Oh c’mon. Like the Chicago mob looks to Obama’s legal actions to determine what actions are acceptable and what aren’t. “Hey boss, can we stick this guy in the concrete boots already?” “Hold on, Rico! We need to see how Obama handles banking malfeasance first!”

A patient with a knife protruding from his shoulder-blades is taken to the resuscitation department. A doctor asks him: “Do you feel pain?” The patiens respondes: “Only when I laugh.”

It’s all normal in Russia. You feel the pain only if you laugh.

It’s true what Kolya says, regarding a corrupt system that makes such things possible. But, you can easily make the case that Putin not only tolerates, but cultivates and maintains this system. The selective enforcement of laws sends the signal that certain crimes are acceptable. Beating or killing the right kind of journalists is one of them.

One of the truly sad aspects of the Zolotarev post is how he ended it. I cannot blame him, but this is what he wrote (rough translation):

“Now I simply want to warn all journalists writing on political matters–walking on the brink. We had Khimki, then Saratov, now Serpukhov. Think a thousand times before taking on a story. I was lucky. If they wanted they could have kill me, maim me. But this did not happen. I was warned. And now I’m warning you. And, yes, I resigned from the newspaper.”

So in this particular case the title of your post should have been “The Steel Pipe Silences the Pen.”

Actually, Russian capitalism is not much different from capitalism in the US or Western Europe. Companies raise and use capital in order to operate in much the same way they do in the west, i.e by borrowing it from a bank or flogging shares.

It is Russian business, and the methods of doing business, which differ from its American and Western European counterparts. Capitalism has nothing to do with it.

So you think the particular type of capitalist system in Russia doesn’t play a role? Russian capitalism is nothing like the US or Western Europe. It’s different and far more locally violent. More like Latin America or even Asia.

There’s no doubt that causation on this topic can take the wrong direction, or make spectacular jumps. I’ve no doubt that a Western editor would have no problems putting a headline like “Putin continues to crack down on journalists” on a headline like this. But it’s not part of a Putin-led campaign against journalists or civil society in general.

Autocratic, unaccountable bureaucracies are highly threatened by a free press. This happens at all levels of Russia (and indeed elsewhere in the world, otherwise that poor British arms control inspector would still be alive). Bureaucracies react vigorously and violently against any curtailment of their power. Democracies have learned that they function better if the press and NGOs are protected from politicians and civil servants, to act as part of the system of checks and balances.

No government official in Russia, from Putin downwards, has anything against a free press in principle. In fact, it can serve to help inform them about what’s going on in their country, and is a useful weapon in their internecine conflicts. But when it starts to infringe on their own space, they are very very against it. And this is what we are seeing in practice. Politkovskaya was not killed because she criticised Russia’s policies in Chechnya, but because she threatened specific economic interests (that were making money out of Russia’s policies in Chechnya).

This journalist was attacked because he was publishing embarrassing information about a lucrative, and probably corrupt property deal. Actually, the instigators of the attack were probably not worried about the general public finding out, but about their superiors finding out. And not because their superiors would stop it, but because they would either demand a cut, or take over the entire deal. Russia becomes a lot easier to understand when you realise that it’s not about ideology, but about money.