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The received story of Putin's two decades plus in power was of his tolerance of a monstrously corrupt system. The trade-off with the oligarchs was th… - John Sweeney
" "The received story of Putin's two decades plus in power was of his tolerance of a monstrously corrupt system. The trade-off with the oligarchs was they were allowed to keep much of their fortunes so long as they paid the master of the Kremlin homage and tithes. And they had to keep their snouts out of power. Or else. But that description masks what's really going on. Putin is stealing Russia's wealth, big time, personally, but he cannot be seen to be doing so – psychologically, he hates the idea of being caught out – so he employs proxies to do the stealing for him. True, the oligarchs emerged from the road-crash of the Soviet Union's implosion and Boris Yeltsin's alcoholic incompetence. But with Yeltsin out of the way, a new president had an opportunity to strip the oligarchs of their ill-gotten and obscene wealth and start afresh. Instead, Putin cemented the oligarch system because it best suited his secret urge to take things that rightfully belonged to others.
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About John Sweeney
John Sweeney (born 7 June 1958) is a British investigative journalist and author who has worked for The Observer newspaper and for the BBC's Panorama television series.
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Alternative Names:
John Paul Sweeney
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Additional quotes by John Sweeney
God knows how many civilians have been massacred by the Russian Army in the port city by the Black Sea. There are stories of mobile crematoria vans turning corpses into ash; there are satellite photos of more and yet more mass graves. The chances that the people of Ukraine would agree to a negotiated peace, leaving some of their country permanently under Russian control, is zero or so close to zero as not worth bothering about. Zelenskiy isn't going to try. The war is not going Russia's way, once again, because the morale of the Russian Army is poor; their logistics are rotten from the head down; their leaders are bad in both senses of the word; bad evil and bad incompetent.
What was supposed to be a safety test at the number four reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in April 1986 was the sickest of jokes. The RMBK reactor was the Soviet solution to big oil prices. But it had a series of horrible design flaws. It couldn't tell its operators what was really happening in its guts. Operators could turn a valve by moving a helm-sized wheel and not know whether this would make things more or less dangerous. And the designers' safety test could could lead to a disastrous chain reaction which boiled the nuclear kettles. That had happened eleven years before in 1975 in Soviet Leningrad, now St Petersburg, when Putin was just starting his career inside the KGB in his home city. The secretive Soviet state covered up the huge leak of radiation. The exposed population were not told of the danger. The accident was not reported in the media. The Ministry of Medium Machine Building blamed the accident on poor construction, not terrible design. The commission investigating the incident made several recommendations. None were implemented. No one complained because no one knew. Welcome to the Soviet Union.
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