A Soldier and his Killers

Elena Bonner, widow of Russia's most famous dissident, Andrei Sakharov, reflects on the murder of Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov by Russian security forces:

Aslan Maskhadov was a soldier and never lost his soldier’s, or officer’s, honesty. I would assert that he was not only a grateful person, but a good man. And I do not say this without grounds, but based on a personal impression resulting from an acquaintance with him. The death of a human being is always a great misfortune for the relatives, and I grieve together with them and with his people.

Death, especially in battle, is a bell which rings for both those who have perished and those who survive. Let the lieutenant colonel, commander-in-chief of Russia; let all his generals cheer their success, brought not by military valour and skill but meanness and corruptibility. The bell which rings for Aslan Maskhadov rings also for them, and for the Russia they have corrupted, the land immeasurably further from peace today than it was yesterday.

Do they remember that for nearly two hundred years Russia has been looking for the ashes of five people hanged by Nikolai I on St. Petersburg’s Golodai island? And do they grasp that they are following a hangman who will not grant them a worthy burial?

How does a soldier differ from a bandit or executioner? A real soldier never dishonours his killed enemy. A real soldier would never put the corpse on public display, but would return it to its relatives, to be buried or given up to fire according to their customs, or the soldier buries the body himself.

In the search for a national raison d’etre, parading their adherence to God, the new directors of the Russian future play the lie of international terrorism just as they lie when honouring the memory of all the soldiers who died 60 years ago. The soldiers, who achieved victory with their blood. Those were soldiers, but today’s are simply killers and gangsters.