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> MASHA GESSEN!!!! Peter Lavelle's nemesis!
>
> The woman is a nut.-
Verso publishes books by nuts? Dead Again: The Russian Intelligentsia After Communism by Masha Gessen (Amazon.com has excerpts, http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/1859841473/ref=sib_rdr_next3_ex2/104-6064675-0735968?%5Fencoding=UTF8&p=S004&ns=1#reader-page ) http://www.untimely-thoughts.com/?art=793
Paranoiastan, n+1, number one, fall 2004, Masha Gessen
(heh, s/b n+1, Number One: Negation by n+1, Masha Gessen, Sam Lipsyte, Vladimir Sorokin, Benjamin Kunkel, Keith Gessen, Mark Greif, Dushko Petrovich, Joshua Glenn, Marco Roth~ Joshua Glenn isn't a nut. Occasional contributor to In These Times and The Baffler, no?)
Is this article for real? If it is, Gessen deserves our pity - she is a very ill person. Gessen has long taken top prize in a very special category of Russian journalism: “Lots of heat, no light.” Gessen is not paranoid; she just has limited powers of reason and can’t accept she simply doesn’t understand that she has no idea what she is talking about. Take for example a paragraph found in her crazed text:
“Go ahead. Call me paranoid. I challenge you to explain why one of the candidates in the March presidential election, a faceless bureaucrat named Ivan Rybkin, suddenly disappeared in February, only to show up four days later, babbling incoherently about being drugged and dragged off to Kiev. There were those who thought he’d had too much to drink and taken a long weekend. But then why did he drop out of the race and move to London? I think he was kidnapped by the FSB, which wanted him quiet the night after a bomb went off in the subway, killing about 40 people. Rybkin is connected to the people who have worked to publicize the theory that the FSB blew up the apartment buildings in 1999. He may have said the same thing about the subway explosion, so he had to be discredited, which was why his disappearance and blathering re-appearance were staged.”
Maybe Rybkin just went on a drinking binge (away from his wife and family). This seems plausible; actually it happens in Russia all the time. Gessen should consider giving up writing on Russia. I suggest she try her hand at 9-11 theories. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A while back, a couple of lbo'sters speculated (J. Barkley Rosser?)that the apt. bombings were a FSB provocation. I think that is far fetched
(Eric Margolis, which Portside of CCDS, the CPUSA split, reprinted recently on Darfur, http://www.bigeye.com/021502.htm , on the '99 apt. bombing. Re: Margolis on Darfur, my friend Chris Lowe who has a PhD in Africa Studies, sent a reply, http://people-link5.inch.com/pipermail/portside/Week-of-Mon-20040816/006379.html )
but, I've seen a book, "Blowing Up Russia: Terror From Within - Acts of Terror, Abductions & Contract Killings Organized by Russia's Federal Security Services, " by Yuri Felshtinsky, Alexander Litvinenko, alluded to by Margolis, alleging FSB involvement,
Margolis>...In, in late 1999, after the four bombings, FSB agents were caught red-handed planting a large bomb in the basement of an apartment building in the city of Ryazan. Local police were called and arrested the FSB agents - until they revealed their identity. After press reports, particularly from media owned by Berezovsky, the FSB lamely claimed they had been running a `security test' to check preparedness. The bags of `explosives' they were planting actually contained sugar, claimed FSB. However, the Ryazan police reported the bags contained `explosive substances.' The local police were overruled, the Russian press intimidated into silence, or compelled to toe the government line, and the matter was hushed up.
Now, a Russian historian and former KGB-FSB officer have written a book in which they claim the FSB - not Chechen - planted the bombs to justify a second Russian invasion of breakaway Chechnya. Recently, exiled Russian oligarch, Boris Berezovsky, a bitter foe of Putin who has long maintained close contacts with Chechen leaders, claims he will soon reveal evidence the FSB was indeed behind the bombings.
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/02/13/1076548219210.html?from=storyrhs&oneclick=true
> ...War in Chechnya, train bombings and conspiracy theories - it's
> politics as usual in a Russian election year. By Helen Womack.
It should be about as straightforward as a Russian presidential election gets. The opposition candidates are standing mainly for form's sake, and the popular incumbent, Vladimir Putin, looks set to win a landslide victory. Yet in the week after at least 39 people were killed by a bomb on the Moscow metro and a presidential candidate went temporarily missing, presumed kidnapped or murdered, conspiracy theories abound.
As it turns out, the candidate, Ivan Rybkin, appears to have simply been taking a short break in neighbouring Ukraine from the stress of campaigning. But his disappearance on February 6, along with the bomb blast on the same day, helped fuel the sort of paranoia that still drives political life in the former Soviet Union, despite more than a decade of supposed reform.
While the Government is blaming the bombing on Chechen terrorists, others have pointed the finger straight back at the Russian security forces. As one Muscovite wryly noted: "Our country produces the best black theatre in the world."
The unsettling truth is that no one, except the perpetrators, knows exactly who was behind the subway blast, or a string of other bombings in Russia over the past five years.
As always, insurgents from the rebel province of Chechnya, against whom Russia has been waging a prolonged campaign, are the prime suspects. Putin, a former KGB agent, blames Chechen terrorists, and the vast majority of Russians believe him. Moderate Chechen rebels admit they have always regarded Russian soldiers as fair game on the battlefield but deny they target civilians.
But a few Russian dissidents have dared to suggest that the Russian security services have been bombing their own people to scare them into opting for Putin, the strongman. "Who else but the FSB (Federal Security Service, successor to the KGB) has the resources to carry out the metro bombing?" asked Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB officer now in exile in London.
"Putin may be sure of re-election but his power is not yet absolute. The oligarchs are still not completely defeated. There is still something of a free press. There are dissidents. They (security services) need national paranoia so everyone shuts up."
Suspicions of dirty tricks by the FSB were first raised in 1999, when massive bombs, also blamed on the Chechens, destroyed four apartment blocks in Moscow and provincial cities, killing hundreds of people as they slept. Such was the public outrage that Putin, then prime minister, was able to launch a second war against Chechnya that propelled him into the Kremlin as successor to Boris Yeltsin.
However, a bizarre incident in Ryazan, 200 kilometres east of Moscow, in September 1999 made some Russians wonder whether the official version of the bombings should be taken at face value. Residents of a high-rise apartment block similar to the four that had already been destroyed saw a small group of people they described as ethnic Russians, not Chechens, carrying sacks into the basement of their building. The local police said the sacks contained explosives. It appeared the Ryazan flat-dwellers were to be the victims of the next bombing.
When the FSB turned up from Moscow, however, they said the sacks contained sugar and that the whole scare, which had involved the residents of the building being evacuated in the middle of the night, had been a "training exercise" to test the alertness of citizens.
Only recently have dissidents such as Litvinenko, whose book on the apartment block bombings has been banned in Russia, begun to speak up. Two men have been jailed for life for the roles they played in blowing up the blocks of flats, but those who ordered the explosions have not been identified.
Litvinenko has also accused the FSB of blowing up the metro train, packed with hundreds of peak-hour commuters, just as, he says, the FSB and KGB before it were responsible for 80 years of terrorism, going back to the earliest days of the Soviet Union.
Asked why the security services would need to do such a thing when Putin's popularity rating with the public was over 70 per cent, Litvinenko said Russia needed to elicit sympathy from the West and convince the world that it was co-operating in the US-led war against terrorism when really it was committing "genocide" in Chechnya.
Few commentators, however, believe that the FSB, with or without orders
from Putin, could possibly have carried out the metro bombing. Western diplomats say that even if, just conceivably, the security services were behind the explosions in 1999, they have no reason to terrorise metro passengers now, as the Kremlin leader is politically secure. On the contrary, with elections due in March, the last thing Putin needs is to remind the electorate of the continuing problem of Chechnya.
Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a critic of the Putin regime, says she believes the metro bombers were most probably Chechens "taking revenge for human rights abuses" that continue in the North Caucasian region, even though the war is supposed to have ended.
Even Salambek Maigov, former spokesman for moderate rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov, who might be expected to blame the Russian security services, says he believes neither the Kremlin nor the Chechen leadership is responsible for the metro bombing but rather some "third force" interested in destabilising Russia. One such third force might be Abu Walid, a new Saudi-born militant Chechen rebel commander, who is introducing the younger generation of Chechens to the idea of Islamic jihad, according to a report in The Moscow Times.
In the meantime, Putin's position seems unassailable. He is popular with many Russians who feel he has brought stability after the turbulence of the Yeltsin years. The economy is growing and living standards are beginning to rise.
Even Opposition candidates have been cautious in attacking him. Indeed, several are open supporters of the president and are standing only to give the illusion of choice in the election.
Among the genuine challengers is Rybkin, backed by exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who has also suggested that the FSB orchestrated the apartment block bombings. This helps explain why so many Russians assumed Rybkin had been assassinated or kidnapped when he went missing the same day that the bomb ripped through the subway.
Unfortunately for Rybkin, though, his political career appears unlikely to survive his transition from potential martyr to truant. His wife is also said to be very angry with him.
This leaves only the liberal Irina Khakamada to engage Putin in a real political fight. She has said she believes in the presumption of innocence and, in the absence of facts, she refuses to accuse anybody over the apartment block bombings and other acts of terrorism. But she says there is sufficient doubt to warrant an independent inquiry.
Political analysts doubt that the latest events will dent Putin's popularity. "Some will say we need to fight terrorism all the harder and demand even tougher measures," says Dmitry Trenin, a Moscow-based analyst
from the Carnegie Centre, a non-government US think tank.
"Others will point to the ineffectiveness of the special services and ask why they had no advance information (about the metro bomb). But on the whole, it won't affect (Putin's) rating."
-- Michael Pugliese, not Joseph Wanzala ;-)