Anna Politkovskaya was murdered in 2006, in the stairwell of the Moscow apartment building where was living, shot twice in her chest, once in her shoulder and once in her head at point blank range, almost certainly the work of FSB, or paid Chechen assassins.
Murder was the rule in Chechnya’s inter-clan wars and whilst Moscow based federal troops in Grozny, law enforcement was carried out by Chechen authorities, not Russian. Kadyrov with his twenty or thirty thousand militiamen had finally succeeded in putting down the Islamic insurgency.
The persecution of the Vainakhs17 was part of a long running Russian war, pursued by the czars and their successors, and intensified after terrorist attacks such as those that killed Viktor Tuomanov and his men.
In March 2010, two female suicide bombers blew themselves up in Moscow, killing forty people at Lubyanka and Park Kultury metro stations. The bombs were loaded with shrapnel to inflict the greatest damage. The first explosion took place at the busy Lubyanka interchange near the headquarters of the FSB, not far from Red Square and the Bolshoi Theatre. The second at Park Kultury, near Gorky Park.
Russians learned to live with terror.
Dmitri Medvedev, then president, responded by ordering his forces to combat terrorism by every possible means and root out the perpetrators, whilst Vladimir Putin, at that time prime minister, promised those responsible for the attacks would be destroyed.
The explosions, a devastating and symbolic attack on Russia, were the work of Islamist insurgents, another in a series that had hit Moscow and Petersburg, in the ongoing war waged by insurgents from the Caucasian Republics.
Tragedy
Ekaterina told me of the final scene in the terrible drama, how dressed in black she had stood with her two year old daughter in the icy rain as Viktor was buried with military honours in his home town one hundred kilometres to the north of Moscow. A bitter wind had swept the graveyard where their families watched as townspeople lined up to pay their respects laying their floral tributes on Viktor’s freshly dug tomb.
Military authorities would have liked it to be known that his death had been an act of the utmost heroism, in a blatant effort to justify the Kremlin’s actions and boost the morale of the men serving in Chechnya.
The official version was of a heroic stand against Islamist insurgents, the reality was different, Viktor’s vehicle had been destroyed by a roadside bomb in a terrorist ambush.
Ekaterina spoke of that awful morning. Her husband of three years had been due back that day. There was a knock on the door of apartment. She opened it expecting to see her husband. Instead, she was greeted by a lieutenant colonel and two other officers.
‘No words spoken. I knew at once they had come to tell me Viktor was dead. He had died the day before.’
Shortly after, Ekaterina was informed of the arrival of his coffin and was escorted to the airfield, where military honours were accorded to Colonel Viktor Tuomanov, now Posthumous Hero of the Russian Federation, as his sealed zinc coffin covered with the Russian flag was unloaded from an air force Antonov.
After the funeral she was invited to the Kremlin to accept her husband’s Hero of the Russian Federation medal, presented by Vladimir Putin, the then prime minister, in person.
The threat of war in the Ukraine filled Ekaterina with dread. Fear for the young men who would die, fear for her job at Christie’s as sanctions were tightened, fear for her daughters future and fear for the promise of a new life.
Ekaterina like many Russians was aware of the contradictions of her country. At thirty six she remembered the excess of Boris Yeltsin and the dramatic years that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
After welcoming the arrival of Vladimir Putin, and the stability he brought, the tone changed. Soon, Putin’s ambitions for a Great Russia led to confrontation with the West and the Ukrainian crisis.
For her, as for many other Russians, the Ukraine had always been part of Russia, even the birthplace of Russian civilisation. On the other hand, however, the Ukrainians had chosen independence and she did not believe in armed coercion.
That she kept to herself, paying lip service to Putin’s rule. For the sake of her daughter and her independence she avoided political discussions and in her work at Christie’s, the Moscow branch of the auction house where she worked, she never voiced opinions, especially in her relations with the many British and Americans that came and went in the daily affairs of the firm.
She was Russian, as were her parents and grandparents, and the idea of leaving Russian was foreign to her. Until recently she had never travelled beyond the capitals of the former Soviet Union, the near abroad, that is Kiev, Minsk or Tallinn, or the countries of the former East Block, Warsaw and Prague.
Viktor had often spoken of the conditions of Russian soldiers, many of whom died in official silence or limped home from a war the country wanted to forget, humiliated, hungry and demoralised.
Soldiers in frayed uniforms were seen begging for food outside markets in Moscow and other cities, many, including officers, committed suicide.
A cheap enamelled medal and a mountain of obstacles for the obtention of disablement benefits or a widows pension as thanks for the sacrifice.
Ekaterina was bitter and angry, but in her soul was grateful Viktor had not returned home disabled, to a life of Vodka, as had many of his comrades.
Nobody cared, the state’s coffers were empty.
Viktor had served for eight months in Chechnya, fighting in some of the bloodiest battles during which Chechen rebels destroyed Russian tanks and support vehicles.
Soldiers died in an inexplicable war against other Russians, often without food and ammunition, in a conflict where patriotic ideals meant nothing.
Ukraine
The origins of the Ukrainian conflict went back to the collapse of the USSR and its dissolution in December 1991. In fact Ukraine declared it independence in August 1991, six months before Gorbachev’s historic declaration, giving rise to a conflict between the mainly Russian speaking east and the Ukrainian speaking west.
Former president Leonid Kuchma sought closer links to the EU and NATO, whilst Victor Yanukovych, who succeeded him in 2010, tried to draw the country into the orbit of Moscow.
After the Maidan revolt Yanukovych fled to Moscow and the Kremlin launched its tentative to take control of Ukraine by first grabbing the Crimean Peninsula, then backing a separatist movement in the Donetsk Region reinforced by regular Russian army units disguised as volunteers.
In May 2014, the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic were proclaimed. After the the separatist forces were pushed back the Minsk Protocol was signed by Ukraine, the Russian Federation and representatives of the two self declared republics in September 2014.
Two years later, and nearly ten thousand deaths, there was no end in sight.
The hastily brokered peace deal, known as Minsk I, soon broke down, and by January 2015, severe fighting resumed. With Minsk II another cease fire was declared, with prisoner exchanges, an amnesty for fighters and access for humanitarian aid measures.
In spite of the agreements, regular clashes and sniper fire cause casualties as Russian units, ‘volunteers’ from Dagestan and Chechnya, disguised in separatist uniforms, using the latest weaponry, maintain the pressure on Ukrainian forces.
In the streets of Moscow passer-by look fearfully at the flashing red electronic numbers displayed outside currency-exchange booths, what they feared was another collapse in the value of the rouble as in January 2014, as news trickled in of fighting and losses in the Donetsk region of Ukraine.
From the north-western city of Pskov, near the border with Estonia, news was filtering in of the fresh dug tombs from which the names had been removed— paratroopers who lost had their lives in covert missions in eastern Ukraine.
As authorities employed their brutal methods to keep inquisitive outsiders away from the funerals, fresh graves appeared. Those of soldiers of the 76th Airborne Division killed in the fighting.
RT reported fighting a new battle against fascism, as though Russia was plunged back into the Great Patriotic War against Hitler. Few within the Garden Ring believed the news.
Strange slogans were bandied about by TV commentators and the press. ‘We will prevail’, ‘Fascism won’t pass’.
Ukrainian and their NATO friends were now designated as fascists.
I questioned Ekaterina about the mercenaries in East Ukraine, she laughed. They were special units, like that of Viktor's in Chechnya, though he had been neither a mercenary nor a volunteer, but on a special forces on a mission in Chechnya
Military service was mandatory for men from eighteen to twenty seven, but half of them dodged the draft and with the conflicts in Ukraine in Syria more are expected to follow suit. Meanwhile conscripts were subjected to brutal and even lethal hazing, driving many young soldiers to suicide, and were ordered to sign contracts allowing them to be sent to Ukraine, if not their commander would sign in their place.
Many got medical exemption, by joining the police force or fire-fighters. Those who could pursued higher studies at university which also qualified them for exemption.
Ekaterina had spoken to me of Cargo 20018, and her own dramatic experience when Viktor’s dead body returned.
In Pskov, the local newspaper, Pskovskaya Guberniya, published a transcript of conversations between two paratroopers that suggested almost all soldiers of the first regiment of the No. 76 Pskov airborne paratrooper division were killed fighting in Ukrainian territory.
Soon after the appearance of a report, entitled ‘The Dead and Living’, covering the deaths of paratroopers in a special unit, that is an irregular army unit, the owner of the newspaper was savagely attacked.
According to the transcript, some seventy paratroopers were killed in the fighting, leaving just ten survivors, however, the number of killed could have been significantly higher considering the violence of the combat.
The Facebook page, Cargo 200, claimed seven Russian soldiers were killed on the first day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and a further one thousand five hundred since.
The Ukrainian president spoke of more than two thousand deaths, figures no doubt exaggerated, but which reflected high losses. Precisely how many Russian mercenaries, or regular army soldiers, fighting in the guise of mercenaries, had been killed, would never be known.
PART 11 FRANCISTOWN
Dublin
Needless to say the drama in Paris had left Ekaterina in a state of shock, upsetting our well laid plans. First I persuaded her to visit Dublin, to learn more about who I was. Until the she’d had little or no idea of what Ireland was, or perhaps even where it was, an appendage vaguely attached to England.
We started with the house on North Great Georges Street, which she loved with the city with its friendly human scale.
We visited Trinity College with its ancient halls and the Book of Kells. I showed her the bank’s original headquarters on College Green, then we went shopping on O'Connell Street two minutes from the house.
What surprised her most was the Post Office and the story of the Easter Rising, the start of Ireland’s fight for independence, a year before Russia’s own revolution.
We drove down to Francistown, via the scenic route, skirting the Wicklow Mountains, through Blessington, past the lakes and then across to Newbridge.
I could sense her curiosity and anticipation and was amused when she stared in disbelief on arrival at Francistown House, when it came into view at the end of its long driveway.
She was not the first to be impressed on seeing the house for the first time. A cornice and pediment supported on four Doric columns framed the main entrance to the house, set back between its two main wings. In days long gone it had been conceived as the entrance to the reception hall for balls and other important events in the lives of my forefathers.
I had telephoned ahead and the hotel manager and one of his staff was waiting in doorway which led to my private apartments. The ground floor consisted of a very grand double-sized reception hall with high ceilings and an oak parquet floor, to the left and right were doors leading to the library, drawing room and dining room. On the first floor was a transversal bedroom suite and two smaller bedrooms with views over the golf course and gardens. To the other side of the house was the golf club reception area, offices, the restaurant and the hotel. Further off to the left and connected to the main house by a tunnel was the stud farm, its stable block, the manager’s house and outbuildings.
The house had always been way too big for my parents, perhaps my ancestors had entertained a lot with important guests from England and India, officers and government officials who had not deigned to stay in the much less comfortable Newbridge barracks.
After the barracks were demolished and the Irish Army, a much reduced organisation, our house was finally transformed into what it is now, a prosperous business, by my father.
I told Ekaterina the story of the family enterprise and how it wasn’t the people who kept the gentry in a fine life style, like the serfs in Russia, at least our family. Our business was horses, mostly cavalry horses as well as sturdy horses for the army in general. It had been a good business until the end of WWI.
My father and grandfather often spoke of the old days, before the war, which war depended on who was speaking.
Kildare was the perfect environment for horse breeding with the stud farm and the production and raising of thoroughbreds.
The present Francistown Stud was modern with high quality stallions, broodmares, foaling, neonatal care, weaning, veterinary care, laboratory facilities, farriering, exercise and training, and equine transport.
I told Ekaterina the story of the thoroughbred, the history that went back to the 17th century and three remarkable stallions, from which the English Thoroughbred19 and almost all racehorses descended from.
My ancestors introduced quality stallions into Ireland to meet army needs, cavalry horses, working horses, sport and riding horses.
In those days running the business and the house with its outlying farms was a major undertaking, employing literally hundreds of people including their families and children, all of whom had their jobs.
A steward ran the household, paid the bills and expenses, looked after the different buildings, hired servants and paid wages.
There were coachmen, grooms and footmen to attend to carriages and horses, butlers, housekeepers, housemaids, ladies maids, laundry maids, dairy maids, valets, cooks and scullery maids, kitchen boys, gardeners and a butcher, all of whom entered the house by a side passage so that they were not seen by the family and its guests.
All in all with the stables and stud Francistown was a major undertaking. Just feeding everybody required substantial organisation, which required baking bread, supplying meat, that is a sheep every day, a cow every two weeks, as well as pigs and chickens, geese, turkeys, eggs and game from shooting parties. On top of that was the coal and wood needed for the many fires, not forgetting cooking hearths, an all day task that employed dozens of hands.
In addition several tenant farmers produced feed and hay for the horses as well as wheat and vegetables, sheep and cattle, milk and butter.
Francistown was an important supplier to the Army and an important contributor to local life and its economy.
Family
My family was small and I have no surviving family members to speak of. I have never given it much thought, that was the way it was and I accepted my only child status. I loved my grandparents. My grandfather passed away when I was fifteen, I remember it happening at the beginning of my summer holidays just after I arrived in Francistown, it now seems so far away.
Grandfather still rode when I was a small boy, and I still see him as a kindly, rather stiff, old colonel who told me stories about the Lancers in India and tiger hunts. My grandmother, a sweet old lady who doted on me, died three or four years later.
I had just one uncle and an aunt on my mother’s side and the few cousins I had were very distant as they were much older than me.
It seems a long time since my father passed away, he was ninety three. He died suddenly, then my mother died about ten years back.
As they grew older they moved from Francistown to our Dublin home on North Great Georges Street, not far from O’Connell Street, in the centre of town. Today it’s my Dublin home, which I renovated and restored after they died. It’s an elegant 18th century Georgian townhouse on Northside’s only intact Georgian street, built at the time when north inner city Dublin was at the height of its grandeur. A few houses down the street from the house is the James Joyce Museum.
When I was younger, family life turned around the Francistown estate and horses, in fact I knew more about the horses than those distant cousins of mine.
Once my professorship had been established at Trinity the university became my second family and as the years pasts I became a surrogate father for my students.
Naturally I remained extremely close to my parents and lived with them on Northside, which was extremely practical as I could walk from home to Trinity in about ten minutes.
Before my parents moved to Dublin I visited them regularly in Newbridge for weekends, birthdays and holidays such as Christmas. Later after they’d moved to Dublin I returned less frequently to Francistown.
The idea that I now had a ready made family rekindled the embers of the forgotten dreams for the family I’d never had. Alena was a warm and beautiful little girl and soon I fixed my hopes on her future and what I could do for her.
Strangely Alena shared something in common with me, a small family and few cousins. There were her grandparents, on Katya’s side, who were very reserved. On her father’s side, her grandparents had lost one of their sons. Viktor and Sasha had chosen military careers, like their father, a Red Army officer, who had seen service in the Afghan war, Cuba and Southern Africa.
Her Uncle Sasha was married to Irina and they had two children, a girl and a boy with whom Alena was very close. Their father was rarely home, serving somewhere in the Middle East, defending Vladimir Putin’s idea of a renascent Greater Russian. They lived in Moscow with their mother, Irina, attending a school for children of the Red Army. Katya and Ira remained close, both had lost, in different senses, their husbands to the army.
The Russian armed forces had seen hard times with draconian cuts following the dissolution of the Soviet Union and since Vladimir Putin had come to power, though budgets were again on the rise. This meant that life for Irina and her children lacked many of the things that the new Russian consumer society had to offer, though luckily her job in her family’s business enterprise compensated the tight salary of a career officer.
Adequate housing had always been a problem for army families, but Irina’s parent’s, who owned a construction business, had financed an apartment for her, not too far from Ekaterina’s. Her father had even offered Sasha a job, but he was too fixed to his military career.
From what I understand, when Katya had spoken of me, Ira was pleased for her, but on discovering my age, which Katya rounded off on the positive side, she was at first very surprised. However, on learning more about me and the promise of a better life in London, she approved, it was to her mind a serendipitous windfall. After all, the Russian popular press ran endless gossip stories of wealthy men and their young wives, not forgetting the Russian leader, whose current girlfriend was thirty years his junior.
A Surprise
We flew from Dublin to London, where I’d prepared my coup de maître. Life was too complicated being so far apart. We’d been living together, seemingly, out of a suitcase for an eternity. Moscow, London and now Dublin, not to mention our breaks in different other places. It was complicated for not only for us both, but also Alena. There was the almost every present question of visas and the coming Brexit vote, which together precipitated our decision.
I’d scheduled my business trips to coincide with Ekaterina’s visits to Moscow, but it was Alena that suffered. Whenever Ekaterina returned to Moscow, either her mother came to us in London, or if it coincided with school breaks, Alena joined her mother.
Sentiments and officialdom do not mix and we soon discovered the difficulties of travelling to and from the UK, an endless series of hurdles. All of that was complicated by the deteriorating relations between Moscow, Washington and London, over the Ukrainian and Crimean conflict and the imposition of sanctions against Russia.
As an interim solution we overcame the problem of visas and travel to the UK and the EU Schengen Zone with multiple entry visas. As soon as I knew that our relationship was a lasting one, I asked Pat Kennedy for his advice. He steered me to a Jersey based firm, Finlay & Partners, with offices in London, specialised in residence and citizenship planning. They had already helped Pat’s Chinese family and friends with that kind of problem, and Tom and Lola Barton. Finlay’s proposed a plan that that would give Ekaterina a Maltese passport, which would give her right to residence and visa free travel throughout the EU.
I must admit it’s a fact, money can buy you almost anything.
London was our obvious choice. Ekaterina spoke perfect English and in addition there was a large Russian community. For me it had always been a second home and it was just an hour from Central London to City Airport in Docklands.
I'd started by contacting Sarah Kavanagh of Guthrie Plimpton to help me find a house. Barely a week later she informed me a property had just come onto the market a stone’s throws from the Kennedy’s. I jumped at the opportunity, which in spite of the price wouldn’t be on the market long. It was a fine eight bedroom terraced house on Royal Hospital Road. It was big, but to please Ekaterina nothing was too much, besides I had the means, why shouldn’t I leave it to her and Alena, after all I couldn’t take it where I’d be going.
The value of my stock options at INI rocketed once Pat recovered control of the bank from City & Colonial. It was time to realise the gains and put part of it into property, which in the long experience of my family and mine as an economist was as safe as bricks, whatever they tried to tell us. For confirmation I only had to look at the deeds of the house in question, which had changed hands numerous times over the two centuries since it had been built without ever losing money for its owners.
And what did it matter, once it was paid for, a house was a house. Of course there were the running costs and I would ensure Ekaterina would have enough to live comfortably come the day I was no longer there. My father had often reminded me, as he grew old, it was better to make someone happy than worry about what happened beyond our own mortal existence.
I can say my plan had worked, Ekaterina was lost for words when I announced it was to be our home. She immediately realised Alena would be happy there. Her daughter would grow up an Anglo-Russian, never that far from home with Moscow less than a four hours flight from London.
We would be happy together and in addition she could pursue her career at Christie’s London, that I’d discussed with Sergei. My responsibilities at Trinity were now symbolic and as far as INI was concerned, I remained on the board and concentrated my attention on the think tank. Besides that I worked on my books and my presence in our future home, wherever that would be, would reassure her.
Christie’s had many expatriate specialists living in London and Ekaterina was reassured London’s international schools could provide the kind of primary and secondary education she sought for her daughter. A visit to Kensington Preparatory School on Fulham Road settled that question. So our home would have to be situated between school and the auction house’s offices in the West End.
Brexit and Ireland
As an Irishman, bound by eight hundred years of not always happy history to England, it seemed strange that the umbilical cord, which had never really been totally severed, would be cut once and for all. We would be thrown into the arms of Europe and the hereditary enemies of England, those that the English crown, over the centuries, from Henry VIII to Churchill, had feared would gain a foothold in Ireland, the underbelly of England.
My Anglo-Irish family were staunch Republicans, and I, holder of Irish citizenship and an Irish passport, still, like many Irishmen, had a special place in my heart for London.
For people like me Brexit was a disaster, a game changer.
Whenever I opened a newspaper, turned on the TV, it was there. The person leading the UK, with the war cry Brexit means Brexit, was in a sorry state, after a victory in local elections, Theresa May had now been humiliated in her snap general election plunging the country into political chaos. This did not however in the deter Brexiteers who plunged on, regardless, in a venture that was beginning to appear more and more like a slow motion national suicide.
The idea of sovereignty and freedom to negotiate the UK’s own trade deals with the rest of the world was a mirage, when countries as different as Norway, Switzerland and Turkey, were either part of the EU Economic Area, the Schengen Area or the Customs Union.
The idea that the UK would sell less to Europe was certainly unfounded and vice versa, however, the conditions under which such trade continued would not be favourable and costs would be paid on both sides. The problem was on the EU side these costs would be shared by twenty seven nations, whilst on the British side the burden would fall entirely on the UK and it alone.
Imagined fabulous deals with the rest of the