Paul Goble
Staunton, Aug. 23 – One of the ways criminal leaders get away with what they do is not by stopping the illegal and immoral actions they have committed but by doing more and more of them so that all too many people forget about their earlier crimes because they are focused on their more recent ones.
Vladimir Putin epitomizes such leaders, and thus it is both useful and necessary to remember what he has done in the past even as one focuses on what he is doing now. Novaya gazeta provides a list of scholars the Kremlin leader has persecuted over the last 20 years, a list that continues to grow even as many of them languish behind bars or have been forced to leave.
Journalist Vera Chelishcheva provides a listing of those Russian scholars who have fallen victim to Putin’s decisions to declare them foreign agents or spies. They must not be forgotten, and below is a listing of Putin’s victims in this one small portion of Russian life (novayagazeta.eu/articles/2022/08/23/na-vsiakogo-mudretsa-naidetsia-dve-stati).
They include Vladimir Shurov, Yury Khorostov, Valentin Moiseyev, Anatoly Babkin, Valentin Danilov, Yevgeny Afasnasyev, Svyatoslav Bobyshev, Vladimir Lapugin, Vikot Kudyravtsev, Roman Kovalyev, Viktor Prozorov, Aleksey Temiryev, Valery Mitko, Anatoly Gubanov, Varlery Golubkin, Aleksey Vorobyev, Aleksandr Kuranov, Aleksandr Lukanin,Dmitry Kolker, Anatoly Maslov, and Aleksandr Shiplyuk.
The persecution of many of these sparked outrage in Russia and around the world, but with each new case, that outrage about earlier cases seems to ebb. That is what Putin and others like him count on. But these names and many others must never be forgotten and his actions against them must not be forgiven.
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