-
- Russia's acting
President Vladimir Putin has substantially
strengthened the rights of
the secret services and granted them extensive
monitoring powers over
the media, including the Internet.
-
- At the beginning of January,
Putin put a law into effect
that grants eight different security
authorities direct access to all Internet
transactions. Beside the
domestic secret service FSB, other agencies given
access to Internet
monitoring include the tax police; the Interior Ministry;
the border
guard; the customs committee; the security agencies of the Kremlin,
the
president and parliament, as well as the foreign intelligence
agency.
-
- The FSB had already forced all Russian Internet Service
Providers (ISPs) to provide cable links to the secret service at their
own expense. This not only establishes unrestricted control over Internet
access, but also cuts off smaller ISPs that cannot pay the cost of the
hook-up to the FSB. The remaining large providers can be more easily
controlled,
not infrequently they belong to the financial oligarchs
that stand close
to the Kremlin anyway.
-
- Officially, Internet monitoring
is said to aid the fight
against widespread crime and corruption. The
electronic bugging system
carries the name "Sorm," the
Russian acronym for "Rapid
Investigation System. In reality it is
being used as a means of censorship.
This can clearly be seen from the
fate of a report dealing with corruption
accusations against Putin,
stemming from the time when he was the right
hand man of the St.
Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak. The report, which
was disseminated by
an Internet Service Provider called Lenta, disappeared
without trace
after a few hours.
-
- Television and newspapers are also being subjected to
intensified censorship. The private station NTV, whose reporting is
generally
patriotic and quite friendly towards the government, was
excluded from
all organised journeys for journalists to Chechnya, after
it dared to question
the official numbers of Russian soldiers killed.
Based on interviews with
employees in military hospitals and railway
officials, NTV concluded that
the actual number was about ten times
higher than officially admitted.
Pavel Borodin, a key figure in Kremlin
corruption scandals, who has since
become under-secretary for the Union
with White Russia, even threatened
to have NTV closed down.
-
- The journalist
Alexander Chinstein, who had accused Kremlin
financier Boris Berezovsky
on Moscow television station TV Zentr of secret
complicity with Chechen
separatist leaders, was visited afterwards by armed
militiamen wanting
to commit him to a psychiatric hospital. The pretext
was the claim that
Chinstein had acquired his driving licence without a
psychological
certificate.
-
- The strengthening of Kremlin control over the media was
also
accomplished by a decree by Putin placing the payment of state subsidies
for local newspapers under the control of the Press Ministry in Moscow.
Previously it was local government that had been responsible for it.
Officially,
this is supposed to end the power of provincial governors
over the press.
In fact, the papers are simply being placed at the
mercy of central government,
which can determine who will be supported
or not.
-
- Putin's efforts to bring the media into line are more
than a
tactical manoeuvre to secure his victory in the forthcoming presidential
election on March 26. Since the former secret service man stepped into
the political limelight, he has continually stressed that he regards his
most important function as the stabilisation of the state apparatus-the
police, army and secret services.
-
- "For Russians, a strong
state is not an anomaly
that must be eliminated," he wrote in an
article published at the
end of last year on the web site of the
Russian government. "Quite
the opposite, they regard it as a
source and guarantor of order, and as
an initiator and main driving
force of every change."
-
- Putin appeals to the authoritarian and chauvinist
traditions
that made Tsarist Russia a symbol of reaction throughout
Europe. In this,
he receives the support of those sections of the
Russian intelligentsia
who went into raptures about Gorbachev at the
end of the 1980s. This layer,
which enthused over neo-liberal economics
at the beginning of the 1990s,
lost not only their illusions in Western
capitalism with the financial
crash of 1998, but also the major part of
their fortunes. Now they rouse
themselves for Russian values and
greatness, and crowd around the new master
in the Kremlin, the
prospective election winner of March 26.
-
- The Moscow correspondent of the
German daily Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung, Kerstin Holm, described
this "eerie play"
as follows: "In Russia, a feverish
movement is collecting around the
desired successor to Yeltsin. Since
his election victory at the end of
March seems already decided,
politicians from across the entire spectrum"including
political
opponents of the past, even allegedly ideologically incompatible
communists, and stars of cultural life and the intelligentsia"are
hurrying to pay homage to the new ruler, so that they may one day stand
close to his throne."
-
-
- A modern
Fouché
-
- With Putin, a man has reached the pinnacle of the
Russian
state whose actions and thinking are marked in every regard by
the police
mentality of the professional informer. It brings to mind
Joseph Fouché,
who in the revolutionary France first served the
Jacobins as police chief,
then the Thermidorians, Napoleon and in the
end the Bourbons"with
the difference that Putin never came into
contact with the revolution.
-
- Putin operated for fifteen years as a foreign agent for
the Soviet secret service KGB. Between 1998 and 1999 he headed the FSB,
the KGB's successor. Today, he openly admits to this past with pride, even
though the KGB was responsible for the worst crimes in Soviet history and
murdered hundreds of thousands of the political opponents of Stalinism.
In his New Year speech, Putin promised to extend the power of the secret
services even further.
-
- The Russian journalist Dmitri Furman pointed out that
it is no coincidence that a former KGB man has become the saviour of the
criminal elite gathered around the Yeltsin family. Professional conditions
inside the KGB, he writes, called on its employees to possess abilities
that are also characteristic of the Mafia: The secret service occupied
itself with bugging, covert surveillance, intimidation, extortion, theft
and murder. The KGB developed its own values. The professionalism of an
agent concerned the question of whether a matter was carried out well or
badly, and this was more important than whether the matter itself was good
or bad.
-
- Putin's professional and political career is marked by
numerous
scandals, which have always remained in the dark and were never
completely cleared up. As a KGB agent in Germany, he recruited agents,
spied upon and blackmailed Western visitors to the Leipzig trade
fair.
-
- At
the beginning of the 1990s, he began his political
career in St.
Petersburg, and under Anatoly Sobchak rapidly ascended to
become his
right-hand man. Responsible for foreign trade matters, he maintained
close relations with Western enterprises and was by no means unselfish
in his actions. The head of the town council, Alexander Belyayev, accused
him of spying inside the foreign trade committee, gathering information
about companies that he then sold to foreign competitors. He was also
accused
of violating the privatisation laws in the sale of a five-star
hotel, and
of abusing his official position to conduct illegal trade.
Finally, in
order to avoid legal action for the theft of state
property, Putin's sponsor
Sobchak fled to Paris. Putin helped Sobchak
get away and then moved himself
to Moscow.
-
- Putin was also involved in
numerous scandals there. As
head of the FSB, he played a key role in
suppressing the corruption and
money laundering scandals around the
Yeltsin family and their financier
Boris Berezovsky. The FSB produced a
video showing the Attorney General
Yuri Skuratov, responsible for
conducting the investigation into the Yeltsin
scandal, with two
prostitutes. According to reports in the Russian press,
the house where
the incriminating video was made was also used personally
by
Putin.
-
- The
Chechnya war finally created the conditions under
which this modern
Fouché could ascend to the apex of government.
Here also, it
seems there was far more political planning and preparation
in play
than might appear at first sight.
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- In Moscow, rumours persist that
the bloody bombings of
Russian homes, which fundamentally changed the
climate in Russia overnight
and boosted the mood of support for the war
in the general population,
were committed by the FSB. Without providing
any proof, the government
made "Chechen terrorists"
responsible for the explosions and
thus justified the attack on
Chechnya.
-
- A recent interview by Sergei Stepachin, Putin's predecessor
as
Prime Minister, with the press agency Interfax, acknowledged the
suspicions
that the long hand of Russia had prepared the Chechnya war.
According to
Stepachin , President Yeltsin and the government had
already decided in
March last year"long before the invasion of
Chechen separatists into
Dagestan and the bombings in Russia"on a
military intervention.
-
- The invasion should have taken place in August. However,
only a "security zone" up to the river Terek was to be occupied
and individual Chechen separatist guerrilla camps taken out. An attack
on the capital Grozny and the conquest of all Chechnya were not
planned.
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- The German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung commented on
the
interview with the words: "Stepachin's utterances, rejected by
prominent military figures as untrue, are explosive. Some Russian and
international
observers suspect that Moscow regarded the military
campaign mainly as
a means of making the Kremlin popular again and to
facilitate the installation
of an acceptable successor to
Yeltsin."
-
- According to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the Chechen
assault
on Dagestan that had preceded Russia's attack on Chechnya is also
"placed in another light following Stepachin's interview: Possibly,
the rebels were trying to disturb Russian preparations to establish a new
front for their invasion. And in fact the Russian army only invaded
Chechnya
at the beginning of October, after weeks of fighting in
Dagestan."
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