Inside Russia - Fears of Returning to Soviet Era

Caroline Wyatt
BBC Magazine

If Russia is alarming its neighbours with its actions in Ukraine and its anti-Western rhetoric, many of its own people are also uncomfortable with the prevailing atmosphere of bellicose nationalism. Some are preparing to leave, discovers the BBC's Caroline Wyatt, a former Moscow correspondent - and some have already left.

Moscow is at its loveliest in May, when the usually forbidding expanse of Red Square is bathed in sunshine, and the delicate scent of lilac fills the air around the crazy ice-cream spirals of St Basil's Cathedral. Tourists from across the Russian Federation take smiling family photographs in front of the church built to mark Ivan the Terrible's military conquests.

Boris Nemptsov
murdered opposition leader

The rocket launchers and martial might on display to celebrate Victory Day in Europe have all gone. And instead of marching bands, the ethereal sounds of an Orthodox church choir fill the square, and visitors stop to listen. The only reminder that all is not quite as sunny as it seems is the shrine of flowers on the bridge, the fresh summer bunches left with handwritten notes - in memory of the Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, shot dead on this same spot just a few months ago.

I meet an old friend for coffee on the terrace of what was once the empty Soviet department store GUM. Now it's a temple to consumerism that wouldn't feel out of place in Paris, London or Milan. The shop windows bloom with pastel-coloured dresses from all the luxury brands. I can hardly conceal my surprise when the waiter wishes me a good day with a smile that even looks as though he means it.

I hardly know this place, it feels so different. The streets are no longer pot-holed, nor choked with traffic. There's a new confidence visible in the way people walk. And despite Western sanctions over Ukraine, the supermarket shelves are still full, and the cafes too.

Yet as we sit over coffee, reminiscing about the Moscow of old, I'm suddenly reminded of the past as my friend looks around to make sure that nobody can hear.

"I've sent my family to live abroad," he tells me. "It's better that way. I've sold everything, and now I commute. The health service here is crumbling, and so are schools. Sanctions have started to bite, but it's not that - it's the political atmosphere. It's stifling and it's getting worse. Nobody knows what will happen next, but it doesn't feel like a good place for the liberals."

I resist the temptation to make a joke, to lighten the mood... Liberals on the run, worries about the health service? Why, it sounds just like the UK. But my friend isn't laughing - and nor am I, as I remember his optimism about his country's future 15 long years ago. For this highly educated man to send his family abroad was not a step taken lightly.

Later, I meet Olya in a park, and we sit on a bench dappled by the early summer sunshine. It's warm, but getting muggier. The wisps of cloud carry the ominous grey tinge of an oncoming storm. Olya, too, has a sadness in her eyes as she talks about preparing to emigrate - if she can. She's also eminently well-qualified, another middle-class Muscovite with a decent job and good prospects. For Olya, it's not economic fears that make her want to leave, but a gathering sense of unease.

"I don't know if you in England know the story about the frog, who sits in a pan of warm water on the top of the stove. He's happy. And then someone lights the stove beneath, and gradually, the water gets hotter. The frog is happy, he's comfortable. But soon the water will boil - and he probably won't get out in time because he doesn't realise what's happening. I'm scared of being that frog - trapped in a boiling pot, unable to get out."

I love my country - but sometimes my country is hard to love,
Tanya

Olya's fears grew as the troubles in Ukraine spiralled into conflict, causing blazing rows that split her family - and many others too. "Some believe America will use what's happening in Ukraine to attack Russia - and they say that we should attack first because that's the best defence," she tells me.

"All I want is to find a place on earth where everyone knows the law and abides by it, and where there isn't corruption. I'm so sick of it. And I'm tired of arguing about Ukraine. What's happening there is insane, and it's terrifying that it could lead to a full-scale war. All I want is a small patch of land where there's peace and quiet."

I'm reminded of those conversations when I hear President Putin respond to the corruption allegations against Fifa. He blames America for what he seems to see as politically motivated arrests aimed at taking the World Cup away from Russia in 2018.

I ask another friend, Tanya, what she makes of it all. "That bellicose form of patriotism is everywhere in Russia today," she says, speaking softly as she drags deeply on her cigarette.

Soldiers singing on Red Square during Victory Parade, VE Day, May 2015

"You hear it all the time on the news. Everything is interpreted as being aimed against Russia. It's absurd. Americans don't spend their lives scheming against us, but the authorities here think and talk as though they do. And many believe it. The rhetoric today is like something from another era - the Soviet era. I feel as though we're asked every day to make a choice between being true patriots or leaving Russia.

Communist paranoia about western countries - US, UK, Germany, etc., constant plotting to overthrow Russia and destroy communism worked well for about 70 years. The KGB and it's predecessors deliberately planted that paranoia in Stalin and his successors in order to build their massive intelligence empire. They were so successful that even the KGB came to believe that it was true. Vladimir Putin was a KGB agent, and I believe he is still suffering from the conspiracy paranoia.

If the west had any interest in attacking Russia they would have done so when the USSR was crumbling and Russia was broke and in chaos. There is just no sense in invading a country the size of Russia, it would be impossible to defend either from within or without. We still remember Napoleon and Hitler! The west is not interested in attacking Russia, but as long as the Kremlin believes it does, Russia will suffer unnecessarily in myriad ways.

Napoleonic retreat from Russia

"I'm not leaving. I'm Russian and I love my country. But sometimes my country is hard to love." Tanya and her husband are putting money aside for their daughters so in a few years time the girls can travel and perhaps study abroad.

"If our borders are still open then," adds Tanya, with a sigh. "I remember the Soviet Union - we were trapped and we couldn't escape. That's how I grew up. I just hope it doesn't happen again."

Russian Businessman 'May have been Poisoned' in UK

Russian businessman Alexander Perepilichnyy 

'may have been poisoned'

From BBC Surrey

Alexander Perepilichnyy
Surrey Police said Alexander Perepilichnyy's death was not suspicious

A wealthy Russian businessman who died suddenly near his home in Surrey may have been poisoned, a pre-inquest hearing has been told.

Alexander Perepilichnyy, 44, collapsed and died in the road near his home in Weybridge, Surrey, on the evening of 10 November 2012.

Surrey Police investigated his death, but decided it was not suspicious.

However, new toxicology tests have shown that a rare poison may have been used to kill him.
Mr Perepilichnyy had told colleagues in London he had received death threats, reports BBC world affairs correspondent Richard Galpin.

He had handed over sensitive documents to a businessman in London and to prosecutors in Switzerland, our correspondent adds.

These implicated Russian officials and mafia members in the theft of $240m (£147m) from the Russian state through tax fraud.

Russian officials and Mafia members are one and the same, aren't they? This is almost certainly in reference to the same tax fraud that was perpetrated on the Russian people by the government after they kicked Bill Browder out of Russia, stole his businesses, and murdered his lawyer, Sergie Magnitsky.

See Who's Bill Browder and Why Does He Want To Bring Down Putin

The full inquest had been due to get under way earlier, but was delayed because of the new toxicology information.

Tests had showed a potential marker for a rare poison called Gelsemium elegans. Further tests will be carried out to establish if the poison was in his body.

Who's Bill Browder and Why Does He Want to Bring Down Putin?

Investor turned human rights activist Bill Browder had a harrowing experience
 in Vladimir Putin's Russia. But the story he's been telling for six years found
a larger audience after the crisis in Ukraine focused the West
on the Russian president's behaviour. (CBC )

CBC - Ottawa - At first, nobody listened. Who was Bill Browder, anyway? He wasn't the darling of the New York Times best-seller list when he started his campaign. What standing did he have to say that Vladimir Putin, a proud member of the G8 club, was little more than a vicious gangster?

Back then, six years ago, when Kremlin goons beat his lawyer to death in a prison hospital, Browder was just a talented investor – born in the U.S. but now a British citizen – trying to make his fortune in the rock-and-roll stock markets of post-Soviet Russia.

Sanctions best way to hurt Russia, Bill Browder tells MPs

Browder was tolerated for a while. The Russians let him make some money, and even let him pester the oligarchs with demands for transparency. Then, they kicked him out of the country.

But they didn't stop there. Once rid of Browder, Kremlin officials stole his companies and used them to engineer a massive tax fraud on the Russian state – walking off with $230 million. Then, when Browder's idealistic young lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, blew the whistle, Magnitsky was imprisoned, brutalized, denied medical care and finally murdered by goons with rubber truncheons.

Now, by telling the whole, horrifying tale, Browder has opened a window on the black heart of Putin's Russia – and, this time, everyone's listening. His book, Red Notice, has been a best-seller for six straight weeks.

Putin 'a very scared man'

"I've been screaming bloody murder since Sergei Magnitsky was killed in 2009," Browder says, "and most people thought this was an isolated problem. Who knew what the real story was? Bill Browder has some problem with Putin – so what?"

Reciting the story for the umpteenth time, Browder still makes it seem fresh and his anger still seems hot. But the reception he gets now is very different.

Bill Browder's book has been on the
New York Times  best-seller list for
 six weeks, as readers devour his
 insights into Vladimir Putin's Russia

"Now, all of a sudden, everything that I've been saying is affecting the world more broadly. Putin has invaded Ukraine; he's shot down 298 innocent people on [Malaysia Airlines Flight] MH 17; Boris Nemtsov was murdered right in front of the Kremlin. All of a sudden, what we're seeing is that this is a bad guy who's gonna cause a lot of problems for everybody."

Or maybe it will all come to a crashing end. Now that he's unmasked as a thug, Putin is increasingly at risk, according to Browder.

"Putin is a very scared man," he says. "He's stolen a lot of money over the last 14 years — and then he saw a similar kleptocrat, Viktor Yanukovich, the president of Ukraine, be run out of the country by his own people for doing the same thing."

Approval ratings 'complete nonsense'

Could Putin suffer the same fate? Browder thinks it's possible, despite – and maybe because of – Putin's aggression in Ukraine. That brought soaring approval ratings, but also Western sanctions – creating an economic crisis which, Browder hopes, could sweep Putin away.

"He's on thin ice in the sense that anything could happen that might set the Russian people off ... The approval ratings are complete nonsense. If you're living in Russia and someone calls you up on the phone and says, 'Do you support the president or not?' of course, you're not gonna say no, because you get into trouble if you say no. So you'll say, yes."

Left: A photo of Bill Browder's lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, is held by his mother, Nataliya Magnitskayam during an interview in Moscow in 2009. A court found him guilty of tax evasion, concluding an unusual posthumous trial after he mysteriously died in prison. (Alexander Zemlianichenko/Associated Press)

Nor does Browder think Western fecklessness in the face of aggression will save Putin. Although he believes "the Obama administration is doing everything possible not to upset the Russians," he thinks Putin is now riding a tiger from which he cannot dismount.

"I don't think Putin is going to give the Western appeasement crowd the opportunity to fully appease him, because Putin is under such pressure to keep on escalating, from his own domestic audience, that he's not going to give the Europeans, for example, any option but to carry on doing the sanctions."

Canada cracking down?

And, as he escalates throughout the old Soviet empire, Browder predicts that the game, eventually, will be up.

"His plan is to stir up the pot of nationalism, to get everybody in a nationalistic frenzy. Russia for Russians! We need to protect our Russian brothers and sisters in foreign countries! This is the Russian empire! This is what he's selling to the Russian people. And it will work up until the point where people say, wait a minute, why are our young men dying in wars and why are we suffering and hungry at the table? ... And there's no amount of propaganda that overcomes physical hunger."

Browder dashes off for yet another interview. He came to Ottawa to lobby Parliament to crack down on Russian criminals with a version of the Magnitsky Act, already adopted in the U.S. and the E.U. It's Browder's mission to hold the Magnitsky killers, and Putin himself, to account.

His appeal found cross-party support. On Wednesday afternoon, the House of Commons unanimously passed a motion introduced by Liberal MP Irwin Cotler calling for the imposition of targeted visa sanctions and asset freezes against those responsible for Magnitsky's torture, death, and the subsequent cover-up. 

Can one man bring down a billionaire dictator with nuclear weapons? Well, don't say Bill Browder's not trying. And he's not just one man anymore.

Must confess, I thought Putin's advance into the Crimea and eastern Ukraine was empire building - an attempt to make the Russian empire as big as Putin's ego. It appears, however, that it was merely a distraction so no one will look too deeply for the money he apparently stole from the Russian people.

How long will it take for people to realize that their sons are dying in Ukraine for no other reason than to cover up Putin's sins?

What's the point of all that money if you don't retire and enjoy it? I think, as Browder said, 'he's afraid', afraid to stop running the country. He can't let go of the reins and jump off the wagon for fear that the horses will turn around and trample him. 

Consequently, we're stuck with him until the Russian people are 'fed-up' with being hungry.

Nemtsov Murder: Putin Urges End to Political Killings

Nemtsov funeral attracted 50,000 mourners

Russia's President Vladimir Putin has called for an end to "shameful" political killings in Russia, after the shooting of opposition politician Boris Nemtsov just outside the Kremlin walls.

He said the most serious attention should be paid to high-profile crimes.

The former deputy prime minister, 55, was murdered on Friday night and buried in Moscow on Tuesday.

The motive is unknown, but Mr Putin's aides have rejected suggestions that he had any involvement. Could they possibly have done otherwise?

Mr Nemtsov, who had been planning a march against the conflict in eastern Ukraine, said recently that he feared the president would have him killed because of his opposition to the war.

He was shot four times in the back while walking with his Ukrainian girlfriend, Anna Duritskaya, on Great Moskvoretsky Bridge.

At least 50,000 people turned out on Sunday to march in tribute to him.

Vladimir Putin at an interior ministry board meeting in Moscow (4 March)
The Russian president has vowed to bring the killers to justice

Marchers, some chanting "Russia without Putin", blamed the assassination on a climate of hatred fostered by the Kremlin and its supporters towards opponents of its Ukraine policy.

'Suspects'
"It is necessary to finally rid Russia of the shame and tragedies like the one that we lived through and saw quite recently. I mean the murder, the brazen murder of Boris Nemtsov right in the centre of the capital," Mr Putin said in televised comments to the interior ministry.

After the shooting, which the Kremlin described as a "provocation" aimed at discrediting the president, Mr Putin said he would do all he could to ensure the killers were brought to justice but little progress appears to have been made in the investigation.

Of course, it would help if you could actually believe anything Mr Putin says, but he is, in my mind, in a class with Goodluck Jonathon, the Nigerian President, whom I doubt ever spoke a truthful word in his life.

When asked by reporters on Tuesday if there were any suspects in the murder, the head of Russia's FSB security service, Alexander Bortnikov, said: "There are always suspects."

After three days of questioning by Russian authorities, Nemtsov's girlfriend,
the lovely but clearly shaken Anna Duritskaya flew home to Kyiv yesterday

Several theories have emerged for who was the behind the murder of a man who was putting together a report on Russia's involvement in eastern Ukraine:

Opposition leader Alexei Navalny said it was either a government or pro-government organisation. Rogue elements in the security services or fighters returning from eastern Ukraine may have wanted to silence his anti-war stance.

Or it may have been unrelated to Ukraine: Mr Navalny said it could have been ordered by officials in Yaroslavl, where Mr Nemtsov had been investigating corruption.

Obviously, Mr Putin doesn't think this is likely or he wouldn't have used the word "political" in describing the murder.

Boris Nemtsov's last known movements

'Fake'
Russia's finance ministry became part of the story on Tuesday when it was asked about reports that a light-coloured car used by the ministry had been seen in the area at the time of the shooting.

The ministry's press service said the Ford car belonged to an in-house security service, but not the ministry itself, Tass news agency reported.

And Lifenews website, which has close links to the security services, quoted the driver, Dmitry Karmaza, as saying he had driven past the scene a few minutes after the shooting, when a patrol car was already there.

Separately, a video purportedly showing a far-right Russian group active in eastern Ukraine claiming it carried out the killing was dismissed by the group's leader, Alexei Milchakov, as a fake.

"We would have liked to bump him off but we wouldn't even have the money for the car," he wrote earlier on social media. Now why couldn't everyone be that honest?