British investigative journalist and author (born 1958)
When Putin stole Crimea back in 2014, he ripped up the order established after 1945, secured by NATO and what became the European Union, that there would be no more land grabs in Europe. Putin, his 1970s secret policemen sunglasses blinkering his vision, doesn't get it that he is reheating Hitler's chip. The move was hugely popular inside Russia and that caused Navalny, always with an ear for the mood of the Russian electorate, a major headache. Side with Putin on Crimea, and Navalny would keep in with the Russian public but fall out with Ukraine and the international rules-based order; side with Ukraine and, he feared, he would lose relevance back home.
The revolutionaries broke into Yanukovych's Mezhyhirya estate and found a temple constructed to the god of kleptomania. While millions of Ukrainians struggled on the poverty line, Yanukovych boasted a log cabin on steroids, a garage full of vintage motors, an exotic zoo and a ton of receipts proving his thievery. Expenses that stood out were $800 for medicines for his pet fish, $14,500 for tablecloths and $41 million on light fixures. Other boxes of files showed how much he spent on spying on critical journalists, $5.7 million for the month of December 2010 alone. [...] In June 2015, my former BBC Newsnight colleague and pal, Gabriel Gatehouse, got a scoop when he interviewed Yanukovych in his Russian exile. The disgraced president defended himself, saying the hoo-hah about the Mezhyhirya follies were 'political technology and spin: and that the estate did not belong to him personally'. When Gabriel challenged him about the exotic zoo, he replied: 'I supported the ostriches; what's wrong with that?'
Welcome to the 'systemic opposition'. It's a rather deadening phrase for patsy pretend opponents of the Putinist status quo, who exist to confuse ordinary Russians in the sticks and useful idiots in the West that Russia is a democracy when it isn't. They have all the appearance of a political party, leaders, members, logos, rallies, conferences, attempts to win power through elections. But none of the reality. On the corruption of Putin and his goons, they sit there like so many tapioca puddings, in silence. But they come to life again when a serious rival to the Putin system breaks surface.
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Sergei Sobyanin is a semolina pudding Putin loyalist, has been mayor of Moscow since 2010 and has a distinguished academic record. Actually, I made that last bit up. He did write a thesis for his degree on 'The subject of the Russian Federation in the economic and social development of the state. The competence of government bodies and methods of its implementation', but whole chunks were, according to a Russian anti-plagiarism website, copied on pages 32 to 35, 90 to 91, 105, 149 to 153, 161 to 165, 168 to 183, 185 to 194, and so on. If you get the drift, you get the pattern.
A word about the top lawman in the black hat. Aleksandr Bastrykin is one of the top law enforcers in Russia, roughly equivalent to the head of the FBI, but his performance harks back to the bad old days of the Feds, when J. Edgar Hoover made deals with the Mob and told his officers to target political figures who offended his dark sensibilities. Bastrykin is also a self-confessed kidnapper and a plagiarist.
The facts about Bastrykin the copycat are well evidenced, embarassingly so. His 2004 book, Signs of the Hand: Dactyloscopy, about the science of fingerprinting, was a masterpiece of copying and pasting, principally from a book about forensics, The Century of the Detective, by German writer Jürgen Thorwald. [...] The great Masha Gessen noted in The New Yorker that Bastrykin, when he gave a talk at the Sorbonne in November 2013, remained calm when he was heckled about the Russian Investigative Committee's use of torture, but lost his rag when he was personally accused of plagiarism. Dear Reader: I hope you have already worked out the them here, that both Putin and his wannabe Sherlock Holmes steal other people's words.
One of the striking qualities about Vladimir Putin is his longing for legitimacy. Putin's thesis for his degree at Leningrad State University – he graduated in 1975 – was on 'The Most Favoured Nation Trading Principle in International Law'. When I met him in 2014 and challenged him about the Russian shoot-down of MH17, his answer was long and boring and overly legalistic. My working hypothesis is that Putin is a psychopathic serial killer who loves to dress up his bloodlust as legal necessity. Just like Joseph Stalin who always preferred his enemies to be convincted at a show trial before being sent to prison 'with no privileges', code for being shot.
For the avoidance of doubt, I do not believe that the evidence is anything like strong enough to call Vladimir Putin a paedophile. True, in the summer of 2006 he got out of his Kremlin motorcade, walked a few hundred yards, came across a slight, blond young Russian boy, knelt before him, lifted up his T-shirt and kissed him on the stomach, patted him on the head and then hurried off to his high castle. You can see it on YouTube here: <nowiki>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uWEaKLzwUg</nowiki>
It is beyond creepy but that one instance is not enough to jump to the conclusion that Putin is a paedophile. Alexander Litvinenko was the former KGB colonel who clashed bitterly with Putin over corruption inside the renamed FSB, so much so that he had to flee the country for London. After he saw this video, he wrote a blog, alleging that the reason that Putin got a poor posting when he started out in the KGB was because the high-ups discovered he was a paedophile and felt they could not trust him to serve in the West, so he had to work first in Leningrad, now St Petersburg, then Dresden in East Germany where they could keep an eye on him. Litvinenko cited sources, old KGB officers, for this allegation, but he never came up with any written or other corroborating evidence. Artyom Borovik and Antonio Russo are believed to have been working on the 'Putin may be a paedo' story before they were killed in 2000.
Once again, Putin's fog machine is working full blast here. Of course, there are many other reasons why these three men could have been killed. But both Paul Joyal, a former US intelligence analyst, and I are confident that Litvinenko was poisoned with Polonium 210 because he blogged that Putin was a paedophile.
An election where one of the candidates has total control over who the other candidates are is not an election but a coronation. With Yavlinsky out of the way and Navalny not well known enough to run, Putin's hand-picked opponents were Gennady Zyuganov, an elderly Commie, trusted to rock the boat of his geriatric supporters and that alone, Mikhail Prokhorov, a giraffe-like oligarch, Vladimir Zhirinovksy, the fool's bladder on a fascist stick, and Sergey Mironov, a nonentity with the flavour of the actor who gets killed in the first five minutes of a movie.
With the benefit of hindsight, the two outstanding qualities of Medvedev for Putin's benison are that he is the shorter man and that he would never dream of saying boo to the boss. [...] For a time, Medvedev steered or appeared to steer a path to a different future. That was a charade. In fact, he owed fealty to Putin. What you got was liberal lipstick but fascist substance. For far too long, the West went along with Medvedev's schtick as a reformer with an interest in new tech, blah blah, blah blah.
So was he a bit of a fascist? Yes, for a time. But I suspect that his spell in America changed him. At Yale, he could have hung out with all sorts, including white conservative neo-fascists in one of their yucky alpha beta frat houses. Instead, his gang were an African called Lumumba, a Nicaraguan and a black guy from Brizzle. His three months at Yale would have opened his eyes to the land of liberty, its absurdities, its crassness, its cult of money, but also to the fact that power is, more or less, democratic, that the authorities, more or less, respect the rule of law, that liberal democracy, more or less, works, that an open society open to all talents is so much brighter than the dark Soviet basement he had been born into and the place Vladimir Putin wanted Russia to return to.
After Yale, the fascist in Navalny slunk off into a dark corner.
What the fuck was Navalny doing?
The evidence points to the videos being made when Navalny's fury at the ineffectiveness of the liberals to land a punch on Putin was at its most extreme and irrational and that he later regretted them but, Navalny being Navalny, he couldn't bring himself to take them down. Over the next three years he pursued his grand strategy of trying to get the nationalist right to wake up to the threat from Putin's fascism. When he realised that strategy wasn't working it was, for him, too late, and a tad embarassing, to delete the videos, so they stayed up. He didn't get it, that the liberal world hates this kind of stuff and the stink of it followed him down the years even though he had turned himself into something quite different. [...] When one avenue of fire failed, he would pursue another, and then another. The goal was to defeat Putin; he didn't realise that with the NAROD videos he ended up defeating himself.