Paul
Goble
Staunton, August 28 – The Anschluss
of Crimea and the murder of Boris Nemtsov were not continuations of the rules
of the game that had existed before, with the first following the 2008 Russian
actions in Georgia and the second that of murders like Galina Starovoitova and
Anna Politkovskaya, Vitaly Portnikov says.
Instead, on the sixth-month
anniversary of Nemtsov’s assassination, Portnikov argues that “the rules of the
game didn’t so much change as disappear,” just as happened in Soviet times when
Stalin murdered Sergey Kirov in 1934 to destroy the rules up to that time and open
the way to greater horrors (grani.ru/opinion/portnikov/m.243902.html).
Indeed, he suggests, it is important
to see the way in which the Crimean Anschluss and the Nemtsov murder reflect
this change in Russian realities, a change that threatens not only Russia’s
neighbors but also the Russian people and perhaps most directly the Russian
elite around Vladimir Putin.
Before Putin annexed Crimea,
Portnikov writes, “the Russian authorities, both under Yeltsin and under Putin,
never crossed the red lines which separated conditional respect for
international law from complete contempt for it.”
“Yes,” he continues, “they could
help preserve the separatist enclave in Transdniestria, while asserting that
they were for Moldova’s territorial integrity. Yes, they could even recognize
the fictional statehood of Abkhazia and South Osetia while asserting that they
support the right of peoples to self-determination and do not have claims on
Georgian territory.”
With the Crimean Anschluss, “everything
changed, and not only because Putin spat in the face of the entire rest of the
world but because the Russian president for the first time openly demonstrated
his willingness to annex to Russia the territory of the former Soviet Union.”
After that, “everything changed forever – Russia’s relations with the rest of
the world, its contacts with its neighbors and the future of the country
itself.”
The same thing was true of the
murder of Nemtsov, Portnikov continues. “Neither Starovoitova, nor Yushenkov
not Politkovsky was ever one of their own for the group of comrades who
privatized Russia after the collapse of the CPSU. But Nemtsov,” by his life and
career, “was.”
According to the commentator, “the
unwritten laws of the existence of the Russian nomenklatura specify that one
can defame, fine or even imprison [such people] but one cannot kill them.” And
that is why, Portnikov suggested, Nemtsov felt he could act in “relative
security” at least until the Crimean Anschluss.
After that happened, the Ukrainian
commentator points out, Nemtsov became “one of the first to speak about the
possibility of his own death because he understood that there were no more
rules of the game” after Putin’s seizure of the territory of a neighboring
country.
In reality, Portnikov argues, “this
is very similar to what was the case in the Soviet Union after the murder of
Kirov, only in the reverse order: first, [Stalin] began to shoot former members
of the Politburo, then began mass repressions and only after that the
occupation of the territories of other countries.”
The Soviet dictator “consciously
formed a regime in which no internal rules operated and in which each was a
slave to the attitude of the dictator or simply a victim of circumstances. And
Putin today is doing exactly the same thing, even though he doesn’t have a
tenth of the repressive resources Stalin did.”
And that has the truly frightening
consequence that “in the Russian future, there will be still fewer rules and
logic than there was in the Soviet past,” a trend that means that after the Crimean
Anschluss and the murder of Nemtsov, just about anything is possible. And that
in turn should frighten Putin’s entourage in the first instance: they are
likely to be the next victims.
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