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 Russia, though the defendant in the case is unlikely to testify in his defence, he has been dead since February 2009, murdered by the very people who now seek to put him on trial. I suppose the nearest equivalent case would be the trial in Britain in the late 18th Century of a monkey accused of being a French spy. I believe the monkey was found guilty.
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 to turn itself overnight into a functioning capitalist state. The chaos that ensued provided cover for the mass theft of publicly owned assets and raw materials and the growing power of the gangster milieu that sought to strangle democracy at birth; rightly seeing a functioning democracy as inimical  to their criminal aims.
 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 clichĆ©, 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 to be ‘circumcised’ i.e.  to be castrated.
 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.
Russia is now as state where the term ‘rule of law’ is meaningless, democracy a sham, and corruption has all but destroyed the Russian economy. If it were not for oil and Russia’s other vast natural resources the country would be a basket case. 
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 and have been love struck ever since.
I have visited Russia only once, in the heady days of September 1991 and despite making plans to do so, each derailed, I have never managed to go back. The rich cultural contribution Russia has made to 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/
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