The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep

Highlights

• In 1999, after four apartment buildings in Russia were blown up, killing hundreds of residents in their sleep and providing the pretext for starting the second Chechen war, which brought Vladimir Putin to power, I contended that the bombings were carried out by the FSB, not by Chechen rebels. I also argued that the decision in 2004 by Russian forces to open fire with flamethrowers on the gymnasium of the school in Beslan that had been seized by terrorists, killing 338 hostages, constituted a crime against humanity.

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• Understanding Russia is actually very easy, but one must teach oneself to do something that is very hard—to believe the unbelievable. Westerners become confused because they approach Russia with a Western frame of reference, not realizing that Russia is a universe based on a completely different set of values. If a Westerner takes it for granted that the individual has inherent worth and is not just raw material for the deluded schemes of corrupt political leaders, he may not realize that in Russia this outlook is not widely shared.

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• Russians had been opposed to further involvement in Chechnya, but in the wake of the apartment bombings, sentiment shifted.4 They were now ready for a new Chechen war.

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• Yeltsin’s Russia in the spring of 1999 was a nation traumatized by impoverishment and criminalization, and it was far from certain that the presidential elections set for June 2000 would take place. The popular approval ratings of both Yeltsin and his newly appointed prime minister and heir apparent, Vladimir Putin, were at 2 percent.5 It was nearly inconceivable that anyone connected with Yeltsin could win a free election. But there was a widespread fear that Yeltsin would find a pretext for declaring a state of emergency so that the elections would not take place.

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• For Yeltsin and the reformers, the goal was to reach a “point of no return,” beyond which it would be impossible to restore socialism regardless of the will of the people. Property had to be put into private hands as quickly as possible, and this was done with little regard for who received the property or on what basis. Capitalism was created. But by carrying out the largest peaceful transfer of property in history without the benefit of law, the reformers created the conditions for the criminalization of the whole country. The new society that emerged had three outstanding characteristics: an economy dominated by a criminal oligarchy, an authoritarian political system, and, perhaps most important, a moral degradation that subverted all legal and ethical standards and made real civil society impossible. Their interaction set the stage for Russia’s drift into a regime of aggression and terror.

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• By some estimates, a few people who grasped how the voucher privatization game was played secured a third of the country’s industrial base for $1.2 billion.

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• Russia became a classic third world country, selling raw materials to import consumer goods.

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• The elections were set for March 26. Putin eschewed serious campaigning and avoided even explaining where he stood on the issues facing the country. He won with 54 percent of the vote. The runner-up, communist leader Gennady Zyuganov, got 30 percent. The Russian people had elected someone about whom they knew nothing except that he was avenging the apartment bombings.

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• The Yeltsin years were also a time of widespread faith in mysticism and the paranormal. Without the discredited communist ideology to make sense of what was happening around them, people turned to witches, sorcerers, and fortune-tellers.

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• I turned down Sudostroitelnaya Street, walked past rows of concrete panel apartment blocks, and stopped at a metal notice board full of notes from people seeking accommodation or proposing an exchange. One of the handwritten announcements read: “Are you ill and alone? We are ready to help.” It proposed lifetime care for single persons in difficulty in return for legal ownership of their apartment. The note did not include the name or address of an organization, only a phone number. It included a promise to handle legal formalities and said that many people in the area were already being helped.

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• The area was full of people who lived alone. This was the first time I was exposed to the apartment racket, but I felt intuitively that anyone who agreed to this arrangement was signing his death warrant. I soon learned that my suspicions were not unfounded. The bodies of those who agreed were discovered by the hundreds, perhaps thousands, in forests and garbage dumps all over Russia.

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• Russian citizens during the Yeltsin years experienced the trauma of losing an entire worldview that had given meaning, however falsely, to their lives. In response, the government removed all restrictions on the sale of alcohol. The result was that at a time when the purchasing power of the average Russian was cut in half, his salary in relation to the cost of vodka increased threefold. The era of cheap vodka and the resulting tranquilization of the population lowered resistance to the pillaging of the country, but at a severe cost to the nation’s health.

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• Putin’s intention, however, was to create a system in which the regime exercised total power. In his inaugural address May 7, 2000, he said that “the head of the government was always and will always be the person who answers for everything.” In fact, even under the 1993 Constitution, which created the superpresidency, the president did not answer for everything. Parliament was responsible for making laws, and the courts for the administration of justice.

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• The tax structure in Russia is such that if businesses paid all their taxes, they would not be profitable. As a result, businesses generally do not show their real revenues, a fact that is overlooked in exchange for bribes. Businessmen also pay bribes to get goods through customs, to acquire permits, to avoid fines after inspections, and just to be left alone. The system involves nearly everyone, which means that almost every citizen is vulnerable to facing criminal charges. The best way to avoid this fate is to show loyalty to the authorities.

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• Property began to be seized all over the country through a process known as “raiding.” In a Russian raid, an owner is typically charged with a crime by investigators in the pay of his economic competitors, who are often state officials or their close friends and relatives. The owner is then put in pretrial detention and given a below-market offer for his property. If this is not enough to persuade him to give up his business, a judge, in the pay of the raiders, can issue an order allowing the raiders to take it over.

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• The Dubrovka and Beslan hostage takings changed Russia in ways that were not fully appreciated at the time. Russia remained relatively free. But the KGB-FSB view of the supremacy of the state’s interests and the negligible value of human life was affirmed and legitimized. In each case, a thousand or more hostages were seized by Chechen terrorists. In both instances, the Russian authorities refused to negotiate and acted instead to kill the terrorists as well as hundreds of hostages. And in both cases, there was evidence that the government had a role in instigating the original attacks.

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• Dmitri Medvedev, Putin’s longtime protégé, was elected president in 2008. In this way, Putin ostensibly respected the Constitution, which limited the president to two consecutive terms in office. Medvedev immediately made Putin his prime minister, and power in Russia never really changed hands. Putin loyalists occupied 95 percent of the positions in Medvedev’s government, and Putin continued to be the real source of power. Mikhail Delyagin, the director of the Institute of Globalization, commented that Medvedev “is not capable of running anything, even his own secretariat. Putin chose the most reliable way to stay in power—the complete incompetence of his successor.”

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• The calm of the Putin years masked an underlying lack of confidence, and as the protests continued, observers saw what Elena Panfilova called a “last days of Pompeii syndrome.”19 Nearly everyone who had amassed wealth had done so with political protection, and if the person conferring a monopoly was in danger, so were those who depended on his corrupt support. Leading businessmen and bureaucrats began seeking safe havens, laundering their money, and shipping their assets abroad. This had happened in 2008, when there was uncertainty over whether Putin would run for a third term, but the flight of wealth in the wake of the 2011 protests was three to four times as great. An American lawyer with close connections to the Putin era oligarchs remarked that “the lack of patriotism of the elite is astounding.”

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• In Moscow, the events in Ukraine were seen as a textbook example of the popular overthrow of a kleptocratic ruler that could be duplicated in Russia. The regime in Ukraine was almost identical to what had been created in Russia, with the sole difference being that Ukraine, with a nationalist west and center and a pro-Russian east, was more pluralistic. Under these circumstances, it was essential to the Russian leadership that the Ukrainian revolution be discredited. The regime chose the method traditionally used to distract the Russian population from their rulers’ abuses. They started a war. On February 22, the day after Yanukovych fled Kiev, Russia began planning a special operation to seize the Crimean peninsula, which had been transferred to Ukraine in 1954 by Nikita Khrushchev.

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• Among the false reports intended to stoke nationalist hysteria were the story of a three-year-old boy who was allegedly tortured and crucified by the Ukrainian military in Slaviansk, a report on the raising of the levels of the Lopan and Kharkov rivers so that NATO submarines could reach Donetsk, a report on the cancellation of the May 9 World War II commemoration in Kiev and its replacement by a gay pride parade, a report that the Ukrainians had stopped selling bread to Russian speakers, and a report that Petro Poroshenko, the Ukrainian president, was preparing to make Hitler’s birthday a national holiday.

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• The decision of the Russians to provide the rebels with the Buk-M1 systems led to one of the worst tragedies of the war. On July 17, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down, killing all 298 people aboard. The airliner was flying at thirty-three thousand feet in one of the busiest air transit corridors in the world.86

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• As Russia faces the future, it has three serious problems: a deteriorating economy, a fratricidal war whose cost is almost certain to increase, and a moral disintegration that may leave the regime without defenders if it faces a serious challenge. Taken together these factors are more than sufficient to undermine the system’s stability.

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• It is a measure of the government’s concern that it has cut the price on vodka, despite its need for revenue in light of falling oil prices.12 This is a clear sign that the authorities intend to use vodka to tranquilize the population.

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• Russia has fought from the beginning to discredit the revolution in Ukraine so that it cannot become an example for a similar revolution in Russia.

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• Frederick Douglass wrote that the essence of the slave mentality is the tendency to treat conditions that are abnormal as if they were natural. This describes much of Russian life today. In any Russian city, corruption is so routine and well developed that the participants can easily convince themselves that they are doing nothing wrong.

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