February 26, 2007
Who's killing Putin's enemies?
Since 1999, when Vladimir Putin, a career KGB officer, was, in effect, anointed as president by Boris Yeltsin, 13 journalists have been murdered in Russia. Nearly all the deaths took place in strange circumstances, and none of them has been successfully investigated or prosecuted.
Last July... the duma passed a law, introduced by the Kremlin, to permit the assassination of 'enemies of the Russian regime' abroad. For people like Boris Berezovsky, whose hatred for Putin has become an obsession, the new law explained everything.
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...when Russia's young democrats jettisoned the rules of democracy they also forfeited their independence. That made what came next for the media, and for Russia, possible - perhaps even inevitable.
(After) the 1996 election...the authorities understood... mass media could very easily be manipulated to achieve any goal. Whether the Kremlin needed to raise the rating of a president or bring down an opponent or conduct an operation to destroy a business, or a man, the media could do the job. Once the Kremlin understood that it could use journalists as instruments of its will, and saw that journalists would go along, everything that happened in the Putin era was, sadly, quite logical.'
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The Putin government has made a clever calculation: a few newspapers, with tiny elite audiences, can publish highly critical investigations and editorials as long as that reporting and criticism stays absolutely disconnected from television. (And as long as their reporters keep out of Chechnya.)
Anna Politkovskaya began writing about the war in 1999, after the rules of press freedom changed, and she violated those rules every time she went to work. Not long before her death she wrote, 'I will not go into the ... joys of the path I have chosen - the poisoning, the arrests, the threats in letters and over the internet, the telephoned death threats, the weekly summons to the prosecutor general's office to sign statements about practically every article I write (the first question being, "How and where did you obtain this information?"). Of course I don't like the constant derisive articles about me that appear in other newspapers and on websites presenting me as the madwoman of Moscow. I find it disgusting to live this way. I would like a bit more understanding.' The fact that Novaya Gazeta continued to exist says more about the paper's minimal impact than about its openness.
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'I don't know of a single case in the past six years when the duma voted against any presidential initiative,' Vladimir Ryzhkov, one of the last liberal legislators willing to speak critically and publicly, told me. 'I also don't know of any case where the duma adopted an initiative that came from the regions. One man makes all the rules in Russia now, and the duma has become like a new Supreme Soviet.'
'Today, it is ridiculous to remember,' (Fyodor) Lukyanov (the editor of Russia in Global Affairs) said, 'but through much of the Nineties economic decisions in Russia could be taken only after consultation with the IMF and sometimes after the approval of the American Embassy in Moscow. Russia was weak. Russia didn't know what to do. And today's greed is a reaction to all of that. To poverty and humiliation. Our official ideology is to make more money.'
'Here we have this question of freedom or wealth,' Aleksei Venediktov, who runs the radio station Echo of Moscow, told me. It's the one remaining station in the capital that broadcasts truthful, and even combative, news reports and live call-in shows - a genre that has disappeared from Russian television. 'People chose wealth. They do not understand that freedom is a necessary condition for preserving the wealth and security that they have come to value. To be engaged in honest reporting about delicate subjects like corruption or to travel to Chechnya is too dangerous. People don't want it, they don't ask for it, and they really don't understand that they need it.'
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'I have wondered a great deal about why I am so intolerant of Putin,' Politkovskaya wrote. 'Quite simply, I am a 45-year-old Muscovite who observed the Soviet Union at its most disgraceful in the Seventies and Eighties ... Putin has, by chance, gotten his hands on enormous power and has used it to catastrophic effect. I dislike him because he does not like people. He despises us. He sees us as a means to his ends, a means for the achievement and retention of personal power, no more than that. Accordingly, he believes he can do anything he likes with us, play with us as he sees fit, destroy us as he sees fit. We are nobody, while he whom chance has enabled to clamber to the top of the pile is today Tsar and God. In Russia we have had leaders with this outlook before. It led to tragedy, to bloodshed on a vast scale, to civil wars.' For her part, she said, 'I want no more of that.'
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,,2019157,00.html by Michael Specter | Guardian
thanks Conscientious
~A story about people on the other side of the world who have nothing in common with us.
Giant Oil Man statue, AKA "Golden Boy," the "Golden Driller," or "Larry." Tulsa Oklahoma @
[photo via google: oil man\ not with article]
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