Putinesque is not a new flavor pasta at Olive Garden

I have wondered a great deal why I have so got it in for Putin. What is it that makes me dislike him so much as to feel moved to write a book about him? I am not one of his political opponents or rivals, just a woman living in Russia.Quite simply, I am a 45-year-old Muscovite who observed the Soviet Union at its most disgraceful in the 1970s and '80s. I really don't want to find myself back there again. -- Anna Politskovskya

I've been doing some reading about Putin's Russia from various sources, and will probably have more to say about it in the near future. However, I'm finding the work of two journalists, one murdered and one probably worried about it, particularly helpful in understanding what's happening there. If you see this as part of a continuum since Putin ascended to power, it starts to make sense in a lot of ways -- not a lot of difference between the new imperial Russia and the Russia of Ivan the Terrible except it's more efficient and superficially less brutal. And while religion is being re-elevated to its status under the Tsars,  it's happening almost as if it's a Californian approach to the whole thing. I suppose that having the totalitarian leader of a theocratic-based state has some intrinsic contradictions when the said leader is probably an atheist. While nobody has mentioned Vlad the Bad's current rank in the FSB, I'd guess he's some kind of Marshall-General something. He left the KGB as a Lieutenant Colonel but stayed in the Reserves so...and, he's shown no particular hesitancy to helping himself to whatever he wants while in power. Don't ask me, ask Bob Kraft of the New England Patriots; buy him a couple of drinks first, say something bad about Condolezza Rice and let him go off for a bit. If you're not familiar with the story, well, Kraft was meeting Putin for some reason in Russia, showed him his championship ring from one of the Super Bowl victories, and Putin took it, tried it on, said "I could kill somebody with this..." and left wearing the ring. Kraft was kind of dumbfounded, and then the Bush administration told him that hey, things are complicated so be nice please...now Putin is claiming to not remember stealing the ring which he claims that Kraft just gave him for no particular reason but that he'll replace it. ("Hey, Dubya, I'm getting some bad press about this Patriots ring thing with Kraft. I really like it, tho...I can kill someone with it.  Tell Kraft, 'Just go by the Hermitage, Bob and pick something out!' Hey ask Cheney if he wants to come bear hunting with me. He has to wear a shirt tho! Cheers!") Billionaire owners of NFL powers are not used to being treated this way. Putin seems to enjoy twisting the tail of the rich and the powerful more than more world leaders, whether oligarchs in Russia, Mafia leaders or cultural figures. So, yeah, I believe Kraft.  On one level -- the billionaire being put in his place by someone who isn't all that impressed with money except as a means to power, shock and awe -- I'm kind of amused by the whole thing.  But, on a totally different level, I'm wondering what that means for the future of the Russian Federation and the world. I mentioned the two authors that I'm reading through to get a feel and understanding. The first, the dead one, is Anna Politskovskaya who wrote extensively about Chechnya as well as about the myriad issues of crime, corruption, military abuse and incompetence, and the continued prominence of the Organs of State Security in the Russian Federation. I'm reading a collection of her pieces, Putin's Russia in which she makes the case that the former KGB lieutenant colonel is running Russia in much the way the KGB would have done so and why not?  She summed the situation up quite well -- "Society has shown limitless apathy... As the Chekists have become entrenched in power, we have let them see our fear, and thereby have only intensified their urge to treat us like cattle. The KGB respects only the strong. The weak it devours. We of all people ought to know that."   Politskovskaya was murdered in the stairwell outside her apartment in Leningrad in 2006. The crime looks a lot like a Mafia hit, by the way -- no concern about being seen or heard, weapon left at the scene, no money taken, no signs of assault. No clues. No arrests. No witnesses. Hey, no problem, right? Just like in Jooisee... Politskovskya was a pain in the ass especially in her willingness to name names. There were lots of people -- military types who might feel insulted by her reporting of the corruption, brutality and basic insanity of the Russian Army's way of treating its soldiers, politicians, anti-Chechen activists, oligarchs, gangsters and so on. Somebody decided they'd had enough, and had her whacked. From their point of view, end of story...Did Putin approve the hit? We know that Leningrad is his geographic power base as much as the FSB/KGB/NKVD /pick some initials is his spiritual power base. My guess is that somebody decided to get "get rid of that lousy broad" and asked if anyone had any objections. Putin probably shrugged if asked...what's one more? Politskovskya probably wasn't surprised when she was shot; she probably expected it at some point. She wrote in Putin's Russia

Yes, stability has come to Russia. It is a monstrous stability under which nobody seeks justice in law courts which flaunt their subservience and partisanship. Nobody in his or her right mind seeks protection from the institutions entrusted with maintaining law and order, because they are totally corrupt. Lynch law is the order of the day, both in people's minds and in their actions. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. The President himself has set an example by wrecking our major oil company, Yukos, after having jailed its chief executive, Mikhail Khodorkovsky.Putin considered Khodorkovsky to have slighted him personally, so he retaliated. 

 The second Russian journalist I've been reading is Masha Gessen. I first discovered her in her blog on the New York Times.  A civil rights and LGBT rights activist in Moscow, she's been a journalist there since the early 90s after her family had emigrated to the US in 1981 when she was 14. She holds dual Russian and American citizenship, which has probably afforded her some protection in Russia, but she admits to having been intimidated and bullied at various times. Since the Russians are now turning some unwanted attention to the LGBT population, I suspect she's going to become slightly more paranoid. I first read her stuff as she was going through a tough period with the Russian journalistic establishment.  As Managing editor of a major publication, she had an editorial disagreement with the owner who had been pretty much been undermined and absorbed by the Russian government and she refused to send a reporter to cover a Putin environmental activism puff-piece. She was fired on the spot, and since she figured that this was going to happen sometime after the owner had found himself absorbed into the Russian Geographic Society. Let her tell it..

Early in the summer my publisher entered into a partnership agreement with the Russian Geographical Society. This innocuous-sounding event was actually part of a creeping takeover of the sort that businesses in Russia always fear and often face. The Russian Geographic Society’s board is chaired by President Vladimir Putin, which means the nongovernmental organization can have anything it wants — like a four-story building to house its offices a stone’s throw from the Kremlin. So when earlier this year, the group’s leaders decided they wanted to take possession of Vokrug Sveta, Russia’s highest-circulation quality monthly, the magazine’s publisher obediently placed the words “Magazine of the Russian Geographic Society” on the cover. He retained nominal ownership of the magazine — and full financial responsibility for it — but it now had an obligation to print at least one RGS-related story in every issue. Our journalists would go along on RGS expeditions, which were many, exotic, and lavishly funded. I worried. 

Well, no one wants to be fired; but, this had turned out better than she thought. So far...So, again, let her tell it. 

And then, last week, I shouted at him. I had been fired from my job as editor of Vokrug Sveta, a venerable popular-science magazine, for refusing to send a reporter to cover Putin’s hang-glider flight with endangered Siberian cranes. The following morning I felt hung-over and slightly disoriented. My phone rang and a male voice asked me to hold. I listened to silence for two minutes and fumed. A different male voice came on: ‘‘Don’t hang up. I will connect you.’’ I blew up: ‘‘I didn’t ask to be connected with anyone! Why do I have to hold? Who are you connecting me to? Do you want to introduce yourself?’’‘‘Putin, Vladimir Vladimirovich,’’ said the president’s voice on the other end of the line.

Well, as a certified pain in the ass myself, although at lower levels of importance, I've gotten calls like that. But, never from the big boss of the whole damn country. Or, for that matter, corporation. Did get one from a college president one time, but that was actually more like a touching base kind of thing since we'd met on a meet and greet thing and had stayed sort of in touch. And, there is a tradition of that sort of hands on intimidation and seemingly benign concern in Russia going back to the Czars. Ivan the Terrible was notorious for wandering around just checking in as was Peter the Great. It was not unheard of for intellectuals and artists, generals and diplomats to find themselves whisked away to Stalin's dacha in the middle of the night for salted herring and lots of vodka and sweet Georgian wine. (Given the choice between a glass of Georgian wine or a glass of pure liquid sugar, I'd take the sugar. Bleech.) But, I have to say that Gessen entered the Certified Pain In the Ass Hall of Fame in this one. She definitely won my heart, mind and admiration...she'd gone to work for this Russian Version of National Geographic because she wanted to get away from political writing because she figured it was a lost cause and...there she was. Again.

Putin supposedly felt badly about her losing her job and wanted her to come in and discuss it.  She wasn't exactly sure this was what it was, but she agreed. The Kremlin set it up and she went in for the meeting. Turned out that Putin was doing what political bosses from Chicago wards to Leningrad Commissariats to Beijing Union Halls to Capetown Townships to  Roman slums in the time of the late Republic always do -- trying to broker a deal in which everyone would feel that they'd gotten their way and that they owed him. He wanted the owner, who was also at the meeting, to hire her back while she was to act in a more disciplined and favorable way. He wasn't interested in her arguments or her position; he wanted to steamroll the problem. He was simply not aware that, well, he was the problem.  Again, let her tell it...

The meeting had lasted 20 minutes. What had I learned? That the person I had described in my book — shallow, self-involved, not terribly perceptive, and apparently very poorly informed — is indeed the person running Russia, to the extent that Russia is being run.Difficult as it was to believe, it seemed he had not been warned that I had written a highly critical book about him, which has been published to much publicity just about everywhere in the world except Russia. It seemed that Putin, who gets most of his information from television channels he dominates, had been unwittingly set up to offer a job to one of his most vocal critics. Sure, I had held the job before — but if I accepted it now, I would be doing it as a Kremlin appointee. Which is precisely why I had to say no.

I think it's worth noting that act of courage, by the way. In her book The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladamir Putin,  Gessen makes it clear that she sees Putin as a thug, crook and bully by doing a pretty good journalistic review of what's occurred during his...tenure? Rule? Dictatorship? She believes that Putin was at least complicit in the murder of Anna Politskovkaya.  She may be a US citizen but she's in Moscow; accidents happen. Putin has the "technology" to make her life short, painful and very frightening. Yet she basically told him to kiss off and die. Frankly, I would like to think I'd have that much courage. I don't know if I would -- but on September 9, 2012, Masha Gessen, a diminuitive Russian-American lesbian and Jew joined Socrates, Martin Luther, Thomas Paine and the unidentified man in Tienanmen Square as a hero speaking truth directly to power and putting herself at risk for it.

 On the 6th Anniversary of her death, Gessen wrote about Politskovkaya:

Politkovskaya was not the first journalist to be murdered in Putin’s Russia; the country has consistently been ranked by the Committee to Protect Journalists as one of the world’s most dangerous places to be a reporter. Nor was it the most brutal killing in recent years. But in part because the victim was a woman, in part because the murder occurred in broad daylight, and in part because it took place on Putin’s birthday, Politkovskaya’s death signaled a turning point for many people...Still, for the rest of his life, on the day Vladimir Putin celebrates his birthday, it is his slain critic many of us will be remembering...

Postscript

I also posted this at Veterans Today which was interesting when I looked at the initial comments. I recommend visiting that site and reading the comments. I responded  perhaps more gently than I should but when the comments indicated that I was prostituting myself for the Jewish-Communist-Lezbo conspiracy to pollute the precious body fluids of true Christian Americans, I thought I'd take the high ground. Your comments are welcome.

I am proud, proud I say, to prostitute myself in the service of the Lezbo-Jewish-Commie-Irish-American-Sein Fein-Marching Band and Chowder Society. In fact, I think I'll have T-shirts made. See if I can get some in Staid Francais Rugby colors. (Black and Pink...mainly Pink.)

Enjoy. More to come -- http://www.veteranstoday.com/2013/07/23/theocratic-totalitarianism-in-the-new-russia-or-putinesque-is-not-a-style-of-spaghetti/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCKtEJOsz9k 

(This is a bribe. Complete Dylan Concert with the Band...)