The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult (21 page)

He went on to detail routine violations at his department – including orders to falsify evidence against suspects to boost statistics, and jailings of innocent homeless people outright.

To fellow officers, he said:

“I ask you to join us. There are a lot of us who want to work honestly. I ask the pensioners to join us. You’ve already worked, you have nothing to fear. Look at the young people who join the police! They say they are not daunted by salaries of 12,000 roubles
because they can rely on a generous
kalym
.” (Dymovsky seems to have confused
kalym –
which is a bride price in some ethnic republics in Russia – with
obrok,
or a tribute paid by a peasant to his lord.)

Not a single word of what he said was news to anyone, but the monotonous, jargon-ridden voice of a cop, the lowest cog in the Interior Ministry, detailing those petty abuses punctured the uneasy tolerance of police corruption for the second time that year.

Despite Dymovsky’s request to meet with Putin “eye to eye,” the prime minister responded to the video address and to the ensuing scandal with an icy silence. His press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, said that while the prime minister was informed of the address, he had not bothered to watch it.
¹²⁹
Putin would never utter the word “Dymovsky,” and never bring up the issue of his complaint. For apart from complaining about low salaries and general corruption, Dymovsky broke every unspoken rule in the book: addressing the Tsar, he named his boss, Novorossiysk police chief Vladimir Chernositov, and accused him of giving orders to imprison an innocent person in exchange for being given the rank of major.

“Dymovsky did not say anything new. It’s all happened before,” Mikhail Pashkin, chairman of the Moscow Police Union and an avid critic of Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev, told me. “We’ve been talking about this kind of stuff for the last ten years. It’s just that he found a new medium, video.”
¹³⁰

Police whistleblowers frequently faced retribution. Grigory Chekalin, a former deputy prosecutor of the Chita region, fought criminal allegations after he refused to fabricate charges against two people he believed were innocent. He fled to Moscow, virtually exiled from his home city. In Moscow, officers who complain might just lose their jobs.

“If an officer wants to live by the law, they try to get rid of him,” said Pashkin. “Or if an Interior Ministry officer is facing someone who has more money than he does – then he will get prosecuted for bribe-taking. They jailed a [certain] officer for eleven years over $400 that they found in the corridor. He spent six years in prison. The problem was, he [started investigating] a store that was [protected] by a different structure. He’s a lawyer now, and a member of our union. We tried to defend him.”

Dymovsky became an instant celebrity; whisked to Moscow, he gave a press conference where he laid out vague plans to organize efforts to fight corruption in the bottom rungs of power. And as Dymovsky had promised, heartened by his example, more cops followed, recounting the medieval hell of police departments across the country in their monotonous voices.

The dozens of new video revelations posted on his site,
Dymovskiy.name
, bore a single common pattern: these cops had already complained to their superiors about being given orders to break the law, and their complaints earned them nothing but ostracism. Desperate, they tried to channel the wave of public indignation to get their cases across to the government, seeking protection to practice what they saw as honest police work. But most of these attempts went nowhere; and Dymovsky’s, in the end, would be no exception – exiled from the force, they were lucky if they were not in jail.

President Dmitry Medvedev’s epic overhaul of the Interior Ministry – beginning with a plan to cut 20 percent of the work force and raise salaries, going through a series of high profile purges, and culminating in renaming the
militsia
into the ‘
politsia’
for a more Western-sounding corps – did nothing to reinstate these dozens of police officers, who, like Major Dymovsky, blew the whistle on the dirty work they were being forced to do.

The Russian language doesn’t have a term for whistleblowing, but it does have a word for a snitch. And like any military organization structure, the Interior Ministry did not tolerate subordinates ratting publicly on their bosses. Despite feeble gestures from the Kremlin to fire a few police commanders in the Krasnodar Region where Dymovsky’s home town of Novorossiysk was located, local structures came down hard on the hapless police major – using every means in their arsenal to discredit his name.

Almost the day after the video address was picked up by the media, the Krasnodar region Interior Ministry head Sergei Kucheruk fired Dymovsky for slander, while his bosses, Valery Medvedev and Vladimir Chernositov, filed a slander suit against him. But that was only the beginning.

The Interior Ministry immediately unleashed a powerful campaign against Dymovsky. Sources leaked quotes to the press that orders had been given to “bury” the whistleblower.
¹³¹
Spokesmen for the ministry publicly called him insane; an ex-wife posted a video statement accusing him of being a dirty cop.

Under the unspoken laws that enforced loyalty in power structures that had no viable written code to adhere to, the punishment for accusing one’s superiors of a crime was to be discredited and slapped with one’s own crimes. In a system where everyone broke the rules, these crimes did not have to be fabricated.

Even as the Interior Ministry’s security department began checking the validity of his claims, local police also started digging for dirt against Dymovsky. All that investigators could actually find were allegations of embezzling about £500 in the course of eighteen months. Given the scope of police racketeering that Dymovsky and other officers described to me, this was a laughable sum.

Within a month, Dymovsky was presented with charges of fraud and abuse of office. In January 2010, he was taken into custody and locked up in a pretrial detention centre.

What was interesting was that investigators made little effort to deny that the persecution was a direct retaliation for snitching to Putin. Inna Biryukova, a spokeswoman for the Krasnodar regional Investigative Committee, said the fraud checks were not connected to his video. But when I asked her when exactly those checks were initiated – before or after the video was posted – she said, “After.”

But the Kremlin’s anti-corruption drive, which started gaining momentum soon after the outcry sparked by the videos, acted in Dymovsky’s favour. In December 2009, Medvedev decreed that the Interior Ministry should be reformed by 2012; in February, he sacked sixteen interior ministry officials – one of them Boris Martynov, head of the Krasnodar Regional Police, which had Dymovsky’s department in its jurisdiction.

In that context, the media attention given to Dymovsky’s imprisonment only vindicated his claims and his own status as a new type of dissident. Politically, a police whistleblower in prison threatened to make a laughing stock of President Dmitry Medvedev’s reform campaign. In that light, Dymovsky’s release from prison six weeks later on March 7, 2010, made perfect sense. And the
prosecutors who approved the decision gave a perfectly Soviet explanation. “The decision to release him was made because the necessity to keep him in custody has passed,” Inna Biryukova told me when I asked whether the media attention reflected on the decision to release him on bail.
¹³²

The investigation into fraud allegations against Dymovsky never went to court and seemed to be filed away as a potential weapon for further use. As for the slander case, a court ordered Dymovsky to pay 50,000 roubles each to Chernositov and Medvedev for spreading false rumours against them.

Instead, the regional Interior Ministry took on a more localised approach and started waging a “softer” war: officials connected Dymovsky’s
Belaya Lenta
movement, which staged a series of protests in Novorossiysk during his imprisonment, to the US Agency for International Development in a bid to portray the Dymovsky scandal as a Western intervention attempt. One of
Belaya Lenta
’s leaders, Vadim Karastelyov, was arrested once while handing out flyers; on another occasion he was severely beaten by unidentified attackers.

Karastelyov told me that Valery Medvedev – who was behind the slander suit – detained him personally in Novorossiysk as he was handing out flyers.
¹³³
The behaviour of Dymovsky’s bosses, if not backed by Interior Ministry officials in Moscow, was clearly tolerated because Dymovsky had violated the unspoken rules of the game.

Less easy to understand is the reaction of the federal government. In the context of its police reform campaign, simply ignoring Dymovsky was certainly an option, and on the surface this appeared to be precisely what both Medvedev’s Kremlin and Putin’s White House were doing. But the noticeable silence with which it was treating the case raised even more questions. Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, could go on at great lengths about human rights activists and oppositionists; but on Dymovsky everyone was silent.

When reports appeared in the media that winter asking “Who is behind Dymovsky?” and when I got to know Dymovsky and his friends better, I started to understand part of the reason for the silence.

Dymovsky’s video address sparked more than a wave of solidarity from lower-rank cops across the country. It brought a general neurosis to the fore: calls for the entire Interior Ministry to be reformed played into a collective horror that some powerful force was out to destroy the Ministry in an attempt to undermine the government. Even Moscow’s gypsy cabbies – the ones who boasted of friends and relatives in the “power structures” – suddenly started claiming there was a “vast plot” to take down Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev.

The very fact that an inarticulate police major like Dymovsky was on the evening news was so unheard of that it started fuelling rumours that someone was out to transform and destroy the entire Ministry. Because transformation and destruction never benefitted the average subject, all camps agreed that someone was out to shake things up to gain power. The only question that they differed on was who.

Following the beating to death of a student by three policemen, a senior United Russia deputy, Andrei Makarov, weighed in with his own apocalyptic vision. The Interior Ministry, he said at a November press conference, “is impossible to reform, therefore it must be liquidated.”
¹³⁴
It was corrupt, depraved, and, to boot, was struggling to “discredit” a bill to decriminalize tax violations – a bill that was supported from up on high by Vladimir Putin himself. One did not have to be a lawyer to understand why the Interior Ministry spoke out against the decriminalization: charges of tax violations were the most common mechanism used to apply pressure on businessmen to shake them down.

Depending on one’s position and source of income, the increasing changes that were gaining momentum in the second year of Medvedev’s term were interpreted as either legitimate reforms, spearheaded by the president, or a shadowy bid by a hardliner group to destroy the Interior Ministry, gain hold of its financial positions and use it to fortify their power.

And Dymovsky – or whoever was behind him – was automatically categorized as part of a shadowy plot.

“My experience tells me that Dymovsky’s questionable moral
qualities are written on his forehead in capital letters,” Valery Zorkin, the powerful chairman of no less than Russia’s Constitutional Court, penned in a column in the official
Rossiyskaya Gazeta
that December. “Not even a brilliant PR team, attached by someone to put the spin on Dymovsky, could erase those letters. And that someone deliberately attached this PR team to Dymovsky is pretty clear…. It is important to understand that there is a [anti-police] campaign under way.”
¹³⁵

To understand all this talk of a shadowy plot, I went to Kirill Kabanov, the former FSB colonel, who still carried a gun when he went to work in the National Anti-Corruption Committee, an NGO with apparently friendly links to the Presidential Administration.

Yes, he said, there were ulterior motives in the reform campaign – rather, a hardliner group, as he saw it, was taking advantage of the presidential reform campaign to strengthen its position.

“The Interior Ministry has a problem. There’s a group, sometimes called the ‘smaller politburo’. A hardliner group. It believes that Nurgaliyev’s position is not supportive enough of the
siloviki
. This group is trying to shake up the system, to get better control of the president and the prime minister.”

This “smaller politburo,” he told me, was connected to a former KGB associate of Putin’s, the current drug tsar Viktor Ivanov, head of the Federal Service for Drug Control.

And it was very possible that this hardliner, FSB-backed group was using Dymovsky, without his knowledge, for its own purposes.

“These people are starting to put the spin on him. I have one question about Dymovsky. Here he is in Moscow, here he is at a press conference. He gets out of the building and gets into a brand new Audi A8 with a Moscow licence plate.”

“Did that mean Dymovsky had a patron?” I asked.

“No, he’s being used.”

It was not difficult to find who was “behind” Dymovsky. One was a tall, blond, weather-beaten man in his early 40s named Marat Rumyantsev – a contractor for the security services. Another was a former police colonel who identified himself only as Alexei. And like many who had flocked to Dymovsky, they appeared genuinely dismayed at just how commonplace the violations described in his video had become.

They agreed to meet at a Moscow restaurant – and arrived in an Audi minivan.

“When you read about the people behind Dymovsky, these terrifying PR technologists with millions of dollars, that’s us,” Marat Rumyantsev told me. “On the third day they announced that America was behind Dymovsky. We were on the floor laughing. My wife was asking me, ‘when are they going to start paying you?’”