Thought About Russia Lately?

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-16-2003
Thought About Russia Lately?
22
Tue, 07-13-2004 - 2:59pm
Journalists' Deaths Make It Harder to Excuse Putin's Excesses

By SERGE SCHMEMANN

Published: July 13, 2004

PARIS — On Friday night, I got a call from Moscow: my friend Paul Klebnikov, the editor in chief of Forbes Russia, a Russian version of the American business magazine, had been fatally shot as he left work. Paul's wife, Musa, was in Italy with their three children and had just spoken to him on the phone before he was shot. She was heartbreakingly brave the next day. Please gather articles about her husband, she asked, for his boys.

Then the anger rose. I am among those former Moscow correspondents, and those people of Russian descent, who have tried to stay optimistic about today's Russia and President Vladimir Putin, even in the face of all the distressing reports about Chechnya, the Yukos oil company, the media clampdown and the swelling powers of the Kremlin. You have to remember where they were a scant 15 years ago, I would argue: Mr. Putin has to restore control over the government and economy, and the oligarchs have to be reined in.

It will be far harder to argue this, now that someone has pumped four bullets into a journalist who earnestly thought that he could help Russia make it by writing the truth about its dark underside. It's tough to continue pretending that Russia is just in transition, struggling to emerge from Communism's rubble. Twenty journalists have now been assassinated in Russia for their work; 14 since Mr. Putin became president. Not one of the murders has been solved.

Three hours before Paul, who was 41, was gunned down, the last decent political program in Russia had its final broadcast. Savik Shuster's weekly program, "Svoboda Slova" — "Freedom of Speech" — was yanked off NTV, the station that Mr. Putin has been forcibly bringing under state control, by the newly installed general director. The "we're reviewing the programming" stuff rings hollow. Mr. Shuster had consistently high ratings, and they went off the charts when he held political debates during the election campaign for Parliament. The last show was about Russia's banking crisis. The week before that, a program about corporate responsibility was NTV's top-rated show.

I understand that in his last minutes, Paul said he had no idea who would have taken out a contract on his life. He had written books and articles about sleazy figures, and under his supervision, Forbes Russia had published a list of the 100 richest people in the country — most of whom would have serious problems explaining how they got their billions.

Friends worried about him, especially when his book on the exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky came out. But he was not afraid. He was convinced that a Western journalist saying the truth in Russia would be respected. I avidly hope that those who ordered his killing are caught. I hope the trial will be public.

But in the end, the perpetrators are not the issue: it is the cruel confirmation that the law and an appreciation of freedom have not taken hold in Russia. It is the evidence that murder is still perceived as a normal and safe way of settling scores and amassing wealth, and that the Kremlin is not really interested in doing anything about it.

A free press is not the enemy, nor is the West. Paul Klebnikov wrote about oligarchs and crime because he believed, almost naïvely, that Russia really wanted to become normal, that its president really wanted to know what was wrong. Many others, like Paul, have wanted to help. But when power tramples on institutions that are at the heart of a free society, we begin to wonder whether we can, or whether we should.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/13/opinion/13TUE4.html

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iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Wed, 07-14-2004 - 9:01am

I read his obit. this morning, in Time mag.


DIED. PAUL KLEBNIKOV, 41, editor of Forbes Russia and an investigative journalist; of gunshot wounds inflicted by an unknown assailant as he left his office in Moscow; the shooting had the hallmarks of a contract hit. A New Yorker of Russian descent, Klebnikov won notoriety in Russia in the late '90s for his writings on corruption and his coverage of controversial businessman and politician Boris Berezovsky.


The jailing of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, head of Yukos the oil company. Was it really because he owed taxes or was it more for the reason he opposed Putin in the last election?


Things don't look well there.

cl-Libraone~

 


Photobucket&nbs

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-23-2003
Wed, 07-14-2004 - 11:44am

I read the Moscow Times once a week, so yes, I'm aware of the problems Russia is facing.


iVillage Member
Registered: 04-16-2003
Wed, 07-14-2004 - 12:30pm
<>

Thanks, it's nice to know someone is following the transitions. Here's an interesting tidbit that I picked up from Erik H. Erikson, a psychoanalysis who looks at psychology from a social perspective. His most famous book is "Childhood and Society". I think he presents the Russian psychology in a book on Lenin, although it may also be a part of "Childhood and Society". He contends that a child, in Russia is swaddled for long periods during the first two years, and when unbound there is total freedom. What is interesting is that this applies to weather, boundaries as well as society. My concusion is that Russians are comfortable when restrained because they understand the boundaries, but when free they go "wild", i.e. there is not a smooth transition. From what I've read about Russia, this theory holds in general.

I do not follow Russian news, but I am aware of the retrictions of freedom. I don't think Russian leaders are puppets, so I assume that Putin is behind the restraints. It will be interesting to see how far they carry the restrictions; hopefully it will not go back to a totalitarianism.

<>

Whether the comparison with the US was intended it certainly is applicable.



iVillage Member
Registered: 04-16-2003
Wed, 07-14-2004 - 12:35pm
<>

I vote for the latter. Given the information on the previous post, if you don't understand how to gain control gradually, you revert back to excesss control.

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-23-2003
Wed, 07-14-2004 - 3:24pm

I used to post stories from there (both on current events in Russia & the Russian perspective of world affairs), but so few people were interested that I just gave up.


That's an interesting hypothesis about Russian culture...and it makes sense.


iVillage Member
Registered: 04-16-2003
Wed, 07-14-2004 - 5:22pm
<>

They may follow the Chineese example. Not that I am convinced that that's the way to go, but it sure seems a more moderate way. I personaly hope they can settle somewhere between democracy and totalitarianism, at least until they get use to freedom.

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Sat, 07-17-2004 - 10:13am
On trial, Russian oil tycoon calls case a political frame-up.

http://www.boston.com/news/world/europe/articles/2004/07/17/on_trial_russian_oil_tycoon_calls_case_a_political_frame_up/


Imprisoned oil billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky yesterday denounced the government's legal campaign against him as "extremely dangerous" for Russian society, giving his first detailed rebuttal of charges against him after nearly nine months in the Russian prison system.


In a loud, confident voice, Russia's richest man opened his courtroom defense with a point-by-point refutation of the allegations, ridiculing them as "baffling," "sloppy and groundless" and "a politically motivated selective exercise of justice." In a country where wealth is still suspect, he cast himself as a scapegoat in the hunt for culprits from the often corrupt sell-off of state assets during the 1990s.


"I intend to prove that this is an awkward attempt to write off the mistakes made in the privatization legislation at the beginning of the privatization process," Khodorkovsky told the three-judge panel. He was speaking from a cage, as is standard for defendants in Russian courtrooms.


Khodorkovsky's first extended statement on his case since his arrest at gunpoint last October was the most dramatic moment so far in the biggest trial of the post-Soviet period. While the 227 binders of evidence dwell on the details of stock transactions and tax shelters, at stake in the trial are the larger issues of Russia's relationship to capitalism after 13 years of fitful experimentation, and the boundaries between state and private power in the new era.


Khodorkovsky, 41, portrayed himself as only the latest victim of repression in a country with centuries of experience in it. "The demonstration of force indifferent to the law . . . is extremely dangerous for the prospects of development of our country," he said.


His billionaire partner and codefendant, Platon Lebedev, drew the argument more starkly. "I've come to realize that the state is repressing me for political . . . reasons on charges invented or craftily organized," he said.


The government dismissed the defense as political puffery by suspects clearly guilty of elaborate swindles. "I must give credit to Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev," prosecutor Dmitri Shokhrin said. "They can quite skillfully juggle with facts."

 


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iVillage Member
Registered: 04-16-2003
Sat, 07-17-2004 - 11:11am
An omen of the future. Reminds me of an asian saying "The nail that stands up gets pounded down". In Russia it is obviously still not wise to separate yourself from the masses.
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Wed, 08-11-2004 - 8:58am

Why Oil Prices Aren't Falling.
The troubles of Yukos drive up the price.


http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101040816-678644,00.html



Traders blamed the bitter dispute at Russian oil giant Yukos for propelling crude prices to record levels last week. But what's less clear is how a company that produces just 2% of the earth's oil supply can trigger a worldwide hike in the price of September crude, which reached $44.60 a barrel on Friday.


The answer lies as much in psychology as in economics. "There's not a lot of logic to the move that oil has had," says Jeff Kleintop, chief investment strategist at PNC Advisors, noting that a tepid U.S. jobs report last Friday raises the specter of a decelerating economy, which would cut demand for oil. Indeed, share prices of U.S. refiners like Sunoco and ConocoPhillips tumbled even further than the overall market did last week.

But the Yukos political melodrama is hard to ignore. The Russian government is seeking to collect $6.8 billion in back taxes from Yukosan effort that has threatened to send the company into bankruptcy. That prospect is highly unlikely, but the mere possibility has spooked traders. That tiny share of the world's oil could loom large if it were disrupted even temporarily, which would surely push prices higher. Nor does the Kremlin appear to have any qualms about roiling the world's oil markets as the battle with Yukos drags on. "The people who are masterminding the assault on Yukos simply do not take such economic factors into account," says Alexei Kondaurov, a former top Yukos executive. A Moscow court last Friday overruled the Kremlin's seizure of Yukos' core production unit. The government's strategy is to "play a cat-and-mouse game with the company" to drive down its market value and hope to buy its oil assets on the cheap, asserts Mikhail Krutikhin, an analyst at consultant RusEnergy. Oil users across the globe are trapped in the game too. — With reporting by Yuri Zarakhovich

cl-Libraone~

 


Photobucket&nbs

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Wed, 12-15-2004 - 10:27am
Here's an interesting new wrinkle.

 


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