We journalists were escorted by our military guides to one of the nine polling stations. We arrived around noon to find a crowd of people, again mostly women, who had been there since sunrise. They had come in hopes of receiving humanitarian aid: either someone had promised them food and clothing would be distributed at polling stations, or it was simply a rumor that had brought them there. DEMOCRACY IS DICTATORSHIP OF THE LAW, the sign over the entrance to the small building proclaimed, quoting an oxymoronic pronouncement of Putin’s in direct violation of election law. There was no humanitarian aid in sight.
An old woman came up to me and asked me to write that she had been reduced to living in the street.
“Did you vote?” I asked her.
“I voted,” she responded.
“Who did you vote for?”
“I don’t know,” she responded simply. “I can’t read. I had a ballot and I put it in.”
Hours later, at a polling station in a different part of town, I saw some people approaching from a distance. I ran to them before my handlers could stop me, in the hopes of catching some Grozny residents outside the polling station. They turned out to be three people, two of them very old, whom I had seen at the first polling place. All three were dragging empty carts behind them. They told me that after the bus with the journalists left, local officials told them there would be no humanitarian aid; they had spent hours walking back to what had been their homes.
Using my brief moments out of sight of the handlers, I tried to ask these people why they had returned to Grozny. The old couple directed the younger woman to tell me her story. She tried to resist, saying, “What is the point of talking about it?” but in the end did not dare disobey her elders. “We came back to get our relatives’ bodies. They took us to them. They were all tied up with wire. But there is one head they never found.” Eight members of her family had been among the thousands detained and then summarily executed by Russian troops. The woman and her immediate relatives had left Grozny months before, and stayed with relatives in a small village. The eight relatives had not had the money to leave the city: every time one passed through a checkpoint set up by the Russian troops, one had to pay. As we talked, another woman approached us with two of her nieces in tow, a pale eight-year-old and a surly teenager. “Their father was killed in the shelling,” she said. “Their mother couldn’t take it and died, and their grandmother died too. The girls buried them in the yard. We dug the father up yesterday, washed the body, but the men are scared to go outside to bury him, so he is just lying there at home.” She asked the teenager to confirm her story, but the girl started crying and stepped away from our group.
These people told me they had voted for a human-rights activist whose final tally was in such low single digits that most media outlets did not even mention her. But I saw a lot of Putin voters among the Chechens too. “I’m sick of war,” a middle-aged man in Grozny told me. “I am sick of being passed on, like a baton, from one gang of thugs to the next.” I looked around: we were in an area of Grozny that had consisted mostly of private homes; now there were only metal fences separating one ghost property from another. “Wasn’t it Putin who did this?” I asked.
“War has been going on for ten years,” the man responded, exaggerating only slightly: the first armed uprisings in Chechnya dated back to 1991. “What could he have changed? We long for a strong power, power that is united. We are the kind of people who need an arbiter.”
There was a Chechen man among the ten little-known candidates hopelessly competing with Putin in this election. A Moscow millionaire, a real estate developer, he had shipped tons of flour to Chechen refugee camps in advance of the election. “No point in voting for him,” the Chechen deputy manager of one of these camps, in neighboring Ingushetia, told me. “I might vote for him, but nobody in Russia is going to.” He was going to vote for Putin: “He is a good man. He didn’t do this to us for himself: there were many others interested in starting this again.”
The man’s boss, a fifty-year-old wizened man named Hamzat, told me, “They said to vote for Putin because he is going to be president anyway.” Hamzat had spent twenty-nine days in Russian detention during the first Chechen war; he still bore two scars on his head and a permanent dent over his shoulder blade where he had been hit with the butt of a rifle. He showed me a picture of his son, a puffy-lipped, curly-haired sixteen-year-old who was now in Russian detention himself. Hamzat found the camp where his boy was, but his jailers demanded a thousand dollars ransom—a perfectly common practice on both sides of the conflict. Hamzat did not tell me what happened next, but other residents of the refugee camp did: they took up a collection in the camp but managed to scrape together barely a tenth of the required sum. The boy was still in captivity.
The camp was made up of a field full of surplus military tents and a ten-car train that had been towed there. It was a common enough solution to the lack of intact housing; I myself was staying in a military train a few towns over. Hamzat’s office was in a train car. A sheet of paper was posted on the outside with sixty-one names, written by hand, under the headline “Located in the Naursk Jail, Later Transported to the Pyatigorsk Hospital.” Ages from sixteen to fifty-two were noted next to the names. These appeared to be inmates who had been moved to a hospital before a press visit to Chechnya’s most notorious jail. A fellow inmate had made the list in hopes of helping relatives find their lost ones. Someone had written “killed” in blue ballpoint pen next to one of the names.
In accordance with the military’s regulations, I was spending most of my time in the company of Russians in uniform. I would have much preferred to stay on the Chechen side—not so much because I found their cause more sympathetic, but because I found the atmosphere of constant fear on the Russian side exhausting. With soldiers getting ambushed every day, the young conscripts and their commanding officers could not relax even when they tried to drink themselves into oblivion, as they did every night, to drown out the gunfire that never seemed to stop. There was fire all around us during the day, too, even on Election Day. When I tried to wander into a formerly densely populated neighborhood of Grozny, my two handlers begged me to stop. “There isn’t anybody there anyway,” one of them pleaded. “What do you need to go there for? We’ll all get turned off.” He meant killed. These troops—all of whom voted for Putin, as directed by their brass—were supposed to be in control of Grozny. But Russians would be losing people here every day for years to come.
A new Russian-appointed district head in Grozny sang Putin’s praises on cue. “A golden man has come to power in Russia today,” he said. “A firm man.” Before the election, local organizers had combed the cellars in the neighborhood, making lists of voters. They came up with 3,400 and got as many ballots, but ran out by midday. “I told them there would be additional people,” the district head complained, “and they wouldn’t listen! But where did all these people come from? It’s not like they emerged from under the ground!”
In fact, they had very much emerged from underground, not just in the sense that they had been living in the cellars of their demolished buildings, but in the sense that many of the people who came to vote—most of them older women—came to the polling station bearing two or three passports each, their own and those of their family members who, I presumed they hoped, were still alive. Those who had lost their passports could use a special form to cast their vote, although this also meant their own documents could be used to vote elsewhere. I tested my theory as I moved from precinct to precinct: everywhere I went, I was welcome to cast my vote, using my Moscow documents or nothing at all.
Before the start of the second war, Chechnya had an official population of 380,000. By the time of the election, its voter rolls swelled to 460,000, padded not only by Russian troops but by the dead souls whose real or imaginary passports were used. Just below 30 percent voted for Putin, his worst showing in all of Russia. Overall, however, the man without a face, who did not have a political platform and did not campaign, emerged with over 52 percent of the vote, eliminating the need for a second tour.
ON MAY 7, 2000, Vladimir Putin was inaugurated as president of Russia. Strictly speaking, this was the first such ceremony in history: Yeltsin had been elected to his first term when Russia was still a part of the Soviet Union. So Putin had the opportunity to shape a ritual. At his prompting, the ceremony, originally planned for the Kremlin’s modernist State Palace, where the Communist Party had held its congresses and Yeltsin’s administration had organized conferences, was moved to the Kremlin’s historic Great Palace, where the czars had once lived. Putin walked through the hall, down a long red carpet, swinging his left arm and holding his right arm, slightly bent at the elbow, oddly immobile, a gait that would soon become familiar to Russian TV viewers and would give one American observer cause to speculate Putin had suffered a trauma at birth or perhaps a stroke in utero. I am more inclined to think the gait is just what it looks like: the manner of a person who executes all his public acts mechanically and reluctantly, projecting both extreme guard and extreme aggression with every step. To Russians, his walk also looked like an adolescent affectation, as did the habit of wearing his watch on his right hand though he is right- handed; this fashion immediately caught on among bureaucrats at every level, and the country’s leading watch
