He was soldier U-729343, a dedicated defender of the Soviet Union, born in 1975. As a boy he wanted to serve in uniform. Fresh out of high school, he chose to follow his dream and left home to study at the Far East College for Officers. In 1996 he received a commission.
Army officer U-729343 was assigned to USSR’s 58th Army, and by January 18, 2000, he was in Chechnya to fight in the second Chechen war.
Soon after, Lieutenant U-729343 writes a scathing letter home to his parents about poor training, terrible living conditions, and lack of command and control:
“Our lessons have been appalling … The officer in charge of this unit before me was blown up by one of our own booby traps … the soldiers, though mostly very young, are holding out. We sleep together in a tent, on the ground. There is an ocean of lice. We’re given shit to eat … What lies ahead we don’t know. Either we’ll attack who knows where, or we’ll just sit around until we turn into idiots or they pull us out and pack us off to Moscow. Or God knows what…"
Anna Politkovskaya gives a name to U-729343, prints his letter home, and introduces us to his grieving mother in “Putin’s Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy” (Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 2004).
“Pavel Levurda had been desired on the battlefield and then forgotten. Nobody cared that his body was lying there, or that he had a family awaiting his return. What happened after his death is typical of the army, a disgraceful episode that stands for an ethos in which a human is nothing, in which no one watches over the troops, and there is no sense of responsibility toward the families.”
With a reporter’s voice, Politkovskaya shows Pavel’s mother's painful fight with the military and government for accountability, and what happens once his remains are finally recovered. Only his decapitated skull is returned, and that’s how Pavel’s mother has to identify him.
It’s just one of the tragic stories in this book, written several years before Putin invaded Georgia and nearly two decades before his unprovoked and merciless invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
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| Petropavlovsk, Kamchatka |
She tours the nuclear ballistic submarine Vilioutchinsk (formerly Kasatka, now K-456 Tver), where she observes: “An atomic reactor with nuclear missiles is an explosive mixture. The submarine is packed with nuclear weapons, the economy is in crisis, and the armed forces are in a state of disarray. What could be scarier than that?”
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| Putin in 2004 |
She tells the tragic story of a World War II veteran found frozen to death and stuck to the floor of his unheated apartment in Irkutsk “in the depths of Siberia.”
“He was one of those to whom President Putin sends greetings on May 9, Victory Day, wishing him happiness and good health, she writes. "Our old men, our veterans unspoiled by too much attention from the state, weep over these form letters with their facsimile signature … His name was Ivanov, the most common Russian surname. There are hundreds of thousands of Ivanovs in Russia.”
Much of what she writes back in 2004 sounds applicable to what we witness about Putin and the Russians in 2022.
She says:
- “In Russia, holding on to power is more important than saving soldiers’ lives.”
- “A Soldier is an officer’s slave … An officer can treat a soldier exactly as he pleases.”
- “The Russian army has always been a fundamental pillar of the state. To this day, it is mostly a prison camp behind barbed wire.”
- “A depraved society wants comfort and peace and quiet, and doesn’t mind if the cost is other people’s lives. Citizens run away … and would rather believe the state’s brainwashing machine than face the reality.”
- “People leave Russia when staying becomes life-threatening or involves massive injury to their integrity and dignity.”
- “Today’s Russia, brainwashed by propaganda, has largely reverted to Bolshevik thinking.”
- “There is no doubt that Communism was a dead loss for Russia, but what we have today is even worse.”
- “Our constitution is on its death bed … and the FSB [KGB] is in charge of the funeral arrangements.”
- “The shroud of darkness from which we spent several decades during the Soviet era trying to free ourselves is enveloping us again.”
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| Politkovksaya |
Using a reporter’s skill in presenting interviews, court records, and facts of the case, she dives into the scandalous story of Col. Yuri Budanov, initially found not guilty of the rape and murder of an 18-year-old Chechen girl. The account of the teen's torture and death at the hands of Budanov is chilling.
“In 2002, when the experts accepted that Budanov had been temporarily insane at the moment of committing the murder, he was cleared of rape. No storm of indignation swept the country. There was not a single protest demonstration, not even from women’s organizations. No civil-rights defenders took to the streets. Russia thought what had happened was fair enough. The report acquitting the colonel triggered a wave of war crimes in Chechnya, committed by soldiers who used the disastrous situation and the cruelty perpetrated by both sides as a cover. Throughout 2002, ‘purging’ of territory continued in Chechnya on a massive scale and with extreme brutality. Villages were surrounded, men taken away, women raped. Many were killed, and even more disappeared without a trace. Retaliation was elevated to justification for murder. Lynch law was encouraged by the Kremlin itself –– an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. We discovered that we were moving backward, from stagnation under Leonid Brezhnev to the out-and-out arbitrariness of Joseph Stalin. Terrifying as the thought was, we probably had the government we deserved."
(Of note, Budanov was eventually convicted but given a light sentence of ten years for rape/murder. He was released on parole and was murdered in 2011, shot in the back of the head with a silenced pistol. His body was found next to a playground.)
Politkovskaya presents dozens of profiles and stories.
In "Putin's Russia," she reports on the massive tragedy at Nord-Ost, at No. 1 Dubrovka, Moscow, a theater in which 800 mostly Russian hostages were held by several dozen terrorists from Chechnya in October 2002.
Under orders from President Putin, several anti-terrorist units stormed the theater after using a “secret military gas.” All the hostage-takers were killed but so were nearly two hundred civilians.
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| Observing the ten-year anniversary of the Nord-Ost tragedy at Dubrovka Theater, Moscow. |
Politkovskaya reports,
“Let us look at those whose lives were crushed by the events at the Nord-Ost. Let us look at the victims about whom today’s state machine is trying to forget as quickly as possible, and to induce the rest of us to do the same by every means at its disposal. Let us look at the ethnic purging that followed the act of terrorism, and at the state ideology Putin has enunciated: ‘We shall not count the cost. Let nobody doubt that. Even if the cost is very high.’”
The cost is high now in Ukraine. And the cost was as high as it gets for Anna Politkovskaya, (who had previously been threatened, poisoned, interrogated, and subjected to a mock execution), when on 7 October 2006, she was found shot to death in an elevator to her block of apartments in Moscow. She had been shot twice in the chest, once in the shoulder, and once, point blank, in the head. At least two other associates of hers were also assassinated.
Although there have been several arrests, there has been no final resolution. Who ordered Anna Politkovskaya’s murder in Putin’s Russia remains unresolved, for now.
Top Photo: Memorial of the Defenders of the North, Severomorsk, Russia. (MCC Tiffini Jones Vanderwyst)
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