September 26, 2007 (the date of publication in Russian)
Konstantin Cheremnykh
MYSTERIES OF KARELIAN WOODS
Champion Kasparov exposes Putin's clandestine combination
Novaya Gazeta, the central organ of Russia's community of human rights advocates, well corresponding in its design and style with Lenin's "partisan principle of literature", once had a column entitled "The Weekly Rating of Lies". Unfortunately, The Wall Street Journal, a scores more renowned and influential organ of the global financial community, its very name supposed to eponimize preciseness and reliability required by international business, does not have a rubric of this sort.
In his last article date September 20, WSJ's political observer Harry Kasparov, in his other jobs a politician and a chessplayer, managed to mount an unprecedented number of factual lapses one upon another. In his effort to horrify the Western reader with a monstrous image of "Russia Incorporated", the author offered an original explanation for Vladimir Putin's choice of Victor A. Zubkov for the post of Prime Minister of Russia. It was earlier supposed that Mr. Putin appreciated Mr. Zubkov's work in tax bodies and in the sphere of financial supervision, in his latest capacity of Chairman of the Federal Financial Monitoring Service. Behind those trees, Mr. Kasparov discovered a primeval forest of the Karelian Peninsula (Leningrad Region's north), where a covert economic facility of terrible importance is being conveniently concealed from the world community, emerging today from primordial wilderness as a team of the whole economy's shadowy shareholders.
A dozen cottages of a not quite monumental architecture, one of them once belonging to Vladimir Putin (catching fire in 1996 and completely perishing because of being wooden), was puffed up by the author into a "joint-owned company, involved in projects of real estate and development" named Ozero (Lake). Could Mr. Kasparov's courageous agents from his United Civil Front party penetrate into this secretive domain of the Russian power and discover a hundred chthonian storeys under each of the wooden bungalows? Did Mr. Zubkov inhabit one of those undersurface facilities, thus elevating to a "senior shareholder" of the "joint-owned company"?
One more invisible owner of a sophisticated bungalow, discovered by Mr. Kasparov by means of some special optical device, appeared to be [Gennady] Timchenko, chair of Gunvor Trading Ltd. In 2004, Kompania magazine published a photo of Mr. Timchenko's country house, really overlooking a picturesque lake. That was, however, the Geneva Lake. Mr. Zubkov could with to be chairing the CPSU Committee of the relevant canton, but Mikhail Gorbachov never entrusted him such duties, while during years of Mr. Zubkov's service in Moscow, this second job would be too distant to be convenient.
Could the Komsomolskoye Lake on the Karelian Peninsula and the Geneva Lake in Switzerland be connected with a secret underground conduit? You shouldn't wonder if a map of the clandestine moneypipe surfaces in WSJ's next issue. The renowned organ of the world's financial community does not bother to check even quite official government information.
In particular, the recently established Russian Corporation of Nanotechnologies (RCN) is actually chaired by Leonid Melamed, former president of Rosenergoatom Concern, and not by [Academician Mikhail] Kovalchuk, as Mr. Kasparov reports. A person named Kovalchuk really owned one of the bungalows in one of several hundred "dacha cooperatives" of the Karelian Peninsula back in 1990s. However, this Kovalchuk was not the current vice president of RCN but his younger brother.
One more person, highlighted in Mr. Kasparov's investigative writing, was really a senior member of the above mentioned "dacha cooperative" of a dozen bungalows, as after all, even a tiny company is supposed to have a director. However, this person, Vladimir A. Smirnov, resigned from his latest post of director of Russian Nuclear Agency's Techsnabexport Concern in August, and therefore isn't able, even in his dreams, to "control nuclear deals with Iran" ascribed to him by Mr. Kasparov. The chessplayer's close friends from Iran's democratic opposition (such as the son of outstanding democrat Shah Pehlevi), may sigh with relief.
"The parish is as good as the priest", says an old Russian proverb. The opposite is true as well. If Wall Street Journal publishes such kind of poor stuff on one page, should the reader rely upon the rest? As we know from recent scandalous reports from America's financial circles, window-dressing takes place not only in Russia but, horribly, also in the heart of the global finances. In some cases, renowned companies were exposed of publishing fake reports of incomes, reaching dozens of millions – particularly Enron, which also robbed its own pensioners. In case Mr. Zubkov, in his capacity of director of a Soviet agricultural farm, allowed himself such a fakery (in USSR known as "pripiska"), he would never make a career even in the Communist Party organization of the Priozersk District of Leningrad Region.
Ostap Bender, the main character of the famous early Soviet satirical novel, The Twelve Chairs (1926), was a truly outstanding swindler. He even sometimes styled himself as a chessplayer, as well as a political activist of a non-existing pro-Monarchy movement of popular resistance. However, even this fabulous personality, in the imagination of himself or the novel's authors Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov, did not dare to declare himself leader of a "united front" – probably from fear of a sound beating from somebody really returning from the front of the Russian Civil War.
In today's monstrous reality of a totalitarian Russia, secretly steered from remote Karelian wilderness, even a picayune liar may be elected not even director of a cottage-owning company but leader of the whole courageous Russian opposition. Days after WSJ published the horrible story, its author was chosen by the truth-seeking community of the Russian opposition as its favored candidate for Russian Presidency – to a great misfortune for Mikhail Kasyanov, former Russia's Prime Minister, whose latest political activities deprived him of a much more voluminous cottage than Putin's fabulous dacha, and granted him a nickname of "Chairman Pound", one more character of The Twelve Chairs novel.
Mr. Kasyanov has to confess of a great mistake in the choice of his career. He should not have purchased (or ordered) any dacha. He should not have spent years in a ministerial chair, blushing before the London Club for Yeltsin's foreign debt. Instead, he should just be the first of CPSU functionaries to pave the path to Washington back in 1989, and reserve himself a modest job of an observer in The Wall Street Journal. In this case, he would today acquire a (doubtful) honor of "The Best Non-EU Citizen" from European Voice paper, along with all of the twelve chairs (battered in internecine squabble) in the board of the oppositionist "Other Russia" Movement – to which, however, not only the patrons from the US State Department but even the most ingenious of Enron's bookkeepers would never attribute the term "Incorporated".
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