Masha Gessen - The Man Without a Face

This was what Revenko had called “effectively delivering the government’s message.” Local officials got the message clearly and conducted elections in accordance with it.

SEPTEMBER 1 IN RUSSIA is called Knowledge Day: all elementary, secondary, and high schools all over the country begin the year simultaneously. The first day of school is a rather ceremonial occasion: children, especially first-graders and eleventh-graders (the graduating class), arrive dressed up, bearing flowers, and usually accompanied by their parents. There are speeches, greetings, occasional concerts, collective prayers, and festive processions.

In the summer of 2000—the summer when I had had to briefly leave the country after Gusinsky was arrested—I had adopted a child, a little boy named Vova (eleven months later, I also gave birth to a girl). On September 1, 2004, I took Vova to his first day of classes in first grade. He looked very serious in a blue button-down shirt that kept coming untucked. He gave his new teacher a bouquet of flowers, we listened to the speeches, and the children went inside the school. I got in my car for the long drive to work: Knowledge Day is among the worst traffic days of the year. I turned on the radio and heard the news: a group of armed men had taken several hundred children and their parents hostage at a school in North Ossetia.

Even though I coordinated coverage of the story from Moscow—I was now deputy editor at a new city weekly—in the following three days I did some of the most difficult work of my life. The three-day standoff in the town of Beslan, full of fear, confusion, and several moments of acute hope, culminated with federal troops storming the school building; more than three hundred people died. On the afternoon of September 1, when I came to work, I had said to my colleagues, all of whom were younger and less experienced in covering these sorts of stories: “There will be a storming of the building. There is always a storming.” But when it happened, I sat at my desk, hiding my face in my hands, crying. When I finally took my hands away from my face, I found a can of Coke one of my younger colleagues had placed in front of me in an attempt at consolation.

The following weekend, my family and the family of my closest friend huddled together at my dacha. When their eight-year-old daughter briefly stepped out of the front yard, all four of us adults went into a panic. I had the distinct sense that the entire country was similarly traumatized.

It was this shell-shocked nation that Putin addressed, after a fashion, on September 13, 2004. He gathered the cabinet, his own staff, and all eighty-nine governors together, and spoke with them behind closed doors for two hours. The text of his speech was then distributed to journalists.

“One cannot but weep when talking about what happened in Beslan,” the speech went. “One cannot but weep just thinking about it. But compassion, tears, and words on the part of the government are absolutely insufficient. We have to act, we have to increase the effectiveness of the government in combating the entire complex of problems facing the country…. I am convinced that the unity of the country is the main condition of success in the fight against terrorism.”

From now on, he announced, governors would no longer be elected; he himself would appoint them and the mayor of Moscow. Nor would members of the lower house of the parliament be directly elected, as half of them had been. Now Russian citizens would cast their votes in favor of political parties, which would then fill their seats with ranking members. The new procedure for registering political parties made the new procedure for registering presidential candidates seem quaint in comparison. All political parties now had to re-register, which meant most would be eliminated. The threshold for getting a share of the seats in the parliament would be raised from 5 percent of the vote to 7 percent. And, finally, proposed legislation would now pass through a filter before entering the lower house: the president would personally appoint a so-called public chamber to review all bills.

After these changes became law, as they did at the end of 2004, there remained only one federal-level public official who was directly elected: the president himself.

IN THE SPRING OF 2005, one of the world’s most famous Russians declared war on Putin. Garry Kasparov, the chess champion, the top-ranked chess player of all time and also a longtime low-profile political activist, held a press conference to announce he was retiring from chess to take on the job of restoring Russian democracy. He seemed to have what it might take: fame, money, a relentlessly logical mind combined with oratorical ability that allowed him to make politics make sense to many different kinds of people, and the stamina to campaign nonstop. He spent the summer of 2005 on the stump, and I joined him for a portion of his journey.

In Beslan, the site of the previous year’s hostage crisis, Kasparov spent an hour and a half at the cemetery. The New Cemetery, as the locals called it, was a field divided into 330 rectangular plots designed to look identical, though workmen were still laboring every day to cut the granite boxes to frame the graves, cover them with gravel, and place pink granite slabs over them. The plots at the front of the cemetery had been completed, and parents or other relatives had pasted color photographs of the dead children on the stones. Other than that, the only difference among the plots was the size: there were singles, doubles, and triples, and several family graves that included the mother and three or four children, or two sisters and their five children. There were bottles of water, soda, or juice on all the graves: it had become a Beslan tradition to bring open drink bottles for relatives, who had suffered from dehydration before dying. Kasparov paused at every grave, reading the names and the birth and death dates (though every single person buried there was killed on September 3, 2004), and leaned down to place on each grave a red carnation from a box carried by one of his bodyguards. The pace of the visit was like that of a politician moving through a receiving line of voters, except there was no flesh to press.

Then Kasparov went to a house of culture—a sort of all-purpose meeting and entertainment building that exists in every Russian town—where he was scheduled to give a talk. The house of culture was locked up, but about fifty people had gathered on its concrete porch. Many of them were women wearing black dresses and kerchiefs—women in mourning, or, as they had become known all over Russia, the “Mothers of Beslan.” They had been the driving force behind an effort to turn the ongoing trial of the single surviving hostage-taker into a full-fledged investigation of what happened at the school. Increasingly, they had come to believe that the responsibility for the deaths of their children lay with federal troops, which concentrated on killing the hostage-takers rather than freeing the hostages—and killed both the captors and the hostages as a result.

“It’s lies that killed your children,” said Kasparov, addressing the women in black. During the crisis, officials claimed there were 354 hostages in the school. In fact, there were more than a thousand. Former hostages had testified that when their captors, who were watching TV in the teachers’ hall, saw the figure 354, they concluded that the government was laying the groundwork for a storming of the building by underestimating the number of potential casualties. It was then, hostages had said, that the hostage-takers stopped giving them water. Other contested official claims included the assertion that the hostage-takers never advanced any demands—while witnesses claimed there was at least one videotape and one letter containing demands that could have led to negotiations. “It’s lies that form the foundation of this regime,” Kasparov continued. “If the court case here is stifled, if you allow the investigation to wither, then Beslan will happen all over again. I don’t want to be in power myself, but I want those who are in power to tell me the truth. I’d force those lowlifes to come here and walk around the entire cemetery.” He had tears in his eyes. “I want them to see what their lies led to. Lies!”