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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Masha Gessen
Read between
March 2 - March 8, 2022
The first occurred on August 31 in a crowded shopping mall in the center of Moscow. One person died,
Five days later, an explosion brought down a large part of an apartment block in the southern city of Buynaksk, not far from Chechnya. Sixty-four people were killed
Four days later, however, at two seconds before midnight on September 8, a giant blast sounded in a bedroom neighborhood outside Moscow’s city center. A densely populated concrete city block was ripped in half, two of its stairwells—seventy-two apartments in total—completely obliterated. Exactly one hundred people died;
The blast came at five in the morning, which meant that most residents were home at the time; almost all of them were killed: one hundred twenty-four people were dead
Three days after that, on September 16, a truck blew up in the street in Volgodonsk, a city in southern Russia. Nineteen people died,
Putin was using rhetoric markedly different from Yeltsin’s. He was not promising to bring the terrorists to justice. Nor was he expressing compassion for the hundreds of victims of the explosions. This was the language of a leader who was planning to rule with his fist. These sorts of vulgar statements, often spiced with below-the-belt humor, would become Putin’s signature oratorical device. His popularity began to soar.
“First, there was no explosion,” he said. “Second, nothing was prevented.
Ekaterina Podoltseva, a brilliant forty-year-old mathematician who had become one of the city’s most visible—and most eccentric—pro-democracy activists, produced a recipe for fighting the brass band. She asked all the regular “Hyde Park” participants to bring lemons with them the following Saturday. As soon as the band began playing, all the activists were to start eating their lemons, or to imitate the process of eating if they found the reality of it too bitter. Podoltseva had read or heard somewhere that when people see someone eating a lemon, they begin, empathetically, producing copious
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In other words, said the incoming president of Russia, if the law got in the way of his ideas of how things should be done, that would be too bad for the law.
Nine years later, a researcher at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., decided to study the dissertation closely; he said he found about sixteen pages of text and no fewer than six charts taken verbatim from an American textbook. Putin never acknowledged the plagiarism charges.
His first decree as acting president granted immunity from prosecution to Boris Yeltsin. His second established a new Russian military doctrine, abandoning the old no-first-strike policy regarding nuclear weapons and emphasizing a right to use them against aggressors “if other means of conflict resolution have been exhausted or deemed ineffective.”
In all, six of the eleven decrees Putin issued in his first two months as acting president concerned the military. On January 27, Kasyanov announced that defense spending would be increased by 50 percent—this in a country that was still failing to meet its international debt obligations and was seeing most of its population sink further and further into poverty.
“He is a small, vengeful man,”
The case against Gusinsky was, just like the case against Rozhdestvensky, a case of personal vendetta. Gusinsky had not supported Putin in the election. He was friendly and had significant business dealings with Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov, who was a leader of the anti-Family opposition coalition. It was Gusinsky’s television channel that had aired the program about apartment building explosions two days before the election.
Vladimir Gusinsky spent just three days in jail. As soon as he was released on his own recognizance, he left the country, becoming the first political refugee from Putin’s regime—only five weeks after the inauguration.
The Kursk makes an easy metaphor for the post-Soviet condition.
“Don’t we have those kinds of divers ourselves?” someone shouted out in despair. “We don’t have crap in this country!” the president answered furiously.
Six days after the Dorenko show, Putin appeared on CNN’s Larry King Live. When King asked, “What happened?” Putin shrugged, smiled—impishly, it seemed—and said, “It sank.”
Less than a year after Putin came to power, all three federal television networks were controlled by the state.
The bills sailed through the parliament. The installation of the envoys drew no protest. What happened next was exactly what Berezovsky’s letter had predicted, and it went far beyond the legal measures introduced by Putin. Something shifted, instantly and perceptibly, as though the sounds of the new/old Soviet/Russian national anthem had signaled the dawn of a new era for everyone. Soviet instincts, it seemed, kicked in all over the country, and the Soviet Union was instantly restored in spirit.
A law that went into effect just before the campaigns launched required that a notary certify the presence and signature of every person present at a meeting at which a presidential candidate is nominated. Since the law required that a minimum of five hundred people attend such a meeting, the preliminaries took four to five hours;
but more important, the new law specified the look of these signatures down to the comma. Hundreds of thousands of signatures were thrown out by the Central Election Commission because of violations such as the use of “St. Petersburg” instead of “Saint Petersburg” or the failure to write out the words “building” or “apartment” in the address line.
The Soviet bureaucracy had been so unwieldy, incomprehensible, and forbidding that one could function within it only by engaging in corruption, using either money or personal favors as currency.
During the voting itself, international observers and Russian nongovernmental organizations documented a slew of violations, including: the deletion from the rolls of over a million very elderly people and other unlikely voters
His chess player’s memory was invaluable: according to one of his assistants, he had never kept a phone book, because he could not help remembering every phone number he heard. Now he was constantly aggregating and averaging in his mind. He kept a running tally of the percentage of local taxes each region was allowed to keep, the problems opposition activists faced, and details of speech and behavior that he found telling.
These journalists had found two conscripts who had sneaked into an air force warehouse in Ryazan in the fall of 1999 in search of sugar to sweeten their tea. They found what they expected: dozens of fifty-kilo sacks marked SUGAR. But the substance they extracted from the sacks made their tea taste so bizarre that they reported the whole incident, including their own breaking, entering, and stealing, to their superior officer. The officer had the substance analyzed and found it to be hexogen, the explosive.
the transcript of the September 13 Duma session. The speaker had interrupted the session by saying, “We have just received news that a residential building in Volgodonsk was blown up last night.” In fact, the building in Volgodonsk would not be blown up for three more days: it seems the FSB plant in the speaker’s office—whom Litvinenko was later able to identify—had given the speaker the wrong note at the wrong time, but had known of the planned Volgodonsk explosion in advance.
But for all the seeming simplicity of their demands, the terrorists were demanding that Putin act in a way that ran counter to his nature. The boy who could never end a fight—the one who would seem to calm down only to flare up and attack again—now the president who had promised to “rub them out in the outhouse,” would certainly rather sacrifice 129 of his own citizens than publicly say that he wanted peace. He did not.
As I lie here, I sense the distinct presence of the angel of death. It is still possible I’ll be able to evade him, but I fear my feet are no longer as fast as they used to be. I think the time has come to say a few words to the man responsible for my current condition. You may be able to force me to stay quiet, but this silence will come at a price to you. You have now proved that you are exactly the ruthless barbarian your harshest critics made you out to be. You have demonstrated that you have no respect for human life, liberty, or other values of civilization. You have shown that you do
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Lugovoy as the murder suspect and Kovtun as a witness. Russia has refused extradition requests for Lugovoy; moreover, he has been made a member of parliament, giving him immunity from prosecution, including extradition requests.
The simple and evident truth is that Putin’s Russia is a country where political rivals and vocal critics are often killed, and at least sometimes the order comes directly from the president’s office.
On several occasions, at least one of them embarrassingly public, Putin has acted like a person afflicted with kleptomania. In June 2005, while hosting a group of American businessmen in St. Petersburg, Putin pocketed the 124-diamond Super Bowl ring of New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft. He had asked to see it, tried it on, allegedly said, “I could kill someone with this,” then stuck it in his pocket and left the room abruptly.
pleonexia, the insatiable desire to have what rightfully belongs to others.
his continuing attempt to turn the country into a supersize model of the KGB, there can be no room for dissidents or even for independent actors. But then, independent actors are inconvenient in part because they refuse to accept the rules of the mafia.
By mid-2010, a thirty-four-year-old attorney named Alexey Navalny was drawing tens of thousands of daily hits on his blog, where, by combing government websites to find evidence of excess hidden in plain sight, he monitored the many outrages of an unaccountable bureaucracy.
