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A dubious honour
I see that in this week’s Sunday Times I share the dubious honour of being a columnist alongside Vladimir ‘Stalin’ Putin. I realise that good commentators on Russia are hard to find, mainly because he’s had them all murdered, but I am still horrified.
Since Putin came to power in 2000 fourteen journalists have died in questionable circumstances. I found his column dreary bordering on unreadable. I would have preferred to have read something by the brave and brilliant Anna Politkovskaya but she was gunned down in October last year in the lift of her apartment block. Putin was widely assumed to have ordered the killing due to her coverage of the Chechen war. The latest journalist to die was only a few weeks ago; Ivan Safronov, a military affairs correspondent for Kommersant “fell” from a window.
But Putin is not only murdering journalists. What is happening in Chechnya is beyond belief and now it seems he is not above attacking his own people. His police broke up two anti-government protests recently, arresting the key speakers and beating the protestors. Also reported in the Sunday Times this week was the fact that demonstrators were dragged off trains on their way to demos last week. So much for the “democracy” he so long-windedly drones on about in his less-than-riveting column. Instead of writing this drivel himself, which many of us on the Sunday Times are perfectly capable of doing, he should be allowing journalists in Russia the freedom to express their views without fear of extermination.
I wonder what I will be reading this week? Maybe a column on good farming policy by Robert Mugabe? ‘How to be nice to political dissidents’ by China’s Hu Jintao? ‘Look after your Nobel peace prize winners’ by Burma’s Than Schwe? I can hardly wait for next Sunday.
Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2007
27 Mar 2007 helena
Careful, Helena, or you might find some polonium 210 in your tea!
Biting the hand that feeds you, Helena, is always the right thing to do.
I just yesterday bookmarked your website, having found the link on Wife in the North blog, and was enjoying reading it, so it’s a bit disappointing to see today’s entry. I am a Russian, married to an Englishman, living here for about two years but spending a lot of time in Russia as well. Have you ever even lived in Russia for a considerable period of time to be able to draw your verdicts about its political climate and its President left, right and centre? What do you base them on, on the BBC coverage of Russian political situation? At least first speak to a number of British expats who have lived in Russia for more than a couple of years. What is happening in Chechnya that is beyond belief exactly? The only ‘beyond beliefs’ happenings, like Beslan massacre, were initiated by Chechnen terrorists….though I suspect I am wasting my time explaining that to you. It’s like I would start talking about the atrocities of the English in Ireland years ago, and about the glorious IRA fighting for the freedom of their country, only IRA’s imagination would never go as far as what Muslim(among them, Chechnen) extremists can come up with. The way you happily and without any hesitation blame Putin for all the journalist murders is also, in my opinion, unprofessional. You cannot make assertions like that unless you hold the actual facts, which you don’t. I’m not saying it wasn’t Putin who ordered the killings(though I personally don’t believe in that), I’m just saying that at least for the sake of objectivity you should regard other versions, including murders done to set Putin up etc…
You somehow forgot to mention Dear President Bush in the list of nightmarish so-called “leaders” who lie through their teeth.
Dear Lena
Thank you for your comment. Blogs by their very nature are personal not professional: there is rarely the time nor the space to develop an argument or cite your sources. But I am happy to give some of the background and basis for my thoughts on Putin’s Russia. I spent a number of years reporting in Russia in the 1990s, when it appeared that a democratic society was emerging. Yeltsin may have been a boozy buffoon, but he wasn’t systematically silencing opponents and he even allowed journalists to cover the first Chechen conflict. Chechnya was a part of the Soviet Union, but had the same right as Lithuania or Estonia to become a separate republic in 1991. The Kremlin thought otherwise.
I follow events in Russia by reading the American, French, British and Russian press - in particular the work of Anna Politkovskaya. What happened in Beslan was horrible, I will never ever forget it. But so too was the Russian state’s response. What kind of rescue massacres 400-odd people, mainly children? And when interviewed on television soon afterwards, all Putin wanted to talk about were his Labrador puppies.
Here is an extract from an interview Politkovskaya gave to the Guardian’s James Meek, published October 15, 2004: “The only way for the west to regain moral authority, Politkovskaya argues, would be for it to treat Putin as it treats Alexander Lukashenko, the autocratic, bullying president of Russia’s neighbour Belarus - not sanctions, but a more personal, tailored form of ostracism. “It’s impossible to talk on the one hand about the monstrous scale of victims in Chechnya and the spawning of terrorism and then lay out the red carpet, embrace Putin and tell him: ‘We’re with you, you’re the best.’ That shouldn’t be happening. I understand, our country’s a big market, it’s very attractive. I understand it very well. But we’re not second-class people, we’re people like you, and we want to live.”
Well, as we all know, it’s not possible to read Anna’s words anymore because she was murdered at the end of 2006. Of course I cannot be sure that Putin was directly involved in the murders of these journalists. However, he has created a society where opposition is quashed and people die in suspicious circumstances. I, for one, don’t think the west and a paper with a proud record on human rights such as the Sunday Times should be allowing him to use its pages to proclaim his “democratic principles”.
Dear parisbreakfasts - good point, I will get him next time!
Oh Helena,
A dubious, if not wholly disturbing honour.
I believe we must, in any event, make our assumptions about the state of a country’s affairs by what we know as facts, not by what we are told by a coldly disconnected, narcissistic and skewed spin doctor.
While I am infinitely sorry for the Russian people, and particularly her journalists, I also grieve for many more countries, China, South Africa, Burma, where there is a diet rich only in disinformation, fear and retribution for exposing the horror.
Hmmm, I don’t know in whose interests it is to create a Stalin-Putin image of Putin, because the experience of general Russian public of life ‘under Putin’ is of freedom, and as the public sector which used to be represented only by the older generation is getting replaced by younger people with a different attitude, Russia becomes so much like the West you wouldn’t know you were in a former Communist country. Yeltsin is widely hated and despised by Russians, not because he was such an embarrassment, but because he couldn’t care less about the well-being of the nation and sold off the state natural resources to a few people for a tiny nominal fraction of their worth, and now most of these few people are highly regarded members of the Western world, including Britain…There is nothing like Putin’s ‘cult’ anywhere in Russia, in my everyday experience media can dissect him quite freely. The feel in Russia is that so far he has been the only President who could be called efficient at least in some ways, and who we were not embarrassed for when he is representing Russia on the international stage. Hmmm, in spite of becoming ‘chums’ with G.Bush, he turned down Bush’s insistent offer to join forces in Iraq.
As for Chechnya, this comment page is not an appropriate place and not enough to start a whole political discussion…but I must say I know some real life people, including my uncle(who went there not as a military, though he is one) who had a repeating first-hand experience of what’s happening there. They went there not as Western journalists, without any prejudices or missions to discover the truth, and what I heard wasnt’ meant for the general public, it was just sharing their personal experience, there was no motivation to change the truth in any way. It is so far removed from the Western coverage of the events it makes you want to cry with powerlessness, but I guess that is something which just has to be accepted as a part of the world politics, if certain powers in the West need it to be covered like that, it happens. If it ever became necessary for the forces concerned to show Chechnen militants and general population as Muslim fanatics who don’t view non-Muslims or non-Chechnens as human, I’m sure Western public attitude can be easily turned around by 180 degrees.
About Beslan - why do you make it sound as if it was the rescue forces and not the terrorists, who killed the kids, their parents and teachers
…
Hello again Lena
Ownership of a football club, however successful, does not make you ‘highly regarded in the west’. Intelligent people see Abramovich and his gang of oligarchs for the robber barons they are. The French, in particular, have no compunction in arresting them in Courchevel.
And of course I don’t blame the authorities for starting the worst terrorist incident I have ever seen (although questions must be asked as to how they got across the border with all their deadly weapons and bombs) but they handled it very badly indeed.
I agree with you though that the Russians en masse do seem to like an autocratic leader - maybe it’s the only way to govern her?
Hello
Putin’s government doesn’t FEEL autocratic to Russians(at least to those who remember what it was like with the Commuist regime), as I said, being in Russia you feel the society is getting more and more democratic. In any case, I do agree with the old saying that every nation deserves the government they choose, very often it is true. From a historic perspective, Russians do seem to love a strong leader.
On a different note, I’m glad I’ve found your website, I’ve read all the articles here, catching up on the blog and ‘queueing’ in the local library for one of your books.
I can relate to a lot of things you write about, myself having moved to another country with three kids, watching my kids turning more English than Russian, myself half-delighted half-exasperated by the local life.