Publication time: 7 November 2011, 12:17
“In Russia, the FSB, a KGB’s avatar, is present everywhere: in power structures and in large enterprises. This is a logical consequence of the historical development.
We must remember that Vladimir Putin was the patron of this repressive secret army before coming to power. Under his rule, fundamental political and economic decisions are made with or by the hierarchs who came from the secret services.
This is the subject of a detailed conversation with an expert Irina Borogan, whose analysis is confirmed by one of the country’s main sociologist Lev Gudkov (both are secret FSB officers, as is to be expected in a mafia state- KC):
“The political police was an instrumental on the service of the regime, now it has become the regime itself”.
In addition, a concluding article from The American Interest explains why Russia of the XXI century is a kind of a private feudal state, nothing more than a “dictatorship of mediocrity”, where key posts are occupied by “corrupt scum thieves”.
It is to be recalled that a British political weekly New Statesment has recently reported about Russia, based on the evidence of a Guardianjournalist, Luke Harding, who was expelled from Moscow by the terrorist FSB gang in May 2011. The magazine says:
“David Clark, chair of the Russia Foundation, finds Mafia State to be “an absorbing account of [Harding’s] four years spent as head of the Guardian’s Moscow bureau … that ended abruptly with his expulsion from the country”.
“Luke Harding, became a victim of Zersetzung (“demoralization” – KC) in 2009 when he started writing about the dark side of Vladimir Putin’s regime in Russia” writes Iain Macwhirter in the Herald.
“The FSB… assumed, as it did with most foreign journalists, that Harding was a spy … it bugged and followed him; more unusually, its agents repeatedly broke into his home, playing dark practical jokes on him and his family”, explains AD Miller in the Guardian.
Macwhirter reports that to understand modern Russia, [Harding] says, you don’t need Marx or Tolstoy – just Mario Puzo’s The Godfather.”
Clark writes that Harding gives us “a sense of what it is like to live that reality [of Putin’s Russia] everyday.
The author’s descriptive powers and his insights into the mentality and techniques of Putinism are enough to make Mafia State an essential read.” Miller reports that Harding’s “personal story is threaded around a thematic account of the last few years of Russian history [such as] the ongoing brutality in Chechnya and the rising … [he] reports all this colorfully”.
Department of Monitoring
Kavkaz Center
