Sunshine Recorder

During the closing statement, the defendant is expected to repent or express regret for her deeds, or to enumerate attenuating circumstances. In my case, as in the case of my colleagues in the group, this is completely unnecessary. Instead, I want to express my views about the causes of what has happened with us.

The fact that Christ the Savior Cathedral had become a significant symbol in the political strategy of our powers that be was already clear to many thinking people when Vladimir Putin’s former [KGB] colleague Kirill Gundyaev took over as head of the Russian Orthodox Church. After this happened, Christ the Savior Cathedral began to be used openly as a flashy setting for the politics of the security services, which are the main source of power [in Russia].

Why did Putin feel the need to exploit the Orthodox religion and its aesthetics? After all, he could have employed his own, far more secular tools of power—for example, national corporations, or his menacing police system, or his own obedient judiciary system. It may be that the tough, failed policies of Putin’s government, the incident with the submarine Kursk, the bombings of civilians in broad daylight, and other unpleasant moments in his political career forced him to ponder the fact that it was high time to resign; otherwise, the citizens of Russia would help him do this. Apparently, it was then that he felt the need for more convincing, transcendental guarantees of his long tenure at the helm. It was here that the need arose to make use of the aesthetics of the Orthodox religion, historically associated with the heyday of Imperial Russia, where power came not from earthly manifestations such as democratic elections and civil society, but from God Himself.

How did he succeed in doing this? After all, we still have a secular state, and shouldn’t any intersection of the religious and political spheres be dealt with severely by our vigilant and critically minded society? Here, apparently, the authorities took advantage of a certain deficit of Orthodox aesthetics in Soviet times, when the Orthodox religion had the aura of a lost history, of something crushed and damaged by the Soviet totalitarian regime, and was thus an opposition culture. The authorities decided to appropriate this historical effect of loss and present their new political project to restore Russia’s lost spiritual values, a project which has little to do with a genuine concern for preservation of Russian Orthodoxy’s history and culture.

It was also fairly logical that the Russian Orthodox Church, which has long had a mystical connection with power, emerged as this project’s principal executor in the media. Moreover, it was also agreed that the Russian Orthodox Church, unlike the Soviet era, when the church opposed, above all, the crudeness of the authorities towards history itself, should also confront all baleful manifestations of contemporary mass culture, with its concept of diversity and tolerance.

Implementing this thoroughly interesting political project has required considerable quantities of professional lighting and video equipment, air time on national TV channels for hours-long live broadcasts, and numerous background shoots for morally and ethically edifying news stories, where in fact the Patriarch’s well-constructed speeches would be pronounced, helping the faithful make the right political choice during the election campaign, a difficult time for Putin. Moreover, all shooting has to take place continuously; the necessary images must sink into the memory and be constantly updated, to create the impression of something natural, constant and compulsory.

Our sudden musical appearance in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior with the song “Mother of God, Drive Putin Out” violated the integrity of this media image, generated and maintained by the authorities for so long, and revealed its falsity. In our performance we dared, without the Patriarch’s blessing, to combine the visual image of Orthodox culture and protest culture, suggesting to smart people that Orthodox culture belongs not only to the Russian Orthodox Church, the Patriarch and Putin, that it might also take the side of civic rebellion and protest in Russia.

Perhaps such an unpleasant large-scale effect from our media intrusion into the cathedral was a surprise to the authorities themselves. First they tried to present our performance as the prank of heartless militant atheists. But they made a huge blunder, since by this time we were already known as an anti-Putin feminist punk band that carried out their media raids on the country’s major political symbols.

In the end, considering all the irreversible political and symbolic losses caused by our innocent creativity, the authorities decided to protect the public from us and our nonconformist thinking. Thus ended our complicated punk adventure in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior.

I now have mixed feelings about this trial. On the one hand, we now expect a guilty verdict. Compared to the judicial machine, we are nobodies, and we have lost. On the other hand, we have won. Now the whole world sees that the criminal case against us has been fabricated. The system cannot conceal the repressive nature of this trial. Once again, Russia looks different in the eyes of the world from the way Putin tries to present it at daily international meetings. All the steps toward a state governed by the rule of law that he promised have obviously not been made. And his statement that the court in our case will be objective and make a fair decision is another deception of the entire country and the international community. That is all. Thank you.

After Sergei Magnitsky was beaten to death in a Moscow jail for uncovering fraud by Russian authorities, investor Bill Browder devoted himself to publicising the case.

A decade ago, Bill Browder was flying high as one of the most successful foreign investors in Russia. With $4.5bn under management, Browder had committed his career and a lot of his investors’ money to proving his proposition that the shares of Russia’s newly privatised, resource-rich companies were absurdly cheap.

The cocksure, US-born fund manager aggressively argued to anyone prepared to listen – and to many who weren’t – that President Vladimir Putin had been unfairly maligned in the western press and was intent on bringing prosperity and order to the biggest country in the world, after the rapacious criminality of the 1990s. To the disgust of many, Browder declared himself delighted when Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once Russia’s richest and most powerful oligarch, was arrested in 2003 and jailed. “Who’s next?” Browder asked cheerfully.

Two years later, however, Browder’s fortunes suffered a similar convulsion of fate. Returning to Moscow one Sunday evening in November 2005, after a routine trip to London, his visa was rejected for unexplained reasons. He was expelled from the country the next morning and declared a threat to national security. His panicking investors stampeded out of his Russia fund, known as Hermitage Capital Management. He was forced into a fire sale of his Russian assets, reducing his funds to just $50m. Hermitage’s offices in Moscow were later raided by the Russian tax police, amid allegations of fraud.

Browder’s career as an investor in Russia had been wrecked, but worse was to follow. Sergei Magnitsky, a dogged lawyer who worked for the law firm that represented Hermitage, later discovered that the Russian authorities had perpetrated a tax refund fraud, using forged Hermitage documents to transfer $230m of state money to a criminal gang. Rather than congratulating Magnitsky for his assistance, the authorities accused him of orchestrating the fraud himself and arrested him in November 2008. After almost a year’s detention, during which time he was repeatedly denied medical treatment, he was beaten to death in his jail cell.

It is a commonplace, at least in the West, that the current regime in Russia is authoritarian, if not totalitarian. A line can be drawn—with caveats about scale and severity—from Putin straight back to Stalin, while others can be drawn sideways from Putin to the dictators he has befriended and supported: Assad, Qaddafi, Chavez, and Saddam Hussein. (If nothing else, Putin seems to have an oddly consistent and unlucky way of choosing his friends.) The recent protests against him only confirm the neatness of this symmetry.

We think we know what authoritarianism is and why it survives, but our notions about it have not changed much since the 18th century, when Montesquieu contrasted the capricious rule of a despot, who holds power through fear, with the bounded governance of a monarch, held in check by law. In our political language, monarchy has evolved into democracy, but despotism remains despotism (or authoritarianism). In comparison to monarchies and democracies, each in their own time, despotism has always seemed archaic. The gleaming military uniforms, Tolkienesque titles, and Orientalized imperial paraphernalia of modern dictators like Idi Amin, Pinochet, and Qaddafi evoke the 19th century; leaders who are truly modern are supposed to wear self-effacing suits.

If authoritarianism is a relic of a pre-democratic age, Putinism, like the late regime of Putin’s friend Silvio Berlusconi, is not authoritarian. Regimes that see themselves as successors to democracy are not rare—fascists and communists were equally convinced that liberal democracy belonged in the dustbin of history. The difference is that Putinism is partly right in seeing itself as post-democratic, which is why the problems it poses are so vexing. It represents one answer to a set of contradictions that exist not just in Russian democracy but also in contemporary democracy in general.

These contradictions are well known in the United States and Western Europe, on the right as well as on the left. One of them is that while democratic discourse constantly represents the electoral process as a canvassing of the will of the people, in reality political and media institutions police the field of acceptable alternatives so strictly that the choices that can be made are rudimentary at best. Moreover, the participation of multinational elites and large-scale capital flows in the political process means that individual electorates are always pitted against forces much larger than they are, as the Eurozone crisis most recently has shown. The old American conservative fear of international institutions like the United Nations reflects a similar worry. The premise of 19th-century liberal democracy, which envisioned national communities as largely self-enclosed and politics as localized debates on the common good, becomes less tenable with each passing year. 

Democracy arrived in Russia with many of these contradictions already exposed. It had long been a staple of Soviet propaganda that American democracy was a mockery controlled by finance-capital puppet masters and served by a craven media, whose business it was to play down racial, economic, and gender inequalities. Soviet ideologists, like Soviet citizens more generally, knew little about real life in the West, but they closely followed the struggles of Western leftists who were making similar arguments. Ordinary Soviet people were not usually skeptical of such claims: to believe in the decrepitude of the Soviet system or the wonders of the free market, as many did, did not demand allegiance to American-style politics. Up until the last months of the Soviet Union’s existence, most reformers (and supporters of reform) thought they were building a social democracy that abolished the unfree aspects of the Soviet system, not buckling to global capital.

Every so often a lengthy newspaper or magazine article arrives that all but demands a fuller and even longer treatment. Such was the case in the Oct 31. issue of The Sunday Times magazine in London, which published translated excerpts from the diary of a Russian spetsnaz officer who served for more than a decade as one of the Kremlin’s shadowy fighters in the Chechen wars.

The two Chechen wars, fought since the Soviet Union disintegrated between Russian federal forces and shifting bands of rebels who have carried the banners of separatism, jihad and revenge, have seen waves of violence as chilling as most any accounts of war. Fueled by racism and an urge to settle bloody scores, both sides have joined in a descent to the bottom, engaging in unsparing campaigns against each others’ civilian populations. Untold thousands of civilians have vanished or been killed. A wave of emigration followed, and criminality took hold. The tiny Chechen republic was leveled in the process, only to be rebuilt in recent years as a new police state controlled by a megalomaniacal young Kremlin proxy, Ramzan Kadyrov, who rules the land by collective punishment and fear.

If the paired words — insurgency and counterinsurgency — conjure dark associations, Chechnya is the example that summons some of the most severe forms of political violence of our time: hostage-taking in a theater, a public school and a hospital to leverage political demands; suicide bombings;  indiscriminate shelling of rebel strongholds; assassinations; beheadings of captured combatants and suspected informants; mass arrests and incarcerations; public displays of the dead as warnings to others; systemic use of torture, and more.

Much of this is has been rigorously documented by human-rights investigators and a small cadre of journalists; the shape of war-fighting in and near Chechnya is broadly understood. But accounts of participants have been few. The Sunday Times article prepared by The Times’s long-serving Moscow correspondent, Mark Franchetti, marks a valuable step toward gathering participants’ accounts. In a series of first-person vignettes from an anonymous officer’s diary, it offers a front-line account of characteristic forms of Russian-Chechen campaigns — roundups, torture, extrajudicial executions of detained rebels and the almost casual killing of civilians who happen to be in the way. It also captures some of the frantic energy and sorrow of firefights, in which this officer, who gave his 120-page diary to Mr. Franchetti, was often engaged. The result is a portrait of confused dehumanization, of both relishing in fighting and agonizing over the results.

Soldiers’ memoirs are basic artifacts from which any given war can be further understood. They are also potentially risky to rely on, especially in wars for which a large body of individual accounts are not available. As any veteran knows from listening to fellow soldiers’ bar stool accounts, survivors of war sometimes veer into cartoonish description, and accounts of events can be laden with exaggeration. These risks are amplified in a diary like this one, which in its published form presents a series of undated entries. (The Sunday Times said in the article’s introduction that it had removed locations and dates to protect Mr. Franchetti’s source.) Without the original manuscript available for review, it’s not possible to verify these accounts against a larger body of material.

But Mr. Franchetti is not new to the Chechen wars. He is one of the few remaining Western journalists who has troubled to cover a ghastly beat several years after it slipped from most newspapers’ pages, doggedly returning to his subject when many journalists moved on. And his collaboration with Dima Beliakov, a Russian photographer with rich connections throughout the Russian security services operating (to put it euphemistically) in the North Caucasus, has often granted him insights that have borne out. Questions will linger about this anonymous officer and his motives for coming forward. But any reader interested in comprehending what befell Chechnya will be left with a hope that a full treatment of this diary — with dates, locations, names — will become available with time. Perhaps there is a book to do, which would be a valuable addition to the all-too-thin libraries available on an important chapter in the histories not only of Russia and the Caucasus, but also of modern war.

The diary as available now is a complex offering. It provides a departure point for confronting the ways that war can unravel its participants. Mr. Franchetti’s source appears, variously and by his own accounts, as vicious, grim, bitter, alcoholic, criminal, angry at his country but deeply faithful to his fellow fighters, many of whom were killed and whom he feels he has let down. He departs the stage nostalgic, even aching, for a quiet family life. For those trying to understand the slippery new counterinsurgency doctrine, which has swept like a religion through the Pentagon in the past five years, this abbreviated diary also carries insights into how Russia’s forces have pursued their own Eastern brand of counterinsurgent tactics, unapologetically matching brutality with brutality, seeking less to win, as the tin-eared slogan says, Chechnya’s “hearts and minds” than to exhaust the Chechen population. The article is, on many levels, a deeply engaging and frighteningly realistic view of a world rarely exposed.

You can read the diary here.

Vladimir Putin has laid out his plans to compile a canon of 100 Russian books “that every Russian school leaver will be required to read” in an attempt to preserve the “dominance of Russian culture”.

In an article running to more than 4,500 words in Russia’s Nezavisimaya Gazeta newspaper, the Russian prime minister writes that “in the 1920s, some leading universities in the United States advocated something referred to as the Western Canon, a canon of books regarded as the most important and influential in shaping Western culture”, adding that “each self-respecting student was required to read 100 books from a specially compiled list of the greatest books of the Western world”.

Putin, who is running for a third term as president in March, says that Russia has “always been described as a ‘reading nation’”, and proposes taking a survey of the country’s “most influential cultural figures” and compiling “a 100-book canon that every Russian school leaver will be required to read – that is, to read at home rather than study in class or memorise. And then they would be asked to write an essay on one of them in their final exams. Or at least let us give young Russians a chance to demonstrate their knowledge and world outlook in various student competitions.”

Journalist Alexander Nazaryan, who is writing a novel about Russian immigrants in New York, called Putin’s “cultural-unity-through-literature proposal” the Russian leader’s “most chilling [plan] of all”.

“Social engineering through state mandated literature: Nothing else that Putin has done has been quite so nakedly Soviet in its desire to manipulate the human intellect into docility,” writes Nazaryan, predicting that “the books that will benefit from Putin’s new cultural policy will almost certainly be Soviet-era schlock churned out by Writers’ Union foot soldiers who glorified their compatriots’ miserable existence”.

Why the Russian youth have tolerated the political situation in their country for so long and why they are no longer tolerant.

Political freedom has never existed in Russia. Which is why in our country even critically minded people are not used to thinking about society as a whole. […] Politics is one thing, life is another. Russian society, particularly when it comes to my generation, is extremely unpolitical and this gives the government more or less unlimited freedom. We are not concerned about the government and that suits the government just fine. 

Of course there are people, plenty of them, who very definitely do make this connection. But even they do not get involved. There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, the entire political system in Russia – from village soviet to federal committee – is based on lies, on the pursuit of private instead of societal interests, and on theft. Even an honest person who ends up in politics has to play the game to some extent, otherwise he will be “eaten” by less upstanding colleagues. This is why honest people give politics a wide berth. And engage in civil society in other ways. Such as in the voluntary movement which in recent years has become a mass phenomenon. 

Secondly, there has been neither political nor personal freedom in Russia for a very long time. Throughout the 20th century the totalitarian state wanted to control all spheres of life. This is no longer the case. The state no longer reaches into personal affairs, into the family and into people’s inner lives. Beyond this, many people don’t ask more of the state. People are left in peace, they are no longer shot for reading forbidden poetry, they are allowed to wear whatever they want, listen to whatever music they like, travel the world and even think what they wish about the state – and that’s just fine. It is a sort of silent agreement, a mutual nonaggression pact: leave us in peace and we will leave you in peace. The right to live one’s life in exchange for keeping out of politics in exchange. And for quite some time this seems to have satisfied both sides. 

Of course the state does not waste any time in dealing with those who dare to violate this agreement, who poke their noses into things or disrupt the status quo. The attacks on civil rights activists, the murders of prying journalists, the brutal suppression of demonstrations – these are all as much symptoms of the time as social networking or security checks in public spaces. In other words, it is not only hard work to stand up for your rights in Russia, it is also dangerous. And you cannot blame anyone for not wanting to risk their lives. After all, not everyone is a hero and a fighter.

Riot police in helmets roughly dragged more than 550 protesters into detention vans Tuesday evening in central Moscow but the opposition warned they would stage a major protest organised via the internet at the weekend. Protesters were planning more demonstrations today. Amid growing international alarm, Mr Gorbachev said the results of Sunday’s poll should be annulled and new elections held due to “numerous falsifications and rigging. The results do not reflect the will of the people,” Mr Gorbachev, president when the Soviet Union collapsed two decades ago, told the Interfax news agency. ”Therefore I think they (Russia’s leaders) can only take one decision – annul the results of the election and hold new ones.” Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party won the polls with a sharply reduced majority, amid signs the prime minister’s once-invincible popularity might be waning.