Russia Sings the Same Old Song

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Friday, Feb. 15, 2002
As the enemy of the people, Lev Trotski proved indispensable to the regime he had helped install. Back in 1929, Stalin forcibly exiled the erstwhile Bolshevik Number 2 from the Soviet Union, and turned him into the epitome of all the horror that threatened the Soviet Motherland, the bogeyman that the people must rally around the Vozhd to oppose. Moscow show trials were built on alleged ties of the "criminal trotskiite underground" to their exiled principal. All the ills and failures of the Soviet society were explained by the plotting of "trotskiite wreckers." Even after Stalin's agent murdered Trotski with an ice-pick in Mexico in August 1940, his name was invoked to justify terror until Stalin's death in March 1953, and remained a curse till the late 1980s.

Putin has his enemy abroad in Boris Berezovski, a key wheeler and dealer of the Yeltsin epoch. Berezovski did not spare his political and financial resources to make Putin President. Once firmly installed, though, Putin made it clear that Berezovski's resources were welcome, while Berezovski himself was not. All the ills and failures of the post-Soviet society are now ascribed to Berezovski and his fellow oligarchs, like Vladimir Gusinski, whose Media-Most holding company was destroyed by the Kremlin, and who settled in Spain, once Moscow's attempts to have him extradited failed. Berezovski's associates are either in prison — like Nikolai Glushkov, once Deputy General Manager of Aeroflot — or on the wanted list, like Badri Patarkatsishvili, Berezovski's right hand man. The embittered population, fleeced during the reform decade, is receptive to the propaganda line of rallying around Putin against the miscreant who has sold out their country.

Self-exiled to London, Berezovski is now blowing the whistle on the new Russian authoritarianism he himself has helped launch. He accuses Russian law enforcers of complicity in Moscow apartment bombings of 1999 that claimed 230 victims, and paved the way both to the new Chechen war and the Putin presidency. For their part, law enforcers accuse Berezovski — once Deputy Secretary of Russia's Security Council, now a wanted person — of financing the Chechen terrorists. They watch Berezovski as closely as Stalin did Trotski. Said General Victor Prokopov of the Interior Ministry: "We know what he has for breakfast, and where he shops."

However, new times make new songs, as they say in Russia. Unlike Trotski in the 1930s, Berezovski freely communicates with his friends and foes in Russia on live TV link-ups, and in the printed media, and finances a new political opposition. Putin can hardly afford to have Berezovski ice-picked, but he hammers away at Berezovski's business. Berezovski has lost ORT and TV-6 national television stations, and his printed media is slowly coming under siege. It seems vital to Putin to have Berezovski shut up.

Karl Marx, once revered in the Soviet Union as the founder of scientific communism and now referred to in Russia as "a German scholar", said that history first happens as tragedy and repeats itself as farce. Indeed, the Putin-Berezovski act lampoons the Stalin-Trotski one. Except the lampoon is disturbing rather than amusing. Two years of Putin Presidency has been mostly spent fighting Gusinski and Berezovski, while one-third of Russians live below the official poverty level and the country is being torn by the endless and bloody Chechen war. Freedoms of speech and opposition are becoming collateral damage to the struggle between the President and the oligarch. And once the specter of the "enemy of the people" looms over Russia again, once people get imprisoned, and businesses closed for political expediency rather than justice, even the new time might start repeating old songs.