been held captive by Chechen combatants. The Russian officials claimed Babitsky had consented to the exchange, but this could hardly conceal the fact that Russian troops had treated a journalist—a Russian journalist—as an enemy combatant.
When Gevorkyan asked Putin about Babitsky, her question elicited what she later described as “undisguised hatred.” The acting president’s flattened affect momentarily broke, and he launched into a diatribe: “He was working directly for the enemy. He was not a neutral source of information. He worked for the outlaws…. He worked for the outlaws. So when the rebels said, ‘We are willing to free a few of your soldiers in exchange for this correspondent,’ our people asked him, ‘Do you want to be exchanged?’ He said, ‘I do.’ He does…. These were our soldiers. They were fighting for Russia. If we had not taken them back, they would have been executed. And they aren’t going to do anything to Babitsky there, because he is one of them…. What Babitsky did is much more dangerous than firing a machine gun…. He had a map of getting around our checkpoints. Who asked him to stick his nose in there if he wasn’t authorized by the official authorities?… So he was arrested and he became the object of an investigation. And he says, ‘I don’t trust you, I trust the Chechens, if they want to take me, you should give me to them….’ He got a response: ‘Then go, get out of here!’… So you say he is a Russian citizen. Then he should have acted in accordance with the laws of your country, if you want to be protected by these laws.”
Listening to this monologue, Gevorkyan grew convinced that the acting president had direct knowledge of Babitsky’s case. So she decided to be direct too. “He’s got a family, he has children,” she said to Putin. “You have to stop this operation.”
The head of state took the bait. “There will be a car arriving soon,” he said. “It will deliver a cassette tape, and you will see that he is alive and well.” Gevorkyan, who had maintained decorum throughout her many meetings with Putin, was momentarily shocked into rudeness. “Hello?” she almost screamed. “You handed him over to the outlaws. Is this what they told you?”
She excused herself to step outside the room to call a friend at Radio Liberty’s Moscow bureau. “Tell his wife he is alive,” she said.
“How do you know?” asked the friend.
“From the horse’s mouth,” Gevorkyan responded.
“Do you trust him?” the friend asked.
“Not really,” Gevorkyan admitted.
But a few hours later the friend called her back. “You are not going to believe this,” she said. “A car came, its license plate so dirty we couldn’t make out the numbers. They offered to sell us a videocassette tape and we paid two hundred dollars for it.”
The video, which Radio Liberty immediately released to all media, was a grainy recording of Babitsky, looking pale, exhausted, and sleep-deprived, saying, “This is February 6, 2000. I am relatively all right. My only problem is time, since circumstances are stacking up in such a way that, unfortunately, I cannot make it home right away. Here my life is as normal as it can be in conditions of war. People who are near me try to help me in some way. The only problem is, I would really like to go home, I would really like all of this to end finally. Please don’t worry about me. I hope to be home soon.”
In fact, Babitsky was being held under lock and key in a residential house in a Chechen village. He was indeed sleep-deprived, exhausted, and, most of all, terrified. He did not know who was holding him prisoner; he knew only that they were armed Chechen men who had every reason to hate Russians and no clear reason to trust him. He was unable to sleep, fearing as he went to bed every night that he would be awakened to be taken to his execution, and he greeted every morning hating himself for not yet having devised a way to escape or gathered the courage to attempt to break free. Finally, on February 23, he was placed in the trunk of a car, driven to the neighboring republic of Dagestan, given crudely forged documents, and released there—only to be arrested a few hours later by Russian police, who transported him to Moscow, where he would face charges of forgery for the documents he was carrying.
It soon emerged that there had probably been no exchange: there was no documented trace of it, or of the soldiers who had supposedly been handed over by the Chechens. Babitsky’s arrest, his televised handover to the enemy, and subsequent disappearance had all, it seems, been an effort to send a message to journalists. Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev told the media as much: Babitsky had been singled out, he said, because “the information he transmitted was not objective, to put it mildly.” He added, “I would happily have given ten Babitskys for a single soldier.” Putin had been in office for one month and already ministers were talking just like him—just as, it seems, they had been longing to talk for a while.
What Putin apparently did not expect was that what he viewed as meting out perfectly fair punishment would inspire outrage internationally. During his first month as acting president, Western leaders had acted much like the Russian people: they seemed so relieved that unpredictable, embarrassing Yeltsin was gone that they were willing to project their sweetest dreams onto Putin. The Americans and the British acted as though the outcome of the March election were a foregone conclusion. But now the Americans had no choice but to react: Babitsky was not simply a Russian journalist—he was a Russian journalist employed by a media outlet funded by an act of Congress. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright raised the issue in a meeting with Russian foreign minister Igor Ivanov on February 4, and five days later the State Department issued a statement condemning the “treatment of a noncombatant as a hostage or prisoner of war.” The unexpected scrutiny and outrage probably saved Babitsky’s life. They also made Putin bitter and angry. He knew that what he was doing was just and that a man like Babitsky— someone who seemed not at all concerned about the Russian war effort and not at all ashamed to feel compassion for the enemy—did not deserve to live, or at least to live among Russian citizens. A conspiracy of bleeding-heart democrats had forced Putin to compromise. He had successfully beaten these kinds of people back in Leningrad, and he would do it again now.
“The Babitsky story made my life easier,” Gevorkyan later told me. “I realized that this was how [Putin] was going to rule. That this is how his fucking brain works. So I had no illusions. I knew this was how he understood the word
Soon after this discovery, Gevorkyan left Moscow for Paris, where she still lives. Andrei Babitsky, as soon as he was able, left for Prague, where he continued to work for Radio Liberty. But in the year 2000, in the days leading up to the election, Gevorkyan said nothing publicly. Putin’s biography was published as he wanted it; even the impassioned and telling passage about Babitsky was cut, though it had made it into an advance newspaper excerpt. With few exceptions, Russians were led to persist in placing their faith in Putin.
ON MARCH 24, two days before the presidential election, NTV, the television network founded and owned by Vladimir Gusinsky—the same oligarch who owned the magazine where I worked—aired an hourlong program, in talk-show format before a live audience, devoted to the incident in the city of Ryazan the previous September when police responding to a call had found three bags of explosives under the stairway of an apartment building. Vigilant residents thought they had managed to foil a terrorist plan.
Just after nine that evening, September 22, Alexei Kartofelnikov, a bus driver for the local soccer team, was returning home to a twelve-story brick apartment building at Fourteen Novoselov Street. He saw a Russian-made car pull up to the building. A man and a woman got out and went in through a door leading to the cellar, while the driver—another man—stayed in the car. Kartofelnikov watched the man and the woman emerge a few minutes later. Then the car pulled right up to the cellar door, and all three unloaded heavy-looking sacks and carried them into the cellar. They all then returned to the car and left.
By this time, four buildings had been blown up in Moscow and two other cities; in at least one case, eyewitnesses later emerged saying they had seen sacks planted in a stairwell. So it is not surprising that Kartofelnikov tried to take down the license plate number of the car. But the part of the license plate signifying the region where the car was registered was covered with a piece of paper that had the number that stood for Ryazan on it. Kartofelnikov called the police.
The police arrived nearly forty-five minutes later. Two officers entered the cellar, where they found three fifty-kilogram sacks marked SUGAR stacked one atop another. Through a slit in the top sack, they could see wires and a clock. They ran out of the cellar to call for reinforcement and began evacuating residents from the seventy- seven apartments in the building while the bomb squad was on its way. They combed the building, knocking on all doors and ordering residents to exit immediately. People came outside in their pajamas, nightgowns, and bathrobes, not pausing to lock their doors: after weeks of watching news reports of apartment building explosions,
