Surprise: Political Murders Continue in Russia
Late on the evening of April 16, 2004, a 30-year-old Russian attorney named Stanislav Markelov was attacked in the Moscow subway by a gang of five men who screamed “you asked for this!” as they brutally beat him unconscious. They stole his cell phone and various legal papers relating to his clients (including Anna Politkovskaya, the firebrand star reporter for the maverick Novaya Gazeta newspaper) from his briefcase, but left his wallet untouched. The police refused to accept his criminal complaint against the attackers, accusing him of faking his injuries. Markelov had graduated from law school just eight years before.
Some of the stolen papers related to Markelov’s lobbying efforts seeking the prosecution of OMON officer Sergei Lapin. OMON is like a combination of the FBI and SWAT, assuming their officers were paid $3/hour and their primary function was to eliminate political opposition to the president. Three years earlier, Lapin had been the subject of an article in Novaya Gazeta entitled “The Disappearances” and penned by Politkovskaya, an article which accused him of, among many other things, kidnapping and torturing 26-year-old Chechen Zelimkhan Murdalov in a Grozny prison in January 2001. Murdalov then disappeared while in police custody and his body has never been found.
He was not the first victim of torture by Russian police officers imported to Chechnya to “keep order.” In fact, as Politkovskaya began pressing Murdalov’s case it was revealed that dozens of young Chechens had been put to death in what some have called Lapin’s “death factory.”
The following year, as the authorities were forced by her coverage to institute criminal proceedings against Lapin, Politkovskaya began receiving death threats. Amazingly, though Lapin was dismissed from the ranks of OMON when the criminal charges were filed, he was released on his own recognizance pending trial after a finding that he was “not threatening” to public safety, and it was reported that he had been “reinstated as a police officer in the city of Nizhnevartovsk” and “awarded a medal ‘For Protecting Public Order,’ accompanied by a letter, signed by the Russian President.” The prosecution then became mired in red tape and essentially ground to halt. Outraged, Markelov began agitating to move the prosecution forward.
Um, bho, demand Putin stop being a thug? Putin *is* a communist isn’t he? why on earth would bho object to a communist thug? Did I enter a parallel universe where bho isn’t an ultra-left socialist/communist with delusions of grandure and a drive to get socialism/communism enacted here ASAP?
What ked5 said.
I’m beginning to find it a little worrisome that so many columnists/analysts are willing to confer logic and real world, adult, political perceptions to obama.
It’s completely laughable to think that anything he might say or suggest to Putin would bring forth any response except the sound of a Russian choking in laughter.
I agree with Ann141. Obama’s too busy getting tax cheats into his cabinet to notice anything trivial like murder, terrorist threats, etc.
This must be an example of “change and hope”. Whoopee!!!
Russian thugs?..Pat Tillman of the Cardinals was murdered by his own US troops all for the sh*t an giggles of seeing a white man kiss a black one at half-time….Munch on that dorito. “Here you go Mr and Mrs Tillman..see how it’s all “good”…Your outsanding boy, your once promising future is here in “sprit”…maybe..Now let’s us all have one big collective laugh!..Oh you don’t want to laugh? You want us to make your life hell then?” BS. Pathetic.
4. sean sarto:
Keep equivocating state assassinations with friendly fire. Excuse genocide because of economic jealousy. Denigrate freedom and rule of law as unfair. And silence your neighbor because his words might upset.
That’s not a recipe for a utopia Sean.
“Obama’s too busy getting tax cheats into his cabinet…..” Not to mention pushing “Pork” Futures to the limit while ramming a “SocioStimulus” welfare bill through Congress.
sean,
Take your medicine. The yellow pills should quiet the voices in your head.
With all due respect, Obambi is no match for Putin.
It is my view that the borders of Russia have to
be redrawn so that Siberia is a country, and that
it possess all the oil and natural gas (or at least a healthy majority) – or we see the likes of Kasparov and Nemtsov be placed in charge of the Russian portion of a new political entity that stretches from Armenia and Georgia in the east(at the very least), to Cyprus in the south to Estonia in the North and the Czech Republic to the West.
9. David W. Lincoln:It is my view that the borders of Russia have to
be redrawn so that Siberia is a country…
And how do you plan on accomplishing this?
The greater problem is the security men(silovki)
that Putin has introduced into the system. Even if he wanted to, he doesn’t control them, and they have a large part of the Russian economy. Read Brent Ghelfi’ Wolf tales, for ahyperviolent
take on the new Russia. The other problem, are the men on horseback, like General Shamanov, the butcher of Chechnya and Georgia, and General Nagovitsyn, of the Russian General Staff, the Russian version of General Ripper from the strangelove films. For a time, the drop in oil, has curtailed the plans of these
warlords in embryo. Ironically this new administration, by backing down on missile defense, and their equivocal stance on Georgia
during the campaign has likely emboldened them.
If they were facing the old Cold warrior, and his associate, the former neighbor of Russia, who they’ve already tagged the Akhanitsa, the
Huntress, they would a little more circumspect. So expect the curtain of freedom to fall not just in Moscow, but Tblisi, Kiev and Baku. Yet another bitter lesson we’ll have to learn.
Putin will challenge and test Obama, if for no other reason than for laughs with his uncooth vodka swilling pals.
10 e: My plan on accomplishing this is to let Kasparov and Nemtsov and the rest of Solidarity Russia know that they need their allies outside of Russia, and that their support inside Russia isn’t enough to bring about the needed changes. In other words, an either/or matter. Either Russia enters into a new polity where the polity exemplifies sobornost, or the Kremlin will have one less card to play to get its own way.
I still have the newspaper clipping of a Russian Orthodox Bishop, whose diocese borders Alaska, being stripped of his
office. For there are people outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg who conclude that Moscow and St. Petersburg do not
speak for them.
I don’t know what fantasies of breaking up Russia under “liberal” leadership “David W Lincoln” is peddling (talk about an endorsement – vote Kasparov Joe Ivan, and they’ll sell away your national sovereignty) but everyone who reads Pajamas Media should know who – or what – La Russophobe aka Kim Zigfeld is.
Kim Zigfeld most likely is a sock puppet for the Jamestown Foundation, a paper think tank set up in Washington D.C. by several CIA alumnus in the 1980s to host Soviet defectors and give them a job and a platform for fighting the Evil Empire with propaganda. That’s all well and good – I don’t make any excuses for the Soviets, I’m glad they’re history – but the problem is this think tank, zombie like, carries on, as if nothing has changed in the world since 1984, and that we still want to break up the Russian Federation in the same way that the USSR broke up. Because no matter how much they pose as liberals and democrats, that’s really the objective, to seize control over Russia’s natural resources and put them into presumably more competent hands, and to find ways to bypass Russia for access to oil and gas resources from Central Asia, even if it means doing business with Iran and an increasingly Islamist Turkey. Avoid Russia at all costs, even if it means getting in bed with the Islamist devil – that’s Z. Bzerzinski’s strategy outlined in The Grand Chessboard and highlighted when the old Pole takes credit for arming the Afghan mujahadeen beginning in 1979.
During the mid 1990s, for a time some in the West succeeded in these goals, in the sense that the oligarchs had Western partners like George Soros in acquiring the former Soviet industrial complexes for pennies on the dollar (or you guys think that money just dropped from the sky?). In return, these partners were rewarded handsomely with Russian oil, gas and metals sold to them by Khodorkovsky and others at WELL BELOW WORLD MARKET PRICES. Maybe you guys think it was a coincidence that global commodity prices collapsed in 1998, and then the ruble and Russian banking system (and nearly the Yeltsin government), but it wasn’t. All of these events were connected. The Russian government was too weak because it could not pay salaries and it could not do so because of massive tax evasion and capital flight, led by the same oligarchs like Boris Berezovsky who ruled the Kremlin roost and now in exile passionately proclaim their attachment to democracy (even as Berezovsky probably had Alexander Litvinenko poisoned to scupper the extradition case the Russians were building against him in London). However, the oligarchs miscalculated when they brought in Putin in 1998, thinking that he would be as easily manipulated as Yeltsin. They bet wrong, because Putin and his fellow KGB alumnis had been observing all of the oligarch rule with nationalist disgust waiting for their time to reassert Russia as a great power. In 2000 Putin immediately began a reassertion of state power even as he was blamed for the concentration of power in the presidency which Yeltsin himself, with the endorsement of Western advisors like Anders Aslund, assumed during the 90s when he shelled the Communist dominated parliament, passed emergency legislation, and in general kept the Duma as weak as possible. The idea that Putin destroyed Russian democracy by abolishing regional rigged elections for governorships that were bought and sold for vastly more money than Blagojevich ever dreamed about scamming is a joke.
Just ask yourself: why did the U.S. have hundreds of Marines, advisors, defense contractors and NGO bureaucrats in Georgia on the eve of the August 2008 war? Why did Congressman Dana Rohrbacher (R-CA) publically say that he saw intelligence showing that Georgia was preparing an offensive to retake South Ossetia months in advance? Why did Soros and others connected to various Western governments funnel so much money to NGOs during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine? Why do we insist on free markets except when it comes to Ukraine actually paying the same price Germans pay for the same Russian gas (in that case, poor Orange government is always a victim of Kremlin “energy imperialism”).
Anyway, get a clue people. The Cold War didn’t end in 1991, it just changed into a different sort of game. And this game can be dangerous, if you happen to be a civilian in South Ossetia who is getting shelled by Georgian forces trained by American Marines, or a Ukrainian who would prefer union with Russia to having your country dominated by a Western backed clique of oligarchs who represent a tiny minority of the Ukrainian population.
You know I imagine these types of excuses were around in 1920-1, when the Soviet Government took control of Georgia, using the South Ossetian excuse from it’s British allied Government, the same for Azerbaijan, where according to Reds, the likes of Zinoviev were not above appealing to Islamist sentiment to topple the regime. Putin is a Cossack
Nationalist, in keeping with the worst of the old czars, possibly Alexander 111, running a military dictatorship, supported by high oil prices. But the silovki, the fraternity of ex KGB and military run the country, not him.
If Russia’s economy continues to tank, Putin’s job is going to be at risk. The only reason he became popular was because he was good for the economy and was strong. A weak economy makes him look weaker. A weak man with an iron fist is just another tyrant.
Sure Narciso, Russia = Soviet Union. Keep peddling that party line as if the world hasn’t changed at all.
You know why Fannie and Freddie collapsed? The Stabilization Fund of the Russian Federation was their third largest paper holder, behind the Japanese and Chinese. The Democrat apparatchiks who ran Fannie/Freddie into the ground couldn’t grasp that foreigners could pull the plug on their little money making fiefdom…that all the connections and all the patronage they had created inside the Beltway didn’t matter. But why else would the feds have called them in and adruptly told their execs it was over, with no warning? Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac weren’t undone by the Republicans who never liked it, it was undone by foreigners who got nervous and wanted to make damn sure that the US government’s implicit backing of the agency debt was now explicit, otherwise Treasuries would be next to be dumped. And we can’t have an Obama hope and change trillion dollar deficit if that happens.
Does Kim Zigfeld know this? Does she care? Since “she” is a he, I doubt it.
Steve if we go back to Czar Paul and the same encroachments on Tblisi in 1799. Notice I didn’t say Communism, I called it “Cossack
Nationalism” or NeoCzarism, which is what Putin is attempting without a crown. Fannie Mae was horribly run, but I don’t think policy in Russia had a lot to do with it. The economic crisis and the concommitant drop in oil prices
has forestalled his ambitions, but not for long.
As I pointed out before, Putin is a symptom not the actual problem, but the silovki, the Russian
military industrial intelligence complex if you will.
Narciso, you missed my point entirely, which is that Kim Zigfeld, or the people who pay “her”, are simply vestigials leftover from the Cold War. Those “siloviki” you harp about, at least the majority, have found some useful work in the private sector (perhaps too many of them). But too many of the American and British Cold Warriors who built their think tanks, endowments, and policy positions to fight the Evil Empire linger on, like vampires. But like I said, the Kim Zigfelds, Frank Gaffneys, Wall Street Journal editorial boards, and others simply don’t have a clue how embedded Russia and Russian money now is in the global financial system and how there is simply no money for their continuing crusade, without bankrupting the U.S.
How can we fight a new Cold War with Russia when our own government is asking them for money? Do you understand why Hank Paulson was in Moscow three months before the Georgia War broke out? He was doing so to ask Kudrin to keep the Kremlin’s Stabilization Fund money in the U.S., and not to pull it out as the housing crisis built up. Meanwhile, one other arm of the U.S. government was fueling Saakashvili’s delusions of grandeur that he could wipe out a Russian client state in South Ossetia and that there would be no consequences, the Russians would simply stand aside, shocked and awed by “Operation Clear Field” and the sheer awesomeness of his tie-eating Columbia education. I think Saakashvili actually thought in the worst case the Marines who were training his boys would go out and fight the Russian Army for him. The left hand simply does not know or care what the right hand is doing, because the Anti-Russia lobby has embedded itself deeply into the State Department, some in the CIA, and other arms of the government. It’s their gravey train.
If you want to know how deep it goes, just ask yourself, why do the Wall Street Journal and Economist fail to ceaselessly advocate for regime change in China, as they do in Russia? Hint: it has something to do with China owning about fifteen times as much U.S. sovereign debt as Russia, and Wal-Mart shelves being stocked with goods from China rather than Russia.
All I want is to cut the crap and all the double standards and be honest. Kim Zigfeld is pathologically incapable of telling you the truth, especially when talking about real people who use their real names rather than hiding like cowards behind a psuedonym in pathetic attempts to “Google Bomb” select individuals who tell the truth about Russia. Well, now that formula has been reversed, and everyone who Googles La Russophobe or Kim Zigfeld gets a link to my little blog, La Russophobe Exposed, right underneath La Russophobe’s website. And so Kim is getting scared, because “her” act is being exposed for what it is — black PR for hire — and sooner or later we’ll find out who is behind the Darth Vader mask.
You’ll notice that Kim Zigfeld has never ONCE replied to anything I have written. I think that tells you all you need to know. This person is scared of me because I know who they are and who’s paying their bills.
Steve J. Nelson, are you capable of countering without insults those people who arrive at different conclusions than you?
When you have Russians who cross into Siberia being asked by people who live in Siberia, “how are things in Russia”,
there is a divide that exists between Russia and Siberia.
Also, you are putting too much freight on the cart that handles money. There is more to life, and frankly I have more
confidence in Nemtsov, Kasparov, Yushchenko and the Czech leader than the nonentity currently in the White House at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington.
I didn’t insult you David, I just hope you’re not another Kim Zigfeld sock puppet. And saying that you want Kasparov to rule Russia is like me saying that I hope Ron Paul is elected President and Alex Jones, who regularly appears on Russia Today TV (see how their propaganda mirrors ours? Find some marginal figure and pretend that they represent a huge opposition across the country…if anything, that’s an insult to Congressman Paul, who outfundraised and earned nearly as many votes in the GOP primaries nationwide as John McCain) becomes Secretary of the Treasury. And Timoshenko basically blamed Yuschenko for torpedoing a sensible gas deal with Gazprom in the hopes that the EU would ride to his rescue and again buy the “we’re poor victims of Russian energy imperialism” nonsense they spew when they don’t pay their bills on time. I’ll ask NATO to come to my rescue the next time I don’t pay the electric company and they turn out the lights.
It’s funny that you think I’m insulting you when I call Kim Zigfeld what they are when this person insults nearly every Russian alive as bootlicking scum and Russian tennis stars like Sharapova as sluts.
Frankly I conclude that the Borjomi declaration is a good starting point for a new eurasian polity.
For I don’t put as much emphasis as you do when it comes to money. For there is more to life, such as all the schools
of history that is found in “Jews, God & History”
When that is combined with a universal order, you wind up with change. Check “The Abolition of Man” by C.S. Lewis
Now I know that you’re not Kim Zigfeld in sock puppet disguise, since this person appears to be an atheist of some sort. Their hatred for the Russian Orthodox Church is palpable.
The point, Steve, is that Russia has reverted back to the era of the bad czars, Alexander 111,
Nicholas 11, et al. The silovki have privatized
the Okrana and the Third Section of the Chancellory; the predecessors to the Cheka and the KGB. The whole thing smells of Pobuststdenev and Ignatiev and Trepov, the organizers of the pogroms like Kishinev, the propagaters of the Protocols rather than Stolypin or Witte. That in itself is bad enough, but blocking air support from Manas in Kirgistan, cozing up to the Iranians, those are the big issues. Stop attacking Kim Zigfield and even David Lincoln and get some perspectives and what we face, and why it concerns many.
Whether Po-210 poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko or a shot to the back of the head, the tactics only vary – the strategy is the same. Kill his opponents.
You can’t demand anything of Putin (or his lap dog Medvedev). He is an ex-KGB thug, killer and international criminal. He should be dealt with as a criminal. He won’t respond to political pressure. He is an unrepentant murderer.
And so much for this stupid notion of a “thaw” in relations with Russia. You can’t “thaw” realtions with a criminal like him any more than you can invite a petty thief into the house. The petty thief will steal your TV. With Putin, the stakes are higher.
Steve J. Nelson: You are too good for this collection of half-wits, who owe their allegiance to corporfascism or Zionism.
narciso: Why is Iran an enemy? Because you can’t translate Farsi? Because your CIA backstabbed the US-loving leader and installed the bloodthirsty Shaw? Because the US goes around ferreting out World Bank loans with elaborate promises that don’t pay out, then demand 1/2 Iranian oil forever in return? Then try to start war when the 50% cut is threatened? You are just a cog for some banker, at most.
e.
Buddy, that’s the America I’ve seen…kill with a smile…”friendly fire”….”to steal, to cheat, to lie”.. just don’t get caught…slip someone a mickey…industrial espionage…etc….Check out how the Clinton’s were knockin’ off their competition…At least Russia ain’t so smarmy about it.
e
Also, I never said anythin’ about utopia…Step on a snake expect to get bit.
Steven Nelson. You misread me. Russia has two choices. Stay with Putin, Medvedyev and their crowd in a smaller country (for Siberia will be its own
country), or embrace more honourable human rights under Kasparov.