge, it has.’
Nemtsov was no fool. He sensed what was about to happen to him. One month before his murder he blogged that his mother, then eighty-seven years old, feared Putin would have him killed. Was he himself afraid, someone asked? ‘Yes, not as strongly as my mother, but still …’ Nemtsov being Nemtsov, he went on: ‘I am only joking. If I were afraid of Putin, I wouldn’t be in this line of work.’
He wasn’t joking. Two weeks before his murder, Nemtsov told his old pal, journalist Yevgenia Albats, that he was afraid of being killed, but he set out the reasons why it would not happen: he had been a high-up in the Kremlin, a deputy prime minister, and killing him would set a precedent in bloodletting.
Nemtsov was wrong about that. He was shot in the back several times one hundred metres or so from the walls of the Kremlin, one of the most closely CCTV-filmed areas on earth. The official narrative was that a bin lorry obscured the Kremlin’s cameras from capturing the killer or killers. Attentive readers will have already got it, but for the avoidance of any doubt the official narrative is a load of old hogwash. In my four decades-plus of reporting, I have never been detained by police officers more often than outside the Kremlin. You cannot move five yards without a cop demanding to see your passport. The idea that Nemtsov was assassinated but that none of the Kremlin’s cameras captured critical evidence is absurd. Putin’s press officer, Dmitry Peskov, twisted the knife: ‘Putin noted that this cruel murder has all the hallmarks of a contract hit and is extremely provocative … In political terms he did not pose any threat to the current Russian leadership or Vladimir Putin. If we compare popularity levels, Putin’s and the government’s ratings and so on, in general Boris Nemtsov was just a little bit more than an average citizen.’
Once again, for the avoidance of any doubt, Nemtsov was trouble for Vladimir Putin. The one person who benefited from his murder was the master of the Kremlin.
The police investigation into the assassination of the unofficial leader of the Russian opposition went exactly as attentive readers would expect: Moscow’s finest galloped off in the wrong direction. The night after the killing, police raided Nemtsov’s flat and confiscated his computer hard drives. Of course they did. The victim was the enemy. The Russian-born American reporter Julia Ioffe predicted what would happen: ‘We can be sure that the investigation will lead precisely nowhere. At most, some sad sap, the supposed trigger-puller, will be hauled in front of a judge, the scapegoat for someone far more powerful. More likely, the case will founder for years amid promises that everyone is working hard, and no one will be brought to justice at all.’ The Kremlin, she wrote, was already ‘muddying the waters’.
Smart people in Moscow were divided about who, exactly, ordered the hit. Nemtsov was a long-time thorn in Vladimir Putin’s prickly side. But, like Anna Politkovskaya before him, he was also a forthright critic of the psychotic Chechen quisling, Ramzan Kadyrov. Russian opposition activist Ilya Yashin suspected that Kadyrov had Nemtsov killed. The word was that there were FSB officers who found hard evidence that the Chechen satrap commissioned the hit and were frustrated that Putin, after days of indecision, ordered them to close down their investigation.
I say it to my Ukrainian friends again and again: there is another Russia. The problem is that the alternatives to Vladimir Putin are either dead or not very alive.
In December 2016 I was back in Moscow, hanging out with one of the intellectual colossi of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. With his long hair and beard and iconic Slavic looks, Alexander Dugin, then aged fifty-four, is variously described as ‘Putin’s Brain’ or ‘Putin’s Rasputin’. At the time he had his own pro-Kremlin TV show which pumped out Russian Orthodox supremacy. Imagine Goebbels-style rhetoric inside a Songs of Praise format and you get a flavour of the holy-moly mind-fuck. Dugin is the apostle of Eurasianism, the ideology that Russia is a stand-alone country, spanning both Europe and Asia, and so it must hold itself aloft and away from the seductive, weakening diseases of human rights, democracy and the rule of law. It’s Orthodox fascism wrapped up in fancy gibberish but, that said, Dugin is widely believed to have the ear of the Kremlin. When I met him he was under Western sanctions for the ferocity of his statements in favour of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and his denial of Ukraine’s nationhood. At that point in 2016, Putin’s war in the Donbas had only cost 10,000 lives.
Dugin’s big shtick was that the greatest dangers to Western civilization were enfeebling liberalism and Islamist extremism. Others were sympathetic to his view, including President Donald Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon. In 2016, Trump and Bannon seemed to be masters of the universe. Bannon had aired his views in a right-wing mind-fest on the fringes of the Vatican in 2014, claiming that so-called Islamic State has a Twitter account ‘about turning the United States into a “river of blood”’.
‘Trust me, that is going to come to Europe,’ he added. ‘On top of that we’re now, I believe, at the beginning stages of a global war against Islamic fascism.’
The danger is that in allying yourself with the Kremlin in the way it fights ‘Islamist fascism’ in say, Aleppo, you could end up siding with Russian fascism. It is a risk about which Alexander Dugin did not seem willing to reflect. My interview with him in Moscow did not end well.
First, he dismissed the chances that the Russians hacked American democracy in the 2016 US presidential election as ‘strictly zero’.
Sweeney: ‘People ask questions about Vladimir Putin’s commitment to democracy?’
Dugin: ‘Please be careful. You could not teach us democracy because you try to impose to every people, every state, every society, their Western, American or so-called American system of values without asking … and it is absolutely racist; you are racist.’
Sweeney: ‘What happens is, if you are critical of Vladimir Putin you may end up dead.’
Dugin: ‘If you are engaged in Wikileaks, you can be murdered?’
Sweeney: ‘Julian Assange is dead, is he?’
Dugin: ‘No.’
Sweeney: ‘So hold on a second, please, tell me about Boris Nemtsov. He was murdered one hundred yards from the Kremlin.’
Dugin: ‘By Putin? You think he was murdered by Putin?’
Sweeney: ‘He was critical of Putin. Can you list the number of American journalists who had died under Barack Obama. You can’t, can you?’
Dugin: ‘It is a completely stupid kind of conversation. Very nice to meet you but I don’t like to continue.’
Then Dugin ripped off his sound-mike and walked out of the interview.
And we had been getting on so well.
Later, he posted a blog to his 20,000 followers, illustrated with my photograph and accusing me of manufacturing ‘fake news: I’ve kicked a BBC correspondent out. A notorious bastard! An utter cretin … John Sweeney was in charge. His name tells it all: he’s a “globalist swine”. They are making a fake news documentary on how Russians helped Trump become President. Their only evidence that Putin had worked in the KGB. Complete imbeciles. Zero journalistic skills! Nazi-style propagandist. Stay away from them!’
Such is the language of the new world order.
From then on, everywhere I went in Russia I was followed.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Taking On Putin
Shot.
Stabbed.
Tasered.
Beaten by silent thugs.
Hit over the head with an iron bar.
Half-blinded.
These verbs tell the story of what it is like to take on Vladimir Putin, to stand up for Russian democracy. What is so admirable is that the opposition to the Kremlin work with style and panache and a dark sense of humour. And unbelievable courage.
Shot? Nemtsov.
Stabbed? Tasered?
In the spring of 2018 the master of the Kremlin was running to be elected President of Russia, again. Team Navalny were doing their bit to show that the election was a dark farce, at great cost to themselves and, ultimately, their leader.
Even mockery was dangerous. Take the road cleaner who dared to wear a Vladimir Putin mask at opposition demonstrations. Vladimir Ivanyutenko, from St Petersburg, became famous for sporting the mask and a T-shirt with a rude caption which you could translate, politely, as ‘Putin is a plonker’. In December 2017 he was walking to work at six o’clock in the morning when two men attacked him. One man zapped him with a Taser, the second stabbed him twice. They ran off and left him to die in the snow. Yet he survived. Ivanyutenko believed the Russian state was behind the attack. He told me: ‘I can only connect it with my opposition activities. I back the critics of the Putin regime and I think he is a kleptocrat. He is not a legitimate president.’
No one has been charged for the attack on Ivanyutenko. Of course not.
Beaten by silent thugs? In January 2018 Dinar Idrisov was live-streaming Russian police disrupting a Navalny rally. But his live-feed video meant it was child’s play to geo-locate him, whereupon he was attacked by three men. They knocked him to the ground and kicked him in the face, head and torso, keeping silent all the while. He suffered a broken rib, arm and cheekbone, and his face was beaten to a pulp. Idrisov believed the attackers were from Russia’s state security services. Normal thugs yell at you as they hit you, but his silent assailants did not: ‘These people were emotionless.’
No one has been charged for the attack on Idrisov. Of course not.
Hit over the head with an iron bar? Nikolai Lyaskin was a senior aide to Alexei Navalny. In September 2017 he fell to the ground: ‘At first, I actually thought that something had fallen off a roof, maybe the building is collapsing. I turned around and saw a man hit me on the head again with an iron bar.’ After the attack, Lyaskin got a funny peculiar text message: ‘Done.’ The Russian police accused him of setting up the iron-bar attack himself, of paying his assailant to hurt him. Some days after the attack, the police raided the offices where he worked, which so happened to be the HQ of Team Navalny. ‘It was completely absurd. I got hit on my head with an iron bar and they just confiscated all the flyers, all the stickers, all the stuff with Navalny’s name on it from our office.’
No one has been charged for the attack on Lyaskin. Of course not.
Half-blinded? The man who feared for a time that he would lose the sight of an eye, his right one, is Alexei Navalny himself. I first encountered Navalny by Zoom in 2016 when my Russian pal, Roman Borisovich, living in exile in London, put me in touch with Team Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, known by its initials in Russian, FBK. They had made a funny and yet also dark forty-minute video about the then Russian prosecutor-general, Yury Chaika, and his sons. The gist of the film was that Russia’s top law-enforcement official and his sons were in bed with organized crime. If ordinary Russians tried to fight back, they could end up dead. Nick Sturdee and I made a short BBC Newsnight film, using the fact that Chaika means seagull in Russian. Our film opened with a shot of frozen wastes and bleak water, with me holding a chip aloft, to be gobbled up by a diving gull, all to the tune of Stalin’s version of the Soviet national anthem. I intoned to camera: ‘Welcome to Lake Baikal.’ The sound glitched and I came clean: ‘Oh, all right, welcome to Southend-on-Sea.’ Chaika and his sons denied the FBK’s charges, with the then prosecutor-general himself saying on film that the video was ‘a hatchet job’ and that ‘the information presented [had been] deliberately falsified’.
Over Zoom, Navalny told me that Vladimir Putin presided over a Russia rotting from the top: ‘He is the tsar of corruption.’ I came away from the interview impressed by his courage. It was one thing for us to set out these charges from the safety of London, but for Navalny and his team to do it from inside Russia was brave beyond belief.
In the run-up to the 2018 presidential elections everyone knew who was going to win. Any candidate with a chance of beating Vladimir Putin wasn’t in the game. Nemtsov had been shot and killed, Kasyanov sex-shamed, Navalny barred because of a nonsense of a trial featuring absurd evidence from the state, the captive judge mumbling out his lines dictated by the Kremlin.
But Team Navalny caused the Kremlin grief, no question. Navalny’s schtick was a bizarrely clever one, to pretend that Russia was a functioning democracy and act accordingly. In April 2017 he was just outside his office in Moscow when an attacker threw green medical dye, zelyonka in Russian, in his face. The dye is regularly used as a disinfectant, if you’ve grazed your skin for example, and is not toxic. But there was some other substance mixed in the dye, a caustic chemical agent of some kind, and that caused corrosive burning to his right eye. He had to go to Spain for medical treatment and close-up, it’s clear that his damaged eye still looks affected, less mobile than the good one.
