Then, 14 months ago, Nemtsov was assassinated,
execution-style, steps from the Kremlin Wall, in what is probably the most
closely monitored security area in the world. Putin promptly slinked from view
and remained holed up for a couple of weeks. Meanwhile, even an incomplete –
and rapidly quashed – investigation, along with circumstantial evidence,
strongly suggested that Nemtsov’s murder was organized by Putin’s personal
bodyguard Viktor Zolotov and carried out by officers of Chechen leader Ramzan
Kadyrov’s private army. There can be little doubt that Nemtsov’s murder was
personally ordered by Russia’s president.
Why?
А few months before he was killed, Nemtsov described Putin as
“f-cking loopy, completely f-cking loopy.” The video went viral on the
Internet.
There was a comic attempt to charge Nemtsov under an article
that prohibits insulting government officials, complete with a linguistic
review carried out by language experts for the Investigative Committee, which
gained the video wider publicity and made people laugh all the harder.
A puerile joke from the early 1960s helps explain Nemtsov’s
murder. A drunk is stumbling around
Moscow, shouting at the top of his voice: “Khrushchev is an idiot!” He’s
arrested and sentenced to fifteen days of detention for disorderly conduct and
ten years of hard labor for revealing a state secret.
And now, the latest revelations from the Panama Papers
published by journalists’ group OCCRP – notably, detailing the link between two
Sergeis, the late Hermitage Capital Management lawyer Sergei Magnitsky and
Vladimir Putin’s childhood friend cellist Sergei Roldugin – provided a
confirmation of Nemtsov’s informal diagnosis. Indeed, the man running the
world’s second biggest nuclear power is indeed insane – probably in a very real
clinical sense.
George W. Bush famously looked into Putin’s eyes, took the
measure of the man’s soul and came away reassured. The insights into Putin’s
soul provided by the Panama Papers are anything but reassuring. We should be
very afraid.
What OCCRP showed – once
more circumstantially, but extremely convincingly – was that a portion of the
money stolen from the Russian government by a group of middle-level tax
officials using Heritage-owned companies ended up in an offshore account
nominally held by Roldugin but belonging to Putin. As is well-known, Magnitsky
was jailed after uncovering the scheme. A young man of 37, he was effectively
killed in pretrial detention in 2009.
So far there is nothing crazy about it, just sleazy. Many a
dictator stashes his ill-gotten gains abroad, in secret bank accounts around
the world. Putin’s greed and obsession with wealth are legendary even in his
inner circle comprised of thieves who do not seem to be able to stop stealing
even after amassing mind-boggling fortunes. This is still more or less normal –
even if a “Great Dictator” kind of normal.
What makes the Magnitsky case insane is what followed. A sane
dictator would have thrown the minor crooks under the bus and declared the
whole episode a milestone in combatting corruption. Putin has treated his
inconvenient associates like that before, for instance jailing Vladimir
Kumarin, the leader of the Tambov criminal gang in St. Petersburg with whom he
had worked closely in the 1990s.
Instead, Putin took the case personally. Not only was everyone
involved in the scheme, the subsequent cover-up and Magnitsky’s judicial murder
let off scot-free and allowed to enjoy their ill-gotten gains, but they
received promotions in their day jobs. When Hermitage founder BIll Browder –
who had been turned by this case from an enthusiastic Putin advocate into an
implacable and resourceful enemy – succeeded in getting US Congress to pass the
Magnitsky Act, imposing sanctions on people involved in the lawyer’s death,
Putin countered with the notorious Dima Yakovlev law, banning US adoption of
Russian children. Promptly dubbed “scoundrels’ law”, it will live in infamy as
a milestone of state terrorism, since what we have here is the use of handicapped
orphans as hostages by a government of thieves and murderers.
Putin’s irrational behavior continued, as the lawyer was
posthumously put on trial in 2013. In general, the Magnitsky Act was a point at
which Putin’s paranoid obsession with the United States and its putative
intention to break up Russia probably started.
There is more than a whiff of schizophrenia about all of
Putin’s policies. He is systematically destroying Russia’s institutions,
turning them into fiefdoms for unscrupulous bureaucrats and criminal gangs –
thus making sure that the country will fall into complete ruin after his
departure, rerunning the early 17th
century Time of Troubles. He has hollowed out Russia’s education and health
care systems, emergency services, the police and the military from the top down.
Having squandered Russia’s oil wealth during the era of sky-high oil prices, he
is now making sure that the country’s economy will be brought to its knees by
sanctions and international isolation. He has wrecked Russia’s private banking
system. He has prompted everyone with a decent education, a marketable
profession and a modicum of sanity to get the hell out of the country.
He has invaded a neighboring country and got himself involved
in an international conflict even though Russia lacks technological and
economic means to wage a modern war. He proclaimed the right of the strong to
redraw international borders even though his underpopulated and underdeveloped
country sits on territories that formerly belonged to Finland, Germany, Turkey,
Ukraine, China and Japan, to name a few.
Nevertheless, he is totally convinced that he’s a Russian
patriot and savior, who is defending it from foreign aggression and restoring
its greatness. He also apparently sees himself as a good Christian.
It is a clear case of paranoid schizophrenia.
It is a well-worn cliche that every nation has the government
it deserves – or, alternatively, deserves the government it has.
It is only half-true. Political leaders, by controlling or
influencing political and social institutions, promoting certain officials and
impacting culture and the arts, have the power to change nations, to draw out
and develop their better or worse qualities, And mentally ill rulers – such as
Hitler and Stalin – obviously have the ability to infect entire nations.
Russian journalist Nikolai Klimeniouk wrote in early 2012
comparing four years of Dmitry Medvedev’s presidency and the first few weeks of
Putin’s third term that the climate in
the country had palpably changed with Putin’s return. Even though Medvedev had
been a mere place-holder, an ineffectual, bumbling idiot lacking real power, he
had brought with him a more gentle, humane tenor. With Putin’s return, Russia
immediately became meaner and angrier.
That was then. Over the past three years Putin has been
descending to the depths of mental illness, dragging the country down with him.
Every television broadcast and every news item coming from Russia screams of
insanity – and nothing more so than the annual pseudo-patriotic orange-black
hysteria that is about to be unleashed on the May 9 anniversary of the victory
over Nazi Germany. What Russia as a whole now resembles most is an insane
asylum where inmates have overpowered the staff and established their own
rules. It can be argued that this particular asylum is also full of sane people
like TV propagandists Dmytro Kiselyov, Vladimir Solovyev and Tolstoy who cynically exploit the
rulers’ medical condition for personal gain. However, that type of behavior
also suggests serious problems with mental health.
But before we start criticizing Russia, let us not forget that
the world’s most powerful democracy, the United States, is going through a
fairly similar process. While Russian overwhelmingly support their mad leader,
Americans are busily falling for another maniac, Donald Trump. A man
universally dismissed as a narcissistic buffoon only 10 months ago is about to
win the Republican presidential nomination – and his path to victory is
becoming more and more triumphant. A recent opinion poll showed that he’s
gaining on the likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, trailing her by just
3 percent.
Just as the 1930s were known as the Age of Dictators, so our
own time may go down in history as the Age of Mental Illness.
