Open Season on Litvinenko Murder Accusations. Will Every Enemy of Putin be Accused by 2008?
It is getting curioser and curioser by the week. Or is it by the month or year – how long has Russia been descending down the preverbal rabbit hole?
There seems to be a knee-jerk self defensive mechanism installed in Russia – be it on the level of largely state controlled mass media, or be it on eager level of common folk – and any negative coverage, of almost every negative something, happening in Russia is attributed to nasty plans of some evilness.
One has to wonder if this James Bond, Stalin or Mao mentality is for real. Everything seems to come from sedition at one level or another. There is always a plot to subvert, destroy or simply ruin even further the reputation of Russia abroad. The enemy is never ineptness and clumsiness of authorities, it is never nauseatingly nationalistic actions of street mobs that kill Tajik girls and Vietnamese students, and it is never a reaction to dubious Russian policies.
I am no longer sure that my James Bond analogy was appropriate – it is almost never an evil mastermind, it is almost always “they” - the amorphous gooey blob of prime evilness that resides somewhere in Washington, New York, Paris or London. This of course is not a phenomenon unique to Russian culture, but on a societal level Russia exemplifies it much better then kooky fringe conspiracy theorists in the US.
Once in a while a visualization of the prime evil would be invoked by firebrands of propaganda appears to suggest a general hierarchy that ultimately unites, controls and directs various seemingly independent sources of sedition: Georgians, “black assed speculators”, traitors, immigrants, Jews, free masons, anti-fascists, imperialists, illegal immigrants, professional Russophobes – you name it. Then we discover actual names of perpetrators of evil: Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev; or Molotov, Kaganovich, and Malenkov; or…
June 22, 2006 United Russia Party web site featured a memo signed by a dozen Russian Governors (are they still democratically elected or are they democratically appointed by the President by the way) that in part connected a vile murder in St. Petersburg of a nine year old Tajik girl with
“actions… of Nevzlin, Gusinky [and] Berezovsky”
- exiled Russian oligarchs.
Does it come as a surprise then that same names are beginning to float as culprits in the sensational murder of Alexander Litvinenko in London earlier this year? First, Moscow Times claims that
"The common thread linking all the players in Litvinenko's death is that they have all worked for Berezovsky."
Too true, since Mr. Putin and many others has worked for or with Mr. Berezovsky as well when the latter was a part of Yeltsin’s senior government echelon.
Then there is Justin Raimondo from erroneously named antiwar.com (hat tip to Sean Guillory):
On a trip to Germany, Dmitry Kovtun – who met with Litvinenko on the day of his poisoning, along with Andrei Lugovoi, a former "security" man for Berezovsky – shed radioactivity in several Hamburg locations.
Convenient too, since Lugovoi
During his time in the KGB he provided security for Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar, the head of the presidential administration Sergey Filatov and Foreign Minister Andrey Kozyrev.
Does it look like sins of convenient omissions on part of Raimondo for whom this subject appears to be an afterthought of his windmill crusade against evil neocons personified for him in Charles Krauthammer? You bet, and the taste of a Krylov’s fable is all over the place.
In another article Raimondo spends a lot of time illustrating quite correctly that there is a struggle between expelled and exiled oligarchs and oligarchs that are currently in control of the Kremlin, or actually Russia Inc. (No, Raimondo does not see it the way I do and current Kremlin oligarchs and Russia Inc references are mine.) And there is a number of ex KGB agents and officers on both sides. In the end, as if to illustrate his own creation of Bizarro World, he writes about Berezovsky vs. Putin:
We live in a world where criminals are good guys and patriots are villains: where Berezovsky is a liberal "human rights" activist and Putin is a moral monster. And that's why they call it Bizarro World…
… totally unaware how bizarre does his claim about Putin the patriot sounds. Here is a better patriot twist: besides being a “a former security man for Berezovsky”, Lugovoi is involved in distribution of Pershin kvas. Kvas is a symbol of Russian patriotism. Thus not only by words, but by golly, by deeds Mr Lugovoi is a bigger Patriot then Mr. Putin, who still refuses to associate himself with Putinka vodka.
Now, remembering the gubernatorial memo, the bitter struggle between Putin and Berezovsky, Putin and Gusinky, Putin and Khodorkovsky, does this sound strange at all?
Prosecutor General's Office announced yesterday that it is investigating a possibility that former co-owner of YUKOS Leonid Nevzlin might be involved in the poisoning of former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko with polonium-210, and an assassination attempt against his business partner Dmitry Kovtun in London.
Occam Razor be damned. Those that are all sworn and declared enemies of the current CEO of Russia Inc all conspired to kill one of their own to make Putin look bad. Dostoyevshina possessed the oligarchs.
As I have posted elsewhere, I do not believe Putin is involved, but the Western media, including Mr. Raimondo (no matter how much he would like to sound different) seem to have an idiosyncratic view of Russia and USSR before that - as some well oiled (pardon the pun) mechanism that works with demonic precision in carrying out its missions, plans and plots.
The opposite is most likely true. I think Hanlon’s Razor applies here with some modifications:
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Pair it with Occam Razor and there is absolutely no need to pile up phantasmagorical scenarios that involve US foreign policy towards Iran, human sacrifice to make Putin look bad, giant Russophobe conspiracy among the Western media editorial writers that do not seem to ever agree on anything else.
A centralized command system is prone to transfer bad information and skewed orders both up and down, especially in a culture prone to demonstrate exaggerated outbursts of eager anticipation. Remember Nikita Khrushev's corn directives or Gorbachev's war on drinking and the disproportionately twisted and exaggerated actions and results they lead to?
Recent behavior of Moscow ruling machine has been mostly incompetent. Clumsy demonstration of natural gas bullying early this year, the idiotic anti-Georgian hysteria I saw with my own eyes in October, recent excommunication of and subsequent quarrel with Lukashenka, myopic reaction to Politkovskaya's murder - none of this should suggest a sinister and calculated plan of any kind. Shall we expand the list beyond this year? The meaningless quagmire in Chechnya serves only one purpose – destabilization of the isthmus. How about the Kursk, Beslan, Moscow theater hostage crisis – are we lead to believe that the same people that botched so much are a part of some precise mechanism that would never have performed something as clumsy as Litvinenko’s murder?
But to accept Hanlon Razor means to accept fallibility of your rulers, yourselves and most importantly in the long run, your national pride. If however, national pride instead of individual achievements, serves as the pivot of confidence, then a wild phantasmagorical conspiracy theory of primordial Russophobia stirred up by an unholy trinity of current poster enemies is much easier to swallow.
Now, who will be the next to be insinuated of being an accessory to Litvinenko’s murder?.
- Gusinsky
- Khodorkovsky
- Kasyanov
- Politkovskaya
- Pugacheva
- Kobson
- Lukashenka
- Saakashvili
After all, Russian Presidential elections are coming soon.
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CYRILL: Congratulations on a remarkably prescient (and terrifying) post, I'm going to blog it. The answer, of course, turned out to be Khodorkovsky. You've made a brilliant case for the formal arrival of the neo-Soviet state. Any ideas what we can do about it?
# Posted By La Russophobe
| 1/1/07 3:45 PM
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