From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng  (Original Message)    Sent: 2/24/2006 2:57 AM


Metropolitan Books

Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy
By Anna Politkovskaya
Translated by Arch Tait
Metropolitan Books
288 Pages. $25
February 22 - March 2, 2006

 


Democracy at Stake

Anna Politkovskaya may be known for her gutsy reporting, but in her book she calls herself just another former Soviet citizen who dreads returning to a totalitarian regime.

By Peter Baker
Published: February 17, 2006

Irina Fadeeva had been through enough already. She had sat in that dreadful theater for nearly three days as Chechen terrorists hovered menacingly nearby. Her 15-year-old son had been among those left dead after Russian commandos pumped the building with a mystery gas and stormed inside. When his body finally turned up in a morgue, she had found a crevice in his head, what she believed was a bullet wound.

Yet it was only when Fadeeva turned to journalists to help find the answers she wasn't getting from the authorities that investigators began to pay her attention. Perhaps her tall, healthy son had not succumbed to the gas, but instead had been shot to death by the very soldiers sent to save him, she suggested. The authorities would not say and had no intention of allowing her to even ask.

"Either you immediately write a statement to the effect that you told those journalists nothing and that they thought everything up themselves, whereupon we shall bring criminal charges against them for slandering the intelligence services," one investigator told her, "or we dig up your son's grave without your consent and carry out a postmortem examination."

Fadeeva's experiences during and after the hostage crisis in the Dubrovka theater in October 2002 have been recounted before, but never so compellingly as in Anna Politkovskaya's new book, "Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy." Once again, Politkovskaya has given the West a volume that demands attention. In her anguished voice, "Putin's Russia" is a cri de coeur for a society hardened to the suffering of its own people, a democracy in name only that has been warped beyond recognition by a coterie of mobsters, chinovniki, New Russians and, as Politkovskaya tells the tale, by the tsar himself, Vladimir Putin.

For all the desire in Washington, London, Paris and Berlin to view Putin's Russia through rose-colored glasses, Politkovskaya keeps tearing off the shades and forcing readers to confront the reality she sees. Depressing and discouraging, her latest book nonetheless is a must-read for anyone who does not live in Russia but hopes to get beyond the surface understanding of it that prevails in the West. Perhaps "Putin's Russia" will be assigned reading for the Western leaders scheduled to come to St. Petersburg in July for the first G8 summit hosted by Russia.

Sadly and tellingly, however, it will not be available to Russians themselves, since no Russian publisher has dared to print and sell it inside the country. The same goes for Politkovskaya's two previous volumes, "A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya" and "A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya," and so, while the author is also famous at home for her crusading columns in Novaya Gazeta, she has become perhaps the best-known Russian journalist abroad, the conscience of Moscow, the toast of award-givers in Europe and the United States.

In this third book, Politkovskaya ventures beyond Chechnya to train her critical gaze on the rest of Russia, where she finds much of the same moral degradation that pervaded the Caucasus. She introduces readers to Tanya, a swimming-in-money businesswoman who dumps her worthless husband, takes young lovers and finally gets herself elected to the Moscow City Duma so she can avoid at least one layer of the bribery required to do business in today's Russia. There is Dikiy, a proud submarine commander in the Far East who scrounges food and brings home his rations to split with his family because Moscow has allowed a once-mighty military to deteriorate. And there is a long examination of the Uralmash mafia shenanigans in Yekaterinburg and the bought-and-paid-for politicians and judges who let corrupt businessmen get away, literally, with murder.

Xenia Bondareva

'It is we who are responsible for Putin's policies, we first and foremost, not Putin,' Anna Politkovskaya writes.
    

Still, for Politkovskaya, it always comes back to Chechnya. "We seem to have become very primitive in the last few years, even rather ignoble," she writes. "The change in moral values is increasingly noticeable as the war in the Caucasus continues and broken taboos increasingly become familiar facts of life. Killing? Happens every day. Robbery? What of it? Looting? Perfectly legal in a war. It is not only the courts that fail to condemn crimes, but society as well. What was regarded in the past with repugnance is now simply accepted."

Putin is not so much a character in this account as an offstage progenitor of national cynicism. He is, in her rendering, "vindictive" with a "narrow, provincial" outlook, and full of "self-importance." While "he is not a born tyrant and despot," she says, Putin is a product of his life in the KGB. She even titles a chapter "Akaky Akakievich Putin II," a reference to the lowly bureaucrat in Nikolai Gogol's "The Overcoat" who blows his savings on a fancy coat in order to transform himself into an important personage.

"I have wondered a great deal about why I am so intolerant of Putin," Politkovskaya writes. "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 forty-five-year-old Muscovite who observed the Soviet Union at its most disgraceful in the 1970s and 1980s. I really don't want to find myself back there again."

At the same time, Politkovskaya recognizes that Putin's hold over Russia is hardly unwelcome, and expresses equal frustration with the voters who returned him to office and continue to support him to this day. "It is we who are responsible for Putin's policies, we first and foremost, not Putin. The fact that our reactions to him and his cynical manipulation of Russia have been confined to gossiping in the kitchen has enabled him to do all the things he had done in the past four years. Society has shown limitless apathy, and this is what has given Putin the indulgence he requires."

Politkovskaya does not offer sophisticated analysis of the geopolitical implications of Putin's Russia. She is the first to admit she is no political analyst. Instead, she is a witness, a chronicler of tales that give voice to the everyday people who find themselves part of a society weighed down by corruption and callousness.

Is there another side to the Russia story? Sure. In many ways, Russia is a dynamic place of growing opportunities and ever-improving standards of living. A genuine middle class appears to be emerging from the wreckage of the 1990s. The investment reports sent to Western business people are filled with glossy pictures of new shopping malls, robust oil wells and piles of money to be made. It is easy for expatriates or Russians with money to live in Russia without facing the uglier side. Politkovskaya does not want to make it easy.

Peter Baker was Moscow co-bureau chief for The Washington Post from January 2001 to November 2004 and, with his wife, Susan Glasser, wrote "Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin's Russia and the End of Revolution," published last year by Scribner.
http://context.themoscowtimes.com/story/166090/