Paranoiastan

When the country's richest man goes to jail, that must mean something. Back in November, when Russian oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky was arrested and then arraigned on seven different charges ranging from tax evasion to fraud, I spoke at two different roundtables devoted to the question of why he was arrested. (Not, obviously, because he was guilty.) At the same time a friend of mine, a journalist in Moscow, compiled a list of seventeen different theories. The reasons for Khodorkovsky's arrest proposed by these theories included: his political views (liberal), his wealth (excessive), his provenance (Jewish), his business stance (aggressive), his plans for his oil company (international), his willingness to share the wealth with the country's rulers (insufficient), his enemies (jealous), his friends (disloyal), his political contributions (unsanctioned), and several other, related factors. The list also included the possibility that Khodorkovsky was guilty as charged and the prosecutors could actually prove it as well as connect him to two murders, as they also promised to do—but this possibility was Number 17, a humorous afterthought. It was also the only option that raised more questions than it answered.

If Khodorkovsky is guilty, he has committed crimes that characterize his generation of Russian businessmen: they all cheated on their taxes; they all navigated the maze of Russian and Soviet laws by obeying some and violating others; they all engaged in a variety of practices that were questionably legal, indisputably unethical, and obviously common practice. So why was he the only one arrested? Could it be that the prosecutors had collected evidence on him but not on the others? Then why? Could it be that he was guiltier than the others? Then how (it certainly wasn't evident from the charges)? And since the charges date back many years, did something happen to trigger the arrest? Or did the information on a variety of misdeeds suddenly land in the prosecutors' laps at this particular moment—why? Or could it be that he was singled out for some reason that had little or nothing to do with his alleged crimes? Go back to Versions 1 through 16: any—or, in fact, all—of them could be true, and, if true, would raise no further questions.

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When you live, as I do, in a country where things just seem to happen because they do, with no apparent plan or reason, you can do one of two things. You can accept that bad things happen to good people, bad people, and in-between people at random. This is difficult. Most of us don't like to live with the idea that we could get arrested or killed or kidnapped at any moment. So we make up explanations, not so much for why someone has been nabbed, as for why we haven't: because we are not as inconsiderately rich, as politically opinionated, or as conspicuously Jewish. You might object that any country, even one as big as Russia, is bound to run out of the filthy rich and the screamingly Jewish sooner or later, rendering our defenses obsolete, but if you said this, you'd be missing the point. The point is to convince yourself that you are safe.

So, welcome to the world of the truly paranoid. Paranoia, according to Freud, is a hyperrational system within a given framework. The system makes sense; it's the framework that's crazy. That's how it worked in his world. In our world, too, the framework is crazy—so the system had better make sense.

Here is how it works. One night an apartment building on the outskirts of Moscow blows up—rather, several bags of explosives in the basement blow up, and the building crumples in, burying over one hundred residents under a pile of broken concrete. A week later, another building goes down, in a different Moscow suburb. In between, there is an explosion that brings down a building in a small southern city. There are 316 dead. The government quickly identifies the culprits as Chechen terrorists, and a new war in Chechnya is unleashed.

This happened almost five years ago, in August and September of 1999. At first, most Russians seemed to believe that the Chechens did do it. Muscovites spent a few weeks patrolling the streets of their city at night, on the lookout for suspicious people and pets (there was a rumor that some dogs had been found carrying explosives). Then they went home and felt helpless. Because you can't spend every night outside looking for terrorists. And even if you do, you might not catch all the terrorists. Or the terrorists might come during the day, when you are asleep after catching them all night. And then they might pick your building and blow it up, because they would have no less reason to blow up your building than to blow up the original three buildings (note that these were not the Twin Towers; they were not even distinguishable from any of the thousands of identical buildings that make up the suburbs of every post-Soviet city). Nor would the Chechens have any less reason to do it now, in 2004, when they are being massacred by Russian soldiers, than they did in 1999, when Chechnya was more or less left alone.

On the other hand, they may not have done it at all. The government still hasn't produced a shred of evidence linking Chechen terrorists to the apartment-building explosions. Maverick investigators, on the other hand, have uncovered some evidence linking the FSB, the secret police, to the bombings, or at least one foiled bombing of an apartment building in the provincial city of Ryazan. This is an altogether more comfortable and sensible theory. There is motive: the government wanted a new war in Chechnya, and the explosions created instant public support for it. There is opportunity: the buildings were all located in cities easily accessible to any FSB agent. There is the fact that people who wonder what happened have a way of getting into trouble: two deputies from the Duma committee investigating the explosions have been killed in the last two years; a lawyer for the committee was arrested, then fled abroad. Most important, though, there is the promise that it won't happen again, since the mission of the original explosions was accomplished long ago. Such are the spoils of paranoia: if you believe that your own government's secret police killed 316 civilians by blowing up suburban apartment towers, you can feel safe as a civilian going to sleep in a suburban apartment tower.

Back to our shifting framework. If the FSB blew up the apartment buildings, is it to blame for all the other acts of purported Chechen terrorism? Thirty-five honest-to-goodness Chechens took more than 800 people hostage in a Moscow theater in October of 2002. One could say that these were desperate Chechen men and women who really wanted to show Muscovites what war was like so that they would pressure their government to end the war. But that would have a number of troublesome implications. It would mean that it is unsafe to go to the theater or, possibly, to any public place. It would also mean that the Chechen terrorists, if they actually thought they could succeed, are insane, and this would be troubling. Alternatively, we could suppose that it was the FSB that organized/trained/funded a group of ethnic Chechens to go stage a hostage-taking because support for the war was waning (it was) and the government wanted to boost it (it worked). This theory has the added benefit of explaining how several vans filled with armed people and explosives could travel unmolested all the way to Moscow. So if the FSB did it, you can feel safe going to the theater.

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