Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy

We currently have two kinds of war criminals in Russia. The crimes of both relate to the second Chechen war, which began in August 1999 just as Vladimir Putin was appointed prime minister. The war—a feature of his first presidential term—continues to this day.

All the war-crimes prosecutions that have occurred have had one common attribute: their outcome has been determined on ideological rather than on legal grounds. Inter arma silent leges: In time of war, the laws are silent. Those found guilty have been sentenced, not after due process but in accordance with the ideological winds blowing from the Kremlin.

The first kind of war criminal is someone who was, in fact, involved in military conflict—for example, an army soldier engaged in the “antiterrorist operation” in Chechnya, or a Chechen fighter who opposed the army. The former is always cleared of his crime; the latter, treated with scant regard for the law, is charged with a crime. The former is acquitted by the judicial system even where there is manifest proof of guilt (which is rare, since the prosecutor’s office usually makes no attempt to collect evidence). The latter is given the severest sentence possible.

The best-known federal case is that of Colonel Yury Budanov, commanding officer of the 160th Tank Regiment. On March 26, 2000, the day Putin was elected president, Budanov abducted, raped, and murdered an eighteen-year-old Chechen girl, Elza Kungaeva, who lived with her parents in the village of Tangi-Chu, on the outskirts of which Budanov’s regiment was temporarily deployed. We’ll examine Budanov’s experiences later in this chapter.

The best-known Chechen case is that of Salman Raduev. Raduev was a renowned Chechen field commander, a brigadier who had been carrying out terrorist raids since the first Chechen war, when he had commanded what was known as the army of General Dudaev. Raduev was caught in 2001, sentenced to life imprisonment, and died in mysterious circumstances in Solikamsk high-security prison. Solikamsk is an infamous prison city, nestled among salt mines in Perm Province, in the Urals, a place of exile since czarist times. Raduev was a symbol of those fighting for Chechen freedom from Russia. There are many cases like his; as a rule, they are heard behind closed doors, to conceal information from the public. The need for such hush-hush activity is often obscure. Occasionally it is possible, with great difficulty and in great secrecy, to obtain the court records of cases brought against Chechen fighters. The accused are usually found guilty; no time is wasted on the collection and consideration of evidence.

Thus, no one in the first category of accused war criminals, whether federal or Chechen, gets a fair trial. After sentencing, Chechen fighters are sent off to remote labor camps and prisons and do not survive for long. Opinion polls show that even those who support the government’s war in Chechnya believe these prisoners are “gotten rid of” at the behest of the authorities. Almost nobody in Russia believes that the judicial system is fair, while almost everybody believes that the judiciary is subordinate to the executive branch.

Then there is the second kind of war criminal: the individual who is in the wrong place at the wrong time, someone run over by the juggernaut of history—not a soldier on either side but a Chechen who becomes a convenient scapegoat. A typical case is that of Islam Hasuhanov. Everything about his story is redolent of Stalin’s purges. Witness statements are beaten out of people; torture and pyschotropic drugs are used to break the will of the accused. This is the hellish path traveled by the majority of Chechens who have found themselves in the torture chambers not only of the FSB but of all the other security agencies rampaging in Chechnya. Individuals were tortured by the henchmen of the late Ahmat-Hadji Kadyrov, who, until his assassination, was head of the pro-Moscow Chechen puppet government; they are tortured in the military commandant’s posts, in pits on the territory of army units, in solitary-confinement cells at police stations.

All these practices are coordinated and managed by the FSB. These are Putin’s people, they enjoy Putin’s support, and they carry out Putin’s policies.

STALIN WILL ALWAYS BE WITH US

Islam Sheikh-Ahmedovich Hasuhanov was born in 1954 in Kirghizia. Beginning in 1973, he served in the Soviet army. He graduated from the Kiev Higher Naval Political College, and in the 1980s served in the Baltic Fleet, and from 1989 in the Pacific Fleet. In 1991 he graduated from the Lenin Political Military Academy, in Moscow. As a submarine officer who had graduated from a military academy, Hasuhanov would have been regarded as the elite of the Russian navy. He retired to the reserves in 1998, with the rank of captain first class, from the position of deputy commander of a B-251 nuclear submarine. From 1998 he lived in Grozny, where he was head of the Military Inspectorate in the government of Aslan Maskhadov and head of Maskhadov’s operational staff. He is married to Maskhadov’s niece, his second wife, and has two sons. Hasuhanov took no active part in the first or the second Chechen war and was never in hiding from the federal authorities. Arrested on April 20, 2002, in the district center of Shali by special units of the FSB as an “international terrorist” and “one of the organizers of illegal armed formations [IAFs],” he was sentenced by the Supreme Court of the republic of North Ossetia-Alaniya to twelve years’ detention in a strict-regime labor camp.

What happens to a man after he is picked up by the FSB? Not the Cheka of 1937, not the Cheka of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the Gulag, but the one funded by today’s taxpayers? Nobody has any hard facts, but everybody is frightened, just as people used to be.

And just as under the Soviet regime, only rarely does any information get out. One of those rare instances is the case of Islam Hasuhanov.

According to the file of Criminal Case No. 56/17, Islam Hasuhanov was arrested on April 27, 2002, on Mayakovsky Street in Shali, and charged under Article 222 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation with “being in possession of and bearing firearms.” The wording would lead one to expect some evidence of the alleged weapons.

In fact, armed individuals wearing masks, as is usual in Chechnya, burst at dawn into the house of Hasuhanov’s relatives, where he was living with his family. They dragged him off to an unknown destination without bothering to plant any firearms on him; he had none of his own. The federal special units operating in Chechnya in the search for “international terrorists” have long been confident that they can behave, no matter how despicably, with impunity. This time they were acting on a tip-off from an informer, and had no doubt they were picking up one of the leaders of an IAF whose fate was already sealed. As he would not be surviving, no pistol, no assault rifle was registered as material evidence.

The charge under Article 222 was allowed to stand anyway. The false date of April 27 was also left intact. Missing weeks are characteristic of the antiterrorist operation in Chechnya. A man is arrested and goes missing. The first seven days of his detention are the most brutal. No organization is responsible for him; none of the security agencies admits to knowing anything about him. His relatives search desperately, but it is as if he does not exist. It is during this time that the intelligence services beat everything they need out of him.

Hasuhanov has barely any recollection of the period between April 20 and 27. Beatings, injections, more beatings, more injections. Nothing beyond that. The record of the court hearing ten months after that terrible week states: “For the first seven days I was held in the FSB building in Shali, where I was beaten. Dating from that time I have 14 broken ribs, one rib in my kidney.”

What did the authorities want to get out of Hasuhanov before he died from his injuries? They demanded that he lead them to Maskhadov.[3] After that he could die. The trouble was, Hasuhanov didn’t take them to Maskhadov, and with the robust good health of a submarine officer, he didn’t die, either.

On April 30 it was decided to formalize the case against him. He was dragged off (the public prosecutor of Chechnya at the time was Alexander Nikitin) to a temporary interrogation unit in another Chechen district center, Znamenskaya. This village was blasted from the face of the earth by a female suicide bomber on May 12, 2003. Afterward there was general satisfaction in Chechnya, where most people felt that justice had been done at last. How many people had been tortured there and were secretly buried in the area?

When Hasuhanov arrived in Znamenskaya, he looked like death. His body resembled a sack, but he was breathing. The torture continued under the supervision of Lieutenant Colonel Anatoly Cherepnev, deputy head of the investigative section of the directorate of the FSB for Chechnya. Cherepnev was to be the main investigator in the Hasuhanov case, deciding on the level of torture and directing the process to obtain the required evidence.

From the court record:

Hasuhanov could not lead his questioners to Maskhadov because he had last seen him in 2000 and subsequently had contact with him only on audiocassettes. When necessary, Maskhadov would record one and send it to Hasuhanov by courier. Occasionally Hasuhanov would reply. One of the couriers had become an FSB informer. The last time before his arrest that Hasuhanov had received a cassette was in January 2002, and he had replied two days earlier. On the tapes, Maskhadov usually asked Hasuhanov, apparently for the record, to confirm how much money he, Maskhadov, had transferred to which field commanders. We shall see why Maskhadov was interested in this subject.

Let us turn to the submarine. Its story deserves to be told in some detail. As noted earlier, Hasuhanov had been a high-ranking submarine officer before retiring. He was the only Chechen who ever became an officer in the nuclear submarine fleet, in either Soviet or post-Soviet times. Accordingly, Lieutenant Colonel Cherepnev set about trying to incriminate him in the “planning of an IAF to hijack a nuclear submarine, gain possession of a nuclear warhead, seize Deputies of the State Duma as hostages, demand changes to the constitutional system of the Russian Federation by threatening to use a nuclear warhead and to kill hostages.” This is a quotation from a form returned by Cherepnev to the public prosecutor’s office in Chechnya with a request for permission to continue the detention of Hasuhanov. The request was not refused.

Cherepnev did his utmost to incriminate Hasuhanov, but the results were unspectacular. Hasuhanov would not, and indeed could not, give in. In 1992 he himself had “built,” as they say in the navy, the very submarine Cherepnev was accusing him of planning to hijack. Hasuhanov had monitored the submarine’s construction, knowing that he would be serving on it. Thus he had supervised the project on behalf of its future crew.

Cherepnev worked hard on the story of the submarine hijacking. The FSB forged documents supposedly written by Chechen fighters on the basis of intelligence supplied by Hasuhanov. There was a “Working Plan of Chechen IAFs for carrying out an act of sabotage on the territory of the Russian Federation and hand-drawn maps of the bases of 4 Nuclear Submarine Flotilla of the Pacific Fleet” and a “Plan for conducting a terrorist act on the territory of Russia.” There was a helpful note added to the effect that “detailed planning of the operation was carried out on the basis of visual and reconnaissance intelligence of the region of interest to us during December 1995.” It was under these words that Hasuhanov was meant to place his signature.

The trouble was, the authorities could not get him to sign. The FSB set about beating him more ingeniously, although there was little they hadn’t already tried. Now, however, they were punishing him for disrupting their plans.

The only things Cherepnev ever got Hasuhanov to sign (“endorse” was the term used in the verdict), out of his mind from a combination of pain and psychotropic drugs, were blank sheets of “orders and operational instructions of Maskhadov.” Cherepnev wrote in whatever it seemed would go down well. Here is an example of one such fabrication:

Cherepnev also demanded that Hasuhanov sign the minutes of his interrogations without reading them. Here is an example of their quality:

This document is typical of the army’s literary style. For a month Hasuhanov was tortured in Znamenskaya so that material of this caliber could be accumulated.

From the court record:

What timber mill is this? Mention is occasionally made of it in stories about people who have vanished without a trace after purges in Chechnya. Some who have been there and survived call it a lumber camp, a term from Stalin’s times; others call it a timber mill. Its official title is Enterprise No. YaN 68—1, and it comes under the administration of the Ministry of Justice of the Republic of North Ossetia.

What we do know about the timber mill is that it is the destination of people who have been beaten half to death by officers of the law-enforcement agencies (primarily FSB agents). The enterprise closes its eyes to the fact that these individuals have no identification documents. They are nonpersons who have vanished without a trace after their encounter with the feds.

We owe a debt of gratitude to those who work at the timber mill for illegally accepting the outlawed into their enterprise. They have saved many from certain death: those who were supposed to die but whom the feds simply couldn’t be bothered to shoot as they were brought from Chechnya to Ossetia, and those who were sent to the mill to die without the FSB getting its hands dirty. Nobody knows how many people have died there in the course of the second Chechen war or who they were. They have left behind not so much as a grave mound. On the other hand, we do know how many survived. Hasuhanov is one of these. A guard took pity on him, no more than that, and every time the man was on duty he would bring Hasuhanov milk from his home.

Hasuhanov thus survived yet again, and yet again found himself facing Cherepnev. In the Chechen directorate of the FSB, there is a rule that anyone who survives interrogation is put on trial. Not many do, and hence trials of “international terrorists” are few and far between. Nevertheless, for the sake of expediency, at least, some trials are held: within the antiterrorist operation, it is thought desirable to sentence the occasional “terrorist.” Western leaders ask Putin questions from time to time; he demands information from the FSB and the prosecutor general’s office, and they do their best to oblige. Only, of course, when someone survives.

Vladikavkaz is the capital of the republic of North Ossetia—Alaniya, which borders on Chechnya and Ingushetia. Ossetia, too, is a fully paid-up member of the antiterrorist operation. Mozdok, in North Ossetia, is the main military base where federal groups are formed before being sent to Chechnya. It was the scene of two major suicide bombings in 2003: on June 5 a woman got on a bus transporting military pilots and blew herself up and on August 1 a man crashed a truck loaded with a ton of explosives into a military hospital.

In Vladikavkaz, the traditional setting for many fabricated court cases against international terrorists, the local lawyers act less as counsels for the defense than as functionaries in close liaison with the court, the FSB, and the prosecutor’s office. Vladikavkaz is also where agents of the Chechen directorate of the FSB often have extended tours of duty, preferring to bring their victims there to interrogate them, as far away from the war as possible.

Cherepnev now went to Hasuhanov in Vladikavkaz and found him a lawyer. Since June 1, 2003, Russia has had a progressive code of criminal procedure in conformity with the highest European standards. Among other things, it prohibits interrogating a suspect without a lawyer being present, but of course, “when necessary,” everything continues as before. In any case, from April 20 until October 9, 2002, for almost six months, Hasuhanov had no legal representation at all. Not until his skull had healed over and his fractured ribs and broken hands had recovered at the timber mill could he be readied for a court appearance.

Here again, the details are of interest. On October 8, Cherepnev summoned Hasuhanov to an interrogation and instructed him to address an application to him. Cherepnev dictated the following: “I request you to provide me with a lawyer for the preliminary investigation. Up to the present time, I have had no need of the services of a lawyer, and in this connection I have no complaints against the investigative services. I request you to appoint an advocate chosen at the investigator’s discretion….” On October 9, then, Hasuhanov had his first interrogation in the presence of a Vladikavkaz legal-aid attorney. Hasuhanov suspected the attorney was an FSB agent.[4] The lawyer did nothing to cause him to change his mind. He gave Hasuhanov no advice, sat passively at the interrogations, and said nothing.

From the court record:

In all, Hasuhanov had three such interrogations in the presence of a defense lawyer, on October 9, 23, and 24, 2002. More precisely, in the course of these three days, Cherepnev simply copied the testimony beaten out of the defendant in Znamenskaya onto new forms, which became “testimony in accordance with the code of criminal procedure.”

Cherepnev declared that October 25 would be the final day of the investigation. He informed Hasuhanov that he would shortly receive the text of the indictment and that he was to sign it as quickly as possible. So that he should have no illusions. Hasuhanov was taken from the solitary-confinement unit for two days, October 29 and 30—naturally, without a lawyer. He did not know where he was being taken. He had a hood put over his head and was led out as if to be executed. “That’s it, the end,” the guards said, cocking their rifles.

His execution was a hoax, designed to frighten him into signing the indictment.

Of course he signed. But he remained unbroken, and at the trial he retracted everything on which the indictment was based. The indictment was nonetheless confirmed by the new prosecutor of Chechnya, Vladimir Kravchenko, and the text migrated, virtually intact, into the verdict of Judge Valerii Dzhioyev.

Here are quotations from both the indictment and the verdict, with my comments. It is easy to see how criminal cases are fabricated, and also that none of the counterfeiters are the least bit worried about being exposed or about the fact that these records will remain as the raw material of history (which, in accordance with Russian tradition, will surely be rewritten in the course of time).

After retiring, Hasuhanov had returned home to Grozny. Unique in being a Chechen officer with an academic education, he was invited by Maskhadov to work in the Chechen government, which, in 1999, was the official republican government, financed from Moscow, and Maskhadov was the lawfully elected president of Chechnya, recognized by Moscow. The “Military Audit” that Maskhadov invited Hasuhanov to join was an urgent requirement. The Chechen bureaucracy was shamelessly corrupt, as indeed were the bureaucrats in Moscow, and the republican government needed a knowledgeable person to monitor the flow of military funds, in particular those coming from the Russian Federal Treasury. What kind of IAF is that?

From the court record:

Hasuhanov’s work before the war did indeed include the inspection of finances and administration as well as the setting up of a system to audit and monitor the financial resources allocated for maintaining the security services of Chechnya: the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the national and presidential guards, and the army’s staff headquarters. In the summer of 1999, Hasuhanov established that considerable sums of money were passing through staff headquarters for the purchase of weaponry and uniforms but that, for example, the rocket launchers the Ministry of Defense was ordering from the Grozny Red Hammer Factory were known to be militarily useless. This was a blatant misappropriation of funds, as was the purchase of uniforms. They were being sewn in the Chechen town of Gudremes at a price of sixty rubles per outfit, but the accompanying documentation stated that they were “made in the Baltic States” at a higher price.

Hasuhanov reported all this to Maskhadov, and the director of the military audit office immediately ran into trouble with the president’s security forces, who were involved in all phases of the embezzlement. After Hasuhanov had worked in the military audit office for just a week, Maskhadov appointed him chief of staff, simply because he needed honest people around him.

It was the end of July 1999. Chief of Staff Hasuhanov began work in August, a few days before the start of the second Chechen war, in which he refused to take part.

As you read the record of the court hearings (which took place behind closed doors), you cannot help feeling that the trial was a put-up job. Someone had decided that Hasuhanov had to be sent down for a very serious offense, but no one would characterize that offense. Had Hasuhanov, back in 1999, found out something that came back to haunt him three or four years later? Was it the secret of those embezzled federal funds? There is even some suspicion that the fraud itself was, to a large extent, the reason the second Chechen war was started, perhaps a war to ensure that the tracks of the wrongdoers would be covered forever. And is this a reason why the upper echelons of Russia’s armed forces are still so set against peace negotiations?

Here is a further quote from the indictment:

The charge would be laughable if we did not know the price exacted from Hasuhanov for this brazen falsification of history by the forces of the FSB.

From the record of the court hearing:

In front of me I have documents marked OFFICIAL USE ONLY. When he was preparing the court case, Cherepnev sent out inquiries to every local FSB department in Chechnya requesting information on terrorist acts committed in its district on “combat instructions from Chief of the Operational Headquarters of the Armed Forces of the CRI Hasuhanov.” Recall the “combat instructions” Hasuhanov signed during his interrogation: blank sheets of paper, on which Cherepnev then wrote in whatever he wanted. Not surprisingly, every local department head replied that Hasuhanov was not wanted for any terrorist acts. These responses came back to Cherepnev not from Chechen fighters but from his own people.

The negative feedback did not, however, halt the machinery that was to proclaim the guilt of “a leading member of the IAF,” as Hasuhanov, after he had survived, now began to be called. The court paid not the slightest attention to this pile of papers for OFFICIAL USE ONLY, and neither did the prosecutor general’s office.

The Hasuhanov case was heard behind closed doors and at great speed, from January 14 to February 25, 2003, in the Supreme Court of the Republic of North Ossetia—Alaniya, Judge Valerii Dzhioyev presiding. The court found nothing untoward—not in the fact that the accused had had no access to a lawyer for six months, or that the lawyer invited to act on his behalf had been chosen by those who had been beating his client, or that there was no information on the whereabouts of the accused between April 20 and 27. The court noted that he had been tortured but had no comment to make on the subject. Here is a quote from the verdict:

The court passed over this detail, since the torturers had failed to identify themselves to their victim. It even refused to commission a medical report, despite the fact that the accused had a dent in his skull. The court confined itself to asking Tebloev, the director of the timber factory, whether Hasuhanov had stayed in his hospital section. He replied, “Yes. He was there from May 3 until September 2002 with a broken rib cage.” The court took this information in stride. To quote again from the verdict:

Was that it?

Yes, that was it. The sentence was twelve years in a strict-regime labor camp without eligibility for amnesty. The prisoner’s final comment was, “I wish to state that I have no intention of repudiating my beliefs. I consider what is going on in Chechnya to be a flagrant violation of people’s rights. Nobody makes any attempt to catch the real criminals. While the present situation continues, there will be many more people like me in the dock.”

THE SHROUD OF darkness from which we spent several decades during the Soviet era trying to free ourselves is enveloping us again. More and more stories are heard of the FSB using torture to fabricate cases to suit its ideological needs, implicating the courts and the prosecutor’s office as its accomplices. This practice is now the rule rather than the exception. We can no longer pretend that the occurrences are random.

The implication is that our constitution is on its deathbed, in spite of the guarantees intended to safeguard it, and the FSB is in charge of the funeral arrangements.

When I learned that Hasuhanov had been brought to the notorious Krasnaya Presnya transit prison in Moscow, a kind of distribution center from which those already sentenced are sent off in convoys to other parts of the country, I rang the Moscow office of the International Red Cross. Those who work there are among the few people allowed to visit particular prisoners. I called because I knew that after the torture Hasuhanov had endured, he was in poor health indeed. I asked the agency to visit him in Krasnaya Presnya, to provide him with medicine, to ask the prison authorities to ensure that he received treatment, and to get their consent for regular visits.

A week passed, during which the Moscow office of the IRC considered my appeal. Then the charity rejected the request, mumbling something about the situation being “very complicated.”[5]

THE PRECEDENT OF COLONEL BUDANOV

On July 25, 2003, in a North Caucasus district military court in Rostov-on-Don, sentence was finally passed on Yury Budanov, a combatant in the first and second Chechen wars and recipient of two Orders of Valor. He was sentenced to ten years in a strict-regime labor camp for crimes committed in Chechnya in the course of the second war. He had abducted a Chechen girl, Elza Kungaeva, and murdered her in an exceptionally brutal manner. The court further resolved to strip Budanov of his rank and state awards.

As noted earlier, the Budanov case began on March 26, 2000, the day Putin was elected president; it continued for more than three years. It became a test for all of us, from the Kremlin down to the smallest villages. We tried to make sense of the soldiers and officers who, every day, had murdered, robbed, tortured, and raped in Chechnya. Were they thugs and war criminals? Or were they unflinching champions in a global war against international terror, using all the weapons at their disposal, a noble aim justifying their despicable means? The Budanov case became highly politicized, turning into a symbol of our time. Among the Russian people, many crucial events that happened in those three years, in Russia and elsewhere, were seen in the light of this case: September 11, 2001, in the United States; the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; the creation of an international antiterrorist coalition; terrorist acts in Russia; the seizing of hostages in Moscow in October 2002; the endless succession of Chechen women blowing themselves up; and the Palestinization of the second Chechen war.

This striking, tragic case brought our difficulties into the open. Most important, it revealed the changes that the Russian justice system has experienced under Putin and as a result of the war. The legal reform that the democrats had tried to implement and that Yeltsin had done all he could to promote collapsed under the pressure of the Budanov case; for over three years we were treated to a demonstration of the fact that we did not have an independent judiciary. Instead, the judicial system took its marching orders from the Kremlin. Moreover, we discovered that a majority of the population saw nothing out of the ordinary in this state of affairs. Today’s Russian, brainwashed by propaganda, has largely reverted to Bolshevik thinking.

On July 25, Kungaeva’s parents—who, more than most, understood what was going on—did not even bother to attend the court. They were certain the man who had butchered their daughter would be acquitted.

But then a miracle occurred, both a miracle and a courageous act by Judge Vladimir Bukreev. The judge dared to find Budanov guilty and, furthermore, to sentence him to a far-from-token period of detention. Bukreev thereby set himself against the military establishment, which had been actively working on Budanov’s behalf. The military courts come under the jurisdiction of the armed forces, whose commander in chief is the president. Yet, despite immense pressure from the Kremlin and the Ministry of Defense, Bukreev decided that Budanov should receive the sentence he merited. In the process, however, the judge showed beyond a doubt that the judicial system is fully in thrall to the politicians.

To dispel the myths surrounding the Budanov case, I will quote from the indictment. Despite the dry language of the prosecutor’s office, the following excerpts testify more eloquently to the climate of the second Chechen war than many journalists could. They convey the situation in units deployed in the “Zone of Antiterrorist Operations,” where anarchy rules. Lawlessness was the ultimate cause of the crimes committed by Yury Budanov, colonel of a tank regiment and commander of an elite army unit, a graduate of the military academy who had been awarded the country’s highest honors for his distinguished service.

There is a rule in the Russian armed forces that serving personnel can be arrested only with the permission of their superior officers. For Budanov, only General Gerasimov had this status. Accordingly, we are obliged to Gerasimov for the fact that there ever was a Budanov case. The majority of commanding officers in Chechnya do not give the prosecutor’s office permission to arrest those under their command who have committed war crimes and go to great lengths to protect them. Given the situation in the Zone of Antiterrorist Operations, Gerasimov’s act must be regarded as very courageous. It could well have cost him his career. Perhaps because the affair became a major focus of public attention, the general was not punished. Indeed, Gerasimov was appointed commander of the Fifty-eighth Army, a significant promotion. The indictment continues:

After his arrest, Budanov was taken to Hankala [the main military base in Chechnya]. On that same evening, the driver of the APC who had driven Budanov to the village admitted that on the night of March 27, they had brought a girl back and dragged her into Budanov’s quarters. Some two hours later, Budanov had summoned them. The girl was dead. Budanov had ordered them to take the body and bury it.

On the morning of March 28, the body was exhumed, taken to the Medical and Sanitary Battalion, medically examined, washed, and returned to the parents.

When interviewed as a witness, Igor Vladimirovich Grigoriev testified that on March 27, 2000, when they returned to the unit, Budanov ordered them to carry the girl, wrapped in a blanket, into his quarters and themselves to stand guard…. Budanov remained in his quarters with the girl. Some ten minutes after they had left the quarters, a woman’s cries were heard coming from within, and Budanov’s voice was also heard. Then music was heard coming from the accommodation. A woman’s screams were heard for some time more, coming from the same place.

Budanov was together with the girl in his quarters for between one and a half and two hours. Some two hours later, Budanov called all three of them into his quarters, where the woman they had brought was lying naked on the bed. Her face was a bluish color. The blanket they had wrapped the girl in was spread on the floor. Her clothing was lying on it in a heap. Budanov ordered them to take the woman away and bury her in secret…. Wrapping the body in the blanket, they drove the girl away in APC No. 391 and buried the body. Grigoriev reported this back to Budanov on the morning of March 27.

Interviewed on October 17, 2000, Grigoriev elaborated that ten to twenty minutes after their leaving Budanov’s quarters, Budanov began shouting. What, exactly, he did not hear. There were also several screams from the girl, screams indicative of fear. When, at Budanov’s summons, they entered his quarters, they saw the girl lying naked on the camp bed without signs of life…. The girl had bruises to her neck, as if she had been strangled. Pointing to her, Budanov said with a strange expression on his face, “That’s for you, you bitch, for Razmakhnin and the boys who died up that mountain.”

The examination of Kungaeva’s body revealed… injuries… on the… neck… , the face… , bruising in the right suborbital area, on the inner surface of the right thigh, hemorrhaging into the… mouth and… of the left upper jaw. The corpse was unclothed….

The medical examination of the corpse… established that the injuries discovered on the neck had been caused ante-mortem…. The cause of death was pressure on the neck from a blunt object. The bruising on Kungaeva’s face and left thigh, the hemorrhaging into the… mouth, the injury to the right eye resulted from the action of a blunt object(s)…. The act causing injury was a blow. The injuries referred to occurred ante-mortem….

Interviewed as a witness, Captain Alexey Viktorovich Simukhin, investigator, military prosecutor’s office, testified that on March 27, 2000, he received orders to bring Budanov to the landing strip of Army Unit 13206 in order for the latter to be transported to Hankala.

During the flight Budanov was very agitated, inquiring how he should behave, what he should say, and what he should do. On the morning of March 28, 2000, Simukhin traveled out as a member of the investigating team to… locate the body of Kungaeva…. Simukhin wished to note that the burial site had been very carefully camouflaged, covered with turf…. The body was in a half-sitting “fetal” position and was completely naked.

Budanov and Fedorov were charged. The criminal case against Grigoriev, Li-En-Shou, and Yegorov was closed as the result of an amnesty.

The expert conclusion of the Standing Interdepartmental Forensic Psychological and Psychiatric Board was that Budanov was not, at the time of the act with which he was charged in respect to Bagreev, in a transitory pathological state of dysfunction or in a state of pathological or physiological incapacity. At the time of the murder of Kungaeva, Budanov was in a transitory, situationally induced, cumulative psychoemotional state and was not fully aware of the nature and significance of his acts or able to use his free will to control them.

In the summer of 2001, Budanov’s case moved to trial. The first judge was Colonel Victor Kostin of the district military court of the North Caucasus, in Rostov-on-Don, in the same location as the North Caucasus Military District staff headquarters, which, as Russians say, is “fighting the war in Chechnya.” The influence of the military on every aspect of life in Rostov-on-Don is enormous. The main military hospital, through which thousands of soldiers crippled and wounded in Chechnya have passed, is located there, and the city is home to the families of many officers posted to Chechnya. In a sense this is a frontline city, and this circumstance had a significant impact on the development of the Budanov trial. Pickets and demonstrations outside the courtroom, in support of Budanov, provided the trial with a running commentary, with slogans like “Russia in the Dock!” and “Free Russia’s Hero!”

The first phase of the hearings lasted for more than a year, from the summer of 2001 until October 2002. The purpose of the proceedings seemed not to be to decide whether Budanov was guilty or not but to absolve him of all sins and crimes. Throughout the hearings, Judge Kostin displayed manifest support for Budanov, turning down all representations on behalf of the Kungaevs and finding reasons to refuse to admit any witness who might speak against Budanov. He even refused to question Generals Gerasimov and Verbitsky, on the grounds that they had given permission to arrest the murderous colonel.

During this time, the prosecutor, too, appeared openly on the side of the accused, effectively acting as his defense lawyer, although his duty was to act on behalf of the victims.

The situation inside the courtroom was mirrored by the situation outside it. Public opinion was generally on Budanov’s side. There were meetings outside the court with red Communist flags, and flowers for Budanov as he was being led into the building. The top brass at the Ministry of Defense joined in, with public pronouncements by Minister Sergey Ivanov to the effect that Budanov was “quite clearly not guilty.”

The ideological basis for absolving Budanov was that, although he had committed a crime, it was a crime he had a right to commit. His treatment of Elza Kungaeva was justified on the basis that he was taking revenge on an enemy in war, because he believed the girl to be a sniper responsible for the death of officers.

The Kungaev family had major problems with lawyers from the beginning. The family was very poor, had many children, and no work, and was obliged to move to a tent in a refugee camp in the neighboring Republic of Ingushetia after their daughter’s tragic death. Family members were afraid of reprisals from the army for having gone to court (they were threatened on more than one occasion). As a result, they found themselves without a lawyer. At this point, the Memorial Civil Rights Center, based in Moscow, with a branch in Rostov-on-Don, found them attorneys and, for a long time, covered their fees.

The first lawyer who thus became involved in the case was Abdullah Hamzaev, an elderly Chechen who had been living in Moscow for many years and who was, moreover, a distant relative of the Kungaevs.[6] It must be said that his efforts were not effective; rather, the reverse was true—not because of any fault of Hamzaev’s but because Russian society is becoming increasingly racist. It does not trust people from the Caucasus, let alone from Chechnya. The press conferences Hamzaev called in Moscow, to describe how difficult it was to move matters forward in the military court in Rostov-on-Don, went nowhere. Journalists did not believe what he said, and, accordingly, no public campaign in defense of the Kungaevs was mounted. And a public outcry was, of course, the family’s only hope of making any headway.

The Memorial Civil Rights Center invited a young Moscow lawyer, Stanislav Markelov, to assist Hamzaev. Markelov was a member of the same Interrepublican College of Lawyers to which Budanov’s attorneys belonged. The major cases Markelov had defended before and that had attracted Memorial’s attention were the first in Russia to involve accusations of terrorism and political extremism: the blowing up of memorials to Emperor Nicholas II in the vicinity of Moscow, an attempt to blow up the monument to Peter the Great, and the murder of Russian citizens of Afghan descent by skinheads.

Markelov was Russian, and, at the time, his background was crucial. Memorial had made a good selection, because subsequently it was his energy, choice of tactics, and ability to communicate with the press that focused attention on the trial. Here is a summary of what Markelov himself has to say about what he saw in the court just after taking on the case. At this point, the trial was effectively occurring in camera, and journalists were banned:

“The court was in a great rush. It did not want to go into the details of any of our requests and rejected anything that could be interpreted to be against Budanov…. All our petitions, for example, to call witnesses, to call in experts, to have independent examinations, were rejected. I had the impression that Judge Kostin was not even reading them. We discovered that one of the informers who supposedly pointed out the Kungaevs’ house was a deaf mute, physically incapable of hearing Budanov’s question about the female sniper… and physically incapable of replying. The second informer was in fact photographed talking to Budanov one day earlier than alleged. Thus Budanov’s spontaneous reactions, feelings that overwhelmed the colonel and justified his behavior, are no longer valid. Witnesses also testified that on both March 25 and until midday on March 26, when the officers in the regiment began the binge drinking Budanov had organized in honor of his daughter’s birthday, the colonel was calm and showed no intention of taking revenge on some female sniper.”

The second informer turned out to be Ramzan Sembiev, a convict serving in a maximum security labor camp for kidnapping. What matters here is that there should have been no difficulty at all in bringing him to the court for cross-examination.

“The court’s approach to the case was ideological. The Kremlin was applying pressure for Budanov to be absolved of his sins. Nothing was important or relevant if it could be to Budanov’s disadvantage. The prosecutor’s office decided not to behave in… accordance with its role as defined by the Constitution….

“During Nazarov’s speech to the court, a number of other inexplicable things came out. For example, a prosecutor in Dagestan was said to have approached Sembiev in the labor camp after our application and to have asked whether he knew Budanov. Sembiev reputedly denied it and said the first time he had seen him was on television.”

“Was this conversation forwarded to the court as an official document?”

“No, of course not…”

Following in Budanov’s footsteps, the court decided to apply customary law instead. Budanov had acted entirely in accordance with Chechen customary law: he considered the murder he committed to be retribution. The court, and Russian society, supported him in this. What the case shows is that the authorities in Russia, and the state as a whole, accept that Russian law is in abeyance in Chechnya.

One of the main features of the Budanov case was the games played with the forensic psychological and psychiatric reports.

During the three years the case ran, the colonel had the benefit of four psychiatric reports and, when the initial verdict was set aside, of a further two. The conclusions of nearly all these documents were politically slanted and supported whatever the current Kremlin line happened to be.

The first two reports were compiled in the aftermath of the crimes, in May and August 2000, during the preliminary investigation. The first examination was carried out by the psychiatrists of the military hospital of the North Caucasus Military District and the Central North Caucasus Forensic Laboratory of the Ministry of Justice of Russia. The second investigation was produced by doctors of the civilian Novocherkassk Provincial Psychoneurological Hospital. According to these reports, Budanov was responsible for his actions—that is, he was answerable for his crimes. The documents were released during a period when Putin was talking a great deal about the “dictatorship of law,” which needed to be established in Russia. Under this doctrine, soldiers who committed crimes in Chechnya would be punished in exactly the same way as Chechen fighters who were members of IAFs.

Moreover, it was a time of courting the Chechens after the fierce assaults of 1999—2000 and the appointment of a new head of administration of the republic, Ahmad-Hadji Kadyrov. He had been one of the fighters and the mufti, or interpreter of Muslim law, for Djohar Dudaev, the first president of Chechnya, who had been assassinated in 1996 by a smart missile targeted by federal officers. Having earlier declared jihad on Russia, Kadyrov had subsequently become a friend of the Kremlin after “fully appreciating the situation.”

These two reports noted, however, that when Elza Kungaeva was strangled, Budanov was probably mentally unbalanced, and that he appeared to be exhibiting symptoms of brain damage resulting in a “personality and behavioral disorder.”

The Ministry of Defense took exception to these conclusions because they had two serious implications. One was that since Budanov was in his right mind at all other times, he could be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. The other was that the army was employing people with brain damage that nobody bothered to assess, that such people were fighting in battles, and that people with personality disorders had command of hundreds of individuals and had cutting-edge weapons at their disposal.

It soon became clear, when the trial began, that the psychiatrists’ conclusions did not suit Judge Kostin either. As a military judge, employed by the Ministry of Defense, Kostin was beholden to the military establishment for his living accommodations, salary, and any prospects of promotion. So Judge Kostin’s apartment and pay would have to come from the same headquarters to which the accused, Colonel Budanov, was subordinate. Also, by the time Budanov came to trial, political circumstances in Russia had begun to change. The Kremlin had gradually stopped playing at democracy and worrying about the “dictatorship of law.” In consequence, all those who had fought in Chechnya were declared heroes, irrespective of what they had done there. The president began dishing out medals and orders right, left, and center, assuring those involved in the war that the state would never betray them. These highly charged words meant that the government intended to be lenient toward those guilty of war crimes in Chechnya, to the point of forgiving the most sordid offenses, and that any prosecutor trying to bring criminal proceedings against federal military personnel should pipe down.

Stories from the state-controlled television channels explained how scrupulously Budanov had fulfilled his duty, and General Shamanov was continually in evidence making patriotic speeches in praise of his comrade in arms. The claim that the eighteen-year-old Chechen girl whom the colonel had murdered was a sniper was no longer subject to doubt. Nobody now recalled that neither the investigation nor Budanov’s counsel had been able to find a shred of evidence to suggest that Elza Kungaeva had had anything to do with IAFs.

The politically inspired brainwashing of the Russian population was going full tilt, paving the way for Budanov’s acquittal.

At this very moment, the court in Rostov-on-Don, stricken by doubt as to the competence of the experts who had carried out the first two psychiatric reports, commissioned a new one. This time it was a joint military and civilian enterprise, in Moscow, moreover, uniting the efforts of the Central Forensic Medical Laboratory of the Ministry of Defense and the Serbsky State Research Center for Social and Forensic Psychiatry, popularly known as the Serbsky Institute.

The Serbsky’s reputation in Russia dates from Soviet times, when dissidents would be certified insane. The doctors of the Serbsky Institute were invariably conscientious in carrying out the tasks they were allotted by the KGB. It was to the Serbsky Institute that Budanov was sent. When the decision became common knowledge, there were few doubts as to why the state research center had been chosen. Everything possible was being done to free Budanov of criminal responsibility, his supporters—and his opponents—said.

The official reasons for commissioning a third report were given by the court as “imprecision, contradictoriness and factual incompleteness”; in addition, “new and more accurate data” had appeared that were important for “determining Budanov’s true mental state.”

No matter that a series of episodes described to the new commission had never happened. Because the information favored the colonel, it was put before the experts, who then treated it as incontrovertible.

Not to mince words, this was blatant falsification and the Serbsky experts’ response was tailored to produce the requisite image of a hero.

The report continued with a highly variant account of events on the night of March 26 and concluded by noting, “When questioned,… Budanov explained the contradictions in his statements by saying that he had been in a very bad state.

“On the basis of the above, the commission has come to the conclusion that Budanov was not responsible for his actions, on the grounds of diminished responsibility…. The acts of the victim, Kungaeva, were one of the factors causing Budanov’s temporary mental breakdown…. There is no conclusive evidence regarding Budanov’s being in a state of intoxication….

“Budanov… should be kept under observation and treated by a psychiatrist on an outpatient basis. Category C: Partially fit for military service.”

The commission’s conclusions gave the judge all the ammunition he needed under Russian law to do the bidding of his political masters and acquit the colonel. Just as in Soviet times, what the experts report to the courts depends not on the facts but on who is presenting them. Among the cast of characters who provided the psychological and psychiatric grounds for exculpating Budanov was Professor Tamara Pechernikova, doctor of medical science (commission chairman), director of the Consultancy Section of the Serbsky Institute, a doctor with an international reputation, a psychiatric consultant of the highest standing, with fifty years of consultancy experience. This choice was far from random, I believe, because in Russia such appointments do not just happen. This is the way things were done in Soviet times. The worst of Communism is with us again; in Putin’s era the appalling practice of political-psychiatry-to-order has returned.

On August 25, 1968, a famous demonstration took place in Red Square, Moscow. Seven people entered the square and unfurled banners reading FOR OUR AND YOUR FREEDOM! and SHAME ON THE OCCUPIERS! One of the seven was Natalia Gorbanevskaya, a poet, journalist, and dissident who, on this occasion, was pushing a pram with her baby in it. In a country where nobody had protested for a long time, people were stepping forward who had it in them to protest the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

The demonstration of the Seven lasted only a few minutes before they were seized by the plainclothes KGB agents who constantly patrolled Red Square. A court subsequently sentenced two of them to terms in labor camps, sent one to a psychiatric hospital, and three into exile. Gorbanevskaya was at first released, since she was breast-feeding her baby.

Some time later, she was rearrested for continuing civil-rights activism. It was then that Tamara Pechernikova made her mark. It was she who, at the behest of the KGB, interrogated Gorbanevskaya in the same Serbsky Institute where, three decades later, Budanov was examined.

Pechernikova produced the medical verdict on Gorbanevskaya the KGB required: “schizophrenia”—which is to say that anyone displaying a banner in Red Square, protesting Russian tanks in the streets of Prague, must have been insane. Pechernikova also supplied the KGB its diagnosis that Gorbanevskaya was a danger to society and should be subjected indefinitely to compulsory treatment in a specialized psychiatric hospital.

Natalia Gorbanevskaya, the founder and first editor of the underground Chronicle of Current Events, a samizdat bulletin of Soviet civil-rights activists, was to spend grim years of incarceration in the Kazan Specialized Mental Hospital. Imprisoned there from 1969 until 1972, she emigrated with an Israeli visa in 1975. She now lives in France.

The Gorbanevskaya case was among the first of the psychiatric repressions against dissidents in the Soviet Union. The 1970s, an era when the Communist regime fought a war of attrition against dissidents, was a heyday for Colonel Budanov’s would-be savior. To understand what is happening in Russia now, we need to be aware not only of the revival of political psychiatry, with diagnoses to order, but also of the way it functions.

In the files of almost all of Pechernikova’s cases, from Gorbanevskaya and well-known Soviet dissident Alexander Ginzburg to Budanov, we find the leitmotif of the search for social justice. Today these words are used in an entirely different context, however. In the Soviet era, Pechernikova regarded evidence of a search for social justice as a symptom of mental illness dangerous to society. Today she considers a brutal murder to be justified by the murderer’s search for social justice. The colonel was overwhelmed by feelings of guilt over the death of his comrades at the hands of a sniper. As a result—understandably, according to Pechernikova—he killed a woman.

Can it be mere chance that Pechernikova figured in the cases of Ginzburg, Gorbanevskaya, and Budanov?

For the past three decades, the KGB/FSB has known that Pechernikova could be relied upon. She bided her time in the shadows during the “late democratic” period of Mikhail Gorbachev and under Boris Yeltsin, but then a KGB officer with a twenty-year service record became president. In the wake of Putin’s rise to power, every nook and cranny in the power structure was filled by people who had been employed by the KGB.

Information from independent sources (not surprisingly, there is none from official ones) suggests that more than six thousand ex-KGB /FSB people followed Putin to power and now occupy the highest offices. These include the key ministries, in which they hold the most important positions: the president’s office (two deputy directors, the heads of the staffing and information departments); the Security Council (deputy secretary); the government administrative apparatus; the ministries of defense, foreign affairs, justice, the nuclear industry, taxes and revenues, internal affairs, press affairs, television, radio and mass media; the State Customs and Excise Committee; the Russian Agency for National Reserves; the Committee for Financial Recovery—and so on.

Like cancer, bad history tends to recur, and there is only one radical treatment: invasive therapy to destroy the deadly cells. We have not done this. We dragged ourselves out of the Soviet Union and into the New Russia still infected with our Soviet disease. To return to our central question: Is the resurrection of Professor Pechernikova in the Budanov case a coincidence? Well, is the return to power of the secret police a coincidence?

It is not. Back in 2000, people were saying, “What if Putin did start out in the KGB in the Soviet period? He’ll shape up once he is in office.”

By then it was already too late. Now we find ourselves surrounded by people trusted by Putin and Putin’s friends. Unfortunately, they trust only their own kind. The result is that the power structures of the New Russia are overrun with citizens from a particular tradition, brought up with a repressive mentality and with an understanding of how to resolve governmental problems that reflects this mentality.

Pechernikova both embodies that tradition and is a mechanism for perpetuating it. In the two decades she spent patriotically, as she would see it, defending the Soviet social and state system, she put in place a mechanism for controlling medical science, molding psychiatry to fit the needs of the state security apparatus. Now, more than a decade after the fall of the visible structures of the Soviet system, she has found herself and her special skills in as much demand as ever.

These are not abstractions of political theory. Pechernikova’s contribution to the Budanov case had life-and-death consequences for real people, just as it did in the 1970s and 1980s. Whether Budanov did or did not go free was a matter of fundamental importance, not least for the army, which, in Chechnya, has become an instrument of repression. The army was waiting for a precedent from the court in Rostov-on-Don. Could the military continue to behave like Budanov?

Pechernikova, who effectively said, “Go right ahead,” provided crucial ammunition to enable Judge Kostin also to say, in law, “Go right ahead.”

Their signals were certainly interpreted that way in Chechnya, where officers picked up exactly where Budanov had left off. We could cite enough examples to fill another book.

MORE THAN A year passed. The Budanov case files were augmented by three additional expert reports. Pechernikova’s conclusions were rejected as untenable. The Supreme Court sent the case back for a retrial, and a newly appointed military court in Rostov-on-Don commissioned new reports. The prosecutor, who had effectively defended the accused, was removed from the scene, and social justice began to emerge from behind the clouds.

And Pechernikova? Was she reprimanded? No chance—she was left in place.

LET US TURN now to the evidence Pechernikova did not address: the subterranean foundation of the Budanov case.

On the last night of her young life, Elza Kungaeva was not only strangled but also raped. From the forensic report:

From the very beginning of the investigation Budanov had categorically denied rape. But someone had clearly violated Elza Kungaeva before she was murdered. Since during the last hours of Elza’s life Budanov was alone with her, and since he allowed his soldiers to enter his quarters only after she was dead, one conclusion seems inescapable.

Two forensic analyses were performed during the preliminary investigation. When the court set about its whitewash of Budanov, it commissioned a third report for the same purpose as the new psychiatric report commissioned from the Serbsky Institute: to deliver the conclusions the military establishment and the Kremlin wanted to hear, and to avoid having an officer awarded two Orders of Valor shown to be a rapist.

According to the third report, which contradicts everything the original medical corps examiner had seen with his own eyes, “The tears of the hymen and mucosa of the rectum occurred postmortem when the retractive capacity characteristic of living tissue had been completely lost.” In other words, while someone had abused this girl, it most certainly had not been Budanov. He had an alibi. After murdering her, he had gone peacefully to sleep.

To make this explanation seem more plausible, the profuse bleeding Lyanenko had seen was interpreted as follows: “… the presence of bloodstains in the region of the external genital organs does not contradict the conclusion regarding the postmortem origination of these injuries….” These experts augmented their conclusions with a sideswipe at the earlier report: “The unexplained decision by the consultant not to collect material for forensic histological analysis does not allow us to conclude more definitely at the present time….”

In a war zone, with nowhere to conserve histological specimens, the absence of definitive proof strengthened the colonel’s alibi. Without a tissue analysis, as the latest pathologists asserted, any attempt to prove that a rape had occurred, and that the perpetrator had been Budanov, was doomed to failure.

The desired conclusion could now be delivered: “There are no data supporting the hypothesis that the posthumous injuries were caused by an erect male sexual organ. The results of the forensic examination of the body and the material evidence give no grounds for concluding that a forcible sexual act was committed against Kungaeva.”

In other words, the report acquitted Budanov.

The experts who signed the report evidently imagined their efforts had removed a stain from the Russian army’s uniform. From the jacket perhaps, but not from the trousers.

As the Budanov case dragged on, the reaction of Russia’s women became more and more disturbing. Women comprise more than half the population; thus one might expect a majority of Russians to despise a rapist. Apparently not. Tens of millions of Russians have young daughters, and, if only for that reason, one might expect them to understand and identify with the Kungaev family’s grief. Again, apparently not. Budanov’s wife was interviewed on television. She talked about her poor husband having to endure all those examinations and a trial, and about their little daughter who was tired of waiting for her daddy to come home. The country sympathized with the colonel’s wife—not, it seemed, with the Kungaevs, who, wait as they might, would never see their daughter again.

In 2002, when the experts accepted that Budanov had been temporarily insane at the moment of committing the murder, he was cleared of rape. No storm of indignation swept the country. There was not a single protest demonstration, not even from women’s organizations. No civil-rights defenders took to the streets. Russia thought what had happened was fair enough. The report acquitting the colonel triggered a wave of war crimes in Chechnya, committed by soldiers who used the disastrous situation and the cruelty perpetrated by both sides as a cover. Throughout 2002, “purging” of territory continued in Chechnya on a massive scale and with extreme brutality. Villages were surrounded, men taken away, women raped. Many were killed, and even more disappeared without a trace. Retaliation was elevated to justification for murder. Lynch law was encouraged by the Kremlin itself—an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. We discovered that we were moving backward, from stagnation under Leonid Brezhnev to the out-and-out arbitrariness of Joseph Stalin. “terrifying as the thought was, we probably had the government we deserved.

Budanov’s final address to the court was scheduled for July 1, 2002, indicating that the judicial mummery of the case was about to conclude. Elza Kungaeva’s parents and their lawyers left the courtroom, unable to stomach the perverse traducing of morality and the desecration of the law. Supporters of the colonel and his colleagues were braying outside the walls of the courtroom, in the expectation that another couple of days would see them and Budanov toasting their victory with vodka.

Suddenly, something happened. Budanov’s final address was abruptly canceled. The verdict, which had been expected on July 3, was not delivered. To everyone’s surprise, a break in the hearings was announced until the beginning of October, and Budanov was taken off to Moscow again, back to the Serbsky Institute for a further, by now fourth, medical report. What was going on?

Perhaps the strong pressure exerted by the German Bundestag, with letters and appeals addressed to Putin personally, had some effect. Chancellor Gerhard Schröder himself had been inquiring at summit meetings as to why those trying Budanov the war criminal seemed interested only in getting him acquitted. Sources within the president’s office say Putin had no answer. None of this should be too surprising. In Russia, with its byzantine traditions of servility, such trivia are often sufficient to change the course of history.[7]

The hearings started up again on October 3. Attention was focused on the new psychological and psychiatric report. Many were anticipating a sensation, but, in fact, there was only a rerun. Budanov was again found to have suffered a “temporary pathological dysfunction of his mental activity.” The verdict was delivered on December 31, 2002—a day when few Russians have anything very serious on their minds—and thus entirely predictable: he would not bear criminal responsibility, and the court would insist on psychiatric treatment, the length of which would be decided by the doctor treating him.

The Kungaevs’ lawyers, naturally, lodged an appeal, but were not very optimistic. Abdullah Hamzaev pinned most of his hopes on the European Court of Human Rights, not on the Russian judicial system, and the appeal to the Supreme Court was made primarily because that step was procedurally necessary before an appeal could be lodged in Strasbourg.

But then, a sensation: early in March 2003 the Military College of the Supreme Court unexpectedly annulled the verdict, acknowledged irregularities, and decreed that a retrial should take place. The case was to go back to the start of the investigation and convene in Rostov-on-Don in the same district military court, but with a different judge presiding.

On the Russian political map, the Supreme Court has long been regarded as no more than a department of the president’s office rather than as the highest level of an independent national judicial authority. Thus this turn of events could mean only one thing: the winds in the Kremlin had changed direction and the president had turned his back on the notion that a Russian officer in Chechnya was always in the right. Again, as in spring 2000, Putin was trying to position himself publicly as the champion of the dictatorship of law, and the 2004 preelection presidential campaign was about to begin. Putin’s United Russia Party also faced parliamentary elections in December 2003. The front-running slogan for both campaigns was “The law rules supreme.”

On April 9, 2003, the court in Rostov-on-Don reconvened. The colonel was a changed man. There was little sign of the brazen lout who almost spat at the judge and insulted the parents of the murdered girl. He complained he had been betrayed. He was plainly nervous. He demanded a trial by jury but was refused. He then ceased to reply to questions, stuck cotton in his ears, and sat in the dock reading. Colonel Vladimir Bukreev, deputy chairman of the district military court, now presided over the bench. For the first time, witnesses were called for cross-examination. This was a revolution.

First to be questioned was General Gerasimov. He reported that Budanov, as the commanding officer of a tank regiment and hence a representative of the Ministry of Defense rather than of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, had had no right to search the village of Tangi-Chu looking for a female sniper. Arresting suspected members of IAFs was a matter for the prosecutor’s office, the FSB, and the police. Moreover, General Gerasimov testified that the regiment had received no orders to conduct search operations in February and March 2000. Budanov himself had “no right to be checking passports and accommodations in populated areas, and no right to be gathering intelligence there.”

Then Yakhyaev, the head of the municipal administration of Duba-Yurt, was called to give evidence. According to Budanov, Yakhyaev was the one who had given him the photograph of men and women carrying snipers’ rifles, which had been the main reason why Budanov had gone looking for a sniper in Tangi-Chu. Yakhyaev now told the court he had given no such photograph to Budanov. His statement was corroborated by a certain Pankov, who had been in Chechnya as a senior FSB agent in late December 1999 and early January 2000. Pankov testified that Budanov had indeed met Yakhyaev several times in his presence but that Yakhyaev had not given Budanov any photograph or said anything to him about a female sniper. Neither had Budanov himself made any mention to Pankov of a photograph or a sniper.

As a result, all Budanov’s testimony in his own defense was discredited. On July 25, 2003, sentence was passed: ten years’ detention in strict-regime labor camps. Budanov is due for release on March 27, 2010.

Budanov undoubtedly got what he deserved, and even if his comeuppance was as the result of preelection maneuvering and opportunistic political intrigue, one can only welcome the court’s just verdict, of which there are so few in Russia. The trial certainly cut against the grain. The majority of the army top brass, and virtually all of the officers’ corps, especially in the Caucasus, categorically rejected the verdict. Greatly incensed, they were convinced that Budanov had suffered only because he had honorably defended the motherland. They took the ten-year sentence and the stripping of Budanov’s awards and rank as a personal insult. Since the military courts are, to all intents and purposes, part of the military, not the judiciary, Judge Bukreev’s position was a brave act, because he was simultaneously passing sentence on himself.

No matter how dramatic the controversies surrounding the Budanov case, the story of his conviction is an exception to the rule. Political circumstances placed his crime in the limelight and brought the case to the public’s attention, with important political consequences. The authorities were forced to give permission to the court to find Budanov guilty. In other war-crimes trials in which the accused were members of the Russian federal forces, the charges were frozen, and the security services exerted themselves only to enable the criminals to escape punishment, even when monstrous acts had been committed.

For example, on January 12, 2002, six military groups landed in the vicinity of the Chechen highland village of Dai. They were searching for fighters, among them Field Commander Hattab, who, according to operational intelligence, had recently been wounded and was in the region.

What happened then came to be called Budanov Case II. Ten men from a special operations unit tied to the Central Intelligence Directorate (GRU) of General Headquarters, landed from helicopters. Seeing a minibus on the road, they stopped it and ordered everybody to get out. They first tortured the passengers, trying to get them to reveal the whereabouts of fighters, then killed all six, and finished by burning the bodies.

The official agencies promptly dubbed this brutal, lawless execution “a military clash with IAFs.” There were witnesses, however, who quickly made that story untenable. All six passengers proved to be ordinary civilians returning on a scheduled trip from the district of Shatoy to their homes. Among them was forty-year-old Zainap Djavathanova, the mother of seven children, ages two to seventeen years, and expecting her eighth. All that remained of her was one foot in a shoe, from which her husband and older children identified her. That day she had been to Grozny to be examined by a gynecologist.

Then there was the headmaster of the Nokhchi-Keloy village school, Said Mahomed Alskhanov, sixty-nine years old, and Abdul-Wahab Satabaev, the history teacher at the school. They were returning from a teachers’ meeting in Shatoy. The fourth body belonged to Shahban Bahaev, a forester. The fifth was that of a nephew of the pregnant Zainap, Djamalaili Musaev, accompanying her on the journey as was customary in that region. The sixth body was the bus driver, Hamzat Tuburov, a father of five. The entire district knew him well, because every day he drove whoever required transport from Shatoy to the various highland villages and back.

On the evening of January 12, all the killers were arrested. The Shatoy District prosecutor’s office, acting on the evidence of a chance witness, Major Vitaly Nevmerzhitsky of military intelligence, managed to obtain permission to make the arrests, which were virtually unprecedented in Chechnya. The special operations troops were handed over shortly afterward to the investigators of the military prosecutor’s office, and Criminal Case No. 76002 was brought against them.

All, it would seem, was proceeding according to the rules. I met Colonel Andrey Vershinin, the military prosecutor in Shatoy District, who was conducting this much-publicized case at that time, and in the spring of 2002 he was still full of optimism. He said there was more than enough proof of guilt, and that the case would most certainly come to court. It would be almost impossible to demolish it, as happens nearly every time with similar cases. Hundreds of criminal cases waiting to be brought to court are blocked at all levels for one simple reason: army personnel accused of crimes are moved out of Chechnya by their commanding officers as quickly as possible. Investigations stall, obstacles are put in the way of the prosecutor’s office, its staff members are intimidated, and so the investigation is silenced.

Prosecutor Vershinin had managed to achieve what was almost impossible: he had personnel of the GRU under arrest, while the investigation proceeded, in the guardhouse of the 291th Regiment, because the military prosecutor’s office had its premises within the regiment’s compound. So the suspects were under the colonel’s direct, around-the-clock supervision.

Prosecutor Vershinin is not to blame for what happened next. The accused were removed from Shatoy and transferred to a prison outside Chechnya and beyond his reach. Two of the accused, Lieutenant Alexander Kalagandsky and Corporal Vladimir Voevodin, spent nine months in prison in Pyatigorsk and were then released because the central military prosecutor’s office in Russia failed to apply to the court to extend their period of detention. The court was therefore automatically obliged to release them “on receipt of their signed undertaking not to travel outside the Shchelkovsky District of Moscow Province.”

Why were these two killers to be found in Moscow Province? Before being sent to Chechnya, both had been serving at the end of the world in Buryatia. That they had been transferred to Moscow Province meant only one thing: the Central Intelligence Directorate in general headquarters had decided to support them, evidently considering that, like Budanov, they had loyally served a motherland that had failed to appreciate their efforts. The military has tried again to pursue the charges against them but has made no headway on getting a conviction.

Only Captain Eduard Ulman, Special Operations, remained for a while in detention. It was he who, on January 12, 2002, gave the order to carry out the massacre, although he claimed he was following orders from a superior and was later released. The suspected instigator, Major Alexey Perelevsky, remains at large.

What do you call this sort of situation? If a Chechen fighter had shot six Russians and burned their bodies, he surely would not have been freed in return for an undertaking not to change his place of residence.

Russia now faces the question, comparable to the one the United States confronted during and after the Vietnam War: how to view its soldiers and officers in Chechnya who routinely murder, loot, torture, and rape. Are they war criminals? Or are they unyielding combatants in the struggle against international terror, using every means at their disposal, with the noble end of saving humankind? Are the ideological stakes in this struggle so high that everything else should be disregarded?

A Westerner would, I hope, have a simple answers to these questions: It is for the courts to decide. As of now, Russia has no answer. Now, five years into the second Chechen war, more than a million soldiers and officers have experienced that lawlessness. Poisoned by war, they threaten civilian life; they cannot be left out of the social equation.

The Budanov case and the Dai massacre are both tragic and dramatic; they exposed Russia’s problems and challenged the country to consider the impact of the second Chechen war on Russian lives. These events highlighted illogical thinking about the war and about Putin, and put Russia’s notions of right and wrong in the northern Caucasus on trial. Most important, they showed the profound changes that have occurred in the judicial system under Putin and under the influence of the war.

The spirit of democratic reform lived on in the work of Judge Bukreev and Prosecutor Vershinin, but Russia has seen clearly that it does not have an independent judiciary or a prosecutor’s office. Instead it has verdicts decided by political fiat and based on the imperatives of political expediency.