Limonov vs. Putin Page 27
As we see, America consolidated its positions in the Central Asia region and does not intend on leaving. The October blitzkrieg visit of the US State secretary Condoleezza Rice in the Central Asia countries is an illustration of that. In the same way US State secretaries were making visits in “the US soft underbelly” – Latin America in previous times. From now on Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan are apparently considered as the US soft underbelly. The United States fixedly watches the events in Kazakhstan, the oncoming elections there. The 201st infantry division of the Russian army is still present in Tajikistan, covering the North path from Afghanistan, but it has an increasingly miserable role. The Tajik side is quietly forcing the Russians out from the region, seduced by the American money and by the fact that today it is Washington that has become the source of legitimacy for the former Soviet republics.
Putin managed to successively lose the levers of political influence on Moldova, Georgia, Belarus and Ukraine. As a result Russia was forced to withdraw its bases from Georgia in three years and for free, while recently the question was to withdraw the bases in eleven years and with a 500-million-dollars compensation from Georgia. The official propaganda explains the conflict between Russia and Georgia by Saakashvili’s pro-American orientation, in real fact a major role was played by the Kremlin’s stupid animosity to the former soviet bosses Shevarnadze and Abashidze and by the Russian side’s silly approach, stubbornness and haughtiness. There is no consequent policy in relation to Georgia (as in relation to the other former soviet republics). If we do not need Georgia, let us take Abkhazia and South Ossetia, while they still want it. If, for some unknown reason, we need Georgia and good relations with it, we have to recognize Saakashvili and work with him on clear bases and conditions. The Russian diplomacy made a fool of itself on the Abkhaz presidential elections, making all the efforts to bring to power a Kremlin’s protйgй – a former KGB officer. Abkhazia’s population resisted that. As a result a compromise was reached, Sergey Bagapsh, whom the population wanted, became president and a KGB officer imposed by Moscow became prime minister. Moscow’s awkward violence has infuriated and irritated the Abkhaz so much that more and more voices are heard in favor of keeping independence both from Georgia and from Russia. In the beginning of November Abkhazia’s defense ministry held large-scale exercises for the reservists. The goal of the exercises was “to defend the republic from an exterior attack and to assist the armed forces in repulsing a foreign aggression.” Abkhazia’s foreign minister Sergey Shamba said about this: “Abkhazia does not have to get an approval for its exercises neither from Georgia nor from Russia. We will not ask for their approval in the future either.” That’s right.
It has been ten years now that Russia is reuniting with Belarus. On October 20th 2005 “the commission preparing the Constitutional act of an Allied State announced that the project of the document that declares the alliance’s bases, would be examined by the Supreme Council before November 15th. Then the act will be submitted to a referendum, which will take place both in Russia and in Belarus,” Izvestia writes on 10.21.05. We can rejoice and applaud? Finally two people will merge into one? No, Izvestia explains. “The Constitutional act is not yet the constitution of a united State, but the document of a ‘transitional period’. The commission members draw attention to that fact. Different datelines for the adoption of the principal law are given: from November-December 2006 (i.e. on the eve of the elections in Russia) up to 2008-2010 (in this case it is the ‘successors’ of the actual presidents who will apparently decide its fate). Thus, today the allied State itself is almost virtual and its principal law is temporary.” “Naturally, the deliberate PR-bluffing with the Russian-Belarusian allied State, revived each time another stage of unpopular reforms is planned in Russia, is able to mislead only the most naпve observer,” the political scientist Stanislav Belkovsky that I already cited, notices.
To put it mildly, president’s Putin personal meddling in the electoral campaign in Ukraine was silly as well. The visit he made there before the elections and his unconditional support of the rather gloomy candidate Yanukovich (two trials and relations with Donbass’ criminal bosses) have polarized Ukraine’s political forces. They have mobilized western Ukraine and led it under Yushenko’s flags. I will explain, why. As all new States that have never had a State system before, Ukraine is experiencing painful sensations each time a big metropolis meddles in its affairs. This is how the “westernizers” have interpreted Putin’s visit and his support of Yanukovich. Literally Putin helped Yushenko to win the elections. And in fact, at a certain moment, by exacerbating the situation with his visit, he led the Ukrainian society (the nazbols are absolutely right!) on the brink of civil war between western and eastern Ukraine. Fuel was added to the fire by the Russian political technologists headed by Gleb Povlovsky who tried to use semi-criminal or even criminal methods during the electoral campaign, the same they use in Russia. Kremlin’s apprehension of the orange revolution is also caused by a sense of deep annoyance for its inadequate, stupid and helpless behavior. Today the Kremlin is spreading its own version of what happened in Ukraine (Maydan, the orange revolution) as a conspiracy organized and paid by the US. While in reality it is the manipulation of the elections according to the Russian model and the interference of Putin and his court political technologists that has caused the outrage of the Ukrainian society. Obviously a man used to solve problems with the use of violence (he has just “solved” the Beslan problem then) Putin would have liked the Maydan problem in Ukraine solved like in Beslan. A little provocation, shots from the Orange ranks at Ukraine’s domestic troops and “forced measures” of the swat teams in return. But the Ukrainians solved their problems peacefully, without bloodshed. From this time the RF president’s principal driving force was the fear of a “Maydan”. Realizing that the police (the Ukrainian and the Russian police have a common psychology inherited from the soviet police) would not shoot at the crowd on the Maydan because they are still under the influence of the soviet, although superficial, admiration of the “people”, Putin has approved the organization of the Nashi. Resorting to semi-military patriotic formations is the first sign of State fascism. You remember how Yakemenko breathlessly described to the students how the victorious soccer fans from Russia are driving out 100 thousand Ukrainians from the Maydan to the Dnieper with plastic chairs and then he mentioned the prison in The Hague where he will be sent. I don’t know if Putin realizes that the creation of semi-military organizations that practice beatings of their opponents, arsons and pogroms is State fascism?
Putin’s group has simply gone mad from the sight of “orange” revolutions. On October 20th 2005, on an official visit, Mister Lavrov said the following, I am citing Kommersant: “Concerning the subject of ‘color revolutions’ that is actually worrying the leaders of the CIS countries, mister Lavrov said: ‘The standardization in any form and the exportation of a certain sort of democracies with the use of force and all sorts of pressure methods are inadmissible. Even more inadmissible and counter-productive are the attempts of so-called regime changes that usually pursue quite defined foreign political goals that have nothing to do with the interests of a stable domestic development of the countries that have become the object of such intervention.” Where do you think, Sergey Lavrov, foreign minister of the Russian federation, has said this? In Askhabad, Turkmenistan’s capital, speaking in the National Institute of Democracy and Human Rights in the presence of the Turkmen president. That’s right. Inadmissible, intolerable and counter-productive are the attempts… Suffer in the stable domestic development of your Turkmenbashi, Turkmen and Russians in Turkmenistan. Belkovsky: “The Kremlin’s achievements in the sphere of defense of their compatriots outside the border are totally absent as well. The persecutions and humiliations to which the overly emotional Turkmenbashi has exposed the Russians were left unnoticed. The discrimination of the Russian minority, composing almost 40% of Latvia’s population sometimes cause
d a hoarse yelping in the Kremlin but it never ended in any real sanctions or other methods of pressure on Riga. And in a recent friendly conversation with his carefully selected people Vladimir Putin called not to demonize ‘our Latvian friends’.
The Kremlin did not show the slightest interest for the 2002-2004 political battles. Although, if forces loyal to Russia would have taken the power in this country it would have been much easier to solve the difficult problem of Kaliningrad’s transit. But the calls for help made from the other side of the Latvian border were ignored by the official Moscow. Not a single from the enumerated countries orients itself on Russia strategically, Belkovsky goes on. What’s left is of course the menacingly bent gas pipeline, but it’s hard to say that Putin is its creator and the image of an aggressive degenerate from the Kremlin, traditionally attached to the gifts of the pipeline by Putin’s administration does little to contribute to the growth of respect towards Russia in the remote and close corners of its former Empire.” Then Belkovsky concludes: “In the whole, effective geopolitics don’t work out. And those who want to know and understand Putin will never be able to understand his motivations if they don’t learn one simple principle: the RF second president is not a politician by his nature (and even less so an imperialist). He is a normal and typical businessman. And all of his decisions and actions are exclusively subordinated to the logic of big business, which comes down to the extraction of profits.” You could not have said it better.
THE DICTATORSHIP OF LAW
(“THE RENEWAL OF POLITICAL REPRESSIONS IN RUSSIA”)
The tenth point of the leaflet addressed to RF president V. V. Putin says: “ The renewal of political repressions in Russia. The National-Bolsheviks Gromov, Tishin, Globa-Mikhaylenko, Bespalov, Korshunsky, Yezhov, Klenov, who stood up against the robbing of the people are political prisoners. The victims of political arbitrariness are such people as the physicist Danilov and the lawyer Trepashkin, punished altogether only for their independent behavior.”
While in detention in Lefortovo in 2001 I wrote and sent a political document – an open letter to the RF president entitled: “You have tightened the wrong screws and turned the wheel in the wrong direction”. The nazbols received this document and published it in the form of a brochure. In this document I examine many internal and external aspects of the president’s policies, it was only the second year of Putin’s rule then, but many things have already become clear. I will myself here in order to avoid reinventing some precise expressions. Here is what I wrote about the trials of the opponents of that time, logically addressing myself to Putin.
Famous show trials are defaming, shaking and worrying the country. Most probably they were started by your statement about the only dictatorship that you would like to introduce, the “dictatorship of law”. The Prosecutor General, the FSB, the police and the courts took your statement as a presidential order and hurried to execute it. However the following happened: neither the FSB, nor the Prosecutor General, nor other “services” were ever reformed and have heard about democracy and freedoms only on television. Most of the staff of these powerful organizations graduated from the Soviet school. Their mentality has frozen on the 1956 level. Independently from the staff’s age, totalitarian mentality is transmitted as a corporative spirit. Your order about a “dictatorship of law” turned into several series of trials.
1. The trials of “spies”. In this category we can put the trials of military journalists, scientists, ecologists and diplomats. The trial of captain Nikitin, the trial of Gregory Pasko (arrested in 1997 and accused of spying for Japan and of betraying the Motherland), the trial of Sutyagin, the trial of the diplomat Moyseyev (accused of spying for South Korea) and many others. Trials of “spies” consist of a different understanding by the State and the individual: what is secret and what isn’t during Putin’s rule. However until 1999 the ways, introduced by the State, that ruled in the RF were such that nothing was considered secret. Subsequently the State did not bother to announce that new secrecy rules were introduced. And it couldn’t have announced it because such rules were not introduced; simply now people were tried for what was encouraged before. The trials of “spies” are still ending in a disgrace for the investigation, but in years of unjust detention for the defendants. Why? Because two mentalities are clashing here: the 1965 worldview of the Soviet KGB and the Prosecutor General with the worldview of a modern scientist and ecologist at the end of the XX century.
(This is how I understood the situation in 2001. This is how I understand it in 2005. My comment: I did not understand then that the trials of the scientists as well as of other groups of society were made to scare, create an atmosphere of fear in the country. The goal was to paralyze society’s will in order to abuse the population easier. Many “cases” over the “spies” were started when VVP was still FSB director, possibly he started them. And I was wrong that the “spy” trials end with a disgrace for the investigation. If Nikitin, Pasko and Moyseyev made from three to four and a half years of prison each, then Igor Sutyagin and Valentin Danilov, the physicist from Krasnoyarsk, were sentenced to a merciless 14 years each. The trials of scientists continue. This year the former director of the Institute of problems related to the over-plasticity of metals (IPSM) Oscar Kaybishev was arrested. He is accused of sending technologies of “double assignment” to South Korea. What is meant is simply titanium discs for car wheels. The trial of Kaybishev started in Ufa on November 10th. In all he can be sentenced to ten years of detention.)
2. There is another series of trials: the trials of oligarchs. These trials are obviously called to prove to the population that here everybody is equal before the law and the “criminal” oligarchs, guilty of crimes, will be sentenced like any normal citizen. However the oligarchs’ trials prove something else. The three most famous oligarchs’ cases: Bykov’s case, Zhivilo’s case and Gusinsky’s case. In the first two the accusations are based exclusively on testimonies made by criminal authorities. It is the actual criminal Struganov, in Bykov’s case and Kharchinko in Zhivilo’s case as well as criminal authorities, leaders of criminal gangs. The single fact that the dictatorship of law is carried out with the help of people, whom society considers criminal, causes society to have a negative attitude towards the law and its representatives. (Besides, the “crimes”, both in Bykov’s and in Zhivilo’s case, were not carried out yet, but only, supposedly, planned.) The FSB and the Prosecutor General simply don’t have the right to behave in a “civilized” State, like they behave in Bykov and Zhivilo’s cases! Believe me, mister President; I have spent 20 years in civilized countries. This is disgraceful and illegal. Besides there are persistent rumors in the country that the true goal of Bykov and Zhivilo’s cases is to take away their property: KRAZ and NKAZA shares, to benefit other oligarchs. If it’s true, does it mean that you can order the doom of an oligarch to the FSB and the Prosecutor General? I pray God it isn’t true. Zhivilo is hiding, Bykov is in Lefortovo, while hundreds of other oligarchs, whose wealth began from crimes and fraud, are in liberty. It turns out that your justice is selective. Concerning the case of the oligarch Gusinsky, then, like the overwhelming majority of Russia’s intelligentsia, I have received the complete certainty, watching how the “dictatorship of the law” is carried out over him, that the reason of his “case’s” apparition was the long tongue of NTV – a TV channel opposed to Putin. This is already a question of freedom of speech and whether the Prosecutor General wanted it or not, they have destroyed an oppositional TV company. By the way the courts of the “civilized” countries disagreed with your prosecution and refused to extradite: Spain refused to extradite Gusinsky and France – Zhivilo… Possibly, if Bykov were not in Hungry, but in a more civilized country, he wouldn’t be in a Lefortovo cell.
(This is how I saw the situation in 2001. I saw it right. God did not give me what I asked for. It turned out that yes; you can really order to doom an oligarch to the Prosecutor General and the FSB. The biggest one if the client is Russi
a’s president. For two years now the country is watching how Khodorkovsky’s empire and himself were ruined, drowned and destroyed. At the same time we watched how another oligarch – Roman Abramovich has fantastically risen, became governor of Chukotka, owner of Chelsea and received 13 billion dollars for the Sibneft Company directly on his offshore accounts. Abramovich was paid with our money, dear Russians. In other words, we see how one oligarch was just brought to the Chitin region, in the city of Krasnokamensk, where the wind is dispersing uranium dust and the other has fantastic immunity. What a dictatorship of law is that? This is the toughest, harshest abuse. Actually, some say that Abramovich is only the manager of the Yeltsin family’s money. Then it is different. Today I get the impression that the investigators and prosecutors were only practicing their skills on “Bykov’s case” and “Zhivilo’s case”, preparing for a big case. Today I feel proud of myself that I was not scared to defend Bykov and have written the book “The Hunt for Bykov”, despite A. P. Bykov’s ambiguous reputation.)