Well, we made it through the doldrums of August. In an apparent attempt to inject some drama into this perennially languid month, a Russian journalist, Roman Trunov, tried to paint August in Russia as fraught with history-altering events. Four of his five examples occurred in the 1990s—admittedly a tumultuous time in that country. Two of them stand out:
August 19, 1991: Mikhail Gorbachev is ousted as President of the USSR and a short-lived State Emergency Committee is put in charge.
August 9, 1999: Boris Yeltsin appoints Vladimir Putin acting prime minister (the appointment is confirmed seven days later by the legislature); the significance of this becomes clearer later in the year, when Yeltsin resigns (on December 31) and Putin becomes the acting president.
Seeking support for his hypothesis, Trunov posed two questions to three Russian political scientists in early August 2007:
- Might something happen this August that will fundamentally change the direction of politics in Russia?
- Is it a historical law or merely a coincidence that many pivotal moments in Russian history have occurred in August?
Short answers:
- Unlikely.
- August is an slow month, politically and generally. Those who try to take advantage of it fail, by and large.
That said, August 2007 brought a pleasant surprise: the Prosecutor General of Russia, Yuri Chaika, announced that ten persons were arrested in connection with the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya and will soon be charged. (That number changed slightly a few days later.) Among those implicated are a Chechen crime boss and current or former employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) and the Federal Security Service (FSB), who allegedly tracked the journalist and provided other intelligence to whoever ordered and perpetrated the murder. In this regard, Chaika cast suspicion on “people and structures that aim to destabilize the situation in the country, change the constitutional order [and] create a crisis in Russia” (as quoted in the New York Times). Commentators assume Chaika is referring to exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky. Alexei Simonov of the Glasnost Defense Foundation said the staff of Novaya Gazeta (Politkovskaya’s newspaper) feared the authorities would try “to steer the case in the direction of London” and blame Politkovskaya’s killing on Berezovsky.
Simonov is apparently a bona fide home-grown gadfly, and I tip my hat to him. But am I the only person west of Pskov who does not find it implausible that Berezovsky was behind not only this murder but others as well? And who continues to believe it is not in Vladimir Putin’s political interest (and certainly not worth the risk) to bump off noisy opponents? Those who are suspicious of Putin will point to the participation of MVD and FSB personnel and say, “Aha!” But for anyone conversant in US history, the phrase “rogue elements” will not sound foreign. And the bottom line is, the Putin government is prosecuting these people. Maybe, just maybe, Putin’s hands are clean in this matter. Or is it probably?
Certain elements in the US have a lot to fear in the person of Vladimir Putin. But their handwringing over how he treats his own people strikes one as disingenuous. Their real worry is that Putin is starting to rebuild a Russian counterpoise to US power—that their dream of a unipolar world is being disturbed.
