March 1997
45-year-old former KGB agent
Vladimir Putin is plucked from obscurity out of the St.
Petersburg local government apparatus by President Boris Yeltsin and named
Deputy Chief of Staff. In June, he defends his PhD dissertation in “strategic planning”
at St. Petersburg’s Mining Institute. Later, this document proves to have been plagiarized
from a KGB translation of work by U.S. professors published many years earlier
(as if nobody would notice, and in fact for quite a while nobody did).
July 1998
In a second inexplicable move,
Yeltsin names Putin head of the KGB (now called the FSB).
November 1998
Less
than four months after Putin takes over at the KGB, opposition Duma Deputy
Galina Starovoitova (pictured, right), the most prominent pro-democracy Kremlin
critic in the nation, is murdered at her apartment building in St. Petersburg.
Four months after that, Putin will play a key role in silencing the Russian
Attorney General, Yury Skuratov, who was investigating high-level corruption in
the Kremlin, by airing an illicit sex video involving Skuratov on national TV.
Four months after the dust settles in the Skuratov affair, Putin will be named
Prime Minister.
August 1999
Completing a hat trick of bizarre
spontaneous promotions, proud KGB spy Putin is named by Yeltsin Prime Minister
of Russia. Almost immediately, Putin orders a massive bombing campaign against
the tiny, defenseless breakaway republic of Chechnya, apparently seeing the
reassertion of Russian power there as key to overall resurgence of Russia’s
military and state security apparatus, his primary political objective. On
August 26th, he’s forced to acknowledge the horrific consequences of the
bombing. Hundreds of civilians are killed and tens of thousands are left
homeless as civilian targets are attacked. World opinion begins to turn starkly
against Russia, especially in Europe, very similarly to the manner in which it
has polarized against U.S. President George Bush over Iraq. Putin’s poll
numbers in Russia begin to slide.
September 1999
An apartment building in the
Pechatniki neighborhood of Moscow is blown up by a bomb. 94 are killed. Less
than a week later a second bomb destroys a building in Moscow’s Kashirskoye
neighborhood, killing 118. Days after that, a massive contingent of Russian
soldiers is surrounding Chechnya as public opposition to the war evaporates. On
October 1st, Putin declares Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov
and his parliament illegitimate. Russian forces invade.
New Year’s Eve, 1999
Boris Yeltsin resigns the presidency
of Russia, handing the office to Putin in order to allow him to run as an
incumbent three months later. Given the pattern of bizarre promotions Putin has
previously received, the move is hardly even surprising. So-called “experts” on
Russia scoff at the possibility that Putin could be elected, proclaiming that,
having tasted freedom, Russia can “never go back” to the dark days of the USSR.
March 2000
Despite being the nominee of a man,
Yeltsin, who enjoyed single-digit public approval ratings in polls, Vladimir
Putin is elected “president” of Russia in a massive landslide (he wins nearly
twice as many votes as his nearest competitor). Shortly thereafter, all hell
breaks loose in Chechnya. Russia will ultimately be convicted of human rights
violations before the European Court for Human Rights and condemned for its
abuses of the civilian population by every human rights organization under the
sun.
[Between April 2000 and March 2002,
Russia plunges into a nightmarish conflict in Chechnya eerily similar to what
America now faces in Iraq. Opposition journalists, especially those who dare to
report on what it going on in Chechnya, suddenly start dying. In 2000 alone,
reporters Igor Domnikov, Sergey Novikov, Iskandar Khatloni, Sergey Ivanov and
Adam Tepsurgayev are murdered — not by hostile fire
in Chechnya but in blatant assassinations at home in Russia. On June 16,
2001, at a press conference in Brdo Pri Kranju, Slovenia, President Bush is
asked about Putin: “Is this a man that Americans can trust?” Bush replies: “I
will answer the question. I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very
straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get
a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and the best
interests of his country. And I appreciated so very much the frank dialogue.”]
April 2003
Sergei Yushenkov, co-chairman of the
Liberal Russia political party (pictured, left), is gunned down at the entrance
of his Moscow apartment block. Yushenkov had been serving as the vice chair of
the group known as the “Kovalev Commission” which was formed to informally
investigate charges that Putin’s KGB had planted the Pechatniki and Kashirskoye
apartment bombs to whip up support for the Putin’s war in Chechnya after the
formal legislative investigation turned out to be impossible. Another member of
the Commission, Yuri Shchekochikhin (see below)
will perish of poisoning, a third will be severely beaten by thugs, and two
other members will lose their seats in the Duma. The Commission’s lawyer,
Mikhail Trepashkin (see below) will be jailed after a secret trial on espionage
charges. Today, virtually none of the members of the Commission are left whole
and it is silent.
May 2003
Putin’s popularity in
opinion polls slips below 50% after sliding precipitously while the conflict in Chechnya became
increasingly bloody. Suddenly, he begins to appear vulnerable, and oil
billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky begins to be discussed as one who could unseat
him. All hell breaks loose in Russian politics.
July 2003
Yuri Shchekochikhin
(pictured, right), a vocal opposition journalist and member of the Russian Duma
and the Kovalev Commission, suddenly contracts a mysterious illness. Witnesses
reported: “He complained about fatigue, and red blotches began to appear on his
skin. His internal organs began collapsing one by one. Then he lost almost all
his hair.” One of Shchekochikhin’s last
newspaper articles before his death was entitled “Are we Russia or KGB of
Soviet Union?” In it, he described such issues as the refusal of the FSB to
explain to the Russian Parliament what poison gas was applied during the Moscow
theater hostage crisis, and work
of secret services from the former Soviet republic of Turkmenistan, which
operated with impunity in Moscow against Russian citizens of Turkoman origin.
According to Wikipedia: “He also tried to investigate the Three Whales Corruption Scandal
and criminal activities of FSB officers related to money laundering through the
Bank of New York and illegal actions of Yevgeny Adamov,
a former Russian Minister of Nuclear Energy. This case was under the personal
control of Putin. In June of 2003, Shchekochikhin contacted the FBI and got an
American visa to discuss the case with US authorities. However, he never made
it to the USA because of his sudden death on July 3rd. The Russian authorities
refused to allow an autopsy, but according to Wikipedia his relatives “managed
to send a specimen of his skin to London, where a tentative diagnosis was made
of poisoning with thallium” (a poison commonly used by the KGB, at first suspected in
the Litvinenko killing).
October 2003
Assaults on the enemies of the
Kremlin reach fever pitch as the election cycle begins. Within one week at the
end of the month, two major opposition figures are in prison.
October 22, 2003
Mikhail Trepashkin (pictured, right), a former KGB spy and the attorney for
the Kovalev Commission, is arrested for illegal possession of a firearm (which
he claims was planted in his vehicle). Also retain to represent some of the
victims of the apartment bombings theselves, Trepashkin allegedly uncovered a
trail of a mysterious suspect whose description had disappeared from the files
and learned that the man was one of his former FSB colleagues. He also found a
witness who testified that evidence was doctored to lead the investigation away
from incriminating the FSB. The weapons charge against Trepashkin mysteriously
morphs into a spying charge handled by a closed military proceeding that is condemned by the U.S. government
as being a blatant sham, and Trepashkin is sent to prison for four years. Publius Pundit reported on Trepashkin’s plight back in early December of
last year.
October 25, 2003
Just as the presidential election cycle is beginning, Khodorkovsky (pictured,
left) is arrested at the airport in Novosibirsk. He will be tried and convicted
for tax fraud and sent to Siberia, just like in the bad old days of the USSR,
in a show trial all international observers condemn as rigged (his lawyer has
documented the legal violations in a 75-page treatise). He is there today, now facing a second
prosecution for the same offense. His company, YUKOS, is being slowly gobbled
up by the Kremlin.
March 2004
With Khodorkovsky
conveniently in prison and the Kovalev Commission conveniently muzzled,
Vladimir Putin is re-elected “president” of Russia, again in a landslide
despite his poll numbers. He faces no serious competition from any opposition
candidate. He does not participate in any debates. He wins a ghastly,
Soviet-like 70% of the vote. Immediately, talk begins of a neo-Soviet state,
with Putin assuming the powers of a dictator. The most public and powerful
enemies of the regime start dropping like flies.
June 2004
Nikolai Girenko
(pictured, left), a prominent human rights defender,
Professor of Ethnology and expert on racism and discrimination in the Russian
Federation is shot dead in his home in St Petersburg. Girenko’s work has been
crucial in ensuring that racially motivated assaults are classified as hate
crimes, rather than mere hooliganism, and therefore warrant harsher sentences —
as well as appearing as black marks on Russia’s public record.
July 2004
Paul Klebnikov (pictured, right),
editor of the Russian edition Forbes magazine, is shot and killed in
Moscow. Forbes has reported
that at the time of his death, Paul was believed to have been investigating a
complex web of money laundering involving a Chechen reconstruction fund,
reaching into the centers of power in the Kremlin and involving elements of
organized crime and the FSB (the former KGB).
September 2004
Viktor Yushchenko, anti-Russian
candidate for the presidency of the Ukraine, is poisoned by Dioxin. Yushchenko’s
chief of staff Oleg Ribachuk suggests that the poison used was a mycotoxin
called T-2, also known as “Yellow Rain,” a Soviet-era substance which
was reputedly used in Afghanistan as a chemical weapon. Miraculously, he
survives the attack.
[Throughout the next year, a full
frontal assault on the media is launched by the Kremlin. Reporters Without Borders states: “Working conditions for journalists continued to
worsen alarmingly in 2005, with violence the most serious threat to press
freedom. The independent press is shrinking because of crippling fines and
politically-inspired distribution of government advertising. The authorities’
refusal to accredit foreign journalists showed the government’s intent to gain
total control of news, especially about the war in Chechnya.”]
September 2006
Andrei Kozlov (pictured, left),
First Deputy Chairman of Russia’s Central Bank, who strove to stamp out money
laundering (basically acting on analyses like that of reporter Klebnikov), the
highest-ranking reformer in Russia, is shot and killed in Moscow. Many media reports
classify Kozlov’s killing as “an impudent challenge to all Russian authorities”
and warn that “failure to apprehend the killers would send a signal to others
that intimidation of government officials is once again an option.” Less
considered is the possibility that Kozlov, like Klebnikov, was on the trail of
corruption that would have led into the Kremlin itself, which then lashed out
at him preemptively assuming he could not be bought.
October 2006
Anna Politkovskaya (pictured,
right), author of countless books and articles exposing Russian human rights
violations in Chechnya and attacking Vladimir Putin as a dictator, is shot and
killed at her home in Moscow. In her book Putin’s Russia, Politkovskaya
had written: “I have wondered a great deal why I have so got it in for Putin.
What is it that makes me dislike him so much as to feel moved to write a book
about him? I am not one of his political opponents or rivals, just a woman
living in Russia. Quite simply, I am a 45-year-old Muscovite who observed the
Soviet Union at its most disgraceful in the 1970s and ’80s. I really don’t want
to find myself back there again.” Analysts begin to talk openly of Kremlin
complicity in the ongoing string of attacks. Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum
writes: “Local businessmen had no motivation to kill her — but officials of the
army, the police and even the Kremlin did. Whereas local thieves might have
tried to cover their tracks, Politkovskaya’s assassin, like so many Russian
assassins, did not seem to fear the law. There are jitters already: A few hours
after news of Politkovskaya’s death became public, a worried friend sent me a link
to an eerie Russian Web site that displays photographs of ‘enemies of the
people’ — all Russian journalists and human rights activists, some quite well
known. Above the pictures is each person’s birth date and a blank space where,
it is implied, the dates of their deaths will soon be marked. That sort of
thing will make many, and probably most, Russians think twice before
criticizing the Kremlin about anything.”
November 2006
Alexander Litvinenko (pictured,
left), KGB defector and author of the book Blowing up Russia, which
accuses the Kremlin of masterminding the and Pechatniki and Kashirskoye
bombings in order to blame Chechen terrorists and whip up support for an
invasion of Chechnya (which shortly followed), is fatally poisoned by
radioactive Polonium obtained from Russian sources. Litivinenko had given sensational testimony to the Kovalev Commission and warned Sergei Yushenkov
that was a KGB target). In his last days Litvinenko himself, as well as other
KGB defectors, including Oleg Kalugin,
Yuri Shvets and Mikhail Trepashkin (who allegedly actually warned Litvinenko that he had been
targeted before the hit took place) directly blamed the Kremlin for ordering
the poisoning. Recent press reports
indicate that British investigators have come to the same conclusion. With
Litvinenko out of the picture, the only member of the Kovalev Commission left
unscathed is its 77-year-old namesake chairman, dissident Sergei Kovalev — who has
grown notably silent.
March 2007
On Sunday February 25th, the
American TV news magazine Dateline NBC aired a report on the
killing of Litvinenko. MSNBC also carried a report.
The reports confirmed that British authorities believe Litvinenko perished in a
“state-sponsored” assasination. In the opening of the broadcast, Dateline
highlighted the analysis of a senior British reporter and a senior American
expert on Russia who knew Litvinennko well. Here’s an excerpt from the MSNBC
report:
Daniel McGrory, a senior
correspondent for The Times of London, has reported many of the
developments in the Litvinenko investigation. He said the police were stuck
between a rock and a hard place. “While they claim, and the prime minister,
Tony Blair, has claimed nothing will be allowed to get in the way of the police
investigation, the reality is the police are perfectly aware of the diplomatic
fallout of this story,” McGrory said. “Let’s be frank about this: The United
States needs a good relationship with Russia, and so does Europe,” said Paul M.
Joyal, a friend of Litvinenko’s with deep ties as a consultant in Russia and
the former Soviet states. Noting that Russia controls a significant segment of
the world gas market, Joyal said: “This is a very important country. But how
can you have an important relationship with a country that could be involved in
activities such as this? It’s a great dilemma.”
Five
days before the broadcast aired, shortly after he was interviewed for it,
McGrory was dead.
His obituary reads “found dead at his home on February 20, 2007, aged 54.” Five
days after the broadcast aired, Joyal (pictured, right) was lying in a hospital bed after having been shot for no apparent reason, ostensibly the victim of a crazed random street
crime. He was returning home after having dinner with KGB defector Oleg
Kalugin, and had been an aggressive advocate for Georgian independence from
Russian influence. The attack remains
unsolved.
CONCLUSION: Did the Kremlin have anything to do with either Joyal’s or
McGrory’s fates, or is it just coincidence that both were struck down within
days of giving statements directly blaming the Kremlin for Litvinenko’s killing
to the American press? Would the Kremlin really be so brazen as to attack an
American for speaking in America? Whether it did not not is almost beside the
point: the thing you can’t see is always scarier than the thing you can. The
Kremlin is now positioned to turn random accidents into weapons. Appelbaum sums
it up: “As Russian (and Eastern European) history well demonstrates, it isn’t
always necessary to kill millions of people to frighten all the others: A few
choice assassinations, in the right time and place, usually suffice. Since the
arrest of oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky in 2003, no other Russian oligarchs
have attempted even to sound politically independent. After the assassination
of Politkovskaya on Saturday, it’s hard to imagine many Russian journalists
following in her footsteps to Grozny either
January 2009
On January 19, 2009, Russian human rights attorney Stanslav Markelov (pictured, right) was shot in the back of the head with a
silenced pistol as he left a press conference at which he announced his
intention to sue the Russian government for its early release of the Col. Yuri
Budanov, who murdered his 18-year-old client in Chechnya five years earlier.
Also shot and killed was Anastasia Barburova, a young journalism student who
was working for Novaya Gazeta and who had studied under Anna Politkovskaya,
reporting on the Budanov proceedings.
July 2009
On July 14, 2009, leading Russian human rights journalist and activist Natalia Estemirova (pictured, left), a single mother of a teenaged daughter,
was abducted in front of her home in Grozny, Chechnya, spirited across the
border into Ingushetia, shot and dumped in a roadside gutter. Viewed as
the successor to Anna Politkovskaya and by far the most prominent living critic
of Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov, who had repeatedly threatened her life,
Estemirova was a member of the “Memorial” human rights NGO and a steadfast
defender of human rights in Chechnya. Most recently, she had been
reporting on the barbaric practice of the government in burning down the homes
of rebel activists, often with women and children locked inside.
