The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

Eight THE DISMANTLING OF DEMOCRACY

The political system changed so quickly that even political activists and political analysts needed time to get their bearings. In December 2000, I went to a roundtable discussion among political scientists, devoted to analyzing what had happened in the year since Putin was handed power in Russia.

“He has put Russia on ice,” said one of them, a man in his fifties with a beautifully chiseled face and tiny wire-rimmed glasses. “That’s not necessarily bad. It’s a kind of stabilizing effect. But what happens next?”

“It’s like the revolution has ended,” said another, a former dissident with disheveled salt-and-pepper hair and beard. He meant that the society had reverted to its pre–post-Soviet state. “Old cultural values, old habits are back. The whole country is trying to apply old habits to new reality.”

“I don’t think anyone really understands anything anymore,” said a third, a short man with a very big nose and a deep voice. I personally held him to be the smartest man in the room—and he certainly should have been the most knowledgeable, because he worked in the presidential administration.

“But all the changes in the last year have occurred in the area of public consciousness,” said another, a liberal political scientist who had come to prominence during perestroika. “The nation has come out of a psychological depression. This is going to be the toughest political era yet, because nationalist ideology is always the strongest.”

“But he has to live up to expectations,” objected a scholar from a younger generation, a large man with bushy black eyebrows.

The last speaker clearly had not shed the assumptions of the 1990s, when the media or the parliament could call the president to account, as they had many times: Yeltsin had last faced an impeachment attempt in 1999. The older man who had spoken before him, who had once been Mikhail Gorbachev’s leading ideological adviser, saw the 1990s for what they had been: a brief period of quasi-democracy, a fleeting vision, a fluke. “They’ve won, my dears,” Alexander Tsipko said to those present. “Russia is a large state floating in an unformed political space. And they try to fill this space with their national anthem, their two-headed eagle, and their tricolored flag. Such are the symbols of Soviet nationalism.”

Russia’s uncertain identity in the 1990s had manifested, among other things, in its inability to settle on state symbols. Having secured its sovereignty in 1991, the country plunged, almost immediately, into some sort of revolutionary’s remorse, which made shedding old symbols and asserting new ones a painful and, as it ultimately turned out, impossible task. The Soviet red flag was immediately replaced with the white, blue, and red flag that had previously served Russia for eight months, between the bourgeois revolution of February 1917 and the Bolshevik revolution in October. The state seal, however, retained its red star, its hammer and sickle, and its stalks of wheat, which had unironically signified plenitude in Soviet times. The parliament debated the seal repeatedly but could not reach any decision except, in mid-1992, for replacing the abbreviation RSFSR (Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic) with the words “Russian Federation.” At the end of 1993, Yeltsin finally created a state seal by decree: a two-headed eagle would serve as its main image, a symbol Russia shares with Albania, Serbia, and Montenegro, among modern states. It was not until December 2000 that Putin’s parliament finally voted to enshrine the two-headed-eagle seal in law.

The national anthem posed an even more implacable challenge. In 1991, the Soviet anthem had been scrapped in favor of “The Patriotic Song,” a lively tune by the nineteenth-century composer Mikhail Glinka. But this anthem had no lyrics; moreover, lyrics proved impossible to write: the rhythmic line dictated by the music was so short that any attempt to set words to it—and Russian words tend to be long—lent it a definite air of absurdity. A number of media outlets ran contests to choose the lyrics to go with the Glinka, but the entries, invariably, were suitable only for the entertainment of the editorial staff, and little by little chipped away at the legitimacy of the anthem.

The Soviet national anthem that had been scrapped in favor of the Glinka had a complicated history. The music, written by Alexander Alexandrov, appeared in 1943, with lyrics supplied by a children’s poet named Sergei Mikhalkov. The anthem’s refrain praised “the Party of Lenin, the Party of Stalin / Leading us to the triumph of Communism.” After Stalin died and, in 1956, his successor Nikita Khrushchev denounced “the cult of personality,” the refrain could no longer be performed, so the anthem lost its lyrics. The instrumental version would be performed for twenty-one years while the Soviet Union sought the poet and the words to express its post-Stalinist identity. In 1977, when I was in third or fourth grade, the anthem suddenly acquired lyrics, which we schoolchildren had to learn as soon as possible. For this purpose, every school notebook manufactured in the Soviet Union that year bore the new lyrics to the old national anthem on the back cover, where multiplication tables or verb exceptions had once resided. The new lyrics had been written by the same children’s poet, who was, by now, sixty-four years old. The refrain now lauded “the Party of Lenin, the force of the people.”

In the fall of 2000, a group of Russian Olympic athletes met with Putin and complained that the lack of a singable anthem demoralized them in competitions and made their victories feel hollow. The old Soviet anthem had been so much better this way, they said. So the once recycled Stalinist anthem was again taken out of storage. The children’s poet, now eighty-seven, wrote new lyrics to replace the old new lyrics. The refrain now praised “the wisdom of centuries, borne by the people.” Putin introduced a bill in parliament and the new old anthem was handily approved.

When the Duma convened in January 2001, the new old anthem was played for the first time—and everyone in the chamber rose, except for two former dissidents, Sergei Kovalev and Yuli Rybakov. “I spent six years in prison listening to this anthem,” said Rybakov; the Soviet national anthem had played at the beginning and the end of each day on state radio, which was always on in the camps. “I had been put in prison for fighting the regime that created this anthem, that put people in camps and executed people to the sounds of this anthem.”

Rybakov and Kovalev were only two out of 450 members of the Duma, as tiny a minority as dissidents had always been. The Soviet ethos had been restored. The people who held the revolution of 1991 to be theirs were now profoundly marginalized. Nor would the parliament itself, as it had been constituted in the 1990s, exist for much longer.

ON MAY 13, 2000, six days after he was inaugurated, Putin signed his first decree and proposed a set of bills, all of them aimed, as he stated, at “strengthening vertical power.” They served as the beginning of a profound restructuring of Russia’s federal composition, or, put another way, as the beginning of the dismantling of the country’s democratic structures. One of the bills replaced elected members of the upper house of the parliament with appointed ones: two from each of Russia’s eighty-nine regions, one appointed by the governor of the region and one by the legislature. Another bill allowed elected governors to be removed from office on mere suspicion of wrongdoing, without a court decision. The decree established seven presidential envoys to seven large territories of the country, each comprising about a dozen regions, each of which had its elected legislature and governor. The envoys, appointed by the president, would supervise the work of elected governors.

The problem Putin was trying to address with these measures was real. In 1998, when Russia defaulted on its foreign debt and plummeted into a profound economic crisis, Moscow had given the regions wide latitude in managing their budgets, collecting taxes, setting tariffs, and creating economic policies. For this and other reasons, the Russian Federation had become as loose as a structure can be while remaining, at least nominally, a single state. Because the problem was real, Russia’s liberal politicians—who still believed Putin to be one of them—did not criticize his solution to it, even though it clearly contradicted the spirit and possibly also the letter of the 1993 constitution.

Putin appointed the seven envoys. Only two of them were civilians—and one of these very much appeared to have the biography of an undercover KGB agent. Two were KGB officers from Leningrad, one was a police general, and two more were army generals who had commanded the troops in Chechnya. So Putin appointed generals to watch over popularly elected governors—who could also now be removed by the federal government.

The lone voice against these new laws belonged to Boris Berezovsky, or, rather, to my old acquaintance Alex Goldfarb, the émigré former dissident who just a year earlier had been willing to be charmed by Putin. He authored a brilliant critique of the decree and the bills that was published under Berezovsky’s byline in Kommersant, the popular daily newspaper Berezovsky owned. “I assert that the most important outcome of the Yeltsin presidency has been the change in mentality of millions of people: those who used to be slaves fully dependent on the will of their boss or the state became free people who depend only on themselves,” he wrote. “In a democratic society, laws exist to protect individual freedom…. The legislation you have proposed will place severe limitations on the independence and civil freedoms of tens of thousands of top-level Russian politicians, forcing them to take their bearings from a single person and follow his will. But we have been through this!”

No one took notice.

The bills sailed through the parliament. The installation of the envoys drew no protest. What happened next was exactly what Berezovsky’s letter had predicted, and it went far beyond the legal measures introduced by Putin. Something shifted, instantly and perceptibly, as though the sounds of the new/old Soviet/Russian national anthem had signaled the dawn of a new era for everyone. Soviet instincts, it seemed, kicked in all over the country, and the Soviet Union was instantly restored in spirit.

You could not quite measure the change. One brilliant Ph.D. student at Moscow University noticed that traditional ways of critiquing election practices, such as tallying up violations (these were on the increase—things like open voting and group voting became routine) or trying to document falsifications (a nearly impossible task) fell short of measuring such a seemingly ephemeral thing as culture. Darya Oreshkina introduced the term “special electoral culture”—one in which elections, while formally free, are orchestrated by local authorities trying to curry favor with the federal center. She identified their statistical symptoms, such as anomalously high voter turnouts and a strikingly high proportion of votes accrued by the leader of the race. She was able to show that over time, the number of precincts where “special electoral culture” decided the outcome grew steadily, and grew fast. In other words, with every election at every level of government, Russians ceded to the authorities more of their power to decide. “Geography disappeared,” she said later—meaning, the entire country was turning into an undifferentiated managed space.

IN MARCH 2004, when Putin stood for reelection, he had five opponents. They had overcome extreme obstacles to join the race. A law that went into effect just before the campaigns launched required that a notary certify the presence and signature of every person present at a meeting at which a presidential candidate is nominated. Since the law required that a minimum of five hundred people attend such a meeting, the preliminaries took four to five hours; people had to arrive in the middle of the day to certify their presence so that the meeting could commence in the evening. After the meeting the potential candidate had a few weeks to collect two million signatures. The old law had required half as many signatures and allotted twice as much time to collect them; but more important, the new law specified the look of these signatures down to the comma. Hundreds of thousands of signatures were thrown out by the Central Election Commission because of violations such as the use of “St. Petersburg” instead of “Saint Petersburg” or the failure to write out the words “building” or “apartment” in the address line.

One of Putin’s St. Petersburg city hall colleagues told me years later that during his tenure as Sobchak’s deputy, Putin had received “a powerful inoculation against the democratic process.” He and Sobchak had ultimately fallen victim to the democratic menace in St. Petersburg, and now that Putin was running the country, he was restoring the late-Soviet mechanisms of control: he was building a tyranny of bureaucracy. The Soviet bureaucracy had been so unwieldy, incomprehensible, and forbidding that one could function within it only by engaging in corruption, using either money or personal favors as currency. That made the system infinitely pliant—which is why “special electoral culture” functioned so well.

During the voting itself, international observers and Russian nongovernmental organizations documented a slew of violations, including: the deletion from the rolls of over a million very elderly people and other unlikely voters (when I went to cast my vote, I was able to see that my eighty-four-year-old grandmother’s name was in fact missing from the list; my voting precinct was also, coincidentally, located next door to an office of the ruling United Russia party); the delivery of prefilled ballots to a psychiatric ward; precinct staff arriving at an elderly voter’s home with a mobile ballot box and leaving hastily when they saw that she was planning to vote for someone other than Putin; and managers and school officials telling staff or students’ parents that contracts or financing depended on their vote. In all likelihood, none of these steps was dictated directly by the Kremlin; rather, following renewed Soviet instincts, individuals did what they could for their president.

During the campaign, opposition candidates constantly encountered refusals to print their campaign material, air their commercials, or even rent them space for campaign events. Yana Dubeykovskaya, who managed the campaign of nationalist-leftist economist Sergei Glazyev, told me that it took days to find a printing plant willing to accept Glazyev’s money. When the candidate tried to hold a campaign event in Yekaterinburg, the largest city in the Urals, the police suddenly kicked everyone out of the building, claiming there was a bomb threat. In Nizhny Novgorod, Russia’s third-largest city, electricity was turned off when Glazyev was getting ready to speak—and every subsequent campaign event in that city was held outdoors, since no one was willing to rent to the pariah candidate.

Around election time, I interviewed a distant acquaintance, the thirty-one-year-old deputy director of news programming on All-Russia State Television. Eight years earlier, Yevgeniy Revenko had become the youngest reporter working at a national television channel, Gusinsky’s independent NTV. He had quickly become known as one of the more enterprising and dogged reporters. The way he worked now seemed to be very different. “A country like Russia needs the sort of television that can effectively deliver the government’s message,” he explained. “As the state grows stronger, it needs to convey its message directly, with no interpretations.” He described his channel’s editorial policy as a simple one: “We do show negative stories—we will report a disaster, if it occurs, for example—but we do not go looking for them. Nor do we go looking for positive stories, but we do focus the viewers’ attention on them. We never speculate about the reasons for something—say, an official’s firing—even if we happen to know the reason. All our information comes from official government statements. In any case, the logic is simple. We are a state television company. Our state is a presidential republic. That means we do not criticize the president.” Very occasionally, admitted Revenko over a mug of beer at an Irish pub in the center of Moscow, he felt he had to stifle his creative urge. “But I say to myself, ‘This is where I work.’” He grew up in a military family and had some military training himself. That clearly helped.

The late Soviet state had depended on using the many and punishing the few—and the KGB had been in charge of the latter. This system had been more or less restored now. While the vast majority enthusiastically fell in line, those who did not paid the price. Marina Litvinovich, the young woman who had helped create Putin and had urged him to go talk to the families of the Kursk crew, was now managing the campaign of his lone liberal opponent in the race, former parliament member Irina Khakamada, who had herself supported Putin four years earlier. During the campaign, Litvinovich got a phone call telling her, “We know where you live and where your child plays outside.” She hired a bodyguard for her three-year-old. She was also robbed and beaten. Yana Dubeykovskaya, Glazyev’s campaign manager, was also beaten and robbed, and once started driving her car before discovering that the brakes had been cut. A step down on the persecution ladder were apartment burglaries. In the months leading up to the election, opposition journalists and activists of Committee 2008—a group organizing to bring about a more fair election in four years—had their apartments broken into. Often these burglaries occurred concurrently in different areas of Moscow. My own apartment was burglarized in February. The only things taken were a laptop computer, the hard drive from a desktop computer, and a cell phone.

On election night, Khakamada planned a great defeat party. Her campaign rented a spacious Southwestern-themed restaurant and splurged on a spread of salmon, lobster, artichokes, and an open bar. Popular music groups lined up at the microphone, and the country’s best-known rock journalist emceed. Nobody came. Waiters seemed to outnumber the guests, and the artichokes lingered. Still, the organizers continued to check all comers against a strict name list. Russian liberals were still struggling to come to terms with just how marginal they had become.

Watching the guests, I was thinking it was understandable that it had taken a while. Four years after putting Putin in office, the few liberals who had switched to the opposition still had personal connections to the many former liberals who remained part of the Russian political establishment. In a vacant dining room off the main hall, Marina Litvinovich perched at one end of a long empty oak table next to Andrei Bystritsky, deputy chairman of the Russian state television and radio conglomerate. Bystritsky, a red-bearded bon vivant in his mid-forties, complained about the wine. “The wine is no worse than our election results,” Litvinovich shot back. Bystritsky immediately ordered a hundred-dollar bottle of wine for the table, and then another. It seemed he had come to assuage his guilt. He assured anyone who would listen that he had voted for Khakamada and had even told his two hair-and-makeup people to vote for her. Of course, he had also run the campaign coverage that went out to about forty-five million Russian homes, and told them, over and over again, to vote for Putin. Seventy-one percent of the voters did.

I went to see Bystritsky in his office three days after the election. We had known each other a long time—in the mid-1990s he had been my editor at Itogi—so there was no point in pussyfooting around the main question.

“So tell me,” I said, “how do you conduct the propaganda of Putin’s regime?”

Bystritsky shrugged uncomfortably and busied himself with hospitable preliminaries. He offered me tea, cookies, chocolates, chocolate-covered marshmallows, and finally a CD with the collected speeches, photographs, and video footage of President Putin. The slipcover had five photographs of the president: serious, intense, impassioned, formal smiling, and informal smiling. The serious one had been reproduced widely: on Election Day alone, I came across it on the cover of school notebooks, on preframed portraits for sale at the Moscow Central Post Office (a bargain at $1.50 for a letter-size picture), and on pink, white, and blue balloons for sale in Red Square. The sale of any of these items on voting day was a violation of election law.

“We don’t especially do any propaganda,” Bystritsky said, settling into a leather armchair. “Look at the election, for example.” Russian law left over from the nineties required media outlets to provide all candidates with equal access to viewers and readers. Bystritsky had his numbers ready, and it was funny math: the president, he claimed, had engaged in only one election activity—meeting with his campaign activists—and the twenty-nine-minute meeting was broadcast three times in its entirety during regular newscasts, which had to be extended to accommodate it. On every other day of the campaign, the state television channel also showed Putin during its newscasts—usually as the lead story—but these, Bystritsky explained, were not campaign activities but the stuff of the president’s day job. An exhaustive study conducted by the Russian Union of Journalists, on the other hand, concluded that Putin got about seven times as much news coverage on the state channel as did either Khakamada or the Communist Party candidate; other candidates fared even worse. Coverage by the other state channel, the one that had once answered to Berezovsky, was even more skewed, while NTV, which had been taken away from Gusinsky, gave Putin a fourfold advantage over the next-best-covered contender.

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!”

Just then there was a dull pop, very much like a gunshot, and the women screamed, “Garry! Garry!” The crowd broke apart, and Kasparov’s bodyguards tried awkwardly to shield him while keeping people from trampling one another as they rushed off the porch. A young man standing in front of the building suddenly turned out to be holding a bottle of ketchup, which he shook up violently and then aimed at Kasparov and squeezed. Kasparov was presently covered: his head, his chest, and the right shoulder of his blue sport coat were stained sticky red. The porch was empty now, save for a clear plastic bag with several broken eggs in it that had hit the roof of the porch before landing: that was what had made the popping sound.

An old woman, now standing on the porch with us, tried to clean Kasparov’s face with a handkerchief. “Forgive me, forgive me,” he whispered over and over again, apologizing for triggering this incident in a town that was already racked with grief. Another woman in black, heavyset, in her forties, said, “Let’s go to the school—it’s safe there,” and Kasparov walked down the street, surrounded by the women, toward the building that had nearly been destroyed in the attack that ended the hostage crisis. For the ten minutes or so that they walked, Kasparov talked about the inevitability of a political crisis, the importance of protest, and the need to put aside political differences in the name of dismantling the regime. The crowd gradually grew as people came out of the houses and apartment blocks along the way to join the walk.

They entered the school through the giant holes in the walls of what used to be the gymnasium. At the end of the siege, this space was filled with children; this was where most of them died. The physical evidence suggested the gymnasium was damaged by tanks firing at point-blank range: there were giant holes in the thick brick wall where steel-grated windows used to be. Inside, the space was charred—by a fire, the Mothers of Beslan believed, started by a flamethrower used by the Russian troops (the state had acknowledged that flamethrowers were used, but denied that they could have led to a fire).

Kasparov gasped when they entered the gym. “Oh my God, oh my God,” he whispered. The women walked to different corners of the ravaged space and began wailing; soon the hall was filled with a muffled, high-pitched sound. Kasparov looked stricken: his eyes red, mouth slightly open, head shaking. It was clear that it would not be possible to talk in here: the room was oversaturated with grief. He asked to be given a tour of the school, and as he walked around with the crowd, now grown to about a hundred people, he talked: “I’m walking through this school, thinking: How do people in Moscow keep walking around, saying something, continuing to lie? Among them, there is someone who gave orders to open fire. If that person gets away with it, we will all be to blame!”

The rest of Kasparov’s day was bizarre. He went on to Vladikavkaz, a half-hour’s drive away, capital of North Ossetia. He was scheduled to give a talk, but his manager was notified that the curtain in the hall had collapsed onto the stage, so the space was unavailable. About four weeks into his campaign, this was familiar: every venue Kasparov rented anywhere in Russia had something go wrong. Here, not only was the hall unavailable, but in front of the building there was a hastily organized children’s event with extremely loud music. Kasparov went anyway and shouted to a crowd of about sixty people, talking about social spending, which constituted about 15 percent of the Russian budget—far less even than in the United States. Several teenagers hovered around the edges of the crowd. One threw a rock at Kasparov and missed. Kasparov kept talking. Then there was a torrent of eggs, two of which hit Kasparov in the head. The teenagers who threw the eggs ran off toward the police vehicles and quickly disappeared: there was no effort to hide that they had been brought there by the police and acted under their protection. When a German journalist who was also hit by an egg tried to chase his assailant, one of the policemen—who later turned out to be the local interior ministry spokesman—grabbed him by the arm and rudely told him to mind his own business. “Their regime is afraid of words!” shouted Kasparov.

Two of his bodyguards, visibly shaken, were whispering to each other. “He was just a kid—I couldn’t see it coming,” said one. “I was in the wrong position,” admitted the other, who tried but failed to shield Kasparov’s head. Eggs are not that dangerous, but they served to demonstrate how defenseless Kasparov was, despite his rotating staff of eight bodyguards.

“We’ve foreseen everything that’s foreseeable,” Kasparov said to me. “But if I really thought about it, I couldn’t go on.” One of his bodyguards always watched over food preparation, and Kasparov drank only bottled water he carried with him and ate only food ordered for the entire table.

At a dinner at the close of his trip to North Ossetia—a roughly five-hour affair during which Kasparov played three games of chess, two of them with a local seven-year-old prodigy—Alan Chochiev, an Ossetian activist who had recently served eleven months in prison for distributing antigovernment leaflets, made a toast: “No one has ever tried what you are doing. You are addressing not four hundred thousand people in every city. Not even four hundred at a time, in some large hall. You are talking to fifty or sixty people at a time, in a country with a population of 145 million. It’s a crazy task. I want to raise this toast: Here is a man who chose to do the impossible. May it now become possible!”

That was only half the story of Kasparov’s impossible task. Kasparov was not just agitating for his point of view; he was also attempting to gather and spread information, turning himself into a one-man substitute for the hijacked news media. He grilled local sympathizers about the situation in their region, then passed this information on. His chess player’s memory was invaluable: according to one of his assistants, he had never kept a phone book, because he could not help remembering every phone number he heard. Now he was constantly aggregating and averaging in his mind. He kept a running tally of the percentage of local taxes each region was allowed to keep, the problems opposition activists faced, and details of speech and behavior that he found telling. Now that local and national media existed only to spread the government’s message, information had to be gathered in this piecemeal manner.

In Rostov, where Kasparov spoke in front of the public library—he had been scheduled to speak in the library itself, but it had been shut down, under the pretense of a burst pipe—a young man approached his assistant, gave her his business card, and said he wanted to participate as a local organizer. When I asked his name, he said, “That’s impossible. I’ll get fired immediately.” As I later learned from Kasparov’s assistant, the man was an instructor at a state college.

Kasparov had flown a chartered plane to the south of Russia, and the plan had been to use it to go from city to city. But after spending most of one day grounded because no airport in the region would give permission to land, the group of thirteen people—Kasparov, his staff, and two journalists—had to switch to cars. When we arrived in Stavropol, it turned out our hotel reservations had been canceled. Standing in the lobby of the hotel, Kasparov’s manager called around to every other hotel in the sleepy city; all claimed to be fully booked. This was when the manager of the hotel showed up.

“I am sorry,” he said, clearly starstruck. “You must understand the position I am in. But can I take a picture with you?”

“I am sorry,” responded Kasparov. “But you must understand the position I am in.”

The hotel manager turned beet-red. Now he was as embarrassed as he had been scared.

“The hell with it,” he said. “We’ll give you rooms.”

That evening, only one of several dozen confirmed dinner guests showed up. The local organizer, an entrepreneur, claimed all the invitees had received threatening phone calls warning them against attending the dinner.

In Dagestan, Kasparov was scheduled to award trophies to the winners of a children’s chess tournament. But when our group arrived, the only person waiting for us was a local opposition journalist. He explained that the head of the Dagestan Chess Federation had received a phone call from the regional government telling him he would be fired if Kasparov attended the event, so the drivers—all of them local policemen, as it turned out—had taken us to the wrong place.

Everywhere Kasparov went, he was followed. There were usually at least two secret police agents, easily identifiable by their manner, their dress, and their standard-issue video cameras. Some of these men videotaped Kasparov, some posed as journalists—they always asked the same questions and refused to identify themselves—and some just trailed him. It was impossible to tell whether such extraordinary measures of security, surveillance, and general obstruction were taken on orders from Moscow or were a local initiative. In any case, they served to stimulate Kasparov by making him feel that the regime was scared, and they added weight to his words. At the same time, they marginalized him: even a world-famous genius begins to look slightly ridiculous when he is reduced to wearing ketchup-stained clothes, traveling in a beat-up hired van, and speaking to ad hoc gatherings in the street time after time.

Kasparov campaigned as doggedly and tirelessly as he had once played chess: he had played some of the longest matches in the history of the game, and as a perennial outsider in the Soviet sports establishment, he was no stranger to having the game rigged. But his political organization failed to grow: with a total television blackout, his voice, over the years, became more and more marginal. In the end, his money, his fame, and his mind proved powerless against the regime, even if it was true that the regime was scared of him. Once the institutions of democracy had been dismantled, it was impossible—it was too late—to organize to defend them.