The particularly horrible thing the Russian army did [in Chechnya] was the 'Slon', Russian for 'The Elephant'… — John Sweeney
The particularly horrible thing the Russian army did [in Chechnya] was the 'Slon', Russian for 'The Elephant' from the Soviet issue gas mask which has a corrugated tube hanging down from the face mask to the filter which looks like an elephant's trunk. They would tie a Chechen captive's arms behind his back, place him on the chair, fix 'The Elephant' over his face, unscrew the filter and then squirt CS gas up the tube so the victim would start to drown in his own tears, vomit and snot. One Chechen victim told me for our BBC Radio 5 documentary, Victims of the Torture Train: 'Once the gas mask was on, they would choke you, so you were gasping to breathe. And they would squirt CS gas down the breathing hole. It was so bad just the sight of the gas mask in the room would make people confess to anything'.
Imagine my horror when I went to a police station in newly liberated Kherson in Ukraine twenty-two years later which had been used as a torture chamber. And there, in the basement, was an Elephant gas mask, without the filter.
p. 159Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
More from this book
His first downfall came in late 2004 when Putin sacked him. Kasyanov was considered to have been a good prime minister, but in the late nineties he was first nicknamed 'Misha Two Per Cent', a reference to the two per cent stake he allegedly took from government deals. Kasyanov says Putin himself brought up the nickname during their last meeting in December 2004: 'Remember that name if you ever decide to go over to the opposition', was Putin's threat. His second downfall was the sex tape during which the couple, as every political couple does the world over, slagged off their allies, Navalny included. Kasyanov carried on for a bit, a bird with a broken wing, but his career in Russian politics was dead.
That left only one man standing: Navalny.
p. 149
The whole point of Putin sending Navalny to Yamal was to break his spirit and within a month of arrival, he was cracking jokes about keeping warm in minus 32 degrees C inside the carcass of a hot, fried elephant. Once again, one is left thinking how much Putin must have hated him.
p. 267
Roughly a year before [his assassination], I had interviewed Nemtsov about Putin's grotesquely corrupt Winter Olympics in Sochi, asking him about the $5 billion road-rail link resort from the coast to the mountain ski resort. Nemtsov replied that: 'It would have been cheaper to have lined this road with Louis Vuitton handbags'. Before meeting Nemtsov, I had spent time with the comically stupid Putinist mayor of Sochi. He had knocked back my question about how gay Olympians would be treated in a city where the Kremlin's homophobic laws held sway by proclaiming: 'There are no gays in Sochi'. When I told Nemtsov about this, he laughed and laughed and laughed for so long we had to trim it down in the edit. He had a beautiful sense of the ridiculous and when I heard he had been shot, I burst into tears.
p. 146
