#3 - JRL 7273
The Guardian (UK)
August 1, 2003
Russia's bureaucracy piles on the misery
By Kevin O'Flynn
Russian papers are very good at finding absurd and usually depressing stories about people who find the power of the state deployed against them. One such involves Gennady Vlakh, who was laid to rest this week - well, sort of. Vlakh was not famous and only one newspaper, Kommersant, covered the sad and surreal conclusion to his story.
Vlakh was killed by the Chechen gunmen who seized a Moscow theatre last October. He was not one of the hostages, however, but a father who had become convinced, wrongly, that his son was being held inside. He sneaked into the theatre to find his son, but was shot by the hostage-takers.
After the siege ended, Vlakh's body was confused with those of the hostage takers, so he was cremated with them. It took his family six months to clear his name, and they never received any remains to enable them to conduct their own farewell.
"They didn't give us the ashes and they didn't even say where he is," his widow Galina told Kommersant at the cemetery where she intended to bury a small vase. "We're not going to bury it empty. Me and my mother decided to put his football top inside and a packet of tea and two sweets ... We decided not to put his cigarettes inside. He loved to drink tea with sweets but he wanted to give up smoking."
The family has put up a headstone, resigning themselves to the fact that they may never get his remains.
The story of Anna Ryabykh, a librarian from Belgorod, is slightly more cheering. She, like many other Russians, lost her life savings after the Russian state bank refused to let her withdraw her money in the early 90s. The subsequent hyperinflation meant her roubles were worthless.
Ms Ryabykh's dreams of building her own house disappeared, her husband and mother died, and she began to lose her sight. Then she decided to take the matter into her own hands. The Russian courts were no help, so she went to the court of human rights in Strasbourg, which awarded her about £17,000 for her pains. Getting the money was more difficult. She has received less than half the money so far and the finance ministry has been badgering her to sign an agreement that would absolve them of responsibility for her misfortune.
When an official from the ministry came to see her, reported Gazeta, she asked where the rest of the money was. "This is not Strasbourg. Take what you're given and sign the agreement. Others don't get anything and no one is complaining," said the official. She is now appealing to Strasbourg again.
A stranger fight against the government is taking place in the mind of Vladimir Kara-Murza, a former news presenter on TVS, the only independent national channel, which was closed down by the government earlier this year.
Under the Communists rule, Mr Kara-Murza would only work as a street sweeper - he believed it was wrong to prosper under such a regime - and he is now taking the same line against the Putin government by working in a boiler room. "It is my principled position," he told Gazeta. "If my grandson one day asks me, 'Grandad, what did you do in the terrible year of 2003?' I can answer: 'I was a boilerman.'"
Colonel Yury Budanov felt the full wrath of the state recently - but he looks set to prosper, despite having been sentenced to 10 years in prison earlier this month for the brutal killing of a young Chechen girl. Yulia Latynina, a trenchant columnist who writes for Novaya Gazeta and the Moscow Times, looked for the real reason behind Budanov's sentence. Only the foolish would think Budanov was convicted because he was guilty, she wrote. Was it, Latynina wondered, to bolster support among the Chechens ahead of the Russian-sponsored elections later this year? Was it to boost the prestige of the courts? Or to undermine the army?
Whatever it was, it certainly was not to stop other soldiers committing atrocities in Chechnya. "Everyone knows very well that he did nothing that other Russian soldiers and officers haven't done in Chechnya," she wrote in the Moscow Times. "Convicting Budanov is really no different to Genghis Khan condemning a single soldier for looting and pillaging on the ruined streets of Samarkand."
Meanwhile, the Liberal Democratic Party, which as everyone here knows is neither liberal nor democratic, has touted Col Budanov as a possible candidate for the parliamentary elections this year.
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