Strongman, The

chairman of Rosneft.
    Another old Leningrad KGB colleague, Nikolai Patrushev, became chairman of the FSB, following Putin himself.
    Rashid Nurgaliyev worked under Putin in the FSB and then became interior minister. Cherkesov, mentioned above, was another subordinate of Putin’s in the FSB.
    Sergei Chemezov, a fellow spy with Putin in Dresden, was brought in to run Rosoboronexport, the country’s chief arms exporter. And another ‘Chekist’, Vladimir Yakunin, was brought in to the transport ministry and eventually became head of Russian Railways.
    Yakunin has another link to Putin: they are both founding members of a so-called ‘dacha cooperative’ known as Ozero , which manages their adjacent country houses on Komsomolskoye lake near St Petersburg. All of Putin’s other friends from the Ozero group (as we shall see in Chapter 12) now hold top positions in government, banking and the media.
    The Chechen war and the backlash
    During Putin’s first years as president events in Chechnya cast a long shadow over his claims to be bringing Russia into the ‘European family’. I spent several months in Chechnya during the earlier war (1994–96) and saw for myself how the republic was ravaged by Russian forces. It seemed to me that there was more than sufficient evidence of serious war crimes and human rights violations, which I and scores of other journalists documented, but the international community – perhaps because it was preoccupied with the simultaneous wars in the Balkans – did nothing about them. The total devastation of the capital, Grozny, and the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians, whose apartment blocks were literally pulverised by Russian air power and artillery, could not be justified by the alleged purpose of destroying ‘bandits’, as the rebel forces were known. I interviewed survivors of Russian ‘filtration camps’ – notorious prisons where Chechens were tortured to extract confessions, or just for fun. I visited huge open graves, filled with hundreds of bodies, some with their hands tied behind their backs. I met dozens of grieving families, saw murdered women and children, hundreds of homes destroyed in villages all across Chechnya, streams of refugees fleeing from Russian troops, people cowering in basements from air attacks. I met defenceless, bedridden old people, all but freezing and starving to death in the rubble of their homes. But this was under Boris Yeltsin’s presidency, and the West, besotted with his alleged devotion to democracy, offered only limp condemnation, considering the conflict to be an ‘internal affair’.
    The second war, unleashed by Putin in 1999, was by all accounts even more brutal. But fewer Western journalists covered it, because it was simply too dangerous. At least in the earlier war the Chechens had been generally well disposed to journalists; since then the republic had turned into a lawless quagmire, where the risk of kidnapping and murder were just too great. The rebel fighters themselves were now as barbarous as the Russians had been. It was left mainly to courageous journalists like Anna Politkovskaya of Novaya gazeta to bring the truth to the world this time. (And even so no Western leader has called for any Russian commander or politician to be tried for war crimes.)
    In the first war it was relatively easy for journalists to move around in Chechnya. It was this that led to the highly critical coverage – not only in the West but in Russia too, especially on NTV. The authorities learned their lesson, and the second time around tried to restrict access to the war zone. One Russian journalist, Andrei Babitsky, who worked for Radio Liberty, was even kidnapped by federal forces in early 2000 because of his critical reporting. They then handed him over to Chechen fighters in exchange for Russian prisoners of war, as though he himself were a combatant – a fallacy apparently supported by Putin, who indicated that he saw nothing wrong with the swap because Babitsky – a journalist , let’s not forget – was a traitor: ‘This was his own decision,’ Putin told the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda . ‘He went to the people whose interests he effectively served.’ 2
    If Putin believed that critical reporting was tantamount to serving the enemy, then there could be no doubt about what he must have thought of Politkovskaya. After the taming of NTV she became the most important chronicler of Russian barbarity in Chechnya, a patient listener