In Russia, an Honest Cop Finds Out the Truth Hurts

Vladimir Port is either that rarest of diamonds--an honest Russian policeman--or a nut case, a traitor and a liar. It depends on whom you talk to.

His face is as round and shiny as a rosy apple. He has an eager smile but sad eyes that tell a story of lifelong naivete--his belief that his country is a better place than it has actually turned out to be.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the culture of corruption and dishonesty among public officials transferred seamlessly to the new Russia--to such an extent that the idea of an honest Russian policeman arouses reflexive mirth.

Port, along with others from the Perm region west of the Ural Mountains, served in Chechnya last year as an Interior Ministry police volunteer. Now he is being pushed out of his job as a lieutenant colonel because he published his diary about what he saw in Russia’s war against the separatist republic.

He is vilified as a traitor by the police command, but he has many supporters, people who believe that citizens like Port are Russia’s hope.

“These people give us knowledge. They tell us the truth. They write history,” said Yevgeny Yermolayev, who served with Port in Chechnya.

“His honesty is paramount. I think he’s incapable of taking a bribe,” said journalist Ivan Gurin, who first published Port’s diary in a small regional newspaper. The diary was later published in a national mass-circulation daily, Komsomolskaya Pravda.

That Port is not considered a normal cop but a saint or a freak is testament to the pervasive dishonesty and corruption of Russian officials. The corruption creates expense and difficulty for Russian and Western businesses and frustrates countless individuals who have to tangle with the bureaucracy. There is little to show for many Kremlin promises to root out graft.

Few of the tens of thousands of Russians who served in Chechnya spoke out about what they saw.

“What you see in Chechnya and what you see on television about Chechnya is as different as earth and sky,” Port said. “Let the people know the truth. My father taught me from childhood that a bitter truth is better than a sweet lie.”

His father was a history teacher--and history in Soviet schools was as much about lies and distortions as it was about the truth. But Port’s father, an ardent Communist, taught with the conviction of a true believer. Port loved history and trained to be a history teacher in his far eastern hometown of Khabarovsk.

But he ended up working as a fireman, later moving to Chernushka to work as a fire inspector and then as a policeman.

Port’s notes on Chechnya are not the most essential part of his personal story. The question is what made this stubborn, emotional, compassionate man so different from those who witnessed the same thing and worse but said nothing.

His war diary contains no sensational allegations of wide-scale atrocities. But the battered school notebook filled with neat, tightly written sloping hand in blue pen is a compelling condemnation of war.

Its power lies in its rambling description of the mundane grind of war. His stories of hardships, contradictory and sometimes idiotic orders, and the ease with which Chechen rebels evaded the Russians touched a chord with readers and enraged Russian Defense and Interior Ministry officials.

Port exposed the desperate and chaotic state of the Russian military. His men had to find local business sponsors in Perm to buy enough ammunition and supply food, warm hats, adequate clothing and sleeping gear for their Chechen mission in winter and spring last year.

Port was horrified when Gen. Gennady Troshev, chief of the North Caucasus military district, crudely told Port’s commander that he and his men should ignore regulations. He was frustrated when his men had to dig and re-dig trenches to satisfy the whims of several generals.

Port and his men grieved when they heard the desperate radio calls of Perm OMON special police troops whose column was ambushed in March 2000. Forty-three were killed, including 11 who were taken prisoner and later executed.

Port’s view that more should have been done to save the men is shared by many in the Perm Interior Ministry unit, yet he is despised there for going public.

Yermolayev believes that Port’s diaries helped Russians understand the cheapness of life in the military services.

But Konstantin Strogy, deputy chief of the Interior Ministry in Perm, claimed that Port’s diary was fantasy. He criticized Port as unstable, nervous, ambitious and a liar.

Port never fit into the police culture, Strogy said.

“He’s an alien, to a large extent,” he said. “He’s a self-obsessed coward and a panic monger, a person who failed to realize his own potential.”

Port is bitter about losing his job, but he feels no shame.

“It’s always been a problem for us,” said Oleg Kharaskin, the young, recently elected head of the Chernushka town administration, who supports Port. “To act in accordance with your conscience has always meant to damage your career. And to act according to your career always meant to damage your conscience.”

Port was always out of the loop. Although other firefighters and police worked the system, Port was stolidly unwilling or unable to do so and found himself marooned in low-prestige positions.

“I’ve always told my wife, ‘If only I was just a tiny bit more grasping, it would be much easier to live,’ ” said Port, who has a son in the army and a daughter to support.

But Tatyana Port fell in love with her husband because of his sense of fairness and the fact that he was never afraid to tell the truth. In Soviet times, it was often difficult to avoid lies. She recalled a student meeting at which her husband and others were criticized for failing to attend a compulsory rally to wave flags and cheer then-Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev.

In the Soviet Union, people coveted a khlebnoye position, derived from the word for bread: a job that let you line your pockets with bribes or fees.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, the free market and privatization opened new opportunities for corruption. For public officials whose salaries were not paid on time, bribes were a means of survival.

In Soviet times, as now, there were two types of firefighters: those like Port who risked their lives putting out fires, and inspectors who were supposed to make sure that buildings met regulations--a khlebnoye position because of bribes.

People never did, and still don’t, think about the dishonesty involved in accepting bribes, Port said. Fire inspectors could get their hands on anything, and people approached them for favors.

“Of course people went to them. But I felt uncomfortable, and I still do. I think you can do without sausage, rather than go to them,” Port said.

The best guide to Port’s honesty is his modest three-room apartment in a shabby block. Among the basic Soviet-era furniture there’s a humble 1980s record player, a chunky digital alarm clock and an old Soviet iron. Prominently displayed on a shelf are the plastic Soviet military models of ships and planes he made with his son.

The surroundings declare that this is not a man on the take.

Port describes himself as a credible man, easy to deceive. “I really try to trust people,” he said.

After he transferred from Khabarovsk to Chernushka in 1988, he got a job as a fire inspector responsible for collective farms.

“There were cases when they offered me meat. I took the meat, but I paid for it. I knew I didn’t need to pay. But you do it once, and then you know you’ll never stop. I didn’t want to go down that path. No way,” he said.

Gurin, the journalist, said Port donated the money he received from the newspaper to families of the dead Perm OMON police.

“He’s emotional. But that’s a good thing. An indifferent person makes a bad policeman,” Gurin said. “He’s the only man of that caliber I’ve ever met.”

Port is disappointed and angry at being rejected as a policeman. Asked about these feelings, he juts out his chin, swallows, refuses to gripe.

“OK, justice did not win out in my case, and it won’t in the next and the next after that. But in the fourth case it might win. I think there are more good people in the world than bad,” he said.

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Dixon was recently on assignment in Chernushka.