THE REAL STORY BEHIND PUTIN'S RISE
Houston Chronicle
April 9, 2000
Ewa M. Thompson, professor of Slavic Studies
VLADIMIR Putin's spectacular rise to power since Jan. 1 has been
crowned with the presidency of the Russian Federation. However,
the road to Putin's success is shrouded in mystery. It is
generally agreed that his successes are linked to the Chechnya
war. The war was meant to wipe out terrorism, which last summer
killed nearly 300 Russians in separate apartment bombings in
Moscow and Volgodonsk.
Let us follow the route to Putin's stardom in some detail. Ever
since the ruble crash in August 1998, there have been rumors of
powerful people profiting from it. In summer 1999, these rumors
intensified as the Bank of New York stood accused of laundering
billions of dollars for the as-yet-unnamed Russian legal entities
to banks outside Russia. Last summer and fall were rife with
speculation that major figures in Russian political and financial
life, including Boris Berezovsky and other "oligarchs," were
involved in these multibillion dollar scandals (that included the
billions which the United States government gave the Russian
government as aid and long-term loans).
The violence in Dagestan last summer, and the apartment bombings
in Moscow and Volgodonsk that followed it, turned Russian and
international attention away from the financial scandal in which
everyone of note in Russia, including then-President Boris
Yeltsin, seemed to be mired. In September, the now-suspended
prosecutor-general, Yury Skuratov, said in an interview with The
Moscow Times that some 780 government officials were under
investigation. The apartment bombings and violence in Dagestan
happened at a convenient time. Headlines about the Moscow
bombings replaced the headlines about money laundering of
unimaginable proportions. The war in Chechnya that followed
further removed tens of billions of dollars from public attention
at home and abroad.
It gets curiouser and curiouser. Barely a couple of weeks after
the bombings, authorities plowed over the crime scenes in Moscow.
The Guryanova Street bombing site was buried just 10 days after
the explosion, and the Kashirskoye Shosse site was never secured
before rubble clearance began the day of the blast. In other
words, the Russian police (then under Putin) made it impossible
fully to collect evidence from the disaster sites. Then came
Yeltsin's resignation and the propelling of Putin to the position
of power on Jan. 1. Shortly after that resignation, Mikhail
Gorbachev told Italy's La Stampa that Yeltsin "did not want to
resign" and "was deposed" by a trio of manipulators that included
his own daughter, Tatiana Dyachenko, presidential chief of staff
Aleksandr Voloshin and billionaire Boris Berezovsky.
On Jan. 6, the London Independent newspaper's Moscow
corespondent, Helen Womack, reported that videotape evidence
pointed to FSK (former KGB) involvement in the Moscow apartment
bombings. But other newspapers did not pick up the lead.
Concurrently, the evidence that Chechens engineered the bombings
has never been presented by the Russian government. More curious
coincidences. Before the March 26 presidential election, there
appeared a spate of statements by prominent Russians suggesting
that the Chechnya war did not just happen because of terrorism.
Last September, Literaturnaya Gazeta said that: "It is useless to
look for the origin of `bombings' in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan.
... The trail leads straight to one place -- the Kremlin." In
January, Yelena Bonner, widow of the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize
laureate Andrei Sakharov, minced no words when she affirmed that
the war was planned to bring acting President Putin to power. She
spoke of "genocide" in Chechnya: "I cannot understand why some
people still think Russia has a place in the Council of Europe as
long as it pounds on Chechnya. ... It seems to me unthinkable to
free funds for Russia. ... It is as if the West were to grant
loans to Nazi Germany just as they attacked Poland."
Were the Chechen war and, what is even more perverse, the
bombings in Russian cities, engineered by the FSK under Putin?
Was the trio of Putin, Berezovsky and Voloshin responsible for
ousting Yeltsin as a necessary step in burying the traces of
financial scandals? Given the Russians' ability to destroy
evidence, we may never know for certain, but strong
circumstantial evidence suggests that Putin might have come to
power as a result of a crime perpetuated on his own people, and
then on a people whom Russians have tried to wipe out already
three times in history, most recently under Josef Stalin: the
Chechens.
How has the weak Russian economy been able to pay for the war in
Chechnya? The recent increases in the price of petroleum have
brought additional tens of billions of dollars into the
previously empty coffers of the Kremlin. America's allies, Saudi
Arabia and Kuwait, cut back production at just about the time
when Russian financial scandals (involving among others the theft
of American aid to Russia) made it all but impossible for the
Clinton administration to continue pouring money into Russia
courtesy of the American taxpayer.
It appears that in voting so overwhelmingly for Putin, Russians
once more put the Russian state over the good of the Russian
people. They have once more retreated to the "default mode" of
Russian discourse: blaming the Chechens and the West for Russian
lack of success in building a peaceful and prosperous society
based on the rule of law. According to a February poll,
three-fourth of Russians support what the Russian army is doing
in Chechnya. This "default mode" is deeply rooted in Russian
political culture. Its centerpiece is intense nationalism:
resentful and narcissistic, claiming victimhood for itself and
indifferent to others' rights. In this mode, the solution to
Russia's problems lies in a stronger military, more
authoritarianism and suppression of everyone and everything that
oppose the Kremlin. It is within this context that one should
view Russia's potential new and "legally elected" president,
Vladimir Putin.
###
Thompson is professor of Slavic studies at Rice University. She
is the author of Imperial Knowledge: Russian Literature and
Colonialism published by Greenwood Press in March 2000 and
available on Amazon.com.
###
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