Limonov vs. Putin Read online

  Limonov vs. Putin

  Edward Limonov

  Edward Limonov

  Limonov vs. Putin

  Table of content

  Foreword of the author…3

  First bloc

  “My son is like a tsar!”… 7

  “Children were always a bit afraid of him”…11

  In the “otstoynik”…16

  The spouse…20

  In the “otstoynik” (II)…22

  With Sobchak…25

  You can’t spoil porridge with butter…38

  A solid manager…42

  Lubyanka’s boss…46

  The premier-heir to the throne…54

  Second block…61

  Indifference and lies…65

  Pack of swindlers…85

  Khabarovsk’s Kuril Islands on the Amur…93

  “There is no ‘international terrorism’, there is a war in Chechnya”…105

  The killing…118

  Massacre of the innocents…141

  The robbing of the people…171

  “You seem to think you’re a tsar…”…191

  The passage from the election to the appointment of governors…203

  How NTV and other free mass media were killed…216

  The staff of the ruling regime…233

  The creation of the Nashi criminal association…246

  “By his nature Putin is not a politician”…277

  The dictatorship of law…289

  Third block

  Alien…313

  The president’s appearance…318

  A wicked father…321

  FOREWORD OF THE AUTHOR

  When I first expressed my desire to write a book about president Putin, editors and friends said to me 1) that I will need “kompromat” [compromising material]; 2) that in order for the book to be convincing, I will need a lot of “kompromat”; 3) that I need to get “kompromat”.

  After giving it a thought, I almost decided not to use “kompromat”, for the following reasons: I don’t have connections in the elite; I don’t have agents in the Kremlin or in the government, those who would have passionately desired to get me exclusive information about the president, which means that I can’t get “kompromat”. Besides, I thought, in his past life Putin surly hasn’t left written confessions about committing illegal or criminal activities, so I won’t be able to prove anything for sure. After all, London’s exiles, Berezovsky, Litvinenko and others didn’t succeed to prove anything when they put forward the version that it was the FSB, which blew up the houses in Russia in fall 1999 in order to bring an ex KGB officer to power. Nevertheless, they succeeded in planting a doubt in the masses. After almost deciding that I won’t use “kompromat”, I finally did the exact opposite. I dedicated the first chapters of my book to V. V. Putin’s life until March 22nd 2000, in other words before the day he became RF president. In doing so, I enumerated all the scandals related to Putin’s name and the accusations put forward against him in different times by different people. And what I did was right. Let the reader decide for himself if he should believe a president with such a life experience.

  After the president’s biography and his adventures as head of the KGB where he didn’t accomplish anything special, then in St-Petersburg’s city hall, where he was mostly noted as the hero of suspicious corruption scandals, then in the president’s administration and as prime-minister, the structure of my book’s second part repeats the form of my comrades National-Bolsheviks’ leaflet, a leaflet they have given out on December 14th 2004, when they came to the reception room of the President’s Administration, in order to say to VVP: find some courage and resign. I made the book’s chapters with those ten accusations – proofs of Putin’s professional inadequacy as president, enumerated by my forty comrades who have paid for their courage with prison detention.

  In the process of my work I added a series of personal accusations to the ten accusations of the “Decembrists”. And finally the book’s third part also consists of “kompromat”, but of a special nature. It is not hidden on mysterious websites, in Sobchak’s or Shutov’s (Sobchak’s former associate, he is detained in St-Petersburg for six years now, but wasn’t accused) archives, but is daily visible to us all. We see it from the television screen. It is VVP himself. Daily, in practically all events life throws him in, he proves that he is hardly competent, that he is not at all able to be the leader of our state, the builder and the guider of our collective life. That he, unwanted, behaves as if we were his subjects on bended knees or moreover – he behaves as our wicked, very wicked and unjust father.

  It is getting harder for us to support his oppression, that of a pale, petty, early bold simple colonel. Even if we are to trust the results of the March 2004 presidential elections (personally I absolutely don’t trust these results), we should acknowledge that the forty-eight point something million voters who voted for him did a mistake. Well, it happens. Are people around us always right about everything? Not at all. Besides, why those who haven’t voted for him, and according to the official results they are ninety-five million, should live under the oppression of Putin’s autocracy?

  Vladimir Vladimirovich doesn’t read letters from the citizens or pretends he doesn’t. He behaves as an arrogant monarch, especially as his parents were simple people: his father was a metalworker and his mother a housecleaner. There is a disease common to simple people who have miraculously reached the power heights – contempt to the people and arrogance. I believe that president Putin will read my book. But I am absolutely sure that my book will not be helpful to him. Actually it is not intended for him. I firmly believe that my book about Putin will be helpful to our society. That it will convince society: we are governed by a little wicked man. Dangerous precisely because of it. Because he is wicked, unwise and simple.

  So let’s begin with God’s help…

  FIRST BLOC

  VVP’s Biography

  From October 7th 1952

  To March 26th 2000

  «MY SON IS LIKE A TSAR!»

  Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was born on October 7th 1952 in the city of Leningrad, the third, late child in the family of Vladimir Putin and Maria Shelomova. VVP’s parents were born in the Turgimovski district of the Tver region, his father is from the Pominovo village, and his mother is from the Zarechye village. Apart from VVP there were two other sons in the family, but they both died in infancy, one before the war and the second during the blockade.

  His father, Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin, supposedly was the secretary of the L.Y.C.L.S.U. cell in his village. Putin Senior’s fellow-villagers have characterized him in youth as a rather unpleasant person: “godless and mischievous”, “he called to remove icons in the houses of the elderly”, “The mother Olga had enough trouble with him”. According to unverified information, supposedly as the war began, Putin’s father has volunteered to the front and served in the extermination battalion of the NKVD.

  After the war, like many migrants from the Tver region, the Putins, these rural people, moved to Leningrad, emptied after the blockade. In the fifties Putin senior started to work in the paramilitary security service of a car-building plant. Then he became a metalworker, he worked as a foreman.

  Putin’s mother, Maria Ivanovna Shelomova, worked on the same plant. She had a face injury. According to some she was hit by her husband when they were young, according to others it was an accident. She worked as a nurse in the plant’s kindergarten, then as a housekeeper, as a merchandise receptionist in a bakery, a watchwoman and a laboratory cleaner. People who knew her described her as a quiet, calm and hardworking woman. They got married in 1928 and VVP was born when his father was around fifty years old.

  Maria Ivanovna died from cancer in the
beginning of 1999. Right after his wife’s death Vladimir Spiridonovich began to have heart problems and a few months later he was hospitalized in the oncology department. Putin’s father died on august 2nd 1999. Both were buried in the “closed” Seraphimovskoe cemetery in Saint Petersburg. All of this is of an ill omen for the RF population. Despite cancer both died almost at ninety years old. People say that on his deathbed his father has said: “My son is like a tsar!” – meaning the prime minister’s suite, with which the son visited the father in the clinic. It can be ascertained that Putin comes from the bottom of society: his father is a turbulent metalworker, the mother, as it often happens, is a “saint” and a quiet woman (a housecleaner) living with a turbulent father. Both Putin’s parents were born in villages. For comparison: I am older than Putin by nine years, my parents for some reason turned out to be younger than Putin’s, both were born in small towns: my father in the city of Bobrov in the Voronezh region and my mother from the city of Sergach in the Gorkov region. Also they have a higher social status than Putin’s parents: my father graduated from a military college and became an officer and my mother managed to study two years in the chemistry department of a technical school. However my grandparents were indeed born in villages.

  In school (№ 193) VVP’s study level was average. According to his school records he wasn’t noted for his good behavior. He was shy and taciturn. After seventh grade he started to study better, for example he showed interest in German. Putin started to practice martial arts from thirteen years old, as a 6th grade student of class “A” of School № 193. During this period he was sick a lot or missed school, either way, there were often notes in his absence records. According to some witnesses of Putin’s family life, VVP looks like his father who behaved as a very harsh person. (You get this kind of dismal workers, either they are harsh to the world or dissatisfied with themselves).

  From 1960 to 1968 Putin attended School № 193 on Griboedov Canal in Leningrad. Griboedov Canal now has a bad fame partly because it is the place where the democrat Starovoytova was killed. Also it is on Griboedov Canal that my late wife, Natalya Medvedeva was born. She was the daughter of a nurse and a coastguard sailor. Apparently, to replace the Saint Petersburg natives extinct after the war, the capital’s downtown was populated with fresh, simple people – metalworkers and sailors. These were the processes of that time, in Putin’s biography I notice a lot of traits similar to mine. For instance, I started free style wrestling in seventh grade, at fourteen years old, but since I am older than Putin, this happened in 1957. Recently, my fellow-townsmen made a documentary about me in Kharkov, in it my old coach Arseny speaks very well of me – a promising teenage fighter. But from the general traits of a generation let us return to Putin. For some time he was the chairman of the detachment’s council. I was one for some years too until I left home at eleven years old.

  After eighth grade Putin entered School № 281 on Sovetsky Street, with a specialization in chemistry. He graduated in 1970. Putin’s class teacher was Mina Moiseevna Yuditskaya (later she emigrated to Israel). Jewish teachers were a rule at that time and not an exception. My class teacher was Jacob Lvovich Kaprov. He didn’t go to Israel. VVP’s records show C marks for physics, chemistry and algebra. This again brings E. Limonov and V. Putin together. The teenager Savenko had C for these subjects and also a C for Russian literature, but an A for Ukrainian literature.

  As it is to be expected, witnesses of Putin-student’s life affirm that he was reserved. “He liked to argue, including with teachers. He easily got into fights”. The fact that VVP is a reserved man, all of Russia sees it everyday from the television screen. His clenched jaws show his stubbornness and his behavior in crisis situations, for instance with hostage taking in the Nord Ost and Beslan confirms the opinion of his classmates. He “easily gets into fights”, too easily, because in his childhood he risked to get hit on the nose and in the case of Beslan his promptness to fight cost 311 lives, half of them children.

  Another information from the past: It turns out that Putin liked to do political reports in school, reading out information from newspapers about currents events in the world. E. V. Savenko (Limonov) also liked to do political reports in class a few years before. In 1959, in January he passionately reported to his classmates about the bearded “barbudos” who captured Cuba’s capital – Havana. As students, Vladimir Vladimirovich and I resembled each other a certain time. It was an era. But after school we ceased to resemble each other. But farther about this.

  Until 1990 the Putins lived near the Moscow train station in a communal apartment. This circumstance emphasizes the extreme poverty of the former metalworker and his wife, or did the communal apartment suit them? Since even if in 1928 by the moment of their marriage, VVP’s father and mother were twenty years old, they must have been born in 1908, meaning that in 1990 they were eighty-two years old. Living in a communal apartment at eighty-two years old! However in 1969 the family bought a house in Tosno near Saint Petersburg. They lived in this house in the summer and sometimes in the winter.

  «CHILDREN WERE ALWAYS A BIT AFRAID OF HIM»

  (LENINGRAD’S STATE UNIVERSITY)

  In 1970 V. V. Putin entered Leningrad’s State University on the law faculty. Ten years earlier in a hot august day E. V. Savenko came to the second exam in Kharkov’s State University. He was sitting on the windowsill in a white shirt, ate an apple and wondered looking at the fuss of the university entrants, at the nervous grimaces of their faces. They were clearly worried, afraid to be refused. E. V. Savenko didn’t understand why they were so worried. And thinking that he’ll have to spend the next five years in the company of these quiet scared young men and women whom he, a free provincial guy, did not respect, he got sad. And then he got up, carefully put his apple core on the windowsill and went down the stairs. At the same time rang the third bell calling to the exam. By October E. V. Savenko was working as a spider-man fitter in a construction trust: I erected a workshop building on Malishev’s factory, commonly it was called the tank factory because tanks were produced there.

  You see, the period is the same, only nine years of difference. But the young men are different. One is a conformist, right after school he enters university, but by doing so he misses out life experience, only school and parents have formed him. The other drifts on life with pleasure, realizing that life is more important, never again undertakes attempts to enter a university, works on many Kharkov’s factories, among others on the famous even today for his strong union movement “Hammer and Sickle” factory in the 1963-1964, where he even takes part in a three-day strike. In result the end product is absolutely different. A dictator and his opponent, an opposing intellectual authority. Two years before the scene in Kharkov’s State University mentioned above, in 1958, in spring after reading the book “Alexander Blok’s youth poems” I got by accident, I started to write poetry and write them to this day.

  But let us return to Putin, at that time still eighteen years old. Nikolay Kropachev, the dean of Saint Petersburg’s University remembers that Putin was studying on an individual plan. He studied without Cs, only Bs and As. Putin defended his diploma on the subject of “The principle of the most favorable nation in international law” and got an A, he passed state exams with an “excellent” distinction.

  It is in Leningrad’s State University that Putin met a person who will later have an enormous influence on his life, Anatoly Sobchak. The famous democrat worked then as an assistant on the chair of economical law and later became a senior lecturer. According to some sources, Putin wrote one of his term papers on Sobchak’s course.

  “During his studies, enthusiastically narrate the official sources of the president’s biography, Putin led an active social life,” he went to construction battalions, participated in sambo competitions, fought for “labor reserves”. In the institute he started to professionally practice judo. In this time Japanese martial arts in the USSR were mostly a prerogative of the special agents. Putin became sport
master of judo in 1975. Already a KGB agent, in 1976 he became Leningrad’s judo champion. After that year Putin’s sport successes come to naught. Biographers explain this circumstance by service trips.

  In university, in the beginning of the fifth session Putin was recruited by state security agents. And after graduating he was directed to the KGB Moscow school where he spent a year. According to his own words Putin “accepted to work in the KGB instantly and without hesitating for patriotic reasons”. One of his friends remembered that in youth Putin himself tried to initiate his recruitment but he didn’t succeed – the KGB was suspicious of initiative takers. However they have apparently noticed the promising guy and later found him by themselves.

  My acquaintance with the State Security Committee happened a couple years earlier than Putin’s. In October 1973 I fell in their vision field, apparently for many reasons at once: I was rubbing elbows with dissidents (in particularly with the famous V. Gershuni), with foreigners (with my wife I visited Venezuela’s embassy and was close with its ambassador in Moscow R. Burelli), my wife’s sister was married to a former Lebanese attachй and lived in Beirut and according to some sources was a GRU agent (with which the KGB’s external intelligence always had hostile relations). I was arrested in my apartment on Maria Ulyanova Street and later called many times to the KGB office on Dzerzhinsky Street. I categorically refused the offer to be an informer and report to the KGB about what happens in Venezuela’s embassy and among the nonconformists, artists and poets to whose circle I belonged. In response to my stubborn answer I received the proposition to leave Russia, which I did with my wife in the following 1974 year. So the KGB had taken part in my life, influenced it and my formation as a person. Because all of this took place in the West where I was expelled thanks to the KGB efforts.

  Lagging behind me, following the flow while I was swimming against the flow, Putin did not manage to have the monstrously rich life experience I had. (1960-1967 – Kharkov’s factories, then from 1967 to 1974 – Moscow’s milieu of intellectuals and dissidents and then the American experience of 1974-1980 and the French one of 1980-1992.) His experience is the modest and one-sided, monotonous, typical experience of a soviet person. Such an experience does not help to understand the problems of Russian life nor the life of other countries. VVP’s modest stay (farther about this) in the German Democratic Republic did not enlarge much the worldview of the FSB director and later president. It did not enlarge much. But let us follow further the flow of Vladimir Vladimirovich’s university life.