![Vladimir Putin's wrestling coach, the person who reportedly helped him get admitted to the Leningrad State University using his connections, was one of the city's top criminals, had served 20 years in prison, and died in a gang battle at 57. Putin admiringly wrote about him in his memoirs called "From the First Person" without using the coach's surname or mentioning his criminal links (for obvious reasons). As the engraving on his grave stone states, the coach Leonid Ionovich Usvyatsov composed the epitaphs himself. [Translator: Please note that in the original Russian the epitaphs crudely rhyme, but the translation did not attempt to reproduce rhyming prioritizing accuracy instead.] The epitaph on the front panel says: "A grave and on the grave there is an epitaph: 'I am dead, but mafia is immortal.'" The back panel is engraved with the following epitaphs: "Hooray! I finally died!!! All of my life I worked for broads like a slave. Now I won't spend a kopeck on this liver sausage anymore." "I gave her my two final bangs and then was carried away on a hearse." "Let's drink to us all, because the curtain will soon fall." (Image: openrussia.org)](https://euromaidanpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/4bbcb9a683811.gif)
The decision of the Russian authorities to take down an interview Russian commentator Viktor Shenderovich gave on Ekho Moskvy on Thursday is already backfiring on the Kremlin, attracting ever more attention to his words than he or his supporters could ever have hoped for.
At a time when officials appear ready to block Andrey Illarionov’s blog and when some Duma deputies have introduced a measure to ban samizdat, it is clear that the Kremlin doesn’t understand the Streisand effect in the age of the Internet.
(In pre-Internet times, many authors in the US hoped to be “banned in Boston” because such actions only helped to boost their sales. Now, in the Internet era, those who seek to ban coverage about themselves, as Barbra Streisand tried to, achieve something even more counterproductive: they attract attention of vastly greater numbers to the situation.)
But the Shenderovich case may provide the Putin regime with an object lesson because it is obvious that the Kremlin took this action because of Shenderovich’s criticism of Putin himself and because it is obvious that taking down the interview in one place won’t block the spread of the text.
A transcript of the full 4500-word interview is available here, among other places. Among Shenderovich’s key arguments are the following:
- “There is already no law” in Russia “and hasn’t been for a long time. What there is is corruption. One can call it by various names: from the Latin, corruption; from the Spanish, junta. There are people who work to keep themselves in power.” When such people are in power as was the case in Nazi Germany, they have to be removed for law to return.
- Vladimir Putin’s childhood tutors were people from the criminal world, and consequently, it is not surprising that their good student has worked out as he has. One of them is dead, but one is in prison; and because “Putin will not always be in power,” the latter must fear for his life now because there is much he could say about the current Kremlin ruler’s modus operandi.
- “Russia has been ruled by various kinds of people. There have been some who were simply mad; there were others who were maniacs. Political maniacs, eastern tyrants, the nomenklatura. There were even half-dead ones like Chernenko. But for the first time, it appears, it is being ruled by a specific representative of an organized criminal band.” That means “we live in an absolutely unique time because there was nothing like this before” and because this man has his finger on the nuclear button.
- “The state is splitting apart; it is already doing so,” but not because of the opposition but because of what the regime has done under the cover and in the name of law but in fact for other reasons. And also because many who should be opposing the regime have been bought off or intimidated and thus taken steps that allow Putin to “simulate democracy and political life” and thus “legitimate” his regime.
- “Does it not seem strange to you that [Chechnya head Ramzan] Kadyrov has received from Russia about ten times more than Dudayev and Maskhadov asked for? They asked only for the independence of Ichkeria. But Kadyrov has received the complete independence of Ichkeria… and the complete right to do what he wants inside it, plus billions from the Russian budget and the right to kill on Moscow streets. Isn’t that too much?” And note, Shenderovich says: Moscow killed Dudayev and Maskhadov and now it has Kadyrov.
- Russian officials are increasingly living in a poetic world of their own, he continues. “Economic Development Minister [Aleksey] Ulukayev considers that Russia can give a symmetrical response to the broadening of US sanctions against Russia.” This is truly “poetic.” Ulyukayev “writes poems and he speaks in [Shenderovich’s] opinion as a poet. To answer symmetrically, of course would mean to refuse American loans, to undermine the dollar, and to push the American economy into stagnation, leading to lines in New York for people to exchange dollars for rubles.” A truly “poetic” vision.
