In December of 2001, Thomas
Friedman took a trip to Russia, where he made two significant
observations: "sushi bars are opening all over (yes, from borscht to
Big Macs to California-Kremlin rolls in one decade!) and so many people
have cars now that traffic is permanently snarled."
Russia, Fredman announced, had finally gotten itself a leader worth
having in the transformative figure of Vladimir Putin. "He's not a
tougher Mikhail Gorbachev, or a more sober Boris Yeltsin," Friedman
explained then. "He is Russia's first Deng Xiaoping - Mao's pragmatic
successor who first told the Chinese that 'to get rich is glorious' and
put in place the modernizing reforms to do it."
If one was not convinced that Putin
is what Friedman said him to be, one could read the words that Putin
would himself write if Friedman were writing them for him, which is
exactly what Friedman did
That is Mr. Putin's
basic message to Russians: ''For a decade, we've tried every bad idea,
from default to devaluation to shock therapy. Now there's only one idea
left: passing real reform legislation so we can get real investment to
build a real modern economy. Because in this world, without a real
economic foundation, you're nothing. So we're going to focus now on the
only line that matters -- the line for money.''
Having expressed the Russian
president's views and intentions for him, Friedman is perhaps in the
best position to explain the significance of the fictional monologue he
had just presented: "This is Putinism: From Das Kapital to DOScapital."
The column concluded with the following exhortation: "So keep rootin' for Putin - and hope that he
makes it to the front of Russia's last line."
***
On New Years Eve 1999, Boris Yelstin suddenly resigned, thereby
elevating Vladimir Putin to the presidency of the Russian Federation.
That evening, Putin signed into
law his first decree, which protected Yeltsin and members of his family
from any and all corruption probes.
Earlier that year,
Yelstin had dismissed from his post the nation's most highly-placed
prosecutor, Yuri Skuratov, who himself had been investigating Yelstin
and others close to him regarding various allegations of corruption;
$600,000 had made it into the credit card accounts of the president's
two daughters, for instance, having been put there by a Swedish firm
which had previously won a lucrative government contract and afterwards
had its offices raided by Swedish police.
A few days after
the sacking, Russian state television ran a video clip of a man
resembling Skurativ in bed with a pair of young whores. The following
month, a press conference was held in which it was announced that the
post-KGB intelligence agency, the FSB, had run an expert analysis on
the tape and determined the man to indeed be the nation's former top
prosecutor; it was also alleged that the prostitutes had been provided
by leading figures of the Russian mafia. The press conference was
presided over by two men: Interior Minister Sergei Stepashin and FSB
chief Vladimir Putin.
In an article that appeared on June
6th of that same year, Moscow correspondent Jan Blomgren reported that
top Kremlin leaders were planning to carry out a series of bombings in
Moscow that would be attributed to Chechen terrorists.
On
August 9th, Putin was elevated to one of the three First Deputy Prime
Ministerships that existed under Yelstin, who let it be known that he
intended Putin to eventually succeed him. A week later, Putin was
elevated again, this time to the position of prime minister. Yevgeny
Primakov, the extraordinarily popular and seemingly incorruptible
former prime minister whom Yeltsin had fired from that position the
previous May, was widely seen as the favorite to win the upcoming
presidential election. In contrast, a major poll showed Putin receiving
about two percent of the vote.
On September 9th, an
explosion originating from the ground floor of an apartment building in
Moscow killed 94 people and injured several hundred others. An
anonymous call to thee Russian news agency Interfax characterized the
strike as "our response to air strikes against peaceful villages in
Chechnya and Dagestan;" the latter republic had been invaded by a small
force of Islamist fighters led by Chechen militant and political figure
Shamil Basayev during the previous month, prompting a successful
military response by Russian forces. The apartment bombing was
immediately attributed to Chechen terrorists.
On September
13th, another Moscow apartment was hit by a similar bomb, resulting in
even
greater casualties than the first. Gennadiy Seleznyov, speaker of the
Duma, interrupted the legislative body's proceedings to announce that
he had just been informed of another massive explosion that had
destroyed a portion of an apartment building in Volgodonsk. No such
attack had actually occurred.
On September 16th, another massive explosion destroyed a portion of an apartment building in Volgodonsk.
On September 22nd, residents of an apartment building in Ryazan called
local police after noticing suspicious activity by three individuals
who had arrived in a car with a partly-concealed license plate. A bomb
squad discovered and diffused an explosive device which their sniffing
equipment identified as including hexagen, the same rare explosive used
in the previous blasts. The surrounding area was evacuated for the
evening; agents of the FSB arrived to pick up the explosives, which
were packed into three large sugar sacks. On the following morning,
government spokespersons announced that the Ryazan police had
successfully prevented a terrorist attack.
Later in the day,
police located the car, which had Moscow plates. Meanwhile, a
long-distance telephone operator contacted police after overrhearing a
conversation in which the caller reported that local cops were sweeping
the city; the voice on the other line provided the following advice:
"Split up and each of you make your own way out." The number that had
been called, it was discovered, was to the FSB offices in Moscow.
The three suspects were found and arrested later that same day. All
three of them were in possession of cards indicating their status as
employees of the FSB, and all were soon released on orders from Moscow.
The FSB announced that the foiled attack had in fact merely been a test
conducted in order to determine the readiness of local investigators
and congratulated the Ryazan police force for having passed with flying
colors. Spokespersons for that agency claimed that the bags, now in FSB
possession, had in fact been filled only with sugar and dismissed the
spot check indicating the presence of hexagen as an equipment
malfunction.
On October 1st, Putin announced that
Russian forces stationed in and around Dagestan had entered into
Chechnya in an attempt to establish a buffer zone north of the Terek
River by which to prevent further terrorist attacks originating from
terrorists based in that country. As Russian attention came to focus
more on the perceived military triumphs that would follow, and as Putin
came to be most closely associated with those triumphs, the prime
minister's popularity skyrocketed. Parliamentary elections in December
saw major gains for those parties with whom Putin had publicly
associated himself.
A few days after Putin's sudden elevation, the U.K.-based newspaper The Independent published
excerpts from an interview with Sergei Stepashin in which the former
interior minister and one-time prime minister - the same fellow who had
presided over the sex tape press conference with Putin back in April -
revealed that the plan to invade Chechnya "had been worked out in
March" by key Kremlin figures including himself.
After
easily winning the March 2000 presidential election, Putin set to work
reorganizing Russia's various institutions. He proposed that the
Federal Council be
"reformed" in order to provide himself with direct control of it, a
move he described as being necessary due to widespread corruption
within that governing body. In May of 2000, he successfully gained
greater control over the nation's semi-autonomous state-level entities
by dividing them into seven regional jurisdictions, each presided over
in turn by one of his own appointees. By the end of the year, he had
also managed to gain
effective control over all three national television networks.
In December of 2001, Thomas Friedman travelled to Moscow and reported
back that sushi restaurants had sprung up across the city and that more
people seemed to own cars these days. He ascribed this economic
resurgence to "Putinism."
Yes, please send me the lists for your kiddoes. (And Barrett, too, Karen) My boys have not made any lists so .maybe just giftcards for them? Borders is always good. And/Or gc to Whole Foods because there is one near Tulane campus. They always need food!
Kay Fulton
214.692.5306 Home
214.538.9974 Mobile
From: Kris Marsh [mailto:marshnks@yahoo.com] Sent: Monday, November 30, 2009 7:10 PM To: Betty Lancaster; Kay Fulton; Karen Lancaster Subject: lists
Did you want Christmas lists from my two this year? Gillian has one that she keeps promising to send me and Will has mentioned that there are some CDs he is wanting.