Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (13 page)

But Cherkesov was also a poor judge of history. In 1988, with perestroika in full swing, he launched an investigation into the new “Democratic Alliance,” a group of activists who were calling for the end of the USSR. It was the final case ever tried in the USSR under the antidissident “Law 70.” Cherkesov called a press conference saying he had discovered an important anti-Soviet conspiracy. The thing was a farce: the young activists were soon deputies in the Duma, and the law itself was rescinded. Within two years the USSR didn’t exist.

After 1991 Cherkesov became head of the St. Petersburg KGB, supported by his friend, the future President, who was deputy head of the mayor’s office. When the young President moved to Moscow to become head of the FSB (the successor to the KGB), Cherkesov moved with him and became his deputy. The rumor in Moscow was that when the President was inaugurated, Cherkesov expected to become head of the FSB. But he was overlooked for Nikolaj Patrushev, also a graduate of the 1970s St. Petersburg KGB, but from the much more glamorous counterespionage department. The president gave Cherkesov the FDCS, the least important of the security organs. Starting in 2006 the FDCS launched a series of moves to capture the chemicals and pharmaceuticals industries. Overnight a whole host of chemicals had their status changed from industrial or medical to narcotic. Pharmacies that traded in food additives were raided, veterinarians who gave ketamine to cats and horses were marched into police stations, and the heads of chemical companies like Yana were suddenly informed they were drug dealers. The plan was to “break” these industries. Yana was meant to swing from the gallows by the edge of the road, a warning to everyone of what would happen if they disagreed with the FDCS.

•  •  •

She had been there four months. Most of the time she would tell herself: “This is a game, a test”; that’s how she coped. But once every two months they would wake her at 5:00 a.m. and take her down to the basement to await her trip to court to see whether she would be granted bail.

“
Yesterday was the worst day
,” she wrote in one of the letters to Alexey she never sent.
“
The worst point is when in a dark, concrete, completely closed space 20 people start smoking at the same time. It’s horrible. Waiting for the van and its cages, concrete, darkness, metal, handcuffs, smoke, smoke. It’s very hard to make yourself feel this is all a game and everyone around you are just actors.
”

After two hours they put the women into a prison van and drove them, as if in a school bus, to various courtrooms around Moscow. When she saw Moscow everything suddenly became real.

“
We drove along the Garden Ring. I could see people walking along the street, hurrying about their own business. And inside I screamed: ‘I will return. This world can’t survive without me. I will return and forget all that has happened. I will cross it out.’
”

And even more strongly she wanted to scream: “Pedestrians! Citizens! Stop! Help! Can’t you see me? I’m here.” Though of course she never did. And all passersby ever saw was a small prison van with dark, barred windows.

At the court they put her in a cage again. Her parents were always there, but the last time Alexey hadn’t come. Her mother would always wear her best dress, which was a way of showing that their spirit hadn’t been crushed. They looked good, and thus they were strong. Yana would repeat to the judge that she had no idea why she was in prison; none of the charges made sense. The judge would nod and give her another two months, and they would bundle her out again.

She had a new lawyer, Evgeny Chernousov. They had found him after he defended a few veterinarians in Yaroslavl against the FDCS. The vets had been charged with dealing ketamine, a drug they used as a painkiller for cats. Evgeny had managed to raise enough noise for the charges to be dropped. But there he had just gone up against provincial FDCS guys out to make a few quick bucks. Now he would be going against senior officials in a much bigger case. The plan was to make so much fuss it would become unprofitable for the FDCS to hold Yana: this was the opposite to what most prisoners did, which was to keep the case as quiet as possible and pay off the right person. Chernousov told Yana he would activate the human rights NGOs, business associations. He was a former cop himself, and he took on cases no one else would. He used to catch criminals, and now he liked to catch cops. He had served in Afghanistan and Ossetia, and it had done something to his head. More than anything he loved a fight against the odds, and he seemed tipsy a lot of the time. He told Yana not to lose hope.

She was almost happy when they brought her back to prison after these excursions into reality. She knew that outside her parents and Chernousov were trying to change the world for her, but beyond giving direction to the overall plan there was nothing she could do from the inside. Her task was to stay sane. She had half a dozen fitness “students.” They would exercise in the morning, and then again in the afternoon during their “walk.” They would take old plastic bottles, fill them with grit, and use them as weights. They were getting better, slimming down. A couple had even stopped smoking. As the “trainer” she had a certain status, was allowed into the showers first. She even managed to convince the others to sometimes change the channel from TNT and MTV to the news. The trick was to keep herself busy all the time. Writing letters, reading newspapers, learning English, doing push-ups. Never a moment to spare. She had almost perfected this.

There were several big NOs for all prisoners: never cry; never talk about the future or release; never, ever, talk about sex. But sex was on everybody’s mind. Tanya, an accountant on the bunk opposite her, would cut out pictures of men from magazines and put them beneath her pillow:

“Maybe I’ll dream of one,” she would say quietly.

Yana dreamt of Alexey every night. She would dream of his eyes when he had come to the FDCS headquarters to bring her bag. In her letters she worried he would forget about her: “
Does that make me an egoist?
”
she wrote. “
But the only way I can keep myself together is to know there’s someone waiting for me.
”

When she went into the yard for exercise she became aware, in a way she never had been when she was free, of smells: “
In summer the two little trees in the yard smelled of heat and bread. Before I would go to a forest and not notice anything. Here there are just two thin trees yet how many impressions!
”

One time she was exercising in the yard with Sasha. Sasha owned a travel agency. She was a little younger than Yana, and they started talking about how they wanted children. They weren’t supposed to talk about things like that, and Yana wasn’t even sure how the conversation started. Sasha wanted two. Yana told her about Alexey and how she thought it was time to start a family, take a break from work. Sasha looked at her and said: “You’re thirty-five; it’s too late for children. There’s no way they’ll give you less than five years, that’s the very minimum. Once you’re in here that’s it. It doesn’t matter whether you’re guilty. Forget about kids. . . . ” Yana switched off and stopped listening to her and started doing star jumps so fast Sasha couldn’t keep up.

Of those charged in Russia, 99 percent receive guilty verdicts. The women in Yana’s cell would return after their trials broken, all found guilty. Their sentences were worse than anyone could have imagined: five years for possession of one gram of cocaine; four years for faking a prescription; eleven years for working as a cashier at one of the country’s top construction companies whose owner had fallen out with someone in the Kremlin. They were often set up by their own lawyers: the lawyers would take the bribes, then use that as “evidence” that the prisoners were guilty (the bribes would then disappear). Yana’s prosecutor, the one who had told the court she was dangerous and had been in hiding, had a reputation for being the fiercest.

“
I’m stronger than him
,” she wrote to herself.

She would scour the news for reports about herself. Chernousov had told her they were writing letters to Duma deputies; there had been meetings and small pickets where human rights activists had defended her. But in Russia you can protest all you like; it won’t change anything. You can scream and scream, but no one will hear you. There was one tiny paragraph about her in a liberal newspaper, and that was it.

Every day new white collar prisoners were brought to the cell. The last was a woman who had just won an award in Cannes for having Russia’s best travel agency. “
Soon
,” wrote Yana, “
prison will become like a University get together. Now I’m afraid again. What should I be preparing myself for? For the worst? Should I be saying good-bye to everyone? Time is passing and nothing is changing. I’m the same as the others. It doesn’t matter whether you are rich or poor. This system grabs people off the street, from work, from home, and eats them up. And no one knows when it will happen to them.
”

Then one day, as they were watching the news, she suddenly saw a report about herself. Not on one of the Ostankino channels, but on a slightly smaller one with an “opposition” reputation though actually owned by one of the President’s oldest friends. There were five hundred people on Pushkin Square protesting against her imprisonment. There were posters with her face on them that said “freedom to Yana Yakovleva.” A relatively famous musician played a resistance song on a stage. Chernousov was making a speech. The reporter said: “The FDCS appears to be arresting people who have nothing to do with drug dealing at all.”

The next day her story was a double spread in one of the newspapers. When she came in after the shower everyone in the cell was gathered around reading it.

“Hey,” they called out, “so you really are innocent.”

•  •  •

Cherkesov had enemies.

He was trying to prove to the President that Patrushev, his rival and the head of the FSB, was a weak link. The President encouraged Cherkesov, handing the FDCS responsibility for investigating an illegal customs business on the China-Russia border allegedly managed by the FSB. This sort of investigation was way out of the FDCS’s remit: Could the fact the President had entrusted it to Cherkesov mean he preferred him to Patrushev?

But Patrushev and the FSB were not going to go down easily.

Just as Cherkesov was investigating Patrushev, so Patrushev supported those who were fighting Cherkesov. So when the FSB heard about Yana’s story, they made sure the police didn’t close down the demonstrations, that the right TV channels and newspapers covered the protests. This was one of the reasons “liberal” papers and channels existed, to give one power broker a weapon to hit another power broker with. Every day Yana’s story became better known. It was nicknamed the “case of the Chemists,” to echo a Stalinist era purge known as the “case of the Doctors.”

None of this ever would have happened if Yana, her parents, and Chernousov had not decided to fight back in the first place. Without the first dissident impulse, nothing would have appeared. But neither would that alone have been enough. To make something happen in Russia, you have to be both valiant protester and Machiavellian, playing one clan off against the other.

•  •  •

Shortly before she was released Yana had a dream. She and Alexey were lying on chaise longues in a strange country. Alexey was reading a newspaper. She got up and climbed a tall tree next to the chaise longue. The tree was very tall, and from the top she could see fields and forests. Suddenly she saw a grizzly bear was in the tree, too. He was coming toward her, growling. She froze in terror. He put his wet teeth right up to her face. And then he stopped. She thought he would eat her. Then suddenly he started to retreat. There was a great noise: below the tree a whole tribe of rabid bulls was running by, making the earth shake. Alexey kept on reading the newspaper as if nothing had happened.

She was awakened by the snores of the woman on the bunk above. She snored so hard her dentures popped out of her mouth and flew clattering onto the floor.

When Yana told the others about the dream, they all said, “It’s a sign, the evil is retreating, but the danger is not over by a long shot.”

The day of her release she was doing exercises with Luba, the Ukrainian girl who would stand next to her at night. Boxing, then some abs. “If you leave,” Luba suddenly said, “I’m not sure how I’ll cope without you.”

“Where would I possibly go?” laughed Yana.

They went back in for lunch. They were all eating when the warden came in. “Yakovleva, get your clothes and your documents and follow me,” she shouted. All the prisoners looked at each other.

“Probably another date with the inspector,” joked Yana.

“They’re probably going to let you go,” said Tanya. “You’ll be free.”

“Shh,” said Yana, “you know we never say that word.”

They drove her back to the FDCS HQ in northern Moscow. Her lawyer was there, and her parents. Her lawyer said: “Look, we’ve done a deal. They will let you out on bail, but they are keeping your business partner in until the trial.”

She didn’t feel anything at first. She only turned and asked her mother: “Is Alexey here?”

“He knows you’re being released but he’s not here,” her mother answered.

They went back to the prison to sign her out. She was still numb. Only when the TV cameras turned up at the prison did she begin crying. It was cold and the tears felt hot in her mouth; there were the people from human rights groups there and journalists; she was hugging all of them and she was crying out of gratitude to them. She had been inside for seven months, and now that she was outside it was suddenly like she had never been there. But it wasn’t over yet: she had been granted bail, but the biggest battle was the trial that lay ahead.

Chernousov drove her back to the apartment she shared with Alexey. She knew their relationship was over. All those letters to him, the letters she never sent, they had been for her. She needed that illusion to keep her going. When they had spoken on the phone (four times over seven months), he was more distant each time. He wasn’t even pretending he cared. She made excuses for him: he was afraid she would come out emotionally damaged. Their relationship had been between two independent grown-ups, and now he was worried he would have to look after someone frail.