I want to explain why I didn’t tell my lawyers about this and why I didn’t mention it in my plaints. I have realized that nobody is able to help a person in prison to avoid police abuse. And with each plaint I wrote my conditions were increasingly unbearable. I learned a truth, that however hard it is at a certain moment, something worse can always happen. In case S. commits what he’s planning I ask to charge him with that.”
The dictatorship of the law, Mr. President. Nothing else. Satanic. Do I have to remind you the articles of the Universal declaration of human rights of 1948? Article 5: “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” Article 7: “All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.” And finally, article 3: “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.”
It has been five years now that you are in power, Mr. Putin, and your prisons are Hell and there are murderers among your investigators. We don’t need such a president!
THIRD BLOCK
I wrote this portrait of Putin soon after he was first elected president – in 2000.
ALIEN
Ideally a leader is not only the head of State, but also an exemplary first man of the nation. Joseph Stalin, with his pipe, moustache, boots, in a semi-military service jacket, insinuating, unhurried, speaking with an accent (with an accent sentences have often a reversed mysterious implication), set the order to USSR countries – disciplined and scared them, keeping them in fear. Everything in a leader, from the form of his nails to his button, is in fact important; nothing is aleatory. Although history does not mention the image makers of Mussolini, Stalin or Hitler, these big characters have worked out their style, or as they say today, “image”, themselves. In reality they were simply natural eccentrics.
Although History will forever ascribe Yeltsin to negative peoples’ leaders, he had a personal character, clearly of popular origin. His crazy drunkenness, petty tyranny and the roughness of a Central Committee dignitary even had a certain charm, as it turned out now. Once in a while the lack of his bad presence is felt in the space of Putin’s clean government. After his last act of petty tyranny, after imposing us God know who, i.e. Putin, Yeltsin left the scene and is groaning somewhere on the dachas, spits and drinks. But we do not know about that.
What concerns Putin, he is very untypical of Russia. It is as though he was created in a laboratory. One gets the impression that he came to this world from artificial insemination, from an unknown father and a surrogate mother. So little he has of his own and at the same time, strange thing, he is not at all a popular type. In other words he does not represent any of the popular archetypes we know. He is clearly not a petty tyrant – Central Committee dignitary, he is clearly not a worker and not a peasant either. A lieutenant colonel, he is not an officer type. Lebedev and Rokhlin, Shamanov or Troshev were officers. Putin is closer to an intellectual, a teacher, not even a university teacher but from a technical school, of chemistry, for example. But as he is, kind of distinct, alien, he would have been a renegade and an exile among the teachers. He would have surly been called “the man in a case”, “ a blotter”, and nobody would have talked with him.
It is of course scandalously accidentally that Putin received the leadership of the State. Without Yeltsin’s last act of stupid willfulness Putin, as he is, distinct, alien, would never have been elected. His fate has just played in his favor here. First the unlucky retired foreign intelligence officer was picked up by the westernizer Sobchak. Sobchak took him with him to the city hall. And here Putin showed the talent of a paper-weight-man, a folder-man. The fact that he loves office work showed up later, when in the first months of his mandate as premier he became daily available to us through the TV. It showed by the gentleness with which he pressed his little folder to his hip or even his chest. Then the little folder disappeared, but we already got it.
Putin’s main value consists of his bureaucratic efficiency. In Russia – a country of rather undisciplined, emotional, irresponsible people – a bureaucrat is simply a treasure. Therefore after the failure of Sobchak’s career Putin was immediately picked up by Pavel Pavlovich Borodin, since people with little folders like him are hard to find. Besides, not a drunker and not a smoker, not going to the sauna in company of drunken guys. Putin was certainly looking like a superman in a crowd of bosses full of vices. Through Borodin, Putin started to work with Yeltsin and in the end the old Yeltsin chose the paper-weight-man as his successor to the throne. He chose his direct opposite, for the qualities that were totally absent in the petty tyrant Yeltsin. And in result we are governed by a folder-man, a kind of a pale secretary.