Read Online A Russian Diary by Anna Politkovskaya - Free Book Online Page A

Both men had been dead for twenty-four hours before the discovery. The circumstances in the two cases are almost identical: the victims are from the Caucasus, aged thirty to forty, and have dark hair. Their identities are unknown. The heads were found two-thirds of a mile apart.
    Such are the results of racist propaganda in the run-up to the parliamentary elections. Our people are very susceptible to fascist propaganda, and react promptly. In Moscow, Dmitry Rogozin's Rodina Party won 15 percent of the vote earlier this month.
    The Union of Right Forces and Yabloko have unveiled their new joint project: the United Democratic Council, an interparty body to which each party will nominate six members. At the announcement, not even party workers seemed to have much faith that the union would last. The general public seem totally uninterested in what has become of Yavlinsky, Nemtsov, and the Yabloko Party luminaries.
    Putin has held a meeting with the business elite, or rather there has been a meeting of the board of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry that the president attended.
    Putin favors the chamber over the RUIE, the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, which is considered the oligarchs’ trade union. It was from the RUIE that Anatoly Chubais spoke out in defense of Khodorkovsky shortly after his arrest. He didn't pull his punches, talking of an “escalation of the actions of the authorities and the law enforcement agencies in respect of Russian business.” He warned that the business community's confidence in the government had been undermined: “Russian business no longer trusts the current system of law enforcement or those running it.” This was a direct accusation by the oligarchs’ trade union that the forces under Putin's command were destabilizing society. Chubais called for Putin to adopt a “clear and unambiguous position.” These were unprecedentedly harsh words from business to the government.
    Putin's response was to tell them publicly to “cut out the hysterics” and to advise the government “not to get drawn into this discussion.” He ignored the substance of the oligarchs’ complaint and expressed his complete confidence in the law enforcement agencies. When in January Boris Gryzlov was appointed speaker of the Duma, Putin promoted Rashid Nurgaliev, one of the most odious militia bosses, to be minister of the interior. This may also have been a response to whisperings at that time about Putin's supposed weakness as a leader, an attempt to demonstrate the robustness of the regime.
    Putin's meeting with the Chamber of Commerce and Industry was much calmer, though. He sees the chamber as being in a different category from the RUIE. The president of the CCI, that wily old Soviet fox Yevgeny Primakov, read his speech and quoted Putin on five occasions, prefacing his words with “as Vladimir Vladimirovich has correctly remarked …” Primakov assured Putin that “an oligarch and a major entrepreneur are quite different things… The word ‘oligarch’ sounds pejorative. After all, what is an oligarch? Someone who gets rich through devious manipulation of, among other things, his tax bill, who may trip up his business comrades or make crude attempts to interfere in politics,corrupting officials, parties, deputies …” and so on. Primakov's entire speech was in the register of Soviet servility, and Putin clearly loved it.
    Then it was time for questions. Naturally, they asked whether there was to be a review of the results of privatization. Even if they are not the oligarchs’ trade union, the Yukos affair was on everybody's mind.
    Putin suddenly bawled like a market trader, or a prison guard, “There will be no review of privatization! The laws were complicated, muddled, but it was perfectly possible to observe them! There was nothing impossible about it, and those who wanted to, did! If five or ten people failed to observe them, that does not mean everybody failed to! Those who