THE RONNIE AND REGGIE STATE
THE MAN WITHOUT A FACE THE UNLIKELY RISE OF VLADIMIR PUTIN
MASHA GLEESON
There is currently a trial taking place in
The
‘accused’ in the Russian case is one Sergey
Magnitsky who exposed, I would say a complex fraud, though in reality is was
not that complex, not much more than a five fingered discount at Tesco, though
in this case it involved £800 million.
Magnitsky was arrested in 2008, he had investigated the tax refund fraud
for his boss William Browder, who headed the company The Hermitage Fund, one of
the victims of the crime. The Russian state
turned the tables, accusing Magnitsky himself of the crime. Magnitsky
later died in prison, almost certainly after being tortured and suffering from
severe beatings.
Details
of the case can be viewed here.
To say
that the Russian people have enjoyed an
unhappy history is a bit like saying that a woman subjected to decades of
domestic violence has had a stroke of bad luck; it is a nation cursed to be ruled by thugs, people to whom
cruelty and malice are ingrained. However this is not to say that there is
anything ‘inevitable’ about the plight of the Russian people; there is a great
deal of nonsense talked about the innate need of the Russian people for
autocratic, even violent rulers. The Russian peoples hunger for freedom and political liberty, is no less
than that of any other country on Earth.
After
the collapse of the Soviet state, despite conditions extraordinarily hostile to
the development of civil society, individual’s right across Russian society
made a brave, determined and often successful attempt to establish functioning
democratic institutions. They might have succeeded but for a combination of
organised resistance from a ruthless criminal class,
composed primarily of KGB officers, and the extraordinary pressure from the
capitalist countries for Russia
It was out of this chaos that Vladimir Putin,
part mafia thug part Jack Abramoff style criminal apparatchik , emerged. The
description of Putin provided by Masha
Gessen in this splendid book ‘The Man Without a Face,’ is, in that somewhat
overused cliché, truly ‘chilling,’ not least in the sense that it describes a
man largely bereft of ordinary human feeling. Empathy and compassion do not
seem to feature as part of his psychological make-up. He comes across as a
vulgar ruthless thug, a kleptomaniac, or as Masha more correctly describes, he
suffers from plenoxia, an overwhelming desire to possess what is not rightfully
yours. I tried to think of a way of transporting Putin into a British context ,
the closest I can imagine is Ronnie Kray as Prime Minister. You need to imagine
a press conference in which the Prime Minister says, “We’ll get those terrorist bastards wherever they go,
if their hiding in the shithouse we’ll rub them out on the john;” and who, on becoming annoyed with a foreign
journalist , invites him to London
Imagine a Prime minister who calls opponents
on the phone to ask after the ‘state
of their health,’ and advises
businessmen who cross him that they might find themselves getting ‘into
difficulty with the Inland Revenue, and then makes good on this promise. A country in which Islamist explosions in UK
cities turn out to be the work of special branch, with the Prime Minister
almost certainly in the loop,[1] and where he sanctions the
murder of an irksome opponent in exile by poisoning with radiation.
This book ought to be
read by any western politician dealing with Putin, though my fear is that in
the case of the UK the likes of William Hague are only too aware of these facts
but choose to ignore them; otherwise why the obstruction of Litvinenko's inquest?[2] Whilst more
recently Boris Berezovsky another man who found himself on the wrong side
of Putin, was found ‘hanged’ in his
£20million mansion in Ascot , Berkshire ;
there was no suicide note. Berezovsky is vividly described in this book, one of
the small clique around Boris Yeltsin who engineered the mass privatisation in
The Russian Confederation and unmercifully ripped off the Russian people. He bears
more responsibility than any one else for the highly resistible rise of
Vladimir Putin. The grim reality is that as London becomes
destination of choice for so many Russian exiles from Putin’s thuggish state
and Putin seeks to silence them, in the manner he knows so well, the British
government may not be able to turn a blind eye for much longer.
When I
was sixteen years old I read War and Peace, prompted to do so by the BBC
produced Jack Pullman dramatisation. I fell in love with Russia
I have
visited Russia Russia Europe and the world is immense and now a tiny criminal elite have
reduced this great culture to the status of banana republic, this is a tragedy
for us all.
[1] I did indeed suggest such
a scenario in my Novel 2024, but that of course is fiction.
[2] Mr Litvinenko, a
former KGB agent, who fled to London
were he was given asylum was murdered in 2006 after drinking tea
which had been poisoned with radioactive polonium-210. See http://nickcohen.net/2013/03/11/hushing-up-a-murder/
Having visited this page I would be grateful for your feedback, either tick one of the boxes below or make a comment via the comments button.
