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Hello all,
Anyway, the top news item lately has been the murder on November 20 of key liberal Duma member Galina Starovoitova. According to her aide, who survived, and to authorities, this was a professional murder. Two hired killers, using weapons which, shall I say, are not in the public domain, ambushed them in front of her home in St. Petersburg. The aide, Ruslan Linkov, was able to talk to doctors on Monday, but since he was shot in the head he may not be able to recall much. But, at least one hopeful sign has come out of this: Mikhail Fridman, owner of the Alfa group (very influential in Russian banking circles and hence in Russia), has offered a reward of $100,000 for information leading to the assassins' arrest. At least someone who's benefiting from the status quo is willing to give something back to help keep it going. Not that assassination is anything new in Russian circles. Banker Boris Berezovsky has claimed that Federal Security Bureau agents have been given his death warrant. Meanwhile, according to political commentator Andrei Piontkovsky, Berezovsky himself approached President Boris Yeltsin's chief bodyguard Alexander Korzhakov in 1994 with the idea of bumping off Berezovsky's rival Vladimir Gusinsky. But that may be precisely the problem: for example, Japan in the 1920s, effectively under control of the military, was in fact a government of assassination: generals would be assassinated on the orders of rival generals. The Japan of the 1930s and 1940s became a juggernaut. This is not simply a matter of post hoc ergo prompter hoc (after this therefore because of this); I would say that the political instability wrought by this had much to do with the subsequent aggression. Maybe the situation in Russia is comparable; maybe it's just a tempest in a samovar. I would say it's a matter of context: if the government otherwise gets its act together, political murders should be less frequent and also less effective in breaking down social order. The context is the thing. Such as the whole situation with regard to food aid in Russia. US Senate Agriculture Committee chair Richard Lugar (who years ago was chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee) recently got back from Russia, and he expressed the opinion that maybe Russia doesn't need food aid after all this winter. He is basing this upon the fact that many food producers are in fact exporting.
The copyright of the article Thanksgiving's Greetings in Russian Politics is owned by Jeffrey Deutsch. Permission to republish Thanksgiving's Greetings in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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