Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [161]
A friend of mine who lives in Moscow said, “For you it’s Putin, which is understandable because you work for Boris and live in the West. But I live in Moscow and Putin is my president. Not just a president, but someone who, rightly or wrongly, is adored and revered by most of the people. He restored our national pride and self-confidence. He is like the queen of England. If I imagined for a moment that he is the murderer, I couldn’t live in this country. So it simply must be Boris, regardless of what evidence you produce. Boris is supposed to be vile.”
My friend represents a better part of Russia, its conscientious class. He wants to believe it was Boris. The majority, I am sure, are the opposite: they want to believe it was Putin—and they are proud of him for it. Litvinenko, in their view, was a traitor, and the president got him. With polonium. Serves him right. That’s what vlast should be: awesome.
A remarkable case in point illustrates the depth of the self-delusion of the Russian educated class with regard to their vlast. Yegor Gaidar is the former prime minister who, along with Chubais, was the architect of the economic reforms in Russia early in Yeltsin’s presidency. Gaidar, an internationally respected figure, is presently a director of an economic think-tank in Moscow. He happened to be in Ireland at the time of Sasha’s death, attending a conference at the National University of Ireland in Maynooth. In what was perhaps the most bizarre, albeit underreported, twist of the Litvinenko affair, on the morning of November 24, Gaidar was poisoned too.
Here is how he described what happened to him in a December 7, 2006, letter to the Financial Times, entitled “How I was poisoned and why Russia’s political enemies were surely behind it.”
“After I crossed the threshold of the conference hall, I collapsed in the university hallway,” Gaidar wrote. “I can remember very little about the events of the following several hours. Those who tended to me as I lay on the floor found me bleeding from the nose, with blood and vomit flowing from my mouth. I was pale, unconscious. It appeared as though I was dying.”
After spending a night in an Irish hospital, Gaidar insisted on returning to Moscow, where he underwent a thorough checkup. His “doctor was unable to explain such large-scale and systemic changes in the body [by] illnesses known to medicine, nor any of their most exotic combinations.” Gaidar is sure that he was poisoned, and that he would have died had he collapsed fifteen minutes earlier, when he was alone in his hotel room.
“Who of the Russian political circle needed my death on the 24th of November 2006, in Dublin?” he wrote. “I rejected the idea of complicity of the Russian leadership almost immediately. After the death of Alexander Litvinenko on November 23 in London, another violent death of a famous Russian on the following day is the last thing that the Russian authorities would want…. Most likely that means that some obvious or hidden adversaries of the Russian authorities stand behind the scenes of this event, those who are interested in further radical deterioration of relations between Russia and the West.”
In his letter Gaidar stopped short of naming the “adversaries of the Russian authorities.” But later, several Russian Web sites published a facsimile of a letter sent by Gaidar to none other than George Soros, apparently in response to his get-well wishes. The “Dear George” fax was dated November 29, 2006. It named Boris Berezovsky as