Prison letters

Often, it is the little lives that tell us most about a system. Perhaps that is why 19^th century Russian literature gave so much place to the “little man” – the humble individual usually subsumed into that slogan-friendly notion of “the people.”

            As I wrote my last blog post, about a big name, Alexei Navalny, and his tragic death in prison, I was thinking, too, of his fellow prisoners, some of them also known to the world, others faceless, last making it into the western media when Yevgeny Prigozhin began recruiting them en-masse to do a stint on the frontlines in Ukraine, in return for freedom.

            And I was thinking of Spartak, named after his sisters’ favourite football team. He was 14 when I first met him. A good-hearted but directionless kid, one of the millions growing up without a father, and with a mother busy trying to survive. The mother, back in the years of Soviet industrial enthusiasm, had left her native Tatarstan to build the Baikal-Amur railway, a young woman eager to contribute to her country’s development. And had ended up stuck in a mining town in southern Yakutia. Spartak was her son from a second marriage, to a Ukrainian, who died young, and when his older half-sisters came to conquer the capital, he soon followed, went to school, tried to settle down.

            He didn’t really settle. He went to live with his father’s parents for a time, but rural Ukraine wasn’t his thing and he returned to Moscow. He drifted, until the army called him up for military service. After a bumpy start, he blossomed, discovered new talents, motivation, a sense of structure and discipline. He was stationed in Ingushetia, amidst the simmering conflict in the North Caucasus. He was a conscript, not a professional soldier, but they sent him to a hotspot, and later gave him a document to prove it.

            He thought of going professional, staying in the army, going to the military academy, but he’d quit school too early and the doors were closed. And so he drifted in Moscow again, did some silly things, ran afoul of the law and ended up being charged with “hooliganism,” a kind of catch-all offence frequently used and abused.

            That he’d become a bit of a hooligan was without doubt, but he wasn’t beyond redemption. He was 20, a malleable age, and all he really needed was some guidance and structure in his life. Instead, he got a year in the Butyrka pre-trial detention facility in Moscow, enough to harden and embitter anyone, followed by 3 years in a prison colony in Mordovia, a region east of Moscow, which hosted some of the matches at the 2018 Football World Cup, but is far better known within Russia as home to countless prisons.

            When he returned to Moscow, the sisters and I looked for programmes or groups working on reintegrating newly released prisoners. We found just one, a Jewish organisation that said it was swamped. There was a big prison population, but practically nothing addressing the needs of those returning to their old homes.

            Spartak now had a criminal record, publicly accessible to any potential employer. Prigozhin, the late Wagner boss, had a criminal record too, but made his way up during the freer and wilder 1990s, and had the right connections. Spartak had no connections and found one door after another closed, even for the least prestigious jobs. The only connections he had were his fellow prisoners, who’d help each other out where they could with employment or other opportunities. A young man written off from the start. A young man who was still kind-hearted Spartak, but branded now, seemingly condemned to this drifting and easily manipulated life.

            He muddled along until last October, found a new job, a girlfriend, when a chance encounter with some men from the North Caucasus upended a life just beginning to shine with new prospects. As he tells it, the men provoked the dispute, and one of them lunged at him with a knife. He reacted fast, instinctive, not thinking, snatched the knife and made a rapid thrusting movement in the man’s direction. Scare him off. Only the thrust was too fast, too hard, and the man went down, trying to stem the blood.

Spartak headed for the police station, told it as it was, he’d left a man injured, a foolish altercation, self defence. Later, he learned the man had died, and he was arrested, charged with murder, despite his pleas that he’d never had any desire or intention to kill anyone.

            I happen to know a judge, an honest judge, and I set out the situation to her. Difficult, she said. Lawyers are costly and few are genuinely good. She put me in touch with a lawyer who also wasn’t cheap, but who she said was a conscientious man, who’d do his best. Spartak said no. He didn’t want to burden anyone. His family would be paying the cost. They’d hired him a lawyer the first time too, when he was up for hooliganism, and that had cost a fortune and hadn’t brought the slightest result.

            He’s onto his third state-appointed lawyer now. These lawyers also try to squeeze money from their clients. He’s in a different Moscow pre-trial detention facility. In his letters, everything is decent – the food, the facilities, his cellmates. The letters are read first by the authorities, of course.

            He has books, a chance to get some exercise. They were all taken to vote in the recent presidential election. No surprise who they voted for. Communication is by letter only, and the occasional visit, when permission is granted, which often it is not. They watched Putin’s recent lengthy address, and he writes about his impressions. He’s not a Putin supporter (that he doesn’t say in his letters, of course), but he can’t help but admire the man’s strong will and sense of purpose.

            Everything he, Spartak, never had. He recognises his foolishness in life, admits too, his ignorance of the law. He’s aware they’re playing a game with him. Everyone else is signing up for the “special military operation,” he writes. The war in Ukraine. People not yet convicted, but already presumed guilty and told they can buy their freedom this way.

            He hasn’t signed anything yet, doesn’t want to go to war – war against half of himself, war against that village where he spent part of his teenage years. But they keep shunting back the hearing date. No clear investigation, no proper lawyers, no case materials to see, no certain date, only the constant repetition that they’re going to sentence him for murder, so he’d be better off going to the front.

            And sometimes he says that maybe he’ll take that offer. Accept his fate. Prison or war, and he writes the word “war,” and it passes uncensored. To escape not the worst of cages, but nonetheless a cage, to breathe a breath of freedom before being killed.

            That’s his story so far. He’s 34 now, still waiting in his cell. Not a story with a hero, because Spartak knows he’s not a hero, and that he’s brought more grief and worry than anything in this life, but he wanted me to share it. He can’t concentrate on much for long, he writes, too battered by the gusts of his thoughts, the uncertainty, the choices ahead.            

And there are many Spartaks, many young men who’ve walked this same road, or are walking it now, but could have had very different lives. Some of them will be given guns and sent into the meatgrinder on the front, and for most, whatever breath of freedom they snatch will be brief and burning.  

Much ado about Nothing

I used to dread Russian President Vladimir Putin’s annual address to the Federal Assembly. I had to translate it. It was long and never very inspiring. True, he later spiced it up with animation showing the latest Russian weapons and where they might strike, but I just missed that one.

This time, Putin’s address has set off a great flurry of speculation. Not surprising when you glance at the headlines – Government resigns, constitutional reform, a national referendum.

My first thought was that surely this is all just much ado about nothing. Yes, history has known cases of sudden conversions and transformations, but Putin and the Russian power system as it exists today? No. This is not some great new transformation in process, not some big turning point or harbinger of new policies and approaches. It’s a bit of minor fiddling with the system dressed up as something with far greater importance and implications, and there are reasons for that.

Constant talk is the bread and butter of life these days. In Russia too. Right from the minute Putin got re-elected in 2018 people have been chattering away about what will happen in 2024, when his final mandate under the current constitution ends, and who his successor might be.

What will happen in 2024? No one knows. Not even Putin. It’s a cliche that we live in a fast-changing world, and an interconnected one too, and so it’s awfully difficult to predict what the situation will look like in 2024, for Russia, for the wider world, and for Putin personally. Sure, working within an authoritarian system, Putin has the luxury of much longer term planning, as he’s not bound to the uncertainties of fickle voter whims and short election cycles. But he’s always been more of a tactician than a strategist, and he doesn’t have a crystal ball at hand.

As a tactician, it’s no doubt pretty clear that there is too much of this US-borrowed “lame duck” talk, too much idle speculation about who might be next in the line of succession, and also the annoying background chatter about environmental protests here, social gripes there, pensions, rising costs, the irritating buzz of those opposition mosquitos with their talk of thieves, crooks and corruption, and gossip about intra-system clan rivalries and jostling for influence. Not to mention that the old fallbacks of Ukraine and other assorted enemies are losing their former reliable lustre. Poland, the current whipping boy for offended patriotic sentiment, doesn’t quite make the cut. The 75th anniversary of the end of World War II is sure to provide numerous occasions for patriotic pathos and efforts to unite the country, but the twittering class prefers other subject matter.

So here it is: constitutional reform and government shakeups. That’ll keep everyone busy speculating and deflate this “lame duck” talk somewhat. Meanwhile, things will keep working as they always did.

One can forget about the State Duma and the Federation Council – the lower and upper houses of parliament – undergoing any real transformation in their roles. Their roles are so minimal as it is, but they play a useful part as symbols – the decorative trappings of democracy.

One can forget about the State Council, too, I think. That rather mysterious body with a vague role, set up when Putin was creating his streamlined “vertical of power”, which meant bringing the regions into line and binding them more tightly in a centralised system. Some of the regional governors, relics from earlier, less centralised and more demanding days, were quite prominent and powerful figures, and the State Council was their nice little retirement place, a face-saving reward and continuation of the Soviet-era tradition that once in the system, you stayed in. You might be removed from a post, but unless you’d really messed up and trodden too painfully on the wrong toes, you’d pop up in another post, less powerful, perhaps, even purely symbolic, but still within the system. That was, and still is, a good way of creating a sense of vested interest in keeping the system going.

If the State Council could be set up on decree, it can surely be given some kind of constitutionally-enshrined status too, if that’s what the Kremlin wants to happen. But at this point, there’s little sense in reading too much into these vague statements.

As for the government, Dmitry Medvedev, the now former prime minister, was always in a tenuous position there. He’s taken plenty of flak over this time, but that also doesn’t mean much. Part of the reason why Putin is Putin, holding the special place he holds, is because for the system’s solidity, it is mighty useful to let public discontent target officials all the way up the ranks, from corrupt or inept local bureaucrats to government ministers or the prime minister himself. Just think of the number of times Putin has stepped in as the arbiter from above, chastising, ordering, urging, mending wrongs and generally looking moderate where others look extreme, or looking decisive where others are fluffing around with little effect, or sharing popular indignation over negligence here and stupidity there.

Medvedev’s seeming demotion doesn’t mean he’s in disgrace in Putin’s eyes. It’s hard to say what plans Putin might have for him, if any, but one thing is sure – the two of them have had and do have their differences, but they are a loyal tandem, tried and tested, and in Putin’s eyes, that kind of longstanding, verified loyalty counts for a lot.

Medvedev is now in the Russian Security Council, directly under Putin himself. In the old days of “Sovietology”, analysts used to look at who was standing where on the Lenin Mausoleum during the annual military parades, and would try to deduce from that what was going on within the Politburo – the decision-making body of that time.

If I was going to watch anything now, I’d watch the Russian Security Council. It’s another vague body within the system, but unlike the State Council, it is where the real decision-making goes on. If you look at its composition, you see that it is always weighted to the security side of things. That fits with Putin’s mindset. He is himself from the security side of things, after all, ex KGB/FSB, and these matters are utmost on his mind. Security first. Everything else as can be managed without detriment to security.

Medvedev isn’t a security guy – that, to Putin’s mind, probably explains why he agreed to let the UN Security Council bring in a no-fly zone over Libya back during the Arab Spring, which other countries than used to intervene in the course of events there. A mistake, in Putin’s way of thinking.

But loyalty comes first – even over poor grasp of security matters, and so, why not keep Medvedev there alongside him on this body that debates the real meat of things? Maybe, with time, Medvedev has learned from his past mistakes?

I doubt we are about to suddenly get a much more public and transparent Security Council. I used to love Security Council days – they gave me the least work. It would be a brief roundup of who attended and the general subjects discussed. But this was where those tactics and decisions were being planned and debated. No need to enlighten the public about the details of important matters of state.

The prime minister usually attends Security Council meetings. The new prime minister, Mikhail Mishustin, is being described as a technocrat. Some compare him to Mikhail Fradkov, an earlier Putin appointee to that post. Fradkov was seen as an obscure technocrat, but he actually came from a security and intelligence background. Mishustin has a tax service background, which, in Russia, amounts to something of a security background too.

Judging by the content of Putin’s address, the government will attempt to deal with various social issues and mitigate some of the discontent that has built up here, especially after the pension reforms. But the overall focus will still be security. This is always priority number one.

One more point that drew attention in Putin’s address was the issue of international law having primacy over the Russian constitution. Putin wants to reverse that and ensure Russia’s legal sovereignty too. Sovereignty in general is a big thing for Putin, ever since the days of “managed” or “sovereign” democracy and through to ensuring Russia has digital sovereignty.

This legal sovereignty won’t change much. The international law in question here is the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights, and Russia already takes a selective approach there. The court passes verdicts, but actually getting them enforced is another matter.

Other international law, arms control treaties, for example, is a simpler case. Russia makes it a point to emphasise its commitment to international law and leaves it to the US to unravel it or to set precedents that Russia can then use, saying, we warned you that this would have consequences in the future.