Category Archives: Putin

Since everyone is afflicted with spymania at the moment, I wanted to make sure this little tidbit of news didn’t go unnoticed.

Well, as I assumed the copies of Putin. The Results. 10 Years seized by St. Petersburg police will be returned.  Reports Ekho Moskvy:

Executive Director of United Civil Front Olga Kurnosova reported to Interfax, a representative of the police have contacted her and said that all the copies would be returned today.

They found no extremism in them whatsoever.

Nah, really?  I could have told them that without even reading the damn thing.  So basically this whole scandal has boiled down to some zealous police minion giving Nemstov and Milov two week’s worth of free advertising.  Good job boys.

Score: Team Solidarity 3 : Putin 0

I have little love for Russian liberals.  Readers of this blog probably know that well.  Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Milov in particular, as one can sense from my take down of their 2008 anti-Putin screed for the now defunct and sorely missed The eXile. I even giggled when Nashi threw piss in Nemtsov’s face.

The dynamic duo is back with a new Putin obsessed treatise, elegantly entitled Putin. The Results. Ten Years.  So much for creativity.  It is sure to get more media attention than it deserves.  I have yet to read it, and probably won’t.  I’m sure my eXile piece applies just as well to this one.  According to reports in the Russian media, the text evaluates Putin’s decade long run and the tandem’s two year performance.  Vedomosti writes that Nemtsov characterized the text this way on his ..read more

What follows is basically an incomplete rundown of some of the commentary coming out of Russia.  It’s mostly based on the Russian language media since, frankly, much of the English language media is worthless with some exceptions.

The Western Party line, as gleaned from Owen Mathews’ piece in Newsweek, seems to be a simple, yet predictable one:

Unlike Israel, though, Putin does not have the option of building a wall across the North Caucasus to keep out bombers. The likely reaction will expanded surveillance powers for the FSB and stop-and-search powers for the police—thereby cutting off a fledgling civil-society movement to crack down on corruption and institute wholesale reforms of both those institutions. Most worryingly of all for the Kremlin, if the state continues to fail to provide security to its citizens, popular protests will only grow—putting opposition groups on ..read more

Yesterday, December 1, was 75 years since the assassination of Sergei Kirov, the first secretary of the Leningrad Party Organization, and Stalin ally.  It was on the night of December 1, 1934 that a certain Leonid Nikolaev, a disgruntled party worker, shot Kirov in the secretary’s third floor office. Nikolaev was immediately caught and interrogated under Stalin’s personal supervision.  He was executed shortly thereafter.

Rumors have been circling for years as to what Nikolaev’s motives were.  Some have suggest that Kirov was having an affair with Nikolaev’s wife.  Others have suggested that he had a personal or work beef with Kirov.  These questions remain mostly unanswered.  Partly it is because they are unanswerable. But also because the majority of historians believe that Nikolaev did not act alone.  For them, Stalin was the main culprit and wanted to get rid of Kirov because of his popularity.  Since Kirov has been held up ..read more

Scott Anderson’s article “Vladimir Putin’s Dark Rise to Power” is a throwback to the 1990s when ex-KGBmen turned mafioso, private security, or hired hands to execute nefarious plots.  It is also a showcase of bygone figures.  Once powerful, influential, or at least in the public eye who have since drifted into memory only to be periodically conjured up as partisan weaponry of high politics.  You know the names: Boris Berezovsky, Alex Goldfarb, Aleksandr Litvinenko, and Mikhail Trepashkin.  The latter serves as the hero of Anderson’s tale.  The gatekeeper of a longstanding conspiracy that many Russians know well:  The FSB carried out the apartment bombings on Guryanova St. in Moscow that brought down eight floors and killed ninety-four residents in their beds.

It’s been a while since Trepashkin’s name graced an English language publication.  He’s spent the last several years serving two stints in the clank.  In 2003, he was arrested for ..read more

A few weeks ago, Dmitry Medvedev announced that Russia’s top officials would reveal their incomes as part of an anti-corruption campaign.  When I heard this I wondered whether that disclosure would include any of the money they’ve most likely picked up over the last eight years.  After all, Medvedev was the chair of Gazprom’s board of directors, and one would suspect he was compensated heavily for his service. However, when he stated his finances for the presidential election, Dima was pretty much broke by American power player standards. Since 2007, Putin has been rumored to have a hefty $40 billion squirreled away in some unknown bank account.

The tandem released their incomes today, and one can only assume that while Medvedev and Putin might have earned $124,000 and $137,000 respectively, I seriously doubt this is the full number and certainly not full disclosure of their wealth.

Both men earn over 18 times ..read more