Masha Gessen - The Man Without a Face

At Sobchak’s funeral, held in St. Petersburg on February 24, Putin, sitting with the wife and a daughter of the deceased, appeared genuinely bereft. He was as emotional as Russian television viewers would ever see him. In his only public statement that day, Putin said, “Sobchak’s passing is not just a death but a violent death, the result of persecution.” This was widely understood to mean that Sobchak, unfairly accused of corruption, had succumbed to the stress before his former deputy could fully restore him to the grandeur he deserved.

Back in Paris, Arkady Vaksberg decided to launch his own investigation into his acquaintance’s death. He was never a close friend or even a great fan of the imperious Russian politician, but he was an investigative journalist with actual forensics experience and a great nose for a story. It was Vaksberg who dug up the most puzzling detail of the circumstances of Sobchak’s death: the two bodyguard-assistants, both physically fit young men, had had to be treated for mild symptoms of poisoning following Sobchak’s death. This was a hallmark of contract killings by poisoning: many a secretary or bodyguard had fallen similarly ill when their bosses were killed. In 2007, Vaksberg published a book on the history of political poisonings in the USSR and Russia. In it, he advanced the theory that Sobchak was killed by a poison placed on the electrical bulb of the bedside lamp, so that the substance was heated and vaporized when the lamp was turned on. This was a technique developed in the USSR. A few months after the book was published, Vaksberg’s car was blown up in his Moscow garage; Vaksberg was not in it.

I spent Election Day, March 26, 2000, in Chechnya. I wanted to avoid the entire question of going to the polls in an election I felt was a mockery, following a campaign best described as a travesty. In the course of less than three months since Yeltsin’s resignation, Putin had not made any political pronouncements—and this, he and his spin people seemed to think, was a virtue: he felt that dancing for his votes was beneath him. His campaign had consisted essentially of the book that put forward his vision of himself as a thug, in addition to a turn at piloting a fighter plane amid much press attention, landing it at Grozny airport a week before the election. His entire political message seemed to be: “Don’t mess with me.”

So I accepted an invitation, extended by the military press office, to cover the voting from Chechnya. I knew I would have little opportunity to move around and that I would have Russian officers monitoring my every move, but I figured I would get some idea of the state of a place I had known fairly well; I had last been in Chechnya about three years earlier, soon after the cease-fire agreement had taken hold.

Grozny had been a city of nearly a million people before the first war, at least half a million after it was over. I was reasonably familiar with Grozny’s geography: it was a manageable-size city, with a few hills and identifiable neighborhoods, most with enough high-rise buildings to allow one to get one’s bearings. Soon after the bombing of the city during the first war, some European observers had compared it to Dresden, the German city bombed into oblivion by the British and Americans toward the end of World War II. I had felt it was a fair comparison—and yet, Grozny had retained its basic landscape.

Now it was gone. I could see no high-rise buildings. I could not identify any monuments, though there had been many. Every part of the city looked the same and smelled the same: burning flesh and concrete dust. It was horribly, deafeningly quiet. I obsessively took in the signs, the only reminder of human life and human communication in the city: CAFÉ; INTERNET; AUTO PARTS; PEOPLE LIVE HERE. The last was the wording of signs people had put up as they returned to their homes after the last war, hoping to prevent looting and shooting.

A dozen loudspeakers had been mounted around what used to be a city, as audible markers of polling stations or of soup kitchens set up by the federal Ministry for Emergencies. People, mostly women, walked the streets in twos and threes, silently moving toward the sound coming from the nearest speaker, surely hoping to find a soup kitchen rather than a polling station.

We journalists were escorted by our military guides to one of the nine polling stations. We arrived around noon to find a crowd of people, again mostly women, who had been there since sunrise. They had come in hopes of receiving humanitarian aid: either someone had promised them food and clothing would be distributed at polling stations, or it was simply a rumor that had brought them there. DEMOCRACY IS DICTATORSHIP OF THE LAW, the sign over the entrance to the small building proclaimed, quoting an oxymoronic pronouncement of Putin’s in direct violation of election law. There was no humanitarian aid in sight.

An old woman came up to me and asked me to write that she had been reduced to living in the street.

“Did you vote?” I asked her.

“I voted,” she responded.

“Who did you vote for?”

“I don’t know,” she responded simply. “I can’t read. I had a ballot and I put it in.”

Hours later, at a polling station in a different part of town, I saw some people approaching from a distance. I ran to them before my handlers could stop me, in the hopes of catching some Grozny residents outside the polling station. They turned out to be three people, two of them very old, whom I had seen at the first polling place. All three were dragging empty carts behind them. They told me that after the bus with the journalists left, local officials told them there would be no humanitarian aid; they had spent hours walking back to what had been their homes.

Using my brief moments out of sight of the handlers, I tried to ask these people why they had returned to Grozny. The old couple directed the younger woman to tell me her story. She tried to resist, saying, “What is the point of talking about it?” but in the end did not dare disobey her elders. “We came back to get our relatives’ bodies. They took us to them. They were all tied up with wire. But there is one head they never found.” Eight members of her family had been among the thousands detained and then summarily executed by Russian troops. The woman and her immediate relatives had left Grozny months before, and stayed with relatives in a small village. The eight relatives had not had the money to leave the city: every time one passed through a checkpoint set up by the Russian troops, one had to pay. As we talked, another woman approached us with two of her nieces in tow, a pale eight-year-old and a surly teenager. “Their father was killed in the shelling,” she said. “Their mother couldn’t take it and died, and their grandmother died too. The girls buried them in the yard. We dug the father up yesterday, washed the body, but the men are scared to go outside to bury him, so he is just lying there at home.” She asked the teenager to confirm her story, but the girl started crying and stepped away from our group.

These people told me they had voted for a human-rights activist whose final tally was in such low single digits that most media outlets did not even mention her. But I saw a lot of Putin voters among the Chechens too. “I’m sick of war,” a middle-aged man in Grozny told me. “I am sick of being passed on, like a baton, from one gang of thugs to the next.” I looked around: we were in an area of Grozny that had consisted mostly of private homes; now there were only metal fences separating one ghost property from another. “Wasn’t it Putin who did this?” I asked.